Jerry Seinfeld doesn’t rate “Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret”

Interview by Oliver Burkeman (6 January)

All the way through, from first standup shows to stardom, he forced himself to work by marking a cross on a calendar for every day he wrote material; soon enough, he had a long chain of crosses, and kept going partly because he didn’t want to break the chain. Since he revealed this trick to a would-be comedian years ago, “Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret” has achieved cult status online: there are at least three apps and one website dedicated to helping people emulate it. This amuses its inventor no end. “It’s so dumb it doesn’t even seem to be worth talking about,” he says. “If you’re a runner and you want to be a better runner, you say, well, I’ll run every day and mark an X on the calendar every day I run. I can’t believe this was useful information to anybody!” He spreads his palms, a gesture conveying the sheer obviousness of the insight. “Really? There are people who think, ‘I’ll just sit around and do absolutely nothing, and somehow the work will get done’?”

When Sky at Night presenter Maggie Aderin-Pocock was a student, people mistook her for the cleaner

Interview by Emine Saner (20 January)

At university, she thinks she was one of only two black students of around 200 physics undergraduates, and one of around 10 women, and in her career she became used to standing out. She remembers visiting the site of a contractor. Even though she was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, as soon as she arrived, one man told her where the keys to the offices were. She didn’t understand. “He said: ‘The keys to the offices. You’re going to go and clean them?’” She laughs. “When the contractor came out and heard what had happened, he was mortified. It’s stereotypes. Most women, and most black women, who come to that site are cleaners.”

Another time, while still a PhD student, somebody mistook her for a university secretary. Again, she laughs about it, but doesn’t it make her furious? “I think I would have been furious, but what’s that saying about secretaries or cleaners? Why is any job too menial for me? I can’t take umbrage at it because it’s not an insult, it’s just the assumption that hurts. My mentality, if I do get upset about it, is that it’s not hurting them – they’ve probably gone off, totally oblivious, but it’s eating me up, so I think it’s best to see these things in a relaxed light when possible. I think I’m sounding a lot more calm than I really am and sometimes I do get upset and angry, but sometimes it’s quite fun – I hop in a taxi and the driver says: ‘What do you do?’ And I say: ‘I’m a space scientist.’ And it’s always: ‘You what?’”

Environment Agency boss Chris Smith remembers Tony Blair being “nervous” about sacking him as culture minister

Interview by Stephen Moss (17 February)

Smith tells me no explanation was ever offered. “He [Blair] was very nervous about doing it, but phoned me up and said: ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go.’ I saw him a couple of months later, and again very nervously he said: ‘How is it?’ I said: ‘Well, I have to say I still think you made a mistake, and quite a lot of people out there think you did too.’ To which he had the decency to say: ‘I know. I’ve had to spend the last couple of months replying to their letters.’” He was replaced at the culture department by Tessa Jowell, which some interpreted as a desire on the part of Blair to promote more women. The fact he was in neither the Blair nor the Brown camp also meant he lacked a protector. “There was me, Robin Cook and Mo Mowlam, and we didn’t really fit,” he says.

Being sacked meant that at just 50 his frontline political career was over. That can’t have been a pleasant feeling? “First of all you’re very upset. Then you get a bit angry. But then you mellow out and decide to get on with your life.”

Harry Hill’s kids weren’t into TV Burp

Interview by Alexis Petridis (24 February)

In 2011, Hill turned down a lucrative golden handcuffs deal and TV Burp ended. He says he occasionally misses the show – “I was watching Benefits Street the other night and I thought: ‘I wish TV Burp was still on.’” But his teenage children, who were apparently mortified by the experience of seeing their father become a household name – “It wasn’t Breaking Bad, was it? It was teatime TV, it wasn’t so cool” – were delighted when he quit. “They literally cheered. Of course, now I haven’t been on TV for so long, they’re a bit itchy about it, they think my career’s dried up. My daughter said: ‘You’re not famous any more, Dad.’ Like it’s a criticism. Then she said: ‘You want to try and get on another advert.’ They didn’t think TV Burp was cool, but they’re really proud of me advertising Danone yoghurt.”

