By David Futrelle

It’s not uncommon for aging libertines to have second thoughts about the casual hedonism of their youth. Neil Strauss followed up his 2005 book The Game, which brought the “pickup artist” subculture into the mainstream, with The Truth, in which he confessed that his celebrity as one of the world’s most famous PUAs had in many ways ruined his life and the lives of those around him. (Still, he didn’t return the royalties from his earlier book, as far as I know, or take it out of print.)