What this “Frankenstein” isn’t is a replication of the source text with the addition of a lot of digital doohickeys like sound effects and illustrations that animate when tapped. The app is all about the text, even if it is beautifully framed by period art and anatomical illustrations. The reader is presented with a screenful of narration and then offered one or more responses to it. The preferred response, when tapped, delivers up another screen of text. (In an absurdly pleasing visual touch, these appear as sheets of paper fasted together by straight pins.) According to the press materials, the reader’s responses will shape the way the narrative is presented, although not to the degree of substantively changing the plot.

This is an important point. The pleasure of storytelling lies in the dynamic between the surprising and the inevitable. The reader wants to feel the story is going somewhere, that its events follow from each other in meaningful, but not too obvious ways. When a story can go anywhere, it feels meaningless. In Mary Shelley’s novella, which is saturated with the Western tradition of the tragedy, Viktor Frankenstein’s character is such that he must create a monster, and the monster’s body is such that he can never belong among human beings however much he yearns to. A “Frankenstein” that ended with either misfit finding a comfortable place in the world would be a travesty.

But that doesn’t mean the reader doesn’t long for the story to unfold otherwise; that’s the nature of tragedy. The great insight that writer Dave Morris brings to this adaptation of the novel is that while a reader cannot significantly change the outcome of the story, the interactive element can change the shading and flavor of the tale. It can be mournful and reflective or action-packed. The creature and his creator can show greater or lesser ambivalence about their own behaviors. The ambiguity of both figures is baked into Mary Shelley’s novella, and while Morris has nearly doubled the word count of the original, this mostly amounts to playing up or down what’s already there.

Morris — a novelist who has written graphic novels, games and, yes, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories for kids — has changed the original text in other ways, as well. (Let’s take a moment here to point out to all future narrative app developers that hiring a real writer who actually knows what he or she is doing is totally worth it.) He’s moved the setting to revolutionary France, a choice that shows shrewd understanding of the idealistic political climate that affected Shelley’s thinking; the new Republic is its own kind of Frankenstein’s monster. He’s also eliminated much of the 19th-century framing of the tale and converted it into two present-tense narrations. One is Frankenstein’s dialogue with either himself or a (possibly imaginary) companion. The other is a second-person account of the monster’s first weeks of life as it spies on a family of dispossessed French nobility and has the chance to observe the loving relationships it can never enjoy itself.

Morris presents the reader with choices I’ve not encountered in other interactive fictions. Is humanity mostly good, or mostly evil? Does the most recent development make you (the monster) feel hope or despair? Is the revolution the dawn of a brave new world or a descent into chaos and barbarity? While I’m usually skeptical that present-tense narration increases the “immediacy” of a story, in this case, it really does work, particularly in the sections concerning the monster. Depending on your own outlook, you may urge him to keep trying to connect with humanity, or promptly forward him on to homicidal rage.

In either case, the narrative is shaped not by the reader deciding to turn left or right, to go down into the cellar or to get out of the house — the usual actions offered on the choose-your-own menu. Instead, the options have more to do with personality and interpretation, beliefs and ideas. As a result of the reader’s choices, the characters seem more like him- or herself, with a concurrent ratcheting up of emotional investment. To my surprise, I found myself more moved by this adaptation of the Shelley novel than I have been by the source text. (Although the app does include the original if you want to compare and contrast.) This is the only interactive fiction I’ve ever read with that quintessential, old-fashioned readerly avidity: the hunger to know what happens next. Of course, I already knew, but that didn’t matter at all.

The Greeks and Romans studied and scrutinized rhetoric so intently because they understood it to be the very stuff of power, specifically the power of persuasion — which, as Leith points out, is even more potent today than it was in the fourth century BC, when Aristotle produced the first treatise on the subject. The master’s “Rhetoric” is a work which (unlike much of his scientific writing) remains as useful today as it did in ancient Athens; Leith sprinkles shrewd tips from it (such as, construct your argument so that your audience thinks it’s their own idea) throughout his book. “He was the first person,” Leith writes of Aristotle, “really to grasp that the study of rhetoric is the study of humanity itself.”