Adrien Brody is a frustrated hip-hop producer

Interview by Alex Needham (3 March)

He makes music in his spare time – beats for hip-hop tracks. He is undoubtedly passionate about his music. He talks with huge enthusiasm about sampling the sound of popcorn hitting a pan and turning it into a beat, and when he complains about the “shit” he hears on the radio, it’s the only time he swears in almost two hours. “I think there was a period in my life where had I met the right people to help me figure out how to pursue it, I would have loved to transition into producing an album,” he says.

So what happened? “I think nobody got it. That’s the dilemma also with having immense success associated from one role, like The Pianist. That’s people’s introduction to who you are and what you must be like, and then they meet you and you’re from Queens and you’re making music that’s inspired by a lifetime of hip-hop and urban culture and New York City and street life. Sequenced music is very hard for lots of people to grasp anyway. And then I didn’t have the wherewithal, the focus I guess, to do something on my own. But you know, I just did a film with Akon [American Heist], we’ve discussed playing around with something; I’m still friends with RZA and we’ve talked about doing some things. I have a lot of ammo, it’s just stockpiled.”

Men of her own age don’t do it for Diana Rigg

Interview by Stuart Jeffries (9 March)

“I found myself talking aloud to the pigeons in the park the other day,” she tells me. “The male pigeons were busily pursuing the female pigeons. I said: ‘You silly farts. Can’t you see they’re not interested?’ And then I realised there were people listening to me.” And what applies to birds, she reckons, applies to elderly men and women. “I think women of my age are still attractive.” She removes her glasses and faces me down with brown eyes that have turned strong men – and, indeed, women – to jelly. “Men of my age aren’t.” Why? “They’ve got their cojones halfway to their knees,” she says, giggling. “They have the same descent as tits.”

Is there no remedy? “Truss,” she cackles. That’s going to make me a demon with the ladies, I reply bleakly.

Bryan Cranston has a Breaking Bad tattoo

Interview by Oliver Burkeman (24 March)

“I miss him. I do, very much,” he says of his character, Walter White, last seen expiring from a self-inflicted gunshot wound on the floor of a meth lab owned by neo-nazis on the outskirts of Albuquerque, New Mexico. “I had this done on the last day of shooting – look.” He shows me a tiny tattoo of the Breaking Bad logo, the periodic table symbols for bromine and barium, on the side of his right ring finger, hidden from view unless he flexes a knuckle. “Someone asked me: ‘Why do you want it there, where no one will see it?’ I said: ‘I’ll see it.’ It catches my eye, and it reminds me: any opportunities I have now are because of that show.” It’s a characteristically Cranstonian comment – the outlook of an actor who found acclaim in his 50s, not his 20s, and is acutely aware that things might have gone differently. (Videos of Cranston advertising haemorrhoid creams on TV in the 1980s are easy to find on YouTube.)

Maverick scientist James Lovelock can envisage a future race of robo-people

Interview by Stephen Moss (31 March)

“Computers are getting more and more organic all the time,” he says. “They are being made from carbon, and I can envisage a process whereby an endosymbiotic person with these things in it will sufficiently fuse the two life systems together that it will become a single person that will breed true.” I ask when this startling development might occur, but he prefers not to make a prediction. Cue further incredulity on my part. “Dash it all,” he says, “we’re pretty odd when you think that we started off 3bn years ago as single cells floating around.”

Abba never got any good drugs

Interview by Tim Jonze (11 April)

Björn Ulvaeus and Frida Lyngstad are sitting in a London hotel bar remembering the decadent 70s – that era of drugs and debauchery during which their band Abba hit astronomical heights of fame.

“And the strange thing is,” says Ulvaeus, turning to his fellow Abba mate, “can you remember ever being approached by someone who came up to us and said,” – his impression of a shady drug dealer at this point is so comically bad that you can only imagine the story he’s telling is true – “‘Hey look, I’ve got some really nice drugs here?’”

“Oh no!” shrieks Lyngstad. “Never!”

“Never!” Ulvaeus bursts out laughing: “Never! Not even on tour! It’s amazing isn’t it?”

It’s pretty unusual!

Lyngstad: “Well, we were at home a lot so they would have had to come to our houses and knock on our doors to offer us drugs!”

“Squeaky clean!” says Ulvaeus, still laughing. “But it’s all true.”

Michael Lewis thinks clever people are the biggest threat to Wall Street

Interview by Emma Brockes (17 April)

The accident of his career is, he says, that he has been so well-placed to document an industry “that has gone insane. The financial markets have generated this fantastic material. I don’t think anything else like this will walk in my door.”

