Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 139 of 501 · 20 per page

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Ames, his fingers tight on a balled up napkin, has prepared himself for an entirely different statement. He needs a moment to key in to the present, a moment to sort the various implications through which to refract the man’s meaning. What Ames would have given, for years, to have heard a straight cis middle-class man compare a trans woman to his own wife, much less in order to defend the trans woman. Now, much too late, one such man has appeared just in time to hurt another woman Ames cares about. This man meets Ames’s eye in man-to-man acknowledgment: The women we love are sacred and we will defend them. Across the table, Katrina shifts in her chair, and Ames catches a waver to her face. A part of her must understand that that moment between men excludes her, will always exclude her—but worse, a part of her must also see that in that moment, she is not the woman whom Ames, or anyone else, has positioned as eligible for protective love. “You're not hearing what I’m saying,” she suddenly interjects. “['m saying that your good buddy Ames here used to be a fucking transsexual.” Reese knows that Ames has gone to Chicago with Katrina. He told Reese that he’d talk to Katrina about his plan, the one that Reese agreed to, sometime while on this business trip. She keeps checking her phone, and still she hasn’t heard anything from him. The stress of it is getting to her, and the more time that goes by the more implausible it seems. Is sharing motherhood really what she wants? Or is she so desperate that she'll take any scrap thrown her way? And if that’s the case, it seems to Reese unlikely that an apparently successful cis woman would settle for so little. To distract herself, Reese has been seeing a lot of her cowboy. But predictably, tonight, her cowboy called to postpone their date. On a last-minute whim, Reese decided to go see her friend Thalia’s weekly set at Dynamite, one of several North Brooklyn queer dive bars run by the same shady family of straight people. Thalia was a former drag queen turned transsexual, one of the earliest converts in the Great Drag Enlightenment, when a significant quorum of Brooklyn’s queens came out as trans, began to inject estrogen, and renounced their gay past, the consequences of which miffed them into misandry, as the desperately cute twinks who used to sleep with them no longer would. Thalia runs a set called Anger Management, in which she plays tropical dubstep to keep everyone chill, then undercuts her chill vibes with hourly advice sessions in which she solicits Ann Landers-—style questions from the various twinks who form her now sexually unavailable fan base, then berates them for their stupidity in profound and profane harangues. It was reliably the most entertaining way for Reese to spend a Tuesday night.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  replied: • " H o w right you At the same time, you make it clear to your targets that they cannot have were to come away from you, at least not right away. You are establishing a barrier, some kind of the [ nunnery] ! What sort tension. of a life can any man lead when he's surrounded by a In days gone by such barriers were easy to create, by taking advantage lot of women? He might as of preexisting social obstacles—of class, race, marriage, religion. Today the well be living with a pack barriers have to be more psychological: your heart is taken by someone of devils. Why, six times out oj seven they don't else; you are really not interested in the target; some secret holds you back; even know their own the timing is bad; you are not good enough for the other person; the other minds." • But when they 234 • The Art of Seduction had finished talking, person is not good enough for you; and so on. Conversely, you can choose Masetto began to consider someone who has a built-in barrier: they are taken, they are not meant to what steps he ought to take want you. These barriers are more subtle than the social or religious variety, so that he could go and stay with them. Knowing but they are barriers nevertheless, and the psychology remains the same. himself to be perfectly People are perversely excited by what they cannot or should not have. capable of carrying out the Create this inner conflict—there is excitement and interest, but you are duties mentioned by Nuto, unavailable—and you will have them grasping like Tantalus for water. And he had no worries about losing the job on that as with Don Juan and Cristeta, the more you make your targets pursue you, particular score, but he was the more they imagine that it is they who are the aggressors. Your seduc-afraid lest he should be tion is perfectly disguised. turned down because of his youth and his unusually attractive appearance. And The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. so, having rejected a —OSCAR WILDE. number of other possible expedients, he eventually thought to himself: "The convent is a long way off, Keys to Seduction and there's nobody there who knows me. If I can pretend to be dumb, they'll take me on for sure." Clinging firmly to this Most of the time, people struggle to maintain security and a sense of balance in their lives. If they were always uprooting themselves in pursuit of every new person or fantasy that passed them by, they could not conjecture, he therefore

