Fear

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.

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• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Even in hungover remorse, she’s not quite having it, and looks up at him from under a curtain of hair. “I feel awful, but I don’t know if comparing our crimes is a road you want to go down.” “Well, what then? What’s next?” She winces. “Coffee and breakfast. Then we strategize. We’ve got a day before we meet with them again.” “T meant about us. Not just about work. What are we going to do about us?” He puts his hand over where he guesses hers is under the covers and gets a wrist. “Do you still want me to explain everything? That was the plan last night. I want to show you I can let you in.” She grimaces, then says, “More water.” He takes his hand off her wrist to hand her another bottle. She drinks half of it in a go, then wipes her mouth. “Yeah, we'll do that too. But not until after food and caffeine.” They sit at Oak Street Beach after breakfast. The wind has changed direction since the previous evening, a warmer summerish breeze from the south that has pacified the previous night’s chop. The air smells totally different. Katrina is caught in the stupor of her hangover. The time strikes him as good as any to tell her about transition. She regards him flatly, emotions ironed out of her affect by the weight of her headache. He tells her about cross-dressing as a kid. About trying to make it a part-time thing. About how his parents hadn’t spoken to him for a year when he finally went on hormones. How meek he had felt as a trans woman. The exhaustion of knowing you're vulnerable. Of seeing bizarre and nonsensical creatures on television and realizing that they were your reflection, as seen through the fun-house mirror of the world’s impressions of trans women. He tells her of the courage it took him, every day, just to go to the corner store—the preparations just to leave the house: put on your makeup, keep your shoulders back, walk with an imaginary book on your head, your hips under your spine but still swaying, and keep that emotional armor tight and polished. The cold stab of fear that hit when something tiny happened—say, a teenage boy follows you home from the store, and says appreciatively, “Hey, baby, where were you made?” A weird compliment of a catcall that hints how close the boy has come to the edge of figuring something true—but if you speak, he'll hear the real answer in the timbre of your voice. And then you fear the boy will get ashamed and then violent. This recitation of facts and memories, though they seem to captivate Katrina, has so far been totally unsatisfactory to Ames; he’s barely begun to skirt the contradiction of knowing he’s trans, yet having detransitioned. It’s like trying to explain one’s childhood in a matter of minutes. Everything sounds cliché. Everything gets boiled down to types.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  Figure 14 As shown, the same sure outcome can be framed in two different ways: as KEEP £20 or as LOSE £30. The objective outcomes are precisely identical in the two frames, and a reality-bound Econ would respond to both in the same way— selecting either the sure thing or the gamble regardless of the frame—but we already know that the Human mind is not bound to reality. Tendencies to approach or avoid are evoked by the words, and we expect System 1 to be biased in favor of the sure option when it is designated as KEEP and against that same option when it is designated as LOSE. The experiment consisted of many trials, and each participant encountered several choice problems in both the KEEP and the LOSE frames. As expected, every one of the 20 subjects showed a framing effect: they were more likely to choose the sure thing in the KEEP frame and more likely to accept the gamble in the LOSE frame. But the subjects were not all alike. Some were highly susceptible to the framing of the problem. Others mostly made the same choice regardless of the frame—as a reality-bound individual should do. The authors ranked the 20 subjects accordingly and gave the ranking a striking label: the rationality index. The activity of the brain was recorded as the subjects made each decision. Later, the trials were separated into two categories: 1 Trials on which the subject’s choice conformed to the frame preferred the sure thing in the KEEP version preferred the gamble in the LOSS version 2 Trials in which the choice did not conform to the frame.