And he hopes the fact that the world’s best and brightest – French particle physicists, Russian aerospace engineers, wunderkind Chinese programmers – all go into banking these days, because the financial rewards are so huge, is a historical anomaly.

“It’s very odd. We think of it as normal, but those sorts of people throughout history have not gone into banking. They’ve done useful things. The sorts of people who used to go into banking were pleasant, jolly chaps, the class monitor who gets on with everyone. That’s who should be in banking. That’s what we need!”

Why? “Because the smart people are too dangerous. They find ways to game the system.”

When Glenn Greenwald found out his partner David Miranda had been detained at Heathrow under the Terrorism Act, it was Edward Snowden who helped him through it

Interview by Ed Pilkington (12 May)

They spent all day in communication, Greenwald frantic at his desk in his jungle office, Snowden just two weeks into his new-found asylum in Russia. It was an extraordinary, and poignant, role reversal: the source comforting the journalist.

“When he heard David was detained, Snowden was so enraged and concerned, which shocked me,” Greenwald says. “His own situation was very uncertain at the time – he’s facing 30, 40 years in prison if he ever comes back to the US, and yet he was supportive of what I was going through. That’s when I realised we were bonded in an eternal way to the same cause, which most journalists don’t like to admit, but I have no trouble admitting – we work to the same ends. We have a bond, a human bond.”

Bond or no bond, it strikes me as interesting that in the book, as in conversation, Greenwald only refers to his interlocutor as “Snowden”, never by his first name. What’s that about?

“It’s the weirdest thing. I cannot call him Ed. For the longest time we referred to him as ‘the source’. And then when I met him, I never used his name. It just rings false to call him Ed.”

For a long time Viv Albertine’s daughter never knew she had been in the Slits

Interview by Alexis Petridis (2 June)

[Her] book details, with candour, the “seven years of absolute madness” that were her attempts to get pregnant via IVF, her diagnosis with cervical cancer six weeks after the birth of her daughter and her doomed attempt to sink into a world of domesticity as a housewife who never mentioned her past. With Albertine’s guitars and memorabilia from the punk era sold to fund the treatment, her daughter initially grew up unaware that her mum had been in a band. “I hid myself from her in the early years,” she says, “because what I was, it was considered not good for a child to know. I know it sounds odd, but I’d got myself caught up in a marriage and a scene that was incompatible to who I was.”

Jonah Hill doesn’t like to talk about why he changed his name

Interview by Hadley Freeman (6 June)

I’d noticed on Hill’s imdb.com page that he was born Jonah Hill Feldstein, and his parents and brother still go by the family name. So I ask why and when he dropped his original surname. This is when everything goes weird and his palpable self-control breaks down. For a full 15 seconds Hill is silent aside from his breathing: it’s so heavy, I think at first he’s having an asthma attack. Eventually, he laughs ruefully to himself.

Is this a difficult question?

“Can we just not?” he whispers.

I didn’t realise this would be awkward.

“Just … don’t,” he hisses.

Is Helena Bonham Carter a Tory?

Interview by Xan Brooks (13 June)

“No, no, no,” she splutters. But this subject is a minefield. At worst, any comment she makes risks being misconstrued. At best, it leaves her sounding defensive. “Why should I have to justify my friendship with Dave and Samantha?” she asks. “Come to think of it, why should I have to justify my friendship with anyone?”

She goes on to explain that she’s known Cameron for years, since his days as a PR man for Carlton TV. Her view of the couple is therefore coloured by shared history, by personal experience and (in particular) by the Camerons’ relationship with their eldest son, Ivan, who required round-the-clock care and died in 2009 at the age of six. “So yeah,” she says. “I definitely get to see a side of them that other people don’t. David Cameron is incredibly witty, incredibly bright and incredibly genuine. But actually both those people are immaculate. The humanity that they showed when it came to dealing with their son. Both of them, probably because of what happened with Ivan and how they reacted to that, they have an amazing sense of humour and sense of proportion, and they are people to be taken seriously.”

She wants to shut up, but she’s now on a roll. The thing about the Camerons, she adds, is that they have no sense of self-importance. Even now, inside No 10, they are open to the world, interested in people. You can talk to them about anything. “Whatever you think about them as public figures, that they are doing well, or that they’re not doing well, there’s a lot to be said for the way people handle themselves and their children and their family. And there is a real compassion to Cameron. Maybe that doesn’t always come through. And, God knows, he sometimes gets it wrong. But that compassion is genuine.”