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  While living with the Smiths, I officially developed a “weak stomach,” a condition that was to a six-year-old what fainting was to a certain breed of Southern ladies in bygone eras. Anytime I found myself anxious or upset, I threw up. Our living conditions being what they were, I was sick on a regular basis. I didn’t will it or fake it, but it did come in handy. Nausea excused me from countless long-winded sermons, and sometimes, if I threw up enough, I didn’t have to go to church at all.Wanda, the eldest of the three Smith teenagers, often accompanied me to the bathroom or the bushes or the side of the road, depending on where the urge struck, and smoothed my hair back from my face while I heaved. Afterward, she held my head in her lap, and if the situation allowed, placed a drippy washcloth on my forehead. She rocked and sang just under her breath a song about a girl dying in a car accident and how her boyfriend wanted to be good so he could see her in heaven. The lyrics made me tense, but I knew from the rapt, solemn expression on Wanda’s long, pale face that the song was important to her, so I kept quiet.“Don’t tell anyone I sang this worldly song. Okay?”I nodded.Anything not related directly to God was a sin in the Smith household. Telling jokes. Smiling. Playing. Exhausted from doing too much of nothing, I tiptoed up the stairs once to the forbidden second story. Stacks of boxes lined the hallway. A splash of red and yellow peeked out of the corner of one box: a tic-tac-toe game, and below it books with drawings of kids and mice and rabbits in blue coats. I pulled out one of the books and ran my hand over it. I wondered whether Wanda or one of the twins would let me borrow the book or the game. Sister Smith’s pinched, dour face came to mind. Not in this life. I pushed through the first door. More boxes; some neatly stacked and pushed against the wall, others scattered across the room and half-filled with old pictures, chipped whatnots, petticoats flung on top. A single bed, sheets and blanket smoothed and tucked into the sides, was shoved against the wall. A nightstand stood watch in the middle of the room, its crooked-neck lamp illuminating nothing. Faded wallpaper peeled away from the walls.I wandered through an endless succession of rooms, all minimally furnished and filled with boxes. It was as if the Smiths had packed up their lives and were getting ready to move. But where? Maybe they were waiting for the rapture. Brother Terrell always said the time was short. I walked into the last room and noticed Betty’s white sweater hanging from it. So this was her room. Betty was Wanda’s younger sister and the twin of Eddy, the Smiths’ only son.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  trading, where the key question is whether the information about the firm is already incorporated in the price of its stock. Traders apparently lack the skill to answer this crucial question, but they appear to be ignorant of their ignorance. As I had discovered from watching cadets on the obstacle field, subjective confidence of traders is a feeling, not a judgment. Our understanding of cognitive ease and associative coherence locates subjective confidence firmly in System 1. Finally, the illusions of validity and skill are supported by a powerful professional culture. We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers. Given the professional culture of the financial community, it is not surprising that large numbers of individuals in that world believe themselves to be among the chosen few who can do what they believe others cannot. The Illusions of Pundits The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained. As Nassim Taleb pointed out in The Black Swan, our tendency to construct and believe coherent narratives of the past makes it difficult for us to accept the limits of our forecasting ability. Everything makes sense in hindsight, a fact that financial pundits exploit every evening as they offer convincing accounts of the day’s events. And we cannot suppress the powerful intuition that what makes sense in hindsight today was predictable yesterday. The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future. The often-used image of the “march of history” implies order and direction. Marches, unlike strolls or walks, are not random. We think that we should be able to explain the past by focusing on either large social movements and cultural and technological developments or the intentions and abilities of a few great men. The idea that large historical events are determined by luck is profoundly shocking, although it is demonstrably true. It is hard to think of the history of the twentieth century, including its large social movements, without bringing in the role of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong. But there was a moment in time, just before an egg was fertilized, when there was a fifty-fifty chance that the embryo that became Hitler could have been a female. Compounding the three events, there was a probability of one-eighth of a twentieth century without any of the three great villains and it is impossible to argue that history would have been roughly the same in their absence. The fertilization of these three eggs

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  At home, Amy had hoped to discuss their finances and time frame for a potential adoption, but instead, Reese arrived home in one of her wild, boisterous moods. Instead of preparing with a serious conversation, they ended up in the bedroom, raiding the closets to cosplay mom outfits for the orientation. Amy put on a jumpsuit and pulled her hair back into a ponytail. “Can I wear my black ankle boots? Or are the heels too much?” She turned her leg to better display the stacked heels to Reese. “Is that, like, not a wholesome mom look? Maybe I should wear sneakers? I want to be a MILF, but a subtle MILF, you know?” Reese scrutinized the heels from where she sat on the bed. “Wear your white Nike sneakers and leave the ponytail,” she told Amy. “Do, like, the sporty soccer mom.” “Yes. Soccer mom, good.” “Ym going to borrow your pearl studs, okay?” Reese asked, although she was already wearing them. Amy’s own mother had given her the studs as a mixed gesture, after first years of deep resentment that followed Amy’s coming out, during which she and Amy played a game of silent-treatment chicken. While the gift of the studs might have appeared to indicate that Amy’s mother had swerved first, Amy interpreted in them a subtext: If I must accept your womanhood, these are a strong suggestion of the kind of woman you should be. Consequently, Amy joined her in silent- treatment armistice, but refused to ever wear the studs. Reese hopped up from the bed and stood close to the mirror that hung on the closet door. “What are we going to tell them if they ask why we're there?” Reese’s nose nearly touched the nose of her reflection as she checked her brows, so Amy couldn’t see her face. “Why would they ask why we're there? It seems pretty self- explanatory.” “But if they press!” “Reese, we are allowed to find out about adopting a baby. We can even name-drop Omar’s sister.” Reese turned away from her reflection. “I know. But I feel naughty. Like we’re passing ourselves off as just a normie lez couple. The deceptive transsexual, going like: One baby, please! Nothing to see here!” “Like, what, they'll have the adoption version of trans panic?” “Yes!” “We are actual adults, Reese. We are not going to get in trouble. Now put your shoes on, sweetheart, so we won't be late.” But the same anxiety tugged at Amy. She had tried to picture to what kind of woman the voice at the adoption agency had belonged. She’d had an American accent, but Amy’s mind’s eye saw a disapproving and officious Englishwoman. Enough with these transgender shenanigans! Weve got real parents who need our time.