Rhetoric is also, to be blunt, the art of talking people into things, and it flourishes in courtrooms and on campaign trails, in singles bars and television commercials, over dinner tables and in Internet forums. Leith, a British journalist and novelist, wants to revive the formal appreciation of rhetorical technique, but he acknowledges that today it’s precisely when we are most aware of rhetorical skill that we condemn it. If Barack Obama won the presidency largely on his strengths as an orator (a testimony to rhetoric’s importance if there ever was one), that same eloquence has become a stick to beat him with in the hands of his critics. Rick Santorum is typical in dismissing Obama “just a person of words.” “It seemed,” Leith writes of the 2008 election, “that though we expected politicians to make speeches, we didn’t like them to be too good at it.”

This isn’t precisely true; Obama’s supporters celebrate his speechmaking. But the potshots do illustrate the contemporary ambivalence toward smooth-talking of any kind. Whereas the ancients admired rhetoric as a consciously mastered skill, we prefer (we think) people who speak “from the heart” — if not quite spontaneously, then at the very least approximating a free outflowing of their supposedly true selves. To appear to have thought too much about what you’re saying, to be obviously conscious of it as a performance, is to seem insincere. No wonder the study of rhetoric per se has fallen by the wayside.

But of course, as Leith also points out, “being anti-rhetoric is, finally, just another rhetorical strategy.” “Words Like Loaded Pistols” sports a fabulous assortment of examples of time-tested rhetorical gambits in action. Exhibit A for “anti-rhetorical rhetoric” is Sarah Palin’s taped television address following the 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 13 others in Arizona. The lunatic gunman, some observers felt, had been egged on by the paramilitaristic language and imagery of right-wingers in general and Palin’s own website in particular. Leith breaks down Palin’s statement using classical rhetorical terminology, but he also holds it up as an illustration of the ironic paradoxes of anti-rhetoric. “The way she chose to defend herself against trial by media was through the media; while denying that words could be held responsible for inciting hatred and violence, she asserted that media reporting on her” was inciting hatred and violence.

In further case studies, Leith examines the rhetorical technique of everyone from Eminem and “South Park” to Frederick Douglass, the courtroom combatants in “A Few Good Men,” Richard Nixon and his famous Checkers speech and Earl Spencer in the eulogy for his sister, Princess Diana. Interstitial chapters highlight “Champions of Rhetoric”: Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Cicero and Martin Luther King Jr., etc. (not excepting Hitler, because whatever else can be said about the man, he knew how to fire up a crowd).

Although this greatest-hits element is key to the appeal of “Words Like Loaded Pistols,” Leith also provides a brisk overview of rhetorical principles and terms — the latter of which, in tongue-twisting Greek and Latin, many readers will promptly forget. (It is amusing to learn that the lyrics to the Carpenters’ “Close to You” present a textbook specimen of hypophora.) However obscure the terminology may seem to modern readers, however, the thinking underlying it is rock solid.

And to judge by much of the public speaking and ostensibly persuasive writing one sees these days, it’s also woefully neglected. “Words Like Loaded Pistols” isn’t a how-to book, but chances are that anyone who reads it will acquire a trick or two. Many a catastrophic best-man toast or limping pitch meeting demonstrates the need for a better understanding of the elementary guidelines laid down well over 2,000 years ago: Know your audience and strive to portray yourself as one of them; adjust your style to the tenor of the occasion; consider starting with a tactical concession; and so on. The marvel is not that the old techniques still work, but that we ever persuaded ourselves that we could do without them.

Atwood appears in the documentary; she is shown working on her manuscript and giving her talks, which were commissioned by the celebrated Massey Lectures series in Canada. Her ideas link stories that include the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Canadian mogul Conrad Black’s prison stint, efforts to unionize tomato farm workers in Florida, and most memorably, a neighborhood feud in Albania that resulted in a family being unable to leave their home for fear of being killed by their enemies.

Atwood, in addition to being one of the grande dames of world literature, is a veritable font of curious information and lore on everything from pest control (“Cockroaches hate cucumber peel,” she informed me) to ancient trading systems to hockey. She emits a string of sardonic wisecracks with the lockjawed, deadpan delivery of Philip Marlowe. In other words, she’s really fun to talk to, and the release of “Payback” gave me a fine opportunity to do so.

You make no claim to prescience about the financial crisis that hit just as the book version of “Payback” came out. What inspired it instead?