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “I don’t know.” Katrina shakes her head. “I don’t know if I understand either of you, why you’d do that.” The way her wonder shades those words sounds to Reese like doubt, almost a whispered insult. “Don’t tell Diana,” Reese says, trying not to plead. “It doesn’t have to be a big deal. I can never see him again. It’s a dumb affair. People have them.” “T don’t know,” Katrina says, then repeats, “I don’t know. ’m going to call a car. Do you think you could give me some space for a few minutes?” Reese nods. Outside, she walks past the cowboy and his wife, willing herself to stare at the ground, afraid that recognition might show on her face. Diana, blinding in her gorgeous skirt, calls out a bright goodbye. Reese waves without looking, pointing vaguely. “My car is waiting down the block,” she protests lamely, then redoubles her rush away. Around the corner, she ducks into a bodega, breathes deeply by the Doritos. The clerk asks if she’s okay, so she nods decisively and grabs two bottles of Corona, in case she needs to get buzzed in the very near future. After buying them, she fumbles them in her purse, and the clerk makes a sour face. Only in leaving does she realize that this makes her look desperate, that it calls attention to her in a way she normally makes a habit to avoid. She still isn’t processing information well. She considers going back to find Katrina, but instead calls her own car. Whenever she tried to mend feelings in the wreckage of a panic, she made things worse. It hurt, the fear, but if she could make it through, experience told her that this could be okay. This is just how things go. It can be salvaged. Nothing has yet happened. She and her lover just locked eyes across a restaurant. No one said anything. It wasn’t Katrina’s business. Don’t panic, don’t rush to fix everything. Everyone just use a little goddamn discretion and things will be fine. What Reese didn’t understand but began to grasp as the cramped shared ride disgorged her at her apartment, was that things had already fallen apart. The lack of drama in the moment had suckered her into underestimation. Years of queer meltdowns had convinced her, wrongly, of the unmistakable current of action that accompanies a true meltdown. Like, when Amy punched Stanley. That was the kind of meltdown Reese had come to expect. Not a series of glares and a car home alone. No polite manners and certainly not well- adjusted adult emotional regulation of rage.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  | ae WAS TWENTY-SIX the first time a man hit her—as a man will sometimes hit a woman: not to injure her, necessarily, but to show her something. The blow, an open-handed hook, caught her as she opened her mouth to insult him. She hadn’t seen his hand coming. Her head jerked back. Her vision wavered. Surprise turned to pain, which in turn surprised her with its force. “Really?” she asked quietly. He coiled his muscles tight again, as if to show her that yes, really. If she had it all to do over, she would have spat at him. But her body, which did not like pain, betrayed her, and without thinking, she flinched and blurted out, “I’m sorry.” Satisfied, his shoulders dropped. Copper trickled thinly from a split lip into the cracks between her teeth. She probed the edges of the cut with her tongue, while her hands hung motionless at her sides, the stillness of an animal turned statue before a predator. Somewhere distant from her traitorous body, a covert part of her mind slipped away to calculate her advantage. Already she saw the doubt gathering across his face, the regret and worry that he’d hit her too hard. Already, in the cool distance, she saw how this would play out: She would make him suffer for this. She’d chip away at his self- image of a calm, assured, stoic man, ever in control of his will, unable to be goaded. She’d make him guilty, she’d make him doubt, she’d hint at abuse. When the animal part of her body had calmed itself, when the pain had turned to memory, she supposed she’d finger the bruise, almost voluptuously, her trophy from a grim victory.His name was Stanley, and he was a rich man in his late thirties who didn’t like dogs. That he didn’t like dogs was one of the things Reese decided was important about his character. When she told her friend Iris his name, Iris said that there was no such thing as a good Stanley. That the name is a curse that parents place upon a son to ensure the boy grows up to become a douche. Reese knew her