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Katrina sits in the roller chair before Ames’s desk. The moment has an air of uncommon inversion. Because she is his boss, Ames nearly always goes to her office and sits in front of her desk. Her office, corresponding to their relative places in the corporate hierarchy, is double the square footage of his, with two full windows looking out on two neighboring buildings, and between them, a sliver of East River view. By contrast, Ames’s office has one window overlooking a small parking lot. Once, in the twilight, he saw a brown creature trotting spritely across the pavement—and has since maintained that it was an urban coyote. One takes one’s excitements where one may. Katrina rifles through a briefcase, pulls out a manila folder, and plops it on his desk. Her coming to his office makes him tense, like a teenager whose parents have entered his room. “Well,” she says. “It’s real. This is happening.” He reaches for the folder. He has good posture, and gives her an easy smile. The folder opens to reveal printouts from an online patient portal. “My gyno,” Katrina says, watching him closely. “She followed up with a blood test and a pelvic exam. She confirmed the home test results. Without an ultrasound, she can’t say how far I am, so I had one scheduled for the Thursday after next. I mean, I know you maybe aren’t sure yet how you feel about it, but maybe if you come, that'll help? If I’m more than four weeks into it, we'll be able to see the baby —or I guess, embryo?” He is aware that she is scrutinizing him for a reaction. He had been unable to give one after the pregnancy test came back positive. He feels the same numbness that he felt then, only now, he can no longer delay by telling her that he wants to wait for official confirmation to get his emotions involved. “Amazing,” he says, and tries out a smile that he fears might be coming off as a grimace. “I guess it’s real! Especially since we have”—he searches briefly for a phrase, and then comes up with one—“an entire dossier of evidence.” Katrina shifts to cross her legs. She’s wearing casual wedge heels. He always notices her clothing, half out of admiration, and half out of the habit of noting what’s going on in the field of women’s fashion. “Your reaction has been hard to read,” she says carefully. “I don’t know, I thought maybe if you saw it in black and white, I’d be able to gauge how you were actually feeling.” She pauses and swallows. “But I still can’t.” He sees the effort it costs her to muster this level of assertion. He stands up, walks around the desk, and half sits against it, just in front of her, so his leg is touching hers.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Mixed in with the crush-sickness, stiffening out the saccharine taste, floated a few drops of unease. Amy’s trust of Reese was shaky. Or rather, the fact that she didn’t fully trust Reese, that she couldn’t quite map squarely the Reese she knew onto the Reese about whom she’d heard stories. The expression “suite of personality disorders” had been said to her about Reese by two different people. Amy couldn’t say whether the expression had been repeated simply because it was a catchy queer-approved pseudo-psychological way to talk shit or whether the phrase arose independently each time because it apparently described Reese so well. But either way, the general consensus when Amy moved Reese into her apartment a week after meeting was: 1) Yes, that’s exactly how Reese operates and 2) Girl, be careful. The first person to use the expression about Reese had been a trans guy named Ricky, whom Reese had dumped cold when she took up and moved in with Stanley, the rich finance guy Reese had left for Amy. “T don’t know exactly what Reese’s diagnosis would be,” Ricky told Amy, when she volunteered to help him fix his motorcycle, which mostly consisted of handing him tools; Amy was ideal for the task because she knew enough about engines and tools to play assistant, but she also understood that ogling a trans guy while he fixed his motorcycle was gender-validation time for them both. “But it’s got to be a whole suite of personality disorders.” “Come on,” Amy chided, “just say you don’t like her, don’t play armchair psychiatrist.” Ricky hesitated. He’d propped his motorcycle, some sort of a 1970s-era Honda, on its center stand in the middle of the Bushwick sidewalk. Pedestrians stepped over the scattered paneling he’d removed. “Reese has a lot of amazing qualities,” Ricky said, “but ’'m probably the wrong person to enumerate them ’cause—and it hurts my pride to say this—I was stupid enough to let her casually break my heart. ’'m not going to say anything more if you’re too wrapped up with her to hear it.” “Please tell me.” “She’s so incredibly charming when she wants to be,” Ricky said, crouching by the chain, “but she has only a few close friends. That alcoholic, Iris, who I trust less than her, and otherwise, just whoever else is infatuated with her at any given moment. Sociopaths and pathological liars are charming like that. They'll read you, process you, figure out your insecurities, then tell you everything you want to hear because for as long as they desire you, they believe it too. But eventually, it falls apart, and you figure out it isn’t true—can you put an eight millimeter socket on the quarter-inch ratchet?”

