Luigi Mangione Left a Long Trail Online. This Part Might Be the Most Revealing of All.

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It was destined to happen, and now it has: Within seconds of authorities naming 26-year-old Luigi Mangione as a “strong person of interest” in the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO last week in Manhattan, the internet went to work to finding out what kind of trail he’d left behind online. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a Gen Z suspect, it was quite a long one. (As of Monday night, Mangione has only been arrested on gun charges and held for questioning in the shooting.)

People who turned to Google found a trove: Mangione had cut abs, a job as a data engineer, and an X page with a header photo showing an X-ray of a spine with some pretty gnarly hardware in it. Speculation quickly turned to evidence he had medical troubles—specifically, a back injury—that may have influenced his views on the insurance industry. Exhibit A: Mangione’s apparent Goodreads page, which flew across social media with record speed on Monday. We still know little about what happened here—and police have been slow to even call Mangione a suspect—but people online saw all they needed to know to understand why a handsome young guy would bring a weapon to a Midtown street and assassinate a 50-year-old businessman, leaving behind bullet casings that read Defend, Deny, Depose.

If it does indeed belong to Mangione, this Goodreads page is a rich text. (Not long after the page began going around, it was set to private. Goodreads did not respond to a request for comment.) After a young man attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at a rally this past summer, online sleuths trying to parse the shooter’s politics were stymied by lack of information. Not so with Mangione, who appears to have joined the Goodreads platform in April 2016 and was last active in July 2024. In those eight years, Mangione was what I’d call medium-engaged with the platform, logging 300-plus titles on Goodreads’ standard out-of-the-box Read, Currently Reading, and Want to Read “bookshelves,” and creating three of his own lists—”Favorites,” “21st century reading list,” and “Owned.” Mangione also posted some reviews and a couple pages of favorite quotes.

Some newly minted online Mangione specialists—that’s the entire internet on Monday— have decided, after surveying his X, LinkedIn, and Goodreads, that he’s “a birthrates center-right pop science centrist type” or a guy “possessing the reading habits of the median Free Press subscriber.” There’s some evidence for that. His Want to Read list, especially, is full of aspirational non-fiction titles about The Trouble With Modern Life: Richard Reeves’ influential Of Boys and Men; Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation; Jean Twenge’s iGen; Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism.

Some of Mangione’s Want to Read list is basic Humanities 101—ambitious titles like Catch-22, Moby-Dick, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. But some of it is, indeed, from that particular zone of “basic humanities 101” that has been colonized by Jordan Peterson-esque right-wingers in recent years: Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, Orwell’s 1984, multiple titles by Aldous Huxley. Scattered across Mangione’s lists are non-fiction titles by authors that you might locate in the Intellectual Dark Web, or its outlying galaxies: Heather Heying’s A Hunter-Gatherers’ Guide to the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, Paul Skallas’ Life & the Lindy Effect.

The theme of anti-modernism you see in titles like Twenge’s, Newport’s, or Skallas’ is especially strong on Mangione’s “21st century reading list” shelf, which contains Catherine Price’s How to Break Up With Your Phone, Ted “the Unabomber” Kaczynski’s Technological Slavery, and Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, a 1964 book described by Kirkus Reviews as “an extravaganza of socio-political and philosophical pessimism.” Fitness journalist Michael Easter’s The Comfort Crisis, a book I first encountered when I wrote about rucking, belongs in this “we should go back” bucket of titles.

Yet you can also find some titles deep in Mangione’s lists that confound the simple picture. There’s an Ezra Klein book in here, on “Want to Read”: Why We’re Polarized. In 2020 and 2021, Mangione marked as “Want to Read” Michelle Alexander’s wildly influential The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness and Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s Merchants of Doubt, a tour de force showing how corporate interests and right-wing ideology skewed public understanding of the dangers of tobacco, acid rain, and climate change. Mangione seems to have had a deeper interest in environmentalism, with titles by PETA’s Ingrid Newkirk and BBC presenter David Attenborough and several books about mycology making the “Want to Read” list.

Some people don’t log self-help books in their Goodreads—it can be a little intimate, if yours is public. Mangione logged many, from more general productivity titles about bullet journaling and “living like a Spartan” to a little sub-genre of books about chronic back pain. This is the dark heart of the Goodreads, for people looking for motive: Why would a random smart-seeming and super-hot Gen Z guy murder a health-insurance executive? Here, on the “Read” and “Want to Read” shelves, we have Stuart McGill’s Back Mechanic; Cathryn Jakonson’s Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry And Getting on the Road to Recovery; David Hanscom’s Do You Really Need Spine Surgery?: Take Control With a Surgeon’s Advice and Back in Control: A Spine Surgeon’s Roadmap Out of Chronic Pain; and John E. Sarno’s Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection.

Deep down in “Want to Read” are a few others—Lindsay Gibson’s Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal From Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents and Gabor Mate’s The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, & Healing in a Toxic Culture—whose meaning will surely get picked over as more and more biographical information about Mangione becomes available.

Mangione’s Goodreads use fell off in recent years. He logged only three books as “read” in 2023: Timothy Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; and Jackass personality Steve-O’s A Hard Kick in the Nuts: What I’ve Learned From a Lifetime Of Terrible Decisions. When he was arrested in Pennsylvania on Monday, he had three on his “currently reading” list: Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak, a bestselling novel about Nazi Germany.

And so for observers who went deep on Monday before the list went to private—sorry to say I was one of them!—Luigi Mangione’s Goodreads ended as it started: a confusing record of a curious mind. It can only tell us so much, but it seems certain another audience was on the page on Monday: Investigators currently flocking to Pennsylvania.