Cara Delevingne fantasises about punching a paparazzo

Interview by Alexis Petridis (16 June)

“I’d love to, I really would, I’d be so happy, I dream about it at night.”

Despite all the sex-abuse allegations levelled at 70s disc jockeys, Tony Blackburn’s conscience is clear

Interview by Simon Hattenstone (11 August)

He became a sex god, didn’t he?

“Me? Oh yes. YEAH!” He laughs it off.

But he boasted about all the women he slept with, I say. At one point he cited 250 women, then there were 500.

“Yes, I shouldn’t have done that.” He cringes. “That was a mistake.”

Look, he says, he knows that is inexcusable but he is not embarrassed about the women – he does not think he did anything wrong, they were all consenting adults. “I was a single guy, I didn’t hurt anybody and there was nobody like ... all the stuff we’re having nowadays. I was working very hard, travelling all over the place doing discos and in my private life I was like any other person. I met somebody in a bar, and it just happened. It was just that sort of era.”

He pauses. “I would never have dreamt of going into an office and touching somebody up. You just don’t do that. I was always very respectful of people. I never saw Savile do anything wrong, I didn’t realise how bad he was. It has tainted that era. It’s horrible, horrible, horrible.”

Did he suspect Jimmy Savile? “There were stories that he liked younger people. Rumours. But unless you see somebody doing something wrong, you can’t report anybody. If I’d seen him doing anything I would have said something, because my view is younger people are younger people, and to me a child is sacred. All this stuff we’re hearing now is horrendous. I’ve got children, I’m a father, I can’t understand it, it’s just … euch, it’s horrible. And my only regret is Savile is not alive to take the punishment he should have done.”

You’re not going to let me down, and be arrested by Operation Yewtree, are you, I say. “No,” he says adamantly. “Nonononono. No, I’m not going to be arrested.”

Daniel Radcliffe used to go to Reading festival in a gas mask

Interview by Tim Jonze (18 August)

Radcliffe has been a vocal indie fan since his teens, when he would turn up in the NME raving about bands such as the Libertines and the Cribs in a rather endearing manner. Even today he sounds thrilled that he once got to meet Pete Doherty in a Eurostar station: “He was really really sweet. He let me waffle on for five minutes about how brilliant I thought his music was.”

Compared with most, Radcliffe’s musical education was pretty unorthodox. He was introduced to Pink Floyd and the Kinks by the driver who took him to the Harry Potter studios each day, and his dresser on Potter taught him about 1970s punk. Eventually he found his own thing and even went to Reading festival a couple of times. Didn’t he get hassled?

“No, not too much. I wore a gas mask for most of the time.”

A gas mask?!

“I was with Rupert Grint and we really didn’t want to be recognised.”

There seems something slightly sad about having to go to a music festival dressed as if you were heading to the western front. Does Radcliffe worry that he missed out on a normal teenagedom? He sighs. “I mean, maybe? I don’t know. I still got to go to Reading. I still had a great time. It’s one of those things that everyone wants to tell me I missed out on ... but I wouldn’t know, I’ve only lived my life this way.”

Gordon Brown knows what Nelson Mandela said to Amy Winehouse

Interview by Simon Hattenstone (1 September)

He is never more convincing than when addressing the rally later in the evening. He struts the stage with utter self-belief – an intellectual giant who can also do a decent turn at standup. He illustrates how he is more Scottish than British, with reference to living under the national humiliation of Scotland’s 9-3 defeat to England in 1962 (“One player Frank Haffey actually emigrated to Australia. Years later Denis Law went out to see him. ‘Is it safe to come back?’ asked Frank. And Denis’s answer? ‘No.’”). The audience laps it up. This is a Brown who was so rarely seen; the prime minister we could have had. He speaks fluently without notes for 40 minutes, holding out his hands as if grasping an invisible rugby ball to make his point. He jeers at the vanity of Alex Salmond when asked how the No vote can cope with his charisma (“Oh yes he’s charismatic all right, aye, very humble, that Alex Salmond. Asked who were the three greatest Scotsman in history, he said the other two are Robert the Bruce and William Wallace.”), is self-deprecating about his record as a leader (“A woman said to me you’re better than your successor. She then said she’s lived under 10 prime ministers and each was worse than the last. That put me in my place”), tells stories about presiding over Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday (“The person he most liked was Amy Winehouse. She said to him: ‘You and my husband have a lot in common.’ He said: ‘Oh, what is that?’ She said: ‘You’ve both spent a long time in prison.’”)