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  Where do I come down in the debate between my friends? Availability cascades are real and they undoubtedly distort priorities in the allocation of public resources. Cass Sunstein would seek mechanisms that insulate decision makers from public pressures, letting the allocation of resources be determined by impartial experts who have a broad view of all risks and of the resources available to reduce them. Paul Slovic trusts the experts much less and the public somewhat more than Sunstein does, and he points out that insulating the experts from the emotions of the public produces policies that the public will reject—an impossible situation in a democracy. Both are eminently sensible, and I agree with both. I share Sunstein’s discomfort with the influence of irrational fears and availability cascades on public policy in the domain of risk. However, I also share Slovic’s belief that widespread fears, even if they are unreasonable, should not be ignored by policy makers. Rational or not, fear is painful and debilitating, and policy makers must endeavor to protect the public from fear, not only from real dangers. Slovic rightly stresses the resistance of the public to the idea of decisions being made by unelected and unaccountable experts. Furthermore, availability cascades may have a long-term benefit by calling attention to classes of risks and by increasing the overall size of the risk-reduction budget. The Love Canal incident may have caused excessive resources to be allocated to the management of toxic waste, but it also had a more general effect in raising the priority level of environmental concerns. Democracy is inevitably messy, in part because the availability and affect heuristics that guide citizens’ beliefs and attitudes are inevitably biased, even if they generally point in the right direction. Psychology should inform the design of risk policies that combine the experts’ knowledge with the public’s emotions and intuitions. Speaking of Availability Cascades “She’s raving about an innovation that has large benefits and no costs. I suspect the affect heuristic.” “This is an availability cascade: a nonevent that is inflated by the media and the public until it fills our TV screens and becomes all anyone is talking about.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “That was Reese’s friend Thalia,” Ames says. “She told me that Reese is in the hospital. A suicide attempt.” Have you ever heard of Wim Hof? He’s this weird-ass Dutchman, known as the Iceman, who developed a method to withstand extreme pain. Among other superhuman feats, he climbed Mount Everest in just a pair of shorts, submerged himself in a block of ice for two hours without his core body temperature dropping, and ran a marathon across a desert without drinking water. He’s in his late fifties and looks like an ancient Northern European hermit or an extra from Game of Thrones. He’s usually filmed shirtless in frozen landscapes, icicles entangled in his beard, exhorting listeners in his staccato Dutch accent: “The cold trains your power. Your mind must deal with the elements. You must be healthy electromagnetically.” His followers, as near as Reese can tell, are bros without girlfriends who read Kerouac between MMA workouts and don’t own sheets. Reese discovered Wim Hof a couple of years back, through a Grindr hookup. She went to a guy’s apartment and he seemed normal enough—he worked at Saks and answered the door in a button-down with French cuffs. He offered Reese vodka, and they commenced to make out. After about ten minutes of dry-humping on the couch, they moved to the bedroom, where he stripped Reese to her bra and panties. Then, abruptly, he walked into the bathroom, took a five-minute icy cold shower, and after toweling off only cursorily, got into bed with her. His skin was so cold that she felt as though she were embracing a corpse. But the guy fucked like a god. Afterward, he admitted that he’d always had trouble maintaining erections. So he started doing this thing called the Wim Hof method —a combination of breathing exercises and cold endurance trials, beginning with cold showers and moving to immersion in frozen lakes—intended to help adherents withstand pain and even control autonomic bodily systems, like blood flow or adrenaline. After a few months on the Wim Hof training regimen, her Grindr date claimed to have taken control of his erections again. The price was simply to freeze himself beyond performance anxiety before any intimacy. As Reese lay under the covers beside his finally warmed-up body, he pulled out a laptop in order to show her a half-hour Vice documentary on Wim Hof. It was a typical Vice piece: a credulous white guy doing things that he ought not to, filmed in a neutered gonzo style. But Wim Hof intrigued Reese—not for his physical feats of endurance, but for his apparent grief.