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  — The Creek’s don’t-rat ethos withstood the test nicely, but when Maxx/Stan/Dr. Morse didn’t shown up by 11:50 that morning, I thought the Colonel would lose his shit. He sat on the bumper of a car in the student parking lot, his head bowed, his hands running through his thick mop of dark hair over and over again, as if he were trying to find something in there. Maxx had promised to arrive by 11:40, twenty minutes before the official start of Speaker Day, giving him time to learn the speech and everything. I stood next to the Colonel, worried but quiet, waiting. We’d sent Takumi to call “the agency” and learn the whereabouts of “the performer.” “Of all the things I thought could go wrong, this was not one of them. We have no solution for this.” Takumi ran up, careful not to speak to us until he was near. Kids were starting to file into the gym. Late late late late. We asked so little of our performer, really. We had written his speech. We had planned everything for him. All Maxx had to do was show up with his outfit on. And yet… “The agency,” said Takumi, “says the performer is on his way.” “On his way?” the Colonel said, clawing at his hair with a new vigor. “On his way? He’s already late.” “They said he should be—” and then suddenly our worries disappeared as a blue minivan rounded the corner toward the parking lot, and I saw a man inside wearing a suit. “That’d better be Maxx,” the Colonel said as the car parked. He jogged up to the front door. “I’m Maxx,” the guy said upon opening the door. “I am a nameless and faceless representative of the junior class,” the Colonel answered, shaking Maxx’s hand. He was thirtyish, tan and wide-shouldered, with a strong jaw and a dark, close-cropped goatee. We gave Maxx a copy of his speech, and he read through it quickly. “Any questions?” I asked. “Uh, yeah. Given the nature of this event, I think y’all should pay me in advance.” He struck me as very articulate, even professorial, and I felt a supreme confidence, as if Alaska had found the best male stripper in central Alabama and led us right to him. Takumi popped the trunk of his SUV and grabbed a paper grocery bag with $320 in it. “Here you go, Maxx,” he said. “Okay, Pudge here is going to sit down there with you, because you are friends with Pudge’s dad. That’s in the speech. But, uh, we’re hoping that if you get interrogated when this is all over, you can find it in your heart to say that the whole junior class called on a conference call to hire you, because we wouldn’t want Pudge here to get in any trouble.” He laughed. “Sounds good to me. I took this gig because I thought it was hilarious.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I knew I’d smoke maybe five of them, but so long as I subsidized the Colonel’s smoking, he couldn’t really attack me for being another rich kid, a Weekday Warrior who just didn’t happen to live in Birmingham. We grabbed Takumi and walked down to the lake, hiding behind a few trees, laughing. The Colonel blew smoke rings, and Takumi called them “pretentious,” while Alaska followed the smoke rings with her fingers, stabbing at them like a kid trying to pop bubbles. And then we heard a branch break. It might have been a deer, but the Colonel busted out anyway. A voice directly behind us said, “Don’t run, Chipper,” and the Colonel stopped, turned around, and returned to us sheepishly. The Eagle walked toward us slowly, his lips pursed in disgust. He wore a white shirt and a black tie, like always. He gave each of us in turn the Look of Doom. “Y’all smell like a North Carolina tobacco field in a wildfire,” he said. We stood silent. I felt disproportionately terrible, like I had just been caught fleeing the scene of a murder. Would he call my parents? “I’ll see you in Jury tomorrow at five,” he announced, and then walked away. Alaska crouched down, picked up the cigarette she had thrown away, and started smoking again. The Eagle wheeled around, his sixth sense detecting Insubordination To Authority Figures. Alaska dropped the cigarette and stepped on it. The Eagle shook his head, and even though he must have been crazy mad, I swear to God he smiled. “He loves me,” Alaska told me as we walked back to the dorm circle. “He loves all y’all, too. He just loves the school more. That’s the thing. He thinks busting us is good for the school and good for us. It’s the eternal struggle, Pudge. The Good versus the Naughty.” “You’re awfully philosophical for a girl that just got busted,” I told her. “Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war.” ninety-eight days before ONE OF THE UNIQUE THINGS about Culver Creek was the Jury. Every semester, the faculty elected twelve students, three from each class, to serve on the Jury. The Jury meted out punishment for nonexpellable offenses, for everything from staying out past curfew to smoking. Usually, it was smoking or being in a girl’s room after seven. So you went to the Jury, you made your case, and they punished you. The Eagle served as the judge, and he had the right to overturn the Jury’s verdict (just like in the real American court system), but he almost never did. I made my way to Classroom 4 right after my last class—forty minutes early, just to be safe. I sat in the hall with my back against the wall and read my American history textbook (kind of remedial reading for me, to be honest) until Alaska showed up and sat down next to me.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  It was very Freudian, Reese thought, that this anxiety centered on the nose—the protuberant nose as phallus, the phallus as Amy’s former self. But Reese didn’t say this, because in truth, quirks of dysphoria did not follow a Freudian pattern—no, they sequenced themselves according to an alchemist’s mixture of beauty standards, consumerism, and liberal doses of self-loathing. It took only a brief search of any transsexual forum to note, for instance, that a large percentage of trans women tend to focus dysphorically on the brow ridge, which thickens with exposure to testosterone during puberty and which avaricious facial feminization surgeons dubiously tout as an instant marker of a masculine face. More to the point, Reese maintained that foreheads drive trans women insane precisely because there is a surgery to alter it. The surgery created the dysphoria even as the dysphoria created a need for surgery. To know that surgery is out there, but that you can’t yet have it, even as you stare in the mirror and want to die, means that the temptation of want will forever taunt you. Large hands, though? Yes, they suck, but short of lopping off your fingers, no surgeon has yet to devise a procedure to shrink them, so most of the women Reese knew just learned ways to minimize them and get over it, as Reese did herself. The instant that some surgeon invented a hand-shrinking procedure, though, Reese knew she would die rather than have that surgery denied to her. Therefore, the fact that Amy’s dysphoria had taken up residence in the nose, and that Amy could get a nose job paid for by her agency’s insurance, meant that in Reese’s opinion, Amy must go through with it, because otherwise, the nose would torment Amy forever.