In a former life I was a student of Victorian literature, which you can’t be without coming smack up against money to an even greater extent than if you are, for instance, an Elizabethan scholar. The 19th century is the one where money becomes the big determinant. The big story is the industrialists, who are making kajillions of dollars some of the time, and at other times are undergoing big busts in which they close factories and everyone’s thrown out of work.

That’s when investment in the stock market became a thing. People didn’t really understand it. (And they still don’t!) Little old ladies would put their money in and they’d get an income, but then something would happen, as in “Cranford,” and they’d lose all their money.

“Wuthering Heights,” when you’re 20, is about the mad passion of Cathy and Heathcliff. When you’re 50, it’s about, “Where did Heathcliff make his money? How did he get so rich?” What was the Great Gatsby doing that caused him to have all those nice pastel shirts — which have always struck me as a nice detail — and that allowed him to pursue his passion for Daisy? What was he doing? There was something dishonest; something having to do with money that we didn’t entirely understand but we knew was shady.

The film is so wide-ranging in its topics that I did wonder if someone who hadn’t read the book would find it easy to see the connections.

I think it all hangs together. It’s a necklace with first one bead, then a different bead, then a different bead. And then a repetition of the pattern. I’m the string. [Jennifer Baichwal] strings it together at the end with that wonderful device of having each of the people interviewed read a little bit from the end of the book, which — boo-hoo! — it makes me cry every time. Especially the Mexican tomato worker reading to his son in Spanish.

It seems an especially challenging project to visualize onscreen because one of your arguments is that debt is imaginary.

No, money is imaginary. Debts are real. Let’s pretend that you save Mr. Brown’s life. What does he owe you?

He owes me “his life.”

You come to him later and say, “Will you write a recommendation for college for my niece?” and he says no. How do you feel?

Outraged!

There you go. That’s why it’s real. It’s real because it’s a visceral, emotional thing and we all know that. We all know that when the engagement breaks up, you give back the ring. People who keep the ring are really [makes a face of great disgust].

These are emotional balances. They’re in us long before money enters the picture. They’re in us as kids, little kids. “It’s not fair,” kicks in probably between 3 and 4, big time. His cookie is bigger, I want one too.

It’s certainly true of primates. If I scratch your back, you owe me one and I’ll remember that. We’re social beings, always exchanging — exchanging good for good and also payback for wrongs. Even if we’re not actually exchanging wrongs, we’re certainly thinking about it. Which is why we like to read a good revenge story now and again.

Speaking of revenge, the feuding Albanians in the film …

That is so amazing. Joined at the hip. How are they ever going to get out of it? Because it’s become so meaningful, particularly to the one who wants the vengeance.

With that story, even more than most of the others in the film, you go through a journey. At first, I felt so sorry for this family confined to their house while their fields fall into disrepair. That their enemy is wearing a shiny leather jacket that makes him look like a nightclub gangster doesn’t help. But then, later in the film, he lifts up his shirt to show the gruesome scars on his abdomen where the other man shot him, several times, and that really drives it home: He shot him. I don’t think I could forgive someone who’d done that to me.

Also, in that culture, if you just give it over, you’re a wuss. Some of those situations apparently do get resolved. There are mediators who work on it, and sums of money change hands. There’s a big party and everybody’s pals. But not with this outfit. It doesn’t look as if that’s going to get finished any time soon.

It’s the most primal example of debt in the film, but the segments about the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are close. There is a debt that can never be repaid.

Not with money. You can pay money to the people involved, but you can’t pay money to the fish. There isn’t a money equivalent. There’s a habitat-restoration equivalent which you could see in money terms, but nature doesn’t deal in money. Nature deals in chemistry and physics. If you create a disequilibrium in nature that is very large, ultimately that will affect you. It’s not that nature is punishing you; it’s that if you kill all the blue-green algae in the ocean, you can’t breathe.

Then there are the farmworkers in Florida. How do they fit into your concept of debt?

Jennifer went out to find real-life, visceral, dramatic stories that illustrated the core ideas of the book. The farm workers’ story is about disequilibrium in the financial system. If one percent is at the top, who’s at the bottom? You’re pretty much looking at it with the farm workers. That’s at the bottom of what we eat and buy.