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Just stay the fuck out of it, dude,” Amy snapped. Her voice came out from somewhere in her chest, low and angry. She sounded like a man. She heard it immediately, with a stab of shame. Something clicked across Stanley’s eyes, so that he saw the scene before him with a new clarity, as occurs at the optometrist during an eye exam: Look at the top line. Do you see him now, Stanley? Do you see the man challenging you? “No, dude.” Stanley leered, loosely pulling his frame to full height. “T don’t think I will. I don’t like little faggots threatening me.” Faggot? For a moment, the misgendering threw Amy off. Was he calling Amy a man or not? If Amy was a faggot, didn’t that make Reese a faggot, which would make him a faggot? But she had no time to ponder inconsistencies. A change had come over Reese. She looked genuinely frightened, and began pushing Amy away from Stanley, whispering, “No, no, no.” Was Reese afraid that Amy would hurt Stanley? No, of course not. Quite obviously, Reese was afraid of Stanley. Around the perimeter of Amy’s consciousness flickered an awareness that there were people out there much crueler, with minds much touchier, more defensive and fragile, who kept themselves more ready and prepared for violence than Amy herself could ever tolerate. One did not escalate with people such as that. Reese still held the umbrella as she pushed Amy away and the rod pressed against Amy’s face, painfully. Amy took a step to the side, so that Reese clumsily fell forward past her. Stanley had closed the distance in one or two long steps. “I know all about you,” Stanley said, flicking his hand toward Reese. “She told me all about her little bitch girlfriend, when she came to get dicked down how she needed.” Was that true? Had Reese complained about Amy to him? Reese had hold of Amy’s arm now, was tugging her away. Amy wrested herself from Reese’s grip, and balled her fists. She had a sense that she would look stupid trying to fight in a tight skirt and heels. She could barely get her legs more than a foot apart. As Amy tensed her arms—the gestural prologue to a shouted Come at me, bro!—an expression of naked scorn came over Reese’s face. In some

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Yeah, that guy. Oh shit, what should I do? Do you think he’s here for me?” Reese has been holding Katrina’s arm lightly, and now Katrina steps back suddenly. She regards Reese with a strange, alarmed expression, peering hard, as though at some object disobeying the laws of reality, flickering in and out of this dimension. Then Katrina turns to the cowboy. He meets her gaze, nods, and smiles amiably. A moment later his eyes flick over to Reese, and his face goes hard. Alarm, then fury, trembles in the briefest of moments through the tiny muscles of his face, before the Empress lays her hand on his arm and leans in for a peck on the cheek, at which he composes himself. “No, he’s not here for you. That’s Diana’s husband,” Katrina says quietly. Diana, right, that’s her name. I guess she has a cowboy after all, Reese thinks inanely. Then the window in which inanity remains a possibility shuts closed—a surge of adrenaline hits, carrying with it a squall of panic. Reese tenses her body, in full fight-or-flight mode— the faces around her blend, break into shapes, and dial back into ultra-sharpened focus. Her evolutionary response has not evolved to meet the moment. Eons of lizard-brain instinct tell her to flee wildly —the exact wrong thing to do. She requires grace or poise or wit. Instead, her body pours on the sweat, her heart rate ascends into the triple digits. In slow time, the cowboy forces his face into a smile for his wife and pushes open the door for her. He turns and catches Reese with a hard questioning look. Then Kathy is behind him, offering up pleasantries, which he gathers himself to return—and then three women in workout gear walk in, blocking Reese’s view, and her cowboy is gone. “He cheated on Diana with a trans woman a year or two ago,” Katrina says quietly, from beside Reese. “Was it you?” “No! No, that wasn’t me,” Reese says, trying for insistence, but the panic makes her voice waver, as though she isn’t sure. She tries to remember if she knew which girl it was. As though if she could name the girl to blame it on, she’d be absolved. “Diana went to college with me,” Katrina says, fidgeting with her purse. “She was my roommate’s younger sister. I’ve known her for a long time. I know most of her family. When he was diagnosed after that affair, it threw everything into turmoil. I thought things were okay now.” “That wasn’t me,” Reese repeats. Katrina continues to hold Reese with that strange look. “Maybe it’s not your fault. Maybe you couldn’t have known. What did he tell you about his wife?” Reese exhales to calm herself, consciously, she forces her shoulders to release down. “I don’t know. He told me some. You know how men are.”

