(“Netzin” is short for “Nenetzin,” which means royal doll in Mayan “Steklis” is a German name.) Having spoken with Steklis by telephone, most of the reviewers told me that they assumed she was simply an office assistant who carried out the daily chores of running the institute. It was time to turn to Netzin Steklis, a woman with a name that seemed designed by God for clean and economical database searches. “You want to buy a computer, you talk to me.” Then he hung up.

“Why don’t you ask them?” he barked back. Monius Institute until I provoked an irritated outburst: “Their number is 321-5809!” I asked the man how he had come to know the number so suddenly.

I called back several times, asking repeatedly for the A.M. I asked for Netzin Steklis and was assured that I had the wrong number. When I called one of these numbers, I reached a computer-sales business. In a reverse-address directory, the institute matched three other telephone numbers, all under the name Jitendrah Shah. On a map, it appeared to be located at the end of a small road just off Interstate 95, near the New Jersey-Pennsylvania border. In addition, the letterhead listed a bricks-and-mortar address in Pennsylvania. Dialing the telephone number on the institute’s letterhead put me in contact with the institute’s voice mail, which I called for several weeks without a reply. My investigation began with the little information that the A.M. So here, for the first time, I recount the mad hunt for-and the unmasking of-the mysterious A.M. None of those individuals, it turns out, is in any way responsible for the work or financial backing of the A.M. At one point in my research, the available evidence pointed to suspects as diverse (and as seemingly improbable) as the esteemed Princeton philosopher Mark Johnston, the film actress Sigourney Weaver, and a suspiciously named professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, Anne Monius. But they turned up few leads.Įarly this April, one reviewer contacted Lingua Franca, hoping to interest some “literary sleuths.” I was assigned to the story. You ordinarily get paid two hundred dollars by Oxford to review a six-hundred-page book.” A few inquisitive reviewers snooped around and made some preliminary Web searches and telephone calls. “It is certainly the most bizarre philosophical undertaking in anyone’s memory,” Zimmerman contends. But curiosity about the institute and the identity of the author only continued to grow. dollars.Įventually the excitement of actually having been paid began to die down.

Printed on official-looking stationery and signed by the institute’s director, Netzin Steklis, the letter offered Zimmerman a “generous” sum of money to review a sixty-page work of metaphysics titled “Coming to Understanding.” As the letter explained, the institute “exists for the primary purpose of disseminating the work ‘Coming to Understanding’ and encouraging its critical review and improvement.” For Zimmerman’s philosophical services, the institute was prepared to pay him the astronomical fee of twelve thousand U.S. The next day Zimmerman received a letter from the A.M. And when he returned to the restaurant three months later, his second fortune was equally promising: “A way out of a financial mess is discovered as if by magic!”

Zimmerman, a metaphysician with side interests in resurrection and divine eternity, was heartened by the prophecy. The week after the fire, Zimmerman got a fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant that brought encouraging news: “You will move to a wonderful new home within the year,” it read.

Metadoctor review