Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession

This low-key, ambient paranoia—this conviction that no place was secure and that any moment could tip into cataclysm—was a new feature of my consciousness, but it was lodged so firmly that I worried it was here to stay.

As legal scholar Michelle Alexander outlines in The New Jim Crow, her bestselling account of the War on Drugs and its impact on the criminal justice system, more black men are currently under correctional control in the United States than were enslaved in 1850.

Part of the curriculum of growing up as a girl is to learn lessons about your vulnerability—if not from your parents, then from a culture that’s fascinated by wounded women.

Miniatures are satisfying not because they are grand, but because they are exact. “It is the accuracy, the rightness, that is so rewarding,” according to writer Alice Gregory. “It is a relief . . . to be in the presence of precision—and be allowed to like it.”

This helps explain why television programs about violent death can feel so strangely soothing: they teach us that even the most senseless crimes can be interpreted and, ultimately, explained.

Dollhouses are an almost too-literal example of these women’s shrunken ambitions—of how, when you don’t have control over the big decisions shaping your life, you narrow your focus to a world that’s small enough for you to impose your will on it.

It takes so little for us to shut ourselves off from someone else’s suffering—all he has to do is be wearing the wrong team’s jersey. Human beings are such good othering machines, so talented at dividing up the world into who matters and who doesn’t.

I want us to wonder what stories we’re most hungry for, and why; to consider what forms our fears take; and to ask ourselves whose pain we still look away from.

they weren’t the only ones warping my sense of reality—it was also the many flavors of online Nazi, the school shooters and the girls who longed to love them, the edgelords and their aggressive brooding, cranky old Ayn Rand—all these various manifestations of a worldview that insisted what mattered most was power, and that getting attention gave yo