I&#x27;m bewildered that such enlightened people as Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin don&#x27;t grok the value of this resource to writers.<p>Just an anecdote: the other day I heard a story about an FBI agent tasked with eavesdropping on the telephone calls of Malcom X. Due to the nature of the assignment, his job was to listen very carefully to everything he had to say. The agent wound up coming around to his perspective.<p>This story came with a quote but no reference to the book, but someone on Twitter thought to search in Google Books and quickly found it for me. This is an amazing power, unimaginable in the days when research meant Dewey Decimals and microfiche.