Some people might find it difficult to see how that relates to debt.

Because they’re thinking of debt only in money terms. Money is a fairly late addition to the human arsenal of tools. Trading preceded money. Money is just an invention. It has no value in itself. You can’t eat it, you can’t smoke it, you can’t drink it or live in a house made of it, and you can’t wear it to keep you warm. It’s a token of exchange, and it facilitates exchange at a distance.

We think of debt as connected with that, but it’s a tip-of-the-iceberg thing. In fact, debt is connected with any form of exchange, with who owes what to whom and are they getting fair value. Is it fair value if you work ten hours a day and you can’t make a living wage?

Both book and film end with urging us to reconceive debt.

What if we stopped thinking of it as just something having to do with our credit cards and instead think of it in terms of equilibrium and imbalance? What arrangement of those things would be healthier for us?

But if most people’s feeling for debt is as primal as you say it is, can it be reframed in that way, say, to be more environmentalist? Can you get them to feel that they owe a debt to nature?

Well, they used to. That’s where religion originated. The earliest gods were vegetation gods; or weather gods; or in hunting societies, animal gods. When you get into agriculture, you have grain gods, dying and rising gods. You owed them sacrifices, partly because they were giving something to you, and you owed them something back. Now we need to graduate to the understanding that while we don’t have to throw ourselves into the ocean to propitiate the blue-green algae, if we kill it — and with it a major source of oxygen — then it’s curtains for us.

The new app for the Design Museum in London is, unsurprisingly, beautifully designed. It features 59 exemplary objects from the museum’s collection, everything from iconic chairs and the original, candy-colored iMac to the first plastic-covered nappy (diaper), devised by an American housewife in 1946 and celebrated in the accompanying text as an example of ingenious “design without designers.” Others are simply beautiful.

The items are presented on a grid, with each column and row scrollable either vertically or horizontally. Select an object and the entry expands to reveal a gallery of photographs from various angles, text explaining the object’s provenance and the reasons for its inclusion, and a brief video of museum director Deyan Sudjic talking about why it’s notable. Although Deyan has a pleasant voice and extemporizes comfortably, the videos are the weakest part of the app because they are superfluous. There’s nothing in them you can’t already find in the text or photographs. Occasionally, they miss an opportunity, such as not including the sound of Alberto Alessi’s famous Whistling Kettle, which was designed to sound like an American freight train, and since many of these objects are praised for their functionality, it would be nice to see some of them in action.

A curious effect of meandering through the Design Museum Collection app and other forms of non-linear media is a low-level anxiety that you might miss something. In a physical museum, you can poke your head in every room and assure yourself that you’ve covered all the exhibit territory in the building. Every so often, using the Design Museum app, I found myself scrolling an interesting object off the main page and then not being able to find it again. (The scrollable “strips” seem to change their composition when you move in and out of an entry.) Where was that weird-looking TV, again? Eventually, I found it, but this nagging sensation of incompleteness is something nonlinear-media creators need to bear in mind. The idea is to make art and information accessible to an audience in new ways, not (or at least not always) to make them wonder if it’s been withheld.

Finally, while I’m leery of the mania for injecting social media elements into every cultural experience, I love that the Design Museum app supports comments on every single entry. The objects were all designed to be used, and it’s delightful to read accounts (both laudatory and derisive) of what it’s like to live with them.

An FBI agent from Dallas, Danny Coulson, knew better. As Andrew Gumbel and Roger Charles relate in their impressive new book, “Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed — and Why It Still Matters,” Coulson jumped in his car and headed to Oklahoma City as soon as he heard about the bombing, fielding a call from a CBS correspondent along the way. She told him “everybody in Washington” said the perpetrators were Middle Eastern, but he said no way. “It’s a Bubba job,” he told her. “It’s Bubbas.”

It was Bubbas. But how many of them? Timothy McVeigh was convicted on 11 counts of murder and conspiracy and was executed for his role in the crime. Terry Nichols, who helped McVeigh construct the truck bomb, is still in federal prison serving a sentence of life without parole. A third conspirator, Mike Fortier, received a reduced sentence (and immunity for his wife, Lori) in exchange for testifying against the other two. Officially, these are all the parties responsible for the bombing, the most devastating act of terrorism committed in this country until 9/11. But many, many people are not satisfied with the official account.

