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.

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.

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.

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.

A gravity anomaly in the Indian Ocean means that a large swath of its waters—an area nearly as large as India itself—has a top level that’s as much as a hundred and six metres lower than the global average.

We know that, because of the way the Earth bulges as it spins, the water levels of equatorial seas are some twenty-one kilometres higher than the sea ice at the North Pole. (This bulge also complicates how we think about mountain heights, since the peak of Mt. Chimborazo, rising close to the equator, is actually farther from the center of the plane... See more

The quest to find a mean sea level for the whole world was part and parcel of the quest to make the world governable. And thus, von Hardenberg writes, did our idea of sea level as a benchmark emerge from a very specific time and place, becoming intertwined with the colonial project and “a long-held perception of holocenic stability.”