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  should yield identical choices. The comparison of the problems highlights the all-important role of the reference point from which the options are evaluated. The reference point is higher than current wealth by $1,000 in problem 3, by $2,000 in problem 4. Being richer by $1,500 is therefore a gain of $500 in problem 3 and a loss in problem 4. Obviously, other examples of the same kind are easy to generate. The story of Anthony and Betty had a similar structure. How much attention did you pay to the gift of $1,000 or $2,000 that you were “given” prior to making your choice? If you are like most people, you barely noticed it. Indeed, there was no reason for you to attend to it, because the gift is included in the reference point, and reference points are generally ignored. You know something about your preferences that utility theorists do not—that your attitudes to risk would not be different if your net worth were higher or lower by a few thousand dollars (unless you are abjectly poor). And you also know that your attitudes to gains and losses are not derived from your evaluation of your wealth. The reason you like the idea of gaining $100 and dislike the idea of losing $100 is not that these amounts change your wealth. You just like winning and dislike losing—and you almost certainly dislike losing more than you like winning. The four problems highlight the weakness of Bernoulli’s model. His theory is too simple and lacks a moving part. The missing variable is the reference point, the earlier state relative to which gains and losses are evaluated. In Bernoulli’s theory you need to know only the state of wealth to determine its utility, but in prospect theory you also need to know the reference state. Prospect theory is therefore more complex than utility theory. In science complexity is considered a cost, which must be justified by a sufficiently rich set of new and (preferably) interesting predictions of facts that the existing theory cannot explain. This was the challenge we had to meet. Although Amos and I were not working with the two-systems model of the mind, it’s clear now that there are three cognitive features at the heart of prospect theory. They play an essential role in the evaluation of financial outcomes and are common to many automatic processes of perception, judgment, and emotion. They should be seen as operating characteristics of System 1. Evaluation is relative to a neutral reference point, which is sometimes referred to as an “adaptation level.” You can easily set up a compelling demonstration of this principle. Place three bowls of water in front of you. Put ice water into the left-hand bowl and warm water into the right-hand

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Ames, his fingers tight on a balled up napkin, has prepared himself for an entirely different statement. He needs a moment to key in to the present, a moment to sort the various implications through which to refract the man’s meaning. What Ames would have given, for years, to have heard a straight cis middle-class man compare a trans woman to his own wife, much less in order to defend the trans woman. Now, much too late, one such man has appeared just in time to hurt another woman Ames cares about. This man meets Ames’s eye in man-to-man acknowledgment: The women we love are sacred and we will defend them. Across the table, Katrina shifts in her chair, and Ames catches a waver to her face. A part of her must understand that that moment between men excludes her, will always exclude her—but worse, a part of her must also see that in that moment, she is not the woman whom Ames, or anyone else, has positioned as eligible for protective love. “You're not hearing what I’m saying,” she suddenly interjects. “['m saying that your good buddy Ames here used to be a fucking transsexual.” Reese knows that Ames has gone to Chicago with Katrina. He told Reese that he’d talk to Katrina about his plan, the one that Reese agreed to, sometime while on this business trip. She keeps checking her phone, and still she hasn’t heard anything from him. The stress of it is getting to her, and the more time that goes by the more implausible it seems. Is sharing motherhood really what she wants? Or is she so desperate that she'll take any scrap thrown her way? And if that’s the case, it seems to Reese unlikely that an apparently successful cis woman would settle for so little. To distract herself, Reese has been seeing a lot of her cowboy. But predictably, tonight, her cowboy called to postpone their date. On a last-minute whim, Reese decided to go see her friend Thalia’s weekly set at Dynamite, one of several North Brooklyn queer dive bars run by the same shady family of straight people. Thalia was a former drag queen turned transsexual, one of the earliest converts in the Great Drag Enlightenment, when a significant quorum of Brooklyn’s queens came out as trans, began to inject estrogen, and renounced their gay past, the consequences of which miffed them into misandry, as the desperately cute twinks who used to sleep with them no longer would. Thalia runs a set called Anger Management, in which she plays tropical dubstep to keep everyone chill, then undercuts her chill vibes with hourly advice sessions in which she solicits Ann Landers-—style questions from the various twinks who form her now sexually unavailable fan base, then berates them for their stupidity in profound and profane harangues. It was reliably the most entertaining way for Reese to spend a Tuesday night.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time? Some aspects of life have more effect on the evaluation of one’s life than on the experience of living. Educational attainment is an example. More education is associated with higher evaluation of one’s life, but not with greater experienced well-being. Indeed, at least in the United States, the more educated tend to report higher stress. On the other hand, ill health has a much stronger adverse effect on experienced well-being than on life evaluation. Living with children also imposes a significant cost in the currency of daily feelings—reports of stress and anger are common among parents, but the adverse effects on life evaluation are smaller. Religious participation also has relatively greater favorable impact on both positive affect and stress reduction than on life evaluation. Surprisingly, however, religion provides no reduction of feelings of depression or worry. An analysis of more than 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well- Being Index, a daily survey of 1,000 Americans, provides a surprisingly definite answer to the most frequently asked question in well-being research: Can money buy happiness? The conclusion is that being poor makes one miserable, and that being rich may enhance one’s life satisfaction, but does not (on average) improve experienced well-being. Severe poverty amplifies the experienced effects of other misfortunes of life. In particular, illness is much worse