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the world is massively more connected now than it has ever been, naturally groupthink is on the rise

Parts of California’s Central Valley have fallen by nearly thirty feet as the aquifers beneath them have emptied, and areas of Louisiana, robbed of the Mississippi River sediment that once counteracted erosion, are sinking by as much as three-quarters of an inch per year.

Lyell turned out to be right: the Scandinavian peninsula was, and still is, rising relative to the sea, as a result of the phenomenon known as “postglacial uplift”—the slow bounce-back of land that was long compressed by the great weight of earlier glaciers.

Literature, to me, is about adding as much complicating information as possible, since this kind of storytelling gets closer and closer to “the real truth” – that is, to the actuality of things just as they are.

Now, on the other hand: since that idea occurred to you, it might be exactly what you should do. Art is weird like that. It could be that you are, in that question, creating a hand that will scratch a certain itch, so to speak.

The better life you absolutely can build isn’t going to be brought to you by ChatGPT but by your own steady uphill clawing and through careful management of your own expectations. You live here. This is it.

People sometimes marked these extremes with rocks that could stand as warnings for a future that was in danger of forgetting the past. We know them now as tsunami stones and hunger stones. A famous one in the Elbe, commemorating a terrible drought, is carved with the words “If you see me, then weep.”

Horror, in this sense, is the feeling you get when you see the monstrous. When the knife-wielding killer stabs the hero, an oozing zombie hand grabs your wrist, or the ghost manifests to spook the living. Terror, on the other hand, is the feeling you get when you sense there might be an evil or otherworldly presence.

everything starts to matter because a context has arisen; expectations arise.