| By the time the Unabomber’s trial was set to begin, in January of 1998, there was little doubt about his guilt. In his secluded cabin in rural Montana, F.B.I. investigators had discovered a functional bomb, plus thousands of pages documenting his work on earlier explosives, which had killed three and wounded nearly two dozen. They also found a carbon copy of his infamous Manifesto, which assailed modern technology and had been published, to great controversy, by the New York Times and the Washington Post. But the legal proceedings against the Unabomber—otherwise known as Ted Kaczynski—would prove far from simple. To spare their client the death penalty, Kaczynski’s lawyers planned to portray him as mentally ill, a designation he fervently rejected. Instead, the New Yorker writer William Finnegan reported, he wanted to explain his motives, and was willing to represent himself to do so. (He also wanted to hire a well-known attorney who had said, of Kaczynski, “This guy is a genius.”) The ensuing court wrangling revealed a series of paradoxes: a defendant battling his own attorneys; Kaczynski’s younger brother, a social worker named David, acutely worried about the sibling he’d turned in; a terrorist who appeared both meek and remorseless. At one point, Finnegan writes, “Nobody—at least, nobody with any power—wanted this trial to go ahead.” | 
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