for the very poor than for those who are more comfortable. A headache increases the proportion reporting sadness and worry from 19% to 38% for individuals in the top two-thirds of the income distribution. The corresponding numbers for the poorest tenth are 38% and 70%—a higher baseline level and a much larger increase. Significant differences between the very poor and others are also found for the effects of divorce and loneliness. Furthermore, the beneficial effects of the weekend on experienced well-being are significantly smaller for the very poor than for most everyone else. The satiation level beyond which experienced well-being no longer increases was a household income of about $75,000 in high-cost areas (it could be less in areas where the cost of living is lower). The average increase of experienced well-being associated with incomes beyond that level was precisely zero. This is surprising because higher income undoubtedly permits the purchase of many pleasures, including vacations in interesting places and opera tickets, as well as an improved living environment. Why do these added pleasures not show up in reports of emotional experience? A plausible interpretation is that higher income is associated with a reduced ability to enjoy the small pleasures of life. There is

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I made the obligatory joke: “Don’t grab my boob.” The Colonel gave an obligatory laugh, then asked, “Want a smoke?” I had never smoked a cigarette, but when in Rome… “Is it safe here?” “Not really,” he said, then lit a cigarette and handed it to me. I inhaled. Coughed. Wheezed. Gasped for breath. Coughed again. Considered vomiting. Grabbed the swinging bench, head spinning, and threw the cigarette to the ground and stomped on it, convinced my Great Perhaps did not involve cigarettes. “Smoke much?” He laughed, then pointed to a white speck across the lake and said, “See that?” “Yeah,” I said. “What is that? A bird?” “It’s the swan,” he said. “Wow. A school with a swan. Wow.” “That swan is the spawn of Satan. Never get closer to it than we are now.” “Why?” “It has some issues with people. It was abused or something. It’ll rip you to pieces. The Eagle put it there to keep us from walking around the lake to smoke.” “The Eagle?” “Mr. Starnes. Code name: the Eagle. The dean of students. Most of the teachers live on campus, and they’ll all bust you. But only the Eagle lives in the dorm circle, and he sees all. He can smell a cigarette from like five miles.” “Isn’t his house back there?” I asked, pointing to it. I could see the house quite clearly despite the darkness, so it followed he could probably see us. “Yeah, but he doesn’t really go into blitzkrieg mode until classes start,” Chip said nonchalantly. “God, if I get in trouble my parents will kill me,” I said. “I suspect you’re exaggerating. But look, you’re going to get in trouble. Ninety-nine percent of the time, your parents never have to know, though. The school doesn’t want your parents to think you became a fuckup here any more than you want your parents to think you’re a fuckup.” He blew a thin stream of smoke forcefully toward the lake. I had to admit: He looked cool doing it. Taller, somehow. “Anyway, when you get in trouble, just don’t tell on anyone. I mean, I hate the rich snots here with a fervent passion I usually reserve only for dental work and my father. But that doesn’t mean I would rat them out. Pretty much the only important thing is never never never never rat.” “Okay,” I said, although I wondered: If someone punches me in the face, I’m supposed to insist that I ran into a door? It seemed a little stupid. How do you deal with bullies and assholes if you can’t get them into trouble? I didn’t ask Chip, though. “All right, Pudge. We have reached the point in the evening when I’m obliged to go and find my girlfriend.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  embarrassed by his own answer: “You know, I never realized this before, but in fact not all the teams at a stage comparable to ours ever did complete their task. A substantial fraction of the teams ended up failing to finish the job.” This was worrisome; we had never considered the possibility that we might fail. My anxiety rising, I asked how large he estimated that fraction was. “About 40%,” he answered. By now, a pall of gloom was falling over the room. The next question was obvious: “Those who finished,” I asked. “How long did it take them?” “I cannot think of any group that finished in less than seven years,” he replied, “nor any that took more than ten.” I grasped at a straw: “When you compare our skills and resources to those of the other groups, how good are we? How would you rank us in comparison with these teams?” Seymour did not hesitate long this time. “We’re below average,” he said, “but not by much.” This came as a complete surprise to all of us— including Seymour, whose prior estimate had been well within the optimistic consensus of the group. Until I prompted him, there was no connection in his mind between his knowledge of the history of other teams and his forecast of our future. Our state of mind when we heard Seymour is not well described by stating what we “knew.” Surely all of us “knew” that a minimum of seven years and a 40% chance of failure was a more plausible forecast of the fate of our project than the numbers we had written on our slips of paper a few minutes earlier. But we did not acknowledge what we knew. The new forecast still seemed unreal, because we could not imagine how it could take so long to finish a project that looked so manageable. No crystal ball was available to tell us the strange sequence of unlikely events that were in our future. All we could see was a reasonable plan that should produce a book in about two years, conflicting with statistics indicating that other teams had failed or had taken an absurdly long time to complete their mission. What we had heard was base-rate information, from which we should have inferred a causal story: if so many teams failed, and if those that succeeded took so long, writing a curriculum was surely much harder than we had thought. But such an inference would have conflicted with our direct experience of the good progress we had been making. The statistics that Seymour provided were treated as base rates normally are—noted and promptly set aside. We should have quit that day. None of us was willing to invest six more years of work in a project with a 40% chance of failure. Although we must have sensed that persevering was not reasonable, the warning did not provide an immediately compelling reason to quit. After a few minutes of desultory debate, we gathered ourselves together and carried on as if nothing had happened. The

