My near-death experience taught me not to fear those final moments
This Is What Uncertainty Feels Like
When you're taking action in the face of uncertainty, you have to make peace with the idea that you're never going to know if you're doing the right thing. This pandemic is one way of remembering what that's going to feel like.
“I was surprised how upset some people got”: A conversation with the creator of TomWikiAssist, the bot that edited Wikipedia
"It's almost like people were really quite disoriented and terrified by it. And to some extent I get it and I'm trying to empathize with how they're feeling."
An Explanation (Which I Would Be Very Grateful If You Took The Time To Read)
What follows is a minor modern horror story.
Managing intrusive thoughts | Lifeline
Dealing with overwhelming and distressing thoughts can be difficult, but knowing how to handle them can make a big difference to how you feel. Learn why you might be experiencing intrusive thoughts and strategies that can help you manage them.
Things I’ve been thinking lately
Notes I kept coming back to this year. On death, on bodies, on playing, on not chasing happiness, and on living close to the things you love.
Working Through the Fear of Being Seen
A personal essay about returning to writing, navigating visibility, and rebuilding confidence after years of second-guessing.
On Dying Well: Ben Sasse and the Vocation of Suffering
Ben Sasse’s recent announcement reveals to us both goods and virtues that show in his dying a glimmer of light, a stirring of hope, and the possibility of spring even in one’s final winter.
Refugees and Searchers Go to the Movies – First of the Month
Spielberg lets the screen go black for about five seconds. The communal experience of film-going then becomes a shared nightmare. With the screen unlit, the emergency lights in the theater are the only source of illumination. If you jump (as I did), you fear for a moment that the movie has stopped—the reel fallen off its plate, the fantasy interrupted by unfunny, drop-dead reality. “Are we still alive?” whispered by Farrier’s daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) is an inquiry that invokes our own doubts about our safety, our capacity to dream, our possible awakening to dire reality. It recalls how many people felt after 9/11. Are we dreaming? Are we still alive? Bringing everyday experience and existential contemplation together so forcefully, Spielberg joins the ranks of the most audacious avant-garde filmmakers: He turns the popcorn movie experience into a consideration of the abyss.
What Steven Spielberg Taught Me About Fear, Catharsis, and Being Human
Hollywood is struggling, but Spielberg insists that the big screen is still the best place to work out our collective dreams, joys and sorrows.
Generalization of beneficial exposure effects to untreated stimuli from another fear category
Previous research has shown that fear associated with one stimulus often spreads to other stimuli with similar perceptual features as well as across different stimulus categories. Exposure is considered as the most effective intervention to attenuate exaggerated fear. The extent to which exposure treatment effects can generalize to fears not targeted during treatment remains elusive. Previous studies on possible generalization of beneficial effects of exposure used stimuli sharing the same stimulus category and/or stimuli having high perceptual similarity. The current study examined whether exposure treatment generalization can be achieved for untreated stimuli which do not share any perceptual resemblance and belong to a different fear category. An analogue sample of fifty participants with fear of spiders (animal-related fears) and heights (natural environment-related fears) was tested. Participants have been randomly assigned to either an exposure treatment (n = 24) or a control condition (n = 26). Exposure treatment was designed to only target participants’ fear of spiders, leaving their fear of heights untreated. Results demonstrated that the effects of exposure treatment generalized to fear of heights, as indicated by a reduction in behavioral avoidance, as well as self-reported acrophobia symptoms. The present study confutes the assumption that generalization of exposure effects to untreated fears is based on perceptual similarity. Clearly, further research is required to determine the decisive factors, in order to expand the generalization effect permanently to any given type of fear.
Since 9/11, Fear Has Driven Our Politics. Don’t Let It Drive The Next 25 Years.
Twenty-five years ago today I was woken up by a phone call from a close friend, who, like me, grew up in New York and, like me, was now living in California. She told me that something horrible had…
The Hole In Your Brain That Makes You Doomscroll
Empathy, Thick and Thin
When we empathize with someone going through something, we often draw on our past experiences with the someone and the something. These kinds of experiences gro
I Survived a Cold Plunge and All I Got Was Everything I Ever Wanted
I resisted the trend until I couldn’t any longer.
