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"Often, when something bad happens, I have a strange, instinctual desire for things to get even worse—I think of a terrible outcome and then wish for it. I recognize the pattern, but I don’t understand it. It’s as though my mind is running simulations and can’t help but prefer the most dramatic option—as though, in that eventuality, I could enjoy it from the outside.��

I said I was writing about disasters. “What about disasters?�� she asked, and I wasn’t sure how to answer. My mother stepped in with a much better elevator pitch: "Isn’t it more about how we think about disasters?"

"Horror and awe are not incompatible; they are intertwined."

"Hubris, or something else? Disasters always feel like a thing of the past. We want to believe that better technology, better engineering will save us. That the more information we have, the safer we can make our technology. But we can never have all the information. In creating new technology to address known problems, we unavoidably create new problems, new unknowns. Progress changes the parameters of possibility. This is something we strive for—to innovate past the event horizon of what we can imagine."

"There have been many more deaths, orders of magnitude more, from accidents in the fossil-fuel industries than in nuclear energy. But I can’t think of a particular accident with as much disaster capital as Chernobyl."

"Normalization is incredibly normal, a way of coping with terror by resetting our default values."

"We believe we need to worry about the right problems, even if we can’t solve them."

"Millions of people who live in areas vulnerable to megathrust tsunamis don’t even have the choice to worry or not; they don’t know the threat exists to begin with."

We must find a way to turn them into “arresting stories�� (in Nixon’s terms), told “in a distinctive manner�� (in Moeller’s)—suggesting that the right response to unending wars and a rapidly warming planet is a shift in aesthetics. Perhaps it is. Perhaps we have to make the real threats fascinating. But how, if we lack the cognitive capacity to see them?

Hyperspace is in part an exercise in conceptualizing spatial dimensions beyond the usual three. As Kaku explains, "The growing realization among scientists today is that any three-dimensional theory is ‘too small�� to describe the forces that govern our universe." Extra dimensions give us "‘enough room�� to explain the fundamental forces.""

There’s something misleading about these exercises, though, as well as the idea of higher dimensions creating “more room”—they make it seem like the fourth and fifth dimensions, and so on, are larger somehow, more outside. But where? As high up or far down as you can imagine is still in the third dimension. But counterintuitively, some theoretical physicists think higher dimensions are smaller, not bigger, than the ones we perceive. The physicist Peter Freund says we can’t see them because they are “‘curled up�� into a tiny ball so small that they can no longer be detected.

The economist Leopold Kohr believed most social dysfunction was the result of “the cult of bigness,�� the unexamined assumption that growth is always good.

Don’t be upset when a teacup breaks, because its breaking was inevitable; therefore, it was already broken. Is the world already broken? I wonder if humanity is not “too big to fail,�� but too big not to.

(What does desire feel like to an ant?)

you might think that the period following the plague years would be one of great austerity. If anything, the opposite is the case. Survivors of the plague did not become ascetic. Instead, they may have sensed a baffling meaninglessness to their being spared—survivor’s guilt being a kind of miserable apprehension of one’s own good luck. [...] People embraced “a more disordered and shameful life,�� and “behavior grew more reckless and callous, as it often does after a period of violence and suffering.�� You could also say not much had changed at all, though a third of the world had died

persistence of the normal is strong.

Since the judge decided then that the historical facticity of the Holocaust would be argued in court, the deniers were seen as having won the battle no matter what the verdict. Both sides believed the impact of the extensive media coverage would be significant and, for different reasons, did not trust the journalists.

It's as if the accident provides an excuse to express the buried trauma.

Rats, Scaer notes, when given shocks in a certain part of a maze, will tend to return to that part of the maze, “leading to reenactment of the shock.�� He adds, “The familiar is more rewarding to the rats than the unknown.��

But while they are frozen, all the chemical activation associated with fight or flight persists. If the animal survives, once it’s safe it will need to “discharge�� this energy through shaking or trembling. He noted that humans also freeze in the face of threats, but rarely do they go through the discharge stage—likely because, as Scaer puts it, “dramatic shaking all over is ‘unseemly�� or ‘hysterical,�� and tends to be suppressed in advanced Western cultures.�� It’s like the fight-or-flight process can’t play itself out and so gets stuck.

“Another example, Fromm writes, is “going berserk,�� which is “found among the Teutonic tribes (berserk means ‘bear shirt��).�� He explains: “This was an initiation rite in which the male youth was induced into a state of identification with a bear. The initiated would attack people, trying to bite them, not speaking but simply making noises like a bear���� It is rage for the sake of rage.��

There’s a debate among psychologists about whether emotions are real, biologically innate things, or whether emotion is a concept that humans made up, like money.�� I felt shocked by that, and still feel shocked. Don’t even infants have emotions? If our emotions are a construct, what part of our conscious experience is not?