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  chances of receiving $1 million improve by 5%. Is the news equally good in each case? A. From 0 to 5% B. From 5% to 10% C. From 60% to 65% D. From 95% to 100% The expectation principle asserts that your utility increases in each case by exactly 5% of the utility of receiving $1 million. Does this prediction describe your experiences? Of course not. Everyone agrees that 0 5% and 95% 100% are more impressive than either 5% 10% or 60% 65%. Increasing the chances from 0 to 5% transforms the situation, creating a possibility that did not exist earlier, a hope of winning the prize. It is a qualitative change, where 5 10% is only a quantitative improvement. The change from 5% to 10% doubles the probability of winning, but there is general agreement that the psychological value of the prospect does not double. The large impact of 0 5% illustrates the possibility effect, which causes highly unlikely outcomes to be weighted disproportionately more than they “deserve.” People who buy lottery tickets in vast amounts show themselves willing to pay much more than expected value for very small chances to win a large prize. The improvement from 95% to 100% is another qualitative change that has a large impact, the certainty effect. Outcomes that are almost certain are given less weight than their probability justifies. To appreciate the certainty effect, imagine that you inherited $1 million, but your greedy stepsister has contested the will in court. The decision is expected tomorrow. Your lawyer assures you that you have a strong case and that you have a 95% chance to win, but he takes pains to remind you that judicial decisions are never perfectly predictable. Now you are approached by a risk-adjustment company, which offers to buy your case for $910,000 outright—take it or leave it. The offer is lower (by $40,000!) than the expected value of waiting for the judgment (which is $950,000), but are you quite sure you would want to reject it? If such an event actually happens in your life, you should know that a large industry of “structured settlements” exists to provide certainty at a hefty price, by taking advantage of the certainty effect. Possibility and certainty have similarly powerful effects in the domain of losses. When a loved one is wheeled into surgery, a 5% risk that an amputation will be necessary is very bad—much more than half as bad as a 10% risk.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “No,” she said. “You don’t get it. It means you begin to entertain creeping suspicions that after all you’ve been through together, years of learning to be adults together, the man who you married might only be with you because he fetishizes Asians—even though I have felt not quite Asian enough my whole life. He couldn’t even fetishize me accurately.” “What’s that kind of chaser called?” Ames asked. “That kind of what?” He pulled the covers around him, suddenly cold. He had the sense of having wandered out blindly in a winter storm to discover that he’d stumbled onto a thinly frozen lake. He had only ever encountered chasers in one context. “Like, uh, a tranny chaser. What’s an Asian chaser called?” She appraised him with a strange look. “A rice chaser,” she said flatly. “In Vermont, growing up, the kids who saw my dad with my mom —their favorite way to bully me was by saying my dad had yellow fever.” Ames saw suddenly that she thought he was asking about himself. That she thought he wanted to know the slur for what having slept with her made him. He stifled an overwhelming urge to protest in horror. To tell her: God, no, I would never think having sex with a certain person could mark me as something—I just really do get what it’s like to be fetishized. I get what it’s like to have someone think that his desire for me degrades or lowers him. But even at that moment, such an admission seemed too risky. What if coming out as a former transsexual meant never getting into bed with her again? What if it meant the end of their professional relationship? No, better to wait for the opportune moment. Now and again, Ames scrutinized Katrina, and imagined what it would be like to tell her. How she would react. When he was alone, he told himself that maybe, maybe, she’d even be into it. That maybe the deepest reason for her divorce from Danny had been sexual. That while not exactly queer—she wasn’t totally into the married straight life either. For real, she was a freak in bed. Their sex was way wilder than he had imagined in his crush stage. Their first hookup had been drunken, and involved pretty typical hetero dynamics. Their second hookup—which occurred dead sober, midday a week later after she took a day to “work from home” and told him, as her employee, to do the same—had been decidedly bent. In her kitchen, she had opened her fridge and leaned into it. The shape of her from behind, along with the thick sexual tension, sunk him to his knees and he half kissed, half nuzzled her jean-clad ass. She looked back from the fridge, with an expression of near concern, at the same time she reached behind her and grabbed a handful of his hair.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Katrina shakes her head. “I already missed my chance to do it with the pill. Now they have to use a vacuum and if I wait more, dilation. The longer I wait—” She pauses and pulls the blanket over her face, so Reese thinks she might be crying, but a moment later, she pulls it back down, eyes still dry, and her face expressionless. “I just can’t take the risk. I just can’t handle the uncertainty, I just can’t.” Reese refuses to let herself respond. She does not trust herself to speak on the subject of risk. Which of them has it in them to risk and which doesn’t. To her surprise, Ames, who is sitting beside Katrina, holding her hand, speaks up. “Do you remember, Reese,” he asks, “what you used to call the Sex and the City Problem?” “Yes, of course. I remember my own bullshit, thank you very much.” Katrina, thankfully, smiled at this. Ames turns to her. “Do you, Katrina, remember how much you liked that reference when I told you about it? I pretended that I had come up with it myself, but actually I stole that from Reese.” “Yes, I remember.” Katrina nods. “Although now it makes way more sense, because I kept asking you about different episodes of Sex and the City, and you could never remember them. I was like, ‘How does someone come up with a life philosophy about a show he doesn’t seem to have watched?’ It makes sense that you got it from Reese. It’s obviously her style.” “Yes,” Reese agrees sadly. “I am much more culturally relevant and funny.” Ames accepts this in the way he’s always accepted being teased, although this teasing has the somberness of a joke cracked at a wake. “Okay, let me ask again: Reese, do you remember how the whole idea of the Sex and the City Problem for you is that no generation of trans women has solved the Sex and the City Problem, and that every generation of cis women has to reinvent it?” “Yes.” “Well, what if this is our solution? Maybe this is so awkward and hard and without obvious precedent because we're trying to imagine our own solution, to reinvent something for ourselves, whatever kind of’—he pauses, and looks down at his own feet, the boots and jeans he wears—“whatever kind of women we are.” “Maybe,” Katrina says. Reese hears this, an indefinite to Katrina’s tone, and she raises her head, eyes shining in the dark circles. “Yeah,” Reese agrees, “maybe.”

