Debbie Foster

When it comes to learning, Triumph is the real foe; it’s Disaster that’s your teacher. It’s Disaster that brings objectivity. It’s Disaster that’s the antidote to that greatest of delusions, overconfidence. And ultimately, both Triumph and Disaster are impostors. They are results that are subject to chance. One of them just happens to be a better

His resistance to the truth about himself is expressed as curiosity about something else, a ruse familiar to psychoanalysts.

Chaos is the score upon which reality is written,

The theory that shamanism is a compelling technology for dealing with uncertainty explains the spectrum of shamanic activities. Illness, weather, and beached whales are not scattered, unrelated events but members of a single class: big outcomes that we want control over and for which we are apt to suspect supernatural involvement. Shamans are not

there's a particular fulfillment that we only get from narrativizing reality, from the satisfaction of familiar procedure and familiar if incorrect facts, from reducing public institutions and individuals into something we can easily grasp. This, I think, holds the key to why this kind of story takes up so much space in most of our lives, and why

As usual, we don't really have a problem with the fictional; we have a problem with the real. Reality is unsatisfying and scary; fiction about reality fixes those problems. It's much easier for us to navigate reality if we can reduce it to simple, digestible patterns: if our public institutions and our fellow human beings can be flattened into

Summerscale concludes The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by suggesting that "the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional," is "to transform sensation, horror, and grief, into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away."

Bottom-up attention automatically keeps you in touch with what’s going on in the world, but this great benefit comes with a drawback, particularly for postindustrial folk who live in metropolitan areas and work at desks rather than on the savannah: lots of fruitless, unwelcome distractions.

Here are some thinking prompts you can use while reading:

• How could I put this in my own words?

• How do I know this is true?

• How can this be applied to my life?

• How do I feel about this?

• How would I improve this?

• How would I change this?

• How would I explain this to a 5-year-old?

• What is the main idea here?

• What is this similar to?

• What is