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  The wrath of the Almighty will fall upon your heads and there won’t be enough of you left for the dogs to eat.”He pulled a folded white handkerchief from his breast pocket, wiped his brow again, and threw it onto the sawdust. A man and a woman dived for it, scrambling to grab hold of its miracle-working powers. The man came up with the cloth, holding it stretched out above his head like a prize, one end in each hand. The woman shrugged and turned to go back to her seat.“Wait a minute, ma’am. Here you go. Here’s another one.” Brother Terrell took a second handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his brow, and threw it to her. She caught it and walked back to her chair bucking at the waist, waving the cloth in front of her. The evangelistic team huddled around Brother Terrell after the service that night, congratulating him on a powerful sermon. He leaned against the outside railing of the prayer ramp. He always left the platform exhausted, but lately he could barely stand at the end of a service. He fingered his keys in his pockets and stared past us. “I can feel the powers of the enemy. He’s trying, he’s gathering against us. I feel it . . . in my soul. The devil, he’s, uh, he’s getting ready to test us.” He paused and fidgeted. “Something big . . . I don’t know what. Remember what Jesus said about the demons, that some, uh, some respond only to prayer and fasting. We got to . . . you know, we need to be ready.” Everyone waited for him to say more, something about how to get ready, maybe, but he was finished.Mama spoke first. “Brother Terrell, we want to stand with you.”“Thank you, Sister Johnson. Those of you who are able, it would be good if you stay and pray with me.”The praying lasted a long time that night. Voices lowed, “Ooooooooh God. Oooooooh God.” In the dim after-hours lighting, shadowy figures glided up and down the sawdust aisles and around the periphery of the darkened tent. I watched the thin smudge of my mother move across the tent. She threaded her way through rows of chairs and disappeared in the twilight that lay beyond the reach of the light and just this side of the night.I woke to Mama’s hands under my shoulders, pulling me up. My body felt thick and heavy as a tree stump. “Is it the middle of the night?” I always wanted to wake up in the middle of the night. No answer.“I’m worried he’s gonna fast hisself to death.” My mother’s voice sounded strained, higher than usual.Brother Cotton nodded. “I don’t know how he’s standing up under the stress. The churches are pulling back on their support, the Klan threatening him night and day. The crowds aren’t what they should be. He’s carrying the burden for a lost and dying world by himself.”Dockery sat up suddenly.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  She fished her white lab coat off the rack and pulled it on while I lost myself in a library book. A package of crackers fell onto my opened book. I looked up. She smiled and turned to study the dentures on the shelf. I opened the package, stuffed the crackers in my mouth, and went to the water fountain for a long drink.I sat down at the table and picked up my book. Then I said what I always said. “I could eat a dozen of those.”Sister Coleman left the room without saying anything and went to the entryway. I followed. She put a nickel into the slot and pulled the knob. Then instead of handing me the package, she put in nickel after nickel and pulled the knob again and again. She handed the packages to me.“Go sit down.” Her voice had a flat, mechanical sound and there was an odd feeling in the room, a feeling of excitement and dread and something I could not name. I walked to the main room and placed twelve packages of crackers on the table.“I told you to sit down.”I pulled the chair out from the table a bit, cringing as its legs scraped against the floor, and wedged myself into it.“Now, eat.”“But I can’t eat all these.”“You said you could eat a dozen of them.”“I didn’t mean it.”She wrapped her hand around the back of my neck. Her palm was cool and firm.“You said you could eat a dozen, and you will.”Each package contained four cracker-cheese sandwiches made up of two crackers each. Eight crackers per package, ninety-six crackers in all. I made my way through package after package. Sister Coleman sat beside me, spine erect, knees and ankles together, hands relaxed and folded in her lap. A small, secretive smile settled on her lips. After a while, she stood up and began to check the teeth on the counter that ran along the longest wall of the room. She hummed under her breath. My mouth grew drier with each cracker until I began to gag. She glanced over her shoulder and pointed at the water fountain. I ran for a drink, careful not to let any of the mush in my mouth escape.That night as Sister Coleman tucked me in, she planted a warm, dry kiss on my forehead, the first in a long time. “You know I love you chillens. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”After dinner one evening, Sister Coleman called me and Gary to sit with her on the couch. She folded us into her arms just as she had when she first welcomed us to her home.