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  four days before THE COLONEL WOULDN’T TELL ME a word about the pre-prank, except that it was to be called Barn Night, and that when I packed, I should pack for two days. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were torture. The Colonel was always with Alaska, and I was never invited. So I spent an inordinate amount of time studying for finals, which helped my GPA considerably. And I finally finished my religion paper. My answer to the question was straightforward enough, really. Most Christians and Muslims believe in a heaven and a hell, though there’s a lot of disagreement within both religions over what, exactly, will get you into one afterlife or the other. Buddhists are more complicated—because of the Buddha’s doctrine of anatta, which basically says that people don’t have eternal souls. Instead, they have a bundle of energy, and that bundle of energy is transitory, migrating from one body to another, reincarnating endlessly until it eventually reaches enlightenment. I never liked writing concluding paragraphs to papers—where you just repeat what you’ve already said with phrases like In summation, and To conclude. I didn’t do that—instead I talked about why I thought it was an important question. People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn’t bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn’t bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn’t even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn’t bear not to. three days before ON FRIDAY, after a surprisingly successful precalc exam that brought my first set of Culver Creek finals to a close, I packed clothes (“Think New York trendy,” the Colonel advised. “Think black. Think sensible. Comfortable, but warm.”) and my sleeping bag into a backpack, and we picked up Takumi in his room and walked to the Eagle’s house. The Eagle was wearing his only outfit, and I wondered whether he just had thirty identical white button-down shirts and thirty identical black ties in his closet. I pictured him waking up in the morning, staring at his closet, and thinking, Hmm…hmm…how about a white shirt and a black tie? Talk about a guy who could use a wife. — “I’m taking Miles and Takumi home for the weekend to New Hope,” the Colonel told him. “Miles liked his taste of New Hope that much?” the Eagle asked me. “Yee haw! There’s a-gonna be a hoedown at the trailer park!” the Colonel said. He could actually have a Southern accent when he wanted to, although like most everyone at Culver Creek, he didn’t usually speak with one. “Hold on one moment while I call your mom,” the Eagle said to the Colonel. Takumi looked at me with poorly disguised panic, and I felt lunch—fried chicken—rising in my stomach. But the Colonel just smiled. “Sure thing.” “Chip and Miles and Takumi will be at your house this weekend?…Yes, ma’am.…Ha!…Okay. Bye now.” The Eagle looked up at the Colonel.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  She kept glancing up at me, her eyes widening as if to say, Well? I could tell she wanted me to ask her about something, but I couldn’t tell what, because my stomach wouldn’t shut up, which was forcing me deep inside a worry that I’d somehow contracted a parasitic infection. I could half hear Mychal telling Daisy about his new art project, in which he was using Photoshop to average the faces of a hundred people named Mychal, and the average of their faces would be this new, one-hundred-and-first Mychal, which was an interesting idea, and I wanted to listen, but the cafeteria was so loud, and I couldn’t stop wondering whether there was something wrong with the microbial balance of power inside me. Excessive abdominal noise is an uncommon, but not unprecedented, presenting symptom of infection with the bacteria Clostridium difficile , which can be fatal. I pulled out my phone and searched “human microbiome” to reread Wikipedia’s introduction to the trillions of microorganisms currently inside me. I clicked over to the article about C. diff , scrolling to the part about how most C. diff infections occur in hospitals. I scrolled down farther to a list of symptoms, none of which I had, except for the excessive abdominal noises, although I knew from previous searches that the Cleveland Clinic had reported the case of one person who’d died of C. diff after presenting at the hospital with only abdominal pain and fever. I reminded myself that I didn’t have a fever, and my self replied: You don’t have a fever YET . At the cafeteria, where a shrinking slice of my consciousness still resided, Daisy was telling Mychal that his averaging project shouldn’t be about people named Mychal but about imprisoned men who’d later been exonerated. “It’ll be easier, anyway,” she said, “because they all have mug shots taken from the same angle, and then it’s not just about names but about race and class and mass incarceration,” and Mychal was like, “You’re a genius, Daisy,” and she said, “You sound surprised,” and meanwhile I was thinking that if half the cells inside of you are not you, doesn’t that challenge the whole notion of me as a singular pronoun, let alone as the author of my fate? And I fell pretty far down that recursive wormhole until it transported me completely out of the White River High School cafeteria into some non-sensorial place only properly crazy people get to visit. Ever since I was little, I’ve pressed my right thumbnail into the finger pad of my middle finger, and so now there’s this weird callus over my fingerprint. After so many years of doing this, I can open up a crack in the skin really easily, so I cover it up with a Band-Aid to try to prevent infection.