Naomi Klein is not as deep green as you might think

Interview by Suzanne Goldenberg (15 September)

Klein does not easily fit into most people’s view of a committed environmentalist. She drives a car (it is a hybrid). She flies, already a lot more than most people, and is set to rack up air miles that would make her, by her own admission, “a climate criminal”. There is a brightly coloured plastic playhouse in the garden that was probably made in China. Yet she confesses to getting weepy when she thinks about the future under climate change.

In a long conversation over the dining table, Klein says she is not about to purge her life of plastics or fossil fuels. She says she is not going to be trapped into “gotcha games” about personal habits. And she is definitely not going to subscribe to the idea that climate change ranks above all other causes.

“I think there has been this really bad habit of environmentalists being insufferably smug, where they are sort of saying: ‘This is the issue that beats all other issues’ or, ‘Your issue doesn’t matter because nothing matters if the earth is fried.’”

It’s fine to make jokes about Shami Chakrabarti

Interview by Sam Wollaston (29 September)

She has heard about, but says she hasn’t seen, the Charlie Brooker black comedy Dead Set, in which a Big Brother-type reality-TV producer dismisses a contestant’s claim that his human rights are being abused by yelling “Fuck off Shami Chakrabarti” into the house PA system. “There’ve been others,” she says. “In that show Spooks, apparently it was an Asian woman who ran an organisation called The Libertarians – and she was very humourless, and she was always droning on in a sort of monotone about how the one-party state was coming.”

Is she humourless? “Well, I don’t think I can be the judge of that, others will have to do it … I don’t think I’m humourless but I wouldn’t, would I? Also, when you’re doing a 10-second soundbite for the news about kidnap and torture, there’s not a lot of funnies in there. But it’s all right, people don’t have to like me, as long as I don’t become a bad advocate for the values or the issues. I’m not trying to be a pop star.”

When the cameras are on, Richard Ayoade is always playing a character

Interview by Sam Wolfson (6 October)

This local TV puff piece [an “awful” documentary piece about Cambridge comedy society Footlights, in which Ayoade appeared alongside a young John Oliver] triggered a permanent unease with appearing in front of camera outside of a clearly demarcated performance. He did the interviews for his first TV shows in character, and says he constructed a sort of public personality for himself from then on. In person, with no camera on, you don’t get any of that slightly dumbfounded geekery you see when he’s on panel shows. He speaks as if he were on Radio 4.

Why is it so difficult for him to be himself? “As soon as cameras are there it’s just different. It’s not being yourself. Your mother could have died that morning but they will say: ‘Just be yourself, we have to film.’ Anything that’s not complete submission to the gaze looks kind of aggressive on camera. Reality stars are geniuses in that they have an ability to be completely undefensive. Joey Essex, for example, is completely open, so you like him. The villains are the defensive ones; shyness can be interpreted as a kind of aggression: ‘Who are you to care so much how you come off?’”

David Blunkett thinks Ed Miliband can still deliver

Interview by Hugh Muir (13 October)

There is an Ed problem; a big one, and he knows it. “There is no point in Ed Miliband being something he is not. I think he needs to build on two strengths: one is the idea of having a conversation with people rather than performing in front of them in a kind of parade; and secondly building a team, as he has been doing, so this is a team approach. Of course, led by him. But actually the offer is a Labour government, not a Labour presidency.”

He is ultra-cautious for good reason. “I said something in a radio interview a year ago which I thought was perfectly innocent – that one of the most successful Labour prime ministers ever was Clement Attlee, but he wasn’t all-singing, all-dancing. People said: ‘Are you saying Ed Miliband isn’t all-singing, all-dancing?’ What I was saying is, it is perfectly feasible for someone to have a different style of leadership and be able to deliver. If people want something that is just a performance, then they will be taken in by Nigel Farage. John Smith once said to me: ‘If you want excitement, go to the races.’”

He laughs. A throaty laugh. Cosby, a sheen black labrador retriever cross and Blunkett’s sixth guide dog, rouses slightly in his basket and retreats to slumber. Like his master. Aware of events, but chilled.