“There’s something I need to tell you. It may be hard to understand at first, but it’s better for everyone. Your mother has officially given you all to me. You’re going to live here from now on.”Gary looked stunned. “You mean forever?”She patted his arm and smiled. “Yes, honey.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  Gary and I hung on to them and begged them not to go. If someone could kill the president, no one was safe. They told us we could watch them through the window, and we did. I didn’t understand how they could meet boyfriends and shop and pay bills as if everything were okay, as if the president were still alive, as if no one had chased us from our house. They said you couldn’t dwell on evil, that you had to move on. [image "004" file=Image00003.jpg] We had lived in the apartment a few months when I opened the door to a young man I had never seen before. He said our mother had sent him to pick us up. Gary and I hugged Queenie and Rita good-bye and cried all the way to the car. By the time we pulled onto the freeway, our eyes were dry. We were headed back to Mama and the tent. The world had resumed its natural order, or we thought it was about to. As the sun set that evening, the implications of not knowing exactly where it was we were going or who it was that was taking us there began to dawn. I was afraid if the man—a boy, really—was a kidnapper, and if I asked him where he was taking us, he might kill us. Better to say nothing and hope for the best.Gary fell asleep in the backseat. My shoulders worked their way up to my ears. The longer we drove, the more the boy talked. About the revivals, the miracles he had seen since he began to travel with Brother Terrell. Goiters, cancers, blindness, cripples, you name it. He smacked his gum and went on about how the Lord and Brother Terrell had changed his life. A familiar monologue. The headlights from oncoming cars played across his long, broad fingers curled around the steering wheel. I liked the way he kept both hands on the wheel and the way he slowed the car around curves. My shoulders began to relax. My eyes closed. He wasn’t going to kidnap us or kill us. We would see Mama again after all. Chapter FifteenNO ONE KNOWS HOW WE CAME TO LIVE WITH THE SMITHS. WHEN I ASK my mother, I get her stock reply:“Honey, there was so much going on at the time, I’m lucky to remember my own name.”I always want to say amen, but I never do.I paw through odds and ends of memory, looking for some way to explain how we came to reside in that ramshackle Victorian house where everything strained and leaned and pulled away from everything else. I see my brother and me on our backs, staring up into the stars. The wooden bars of a folding chair push into my spine. We are lying down in chairs. A long face with ears the size of small boats floats above us. Skillet-size hands reach from white cuffs to pull us up.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  firefighter knows the danger intuitively, “without knowing how he knows.” However, we also do not know how we immediately know that a person we see as we enter a room is our friend Peter. The moral of Simon’s remark is that the mystery of knowing without knowing is not a distinctive feature of intuition; it is the norm of mental life. Acquiring Skill How does the information that supports intuition get “stored in memory”? Certain types of intuitions are acquired very quickly. We have inherited from our ancestors a great facility to learn when to be afraid. Indeed, one experience is often sufficient to establish a long-term aversion and fear. Many of us have the visceral memory of a single dubious dish that still leaves us vaguely reluctant to return to a restaurant. All of us tense up when we approach a spot in which an unpleasant event occurred, even when there is no reason to expect it to happen again. For me, one such place is the ramp leading to the San Francisco airport, where years ago a driver in the throes of road rage followed me from the freeway, rolled down his window, and hurled obscenities at me. I never knew what caused his hatred, but I remember his voice whenever I reach that point on my way to the airport. My memory of the airport incident is conscious and it fully explains the emotion that comes with it. On many occasions, however, you may feel uneasy in a particular place or when someone uses a particular turn of phrase without having a conscious memory of the triggering event. In hindsight, you will label that unease an intuition if it is followed by a bad experience. This mode of emotional learning is closely related to what happened in Pavlov’s famous conditioning experiments, in which the dogs learned to recognize the sound of the bell as a signal that food was coming. What Pavlov’s dogs learned can be described as a learned hope. Learned fears are even more easily acquired. Fear can also be learned—quite easily, in fact—by words rather than by experience. The fireman who had the “sixth sense” of danger had certainly had many occasions to discuss and think about types of fires he was not involved in, and to rehearse in his mind what the cues might be and how he should react. As I remember from experience, a young platoon commander with no experience of combat will tense up while leading troops through a narrowing ravine, because he was taught to identify the terrain as favoring an ambush. Little repetition is needed for learning. Emotional learning may be quick, but what we consider as “expertise” usually takes a long time to develop. The acquisition of expertise in complex

