madden

But here’s the secret that makes this dynamic feel less maddening: people drift into the kitchen for very different reasons.

“Yes, but there is more to it than that,” he said, with maddening mysteriousness.

“The Epstein issue maddens him,” one of his advisers told me.

He found it maddeningly difficult to read people’s nonverbal signals; and their verbal signals he often took more literally than they meant them.

He felt that a maddening finger was poking him in the side, and that the only way to make it stop was by plunging the hemostat in the nurse assistant’s slender neck.