Of course, a lot of these malcontents are cranks, offering paint-by-numbers scenarios in which 1) the attack really was “Middle Eastern” after all and 2) the government rigged the whole thing in order to discredit the right-wing militia movement to which McVeigh and Nichols belonged. Gumbel, an investigative journalist, and Charles, a former Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who consults with national news organizations on military and national intelligence stories, are obliged to distinguish themselves from such fantasists. Nevertheless, they assert, there are good reasons to feel “skeptical that all the perpetrators have been caught,” a sentiment they say is shared by many of their sources both outside the government and within it.

Their argument, unlike other conspiracy theories about Oklahoma City, is not outlandish. Gumbel and Charles (who also worked as an evidence analyst for McVeigh’s defense team) suspect that McVeigh had other accomplices in planning the attack, in assembling the materials for the bomb and in planting it on April 19. This help came from several nodes in a loose network of right-wing extremists — gun nuts, would-be-revolutionaries and separatist Christian sects — who have never been fully investigated or called to account.

Not a fanciful change, but at the same time a bold one, given that the multi-agency federal investigation collected a Brobdingnagian quantity of evidence: 13 million hotel and motel records, 6 million truck rental records, 28,000 interviews — an estimated 1 billion pieces of information. Yet for all this exhaustiveness, certain promising trails in the investigation went largely unexplored: over 1,000 latent fingerprints found in McVeigh’s car and motel room, for example, as well as his links to a gang of bank robbers belonging to the Aryan Republican Army, a rich gun dealer and a creepy fundamentalist compound called Elohim City.

The authors believe that federal agencies, shamed and stinging after bloody clashes with right-wing militants at Waco and Ruby Ridge, preferred not to mess with leads that might end in further confrontations. The prosecution concurred, having tried and failed in an earlier sedition trial against similar militants. They felt they’d learned not to test a jury’s ability to follow complex conspiratorial narratives with too many characters, or that asked it to believe that trash-talking backwoods paranoids could pose a serious threat to the U.S government.

“Oklahoma City” compiles a hefty collection of those unplumbed leads, some of it gleaned from newly released files and a jailhouse interview with Nichols that, they report, went into “great detail.” Given the milieus McVeigh and Nichols frequented, there are enough freak-show touches to keep an FX drama stocked for three seasons: a double-wide trailer full of snakes, a neo-Nazi with a secret life as a cross-dresser, a hot blonde with a swastika tattoo who agreed to act as an informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and so on. The authors refrain from milking this material for all its lurid charm, but somehow their deadpan delivery only makes it more grotesque.

They have excellent reasons for not treating this pack of alienated misfits as merely contemptible. As Gumbel and Rogers point out, McVeigh and many of his pals were veterans whose Gulf War battlefield experience left them with both military skills and emotional damage. “It is not difficult to see,” they write, “how new McVeighs could emerge from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lingering devastation of the 2008 economic meltdown and the anti-establishment rage embodied by everyone from the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street to the violent racists threatening to put a bullet in the brain of America’s first black president.”

The book does suffer a bit from its authors’ submersion in the story. The narrative thread — so necessary for readers whose memories of the attack and investigation have faded — occasionally gets lost as they jump around chronologically to demonstrate the shakiness of some points in the government’s version of the story. Still, it’s shocking to learn that over two dozen eyewitnesses reported having seen McVeigh with at least one other person on the morning of the bombing, contradicting the prosecution’s assertion that he acted alone on that day. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, but that’s a lot of people, and the ones the authors describe in detail had direct, highly memorable encounters with the bomber(s).

Perhaps the most persuasive aspect of “Oklahoma City” is its refusal of paranoia. The typical crackpot conspiracy theory relies on a masterly, Luciferian characterization of the conspirators, who are invariably depicted as puppet masters capable of pulling off elaborate illusions, feints and coverups without a hitch. As Gumbel and Rogers tell it, the bombing investigation fell short of discovering the truth because of sloppiness, failure of will, self-serving intra-office politics and, above all, idiotic and obstructive turf wars among law enforcement agencies. Now, that sounds more like the government that left us vulnerable six years later and that may well let us down again.