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  Randall yelled and danced as the belt hit his jeans. For about the hundredth time, I wished it were not an abomination for girls to wear pants. Brother Terrell let go of Randall’s arm.“Son, you’ve got to do right. We’re supposed to set an example, and here you are burning down barns. And it ain’t even our barn.”Randall moved his head up and down, up and down.Pam and I were next. I looked over at her. Tears rolled down her face and off her chin. She stepped away from the tree.“I’m over here, Daddy.”She walked over to him. “I’m sorry, Daddy. We shouldn’t have done it.”“Pamela, you know I hate to whip you more’n anything. But I got to this time.”“I know, Daddy. I deserve it.”Brother Terrell raised the belt. She didn’t move. I noticed the belt always landed on her behind, not on her legs, and determined that I, too, would stand perfectly still. When the belt stopped, Brother Terrell caught Pam up in his arms and held her for long time. By the time he came for me, all the anger had left him. He gave me a few swipes with the belt. It wasn’t even as bad as when Mama whipped me.After the whippings, Brother Terrell went back to the woods to pray. He said he’d lost all his sanctification. When the fire had reduced the barn to a pile of blackened rubble, the firemen said they’d see us at the tent and waved good-bye. Mama and Betty Ann put us into the bathtub two by two, washed the soot and grime from us, and dressed us in our church clothes. We always bathed and dressed early so that the adults had time to get ready for church. We sat in the living room, quiet and subdued for once. Randall actually looked through one of the books from his homeschool program. Pam showed me how to pop my knuckles. The fire had burned the badness out of us, and Brother Terrell’s whipping had chased away any residual demons. We felt relaxed for the first time in days.We were sitting there being as good as we could be, when Brother Terrell walked back into the house. He stared at us from the dining room and I saw his face go hard. Before we knew what was happening, he had slipped his belt out of his pants and was on us, tongue pinched between his teeth. We did a St. Vitus dance around the living room as the belt popped over our legs. Mama and Betty Ann ran into the room, yelling for him to stop, pleading that he had already whipped us. Brother Cotton and his wife watched from the doorway, mouths open. Then it was over and the three of us kids were scattered across the room, whimpering.Brother Terrell looked around in a daze, running his hand over his head. “I don’t know what come over me.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  struggled to retrieve examples of safe behaviors felt themselves at risk. The students with a family history of heart disease showed the opposite pattern— they felt safer when they retrieved many instances of safe behavior and felt greater danger when they retrieved many instances of risky behavior. They were also more likely to feel that their future behavior would be affected by the experience of evaluating their risk. The conclusion is that the ease with which instances come to mind is a System 1 heuristic, which is replaced by a focus on content when System 2 is more engaged. Multiple lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that people who let themselves be guided by System 1 are more strongly susceptible to availability biases than others who are in a state of higher vigilance. The following are some conditions in which people “go with the flow” and are affected more strongly by ease of retrieval than by the content they retrieved: when they are engaged in another effortful task at the same time when they are in a good mood because they just thought of a happy episode in their life if they score low on a depression scale if they are knowledgeable novices on the topic of the task, in contrast to true experts when they score high on a scale of faith in intuition if they are (or are made to feel) powerful I find the last finding particularly intriguing. The authors introduce their article with a famous quote: “I don’t spend a lot of time taking polls around the world to tell me what I think is the right way to act. I’ve just got to know how I feel” (George W. Bush, November 2002). They go on to show that reliance on intuition is only in part a personality trait. Merely reminding people of a time when they had power increases their apparent trust in their own intuition. Speaking of Availability “Because of the coincidence of two planes crashing last month, she now prefers to take the train. That’s silly. The risk hasn’t really changed; it is an availability bias.” “He underestimates the risks of indoor pollution because there are few media stories on them. That’s an availability effect. He should look at the statistics.” “She has been watching too many spy movies recently, so she’s seeing conspiracies everywhere.” “The CEO has had several successes in a row, so failure doesn’t come easily to her mind. The availability bias is making her overconfident.