I hate the term “date rape.�� If you murder someone on a date, it’s not called “date murder.��

The anesthesiologist Daniel Carr believes that “the memory of pain—the body’s memory of pain, that is—can be more damaging than the original experience.�� He cites experiments showing that shocking a giant sea slug in the same place you shocked it previously causes a more complicated pain response—implying more pain—than the original shock.

"To seem to feel pain just is to be in pain.�� But the converse isn’t true: Not seeming to feel pain doesn’t mean you aren’t in pain.

Poet Sandra Simonds responded "Happiness is basically irrelevant to my life. I am not even convinced happiness is ethical.�� I think about this all the time.

Jennifer Michael Hecht argues that “the basic modern assumptions about how to be happy are nonsense.�� Euphoria is one form of happiness, but “we devalue euphoria in our drugs���� because we value productivity.��

“Happiness�� is not well defined. In addition to euphoria, Hecht points out, the word can mean “a good day�� or “a happy life.�� These different kinds of happiness “are often at odds.�� Too many good days (weekends or vacation days, for most people) could prevent you from having a happy (long, fulfilling, stable) life. But “modern expert advice is hopelessly devoted to ‘happy life�� happiness,�� Hecht writes, at the expense of euphoric moments or simple happy days. It’s a question of perspective, or perhaps resolution—how zoomed in you are when examining your life.

We don’t just look to the media for facts, we look to it for narratives.

“We want to lead lives that are interesting, exciting, fulfilling, and happy, and we want to lead lives that are morally good.�� Increasingly, however, access to information will make this difficult, if not impossible—we will have to choose between happiness and morality.

What in the world are we supposed to care about, and how much? Do our loyalties belong with our friends first—be it our literal friends or, as Schmitt believed, our nation-state? Or do we, as Emmanuel Levinas suggested, have “infinite responsibility�� toward the other, any and every other?

“Rather than confront global suffering, we may cull our feeds, or stop watching the news. Or, worse, we may make of the suffering other an enemy, turning apathy to antipathy. These unspoken algorithms by which we manage our empathy—they are almost innocent, almost “self-care.�� (We’re not committing atrocities, just refusing to witness them.) But layered together, they have the shade of evil.��

The title is based on the Javanese term mata kelap, or “dark eye,�� equivalent to what the Malaysians call amok. In English, “running amok�� suggests wild and disruptive but essentially harmless behavior; I picture toddlers at a birthday party. The original term is more specific, per van der Post: 'It is a phenomenon where a human being who has behaved respectably in the collective sense, obeying all the mores and the collective ethos of a particular culture and people, suddenly at the age of about 35 or 40 finds all this respectability too much—and takes a dagger and murders everyone around before being overpowered.'

Societal mores are in place not to maintain the natural order but to enforce unnatural order.

meaning—in the form of engagement with evil—is a basic human need.

“McTaggart does not use “unreality�� in the same way I do, to describe a quality of seeming unrealness in something I assume to be real. Instead, his paper sets out to prove that time literally does not exist.��

viewers didn’t actually notice if they were a little out of sync, but there was “an asymmetry”—the sound can lag the video by up to 125 milliseconds before people notice something’s wrong, but if the sound leads the video by more than 45 milliseconds, they know it’s off.

I wonder if the way the world gets worse will barely outpace the rate at which we get used to it.

In the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and the odor of butyric acid. For the black ghost knifefish, it’s electrical fields. For the echo-locating bat, it’s air-compression waves. The small subset of the world that an animal is able to detect is its Umwelt. The bigger reality, whatever that might mean, is called the Umgebung.�� The Umgebung is the unknown unknown, the unperceived unperceived.

The we responsible for climate change is a fictional construct, one that’s distorting and dangerous,�� writes Genevieve Guenther

"Most people are good.�� That sentence gives me pause. “Most People Are Good�� is also the name of a country song I hate: I believe this world ain’t half as bad as it looks, the guy croons in the chorus. The more I think of it, the more I disagree. I don’t think most people are good, or bad, for that matter. I think people are neutral. From a distance, they look almost interchangeable. It seems to me that “good people�� can become “bad people�� when provided the opportunity within an existing power structure—to claim and exert power at a deadly cost to others and get away with it. It is not an act of empathy for me to say that Trump is not inherently evil, but “we�� have created opportunities for him to be evil.

One character reminded another that a “revolution�� is simply a turn of the wheel; it doesn’t break the power structure, it just changes who is on top. I think about that all the time.