Ukip defector Douglas Carswell bonded with Nigel Farage over a McFlurry

Interview by Simon Hattenstone (20 October)

As we head off for PMQs, I tell him I can’t imagine him getting on with Farage – he doesn’t even like drinking, for God’s sake. Look, he says, it’s about time Farage was given credit. “We have to acknowledge the extraordinary tenacity of the man, and the personability of the man.”

I know all about his personability, I say, I’ve shared a breakfast pint with him. “You’ve put your finger on it,” he says enthusiastically. “There are stylistic differences. I don’t like booze, but I love McFlurrys. I try to get the guy to go to McDonald’s for ice-cream after we’ve been out knocking on doors.”

Dave Grohl has teenage fans who didn’t realise he was in Nirvana

Interview by Alexis Petridis (7 November)

He has long resigned himself to never quite escaping the shadow of his former band – “it’s always an anniversary of something” – but seems tickled that at least some younger members of the Foo Fighters audience seem to have missed the connection: “It’s started happening that kids go: ‘Aren’t you the guy from Foo Fighters? How did your band begin?’ ‘Well, I was in this band before, called Nirvana.’ ‘You were in Nirvana?’”

Tommy Lee Jones won’t be appearing in an original Netflix drama any time soon

Interview by Rory Carroll (17 November)

There is one area which holds little appeal for the great grouch: television. The small screen’s supposed golden age of The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad and True Detective is passing him by, and that’s just fine. “I probably watch less than one hour of television a week. And when I do watch television it’s usually a football game. Sometimes I’ll watch a news broadcast for a few minutes. Otherwise I don’t have time.”

Directors such as Steven Soderbergh, Cary Fukunaga and Jonathan Demme have migrated to television, as have actors such as Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson and Sean Bean, but Jones is in no rush to follow.

As a director he is fanatical about capturing a certain look and television, he feels, is a medium of compromise. “Most of those things are so poorly lit. And they are limited a lot by their tight schedules. They have to shoot so much material and they have to shoot it so fast.” He shakes his head, appalled at the cinematographic sins. “The lighting is often rather ...” He pauses, searching for the right word. “Gross.”

Bill Murray suggested doing his interview in the bath

Interview by Catherine Shoard (21 November)

I wait on a deserted floor at the Trump hotel, sandwiched between two packed ones. The hallowed atmosphere intensifies. After a time, a security guard materialises and discusses the carpet. Then he touches his ear. “Your parcel has arrived,” he says and evaporates. Murray strolls round the corner.

“Well, you look delightful,” he says. “And you smell nice.” He’s wearing blue linen and is very tall. His silver hair is blond at the tips, so when he gives a gummy grin, you think of the baby in the sun on Teletubbies. Later, Tilda Swinton says she thinks he has the look of “a tired child who has laughed so much he aches – but finds it too complicated to fully explain the joke”. That’s true. It’s like talking to a crumpled bag of sweets.

We’re shown to a room and I help him read the Coke bottle label (he only drinks Mexican, on account of the corn syrup). We inspect the facilities. He suggests we take a bath or watch a DVD. Four hardboiled eggs and some fried potatoes are ushered in. He doesn’t touch them.

Adnan Syed’s father can’t listen to Serial

Interview with the Syeds by Jon Ronson (8 December)

Episode one arrived without much fanfare – just some promotion by its parent show, This American Life – but what happened next was dizzying. It immediately became the world’s most popular podcast – a sensation. It achieved 5m downloads on iTunes – faster than any podcast in history. (BBC Radio 4 Extra has just picked it up for broadcast too.) But Adnan’s father isn’t listening.

“We don’t want him to,” says Yusuf. “We don’t want him to know it exists. He knows it exists but – it’s a very fragile state.”

“We can’t even discuss the topic,” says Shamim. “Sometimes we see him going through the photo album and he starts crying.”

“Do you listen?” I ask Shamim.

“After everybody goes to sleep,” she says. “Eleven, 12 o’clock, I lay down here on this sofa and I listen.” She says she sometimes plays just one part over and over. “It’s the bit at the beginning where the prison operator says: ‘This is a Global-Tel link prepaid call from …’ and Adnan says: ‘Adnan Syed.’”

“So sweet,” Shamim says. “I listen to that again and again and again.”