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  She still holds a handful of sand, seeming to have forgotten about it, squinting one eye at Ames in the sunlight. “But elephants can’t stop being elephants. Or more to the point, women can’t just stop being women. I can’t stop being a woman just because it’s hard—not that I would even if I could.” “T know. That’s my problem.” “So do you think about re-transitioning?” “Would you put a traumatized juvenile elephant back where the poachers killed her mother?” She tosses the sand aside, but little dry brown burrs in the sand cling to the edge of her sleeve. “Shouldn’t the correct answer be that those elephants eventually grow up and just chill the fuck out?” “Yeah. At some point juvenile elephants become adult elephants. Then, eventually, they have their own kids, and hopefully, they treat those kids right and they get to reconstruct the matriarchy.” Something clicks for Katrina, she pulls her hands close to her, defensively. “Is this your way of talking about the pregnancy?” He sighs. “Yeah. It’s hard for me. I’ve got some fear going on. I talk obliquely when I’m scared.” Charcoal smoke passes on the breeze. Two men debate in Spanish the optimal way to set a small hibachi grill into the rocks of the breakwater, while their families play soccer on the grass alongside the boulders. Down on the beach ripples lap against the shore and a couple introduces their child to the water’s edge. The woman wears a red one-piece. She leans over her daughter, pointing out little freshwater shells and seaweed. The child wears a white hat to shield her from the sun. A man stands protectively off to the side, poised to leap into action, should anything approach from either lake or shore to threaten his wife or child. The scene could be B-roll footage for wholesome family time. It’s too much for Ames, like the world has chosen to mock him at that moment. After moments of silence Katrina begins, apropos of little. “My friend Diana and I were talking. You met her last year at the NYF Advertising dinner. She’s baby-crazy and trying to make some choices. We were saying that it seems like all of our mutual friends who got pregnant act like they got sure of everything in pregnancy. That nature just makes that surety happen. You don’t actually have to decide things. Instead you get some kind of biological mama bear instinct that shows you the way. I don’t feel that way. My mama instinct hasn’t kicked in. I don’t know what to do.” She laughs, not happily; she stares too intently at the flower gardens in the middle distance, blinking back emotion. He wets his lips, pauses, and says, “What are you thinking about doing?”

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  Experienced forensic psychologists and psychiatrists are not immune to the effects of the format in which risks are expressed. In one experiment, professionals evaluated whether it was safe to discharge from the psychiatric hospital a patient, Mr. Jones, with a history of violence. The information they received included an expert’s assessment of the risk. The same statistics were described in two ways: Patients similar to Mr. Jones are estimated to have a 10% probability of committing an act of violence against others during the first several months after discharge. Of every 100 patients similar to Mr. Jones, 10 are estimated to commit an act of violence against others during the first several months after discharge. The professionals who saw the frequency format were almost twice as likely to deny the discharge (41%, compared to 21% in the probability format). The more vivid description produces a higher decision weight for the same probability. The power of format creates opportunities for manipulation, which people with an axe to grind know how to exploit. Slovic and his colleagues cite an article that states that “approximately 1,000 homicides a year are committed nationwide by seriously mentally ill individuals who are not taking their medication.” Another way of expressing the same fact is that “1,000 out of 273,000,000 Americans will die in this manner each year.” Another is that “the annual likelihood of being killed by such an individual is approximately 0.00036%.” Still another: “1,000 Americans will die in this manner each year, or less than one-thirtieth the number who will die of suicide and about one-fourth the number who will die of laryngeal cancer.” Slovic points out that “these advocates are quite open about their motivation: they want to frighten the general public about violence by people with mental disorder, in the hope that this fear will translate into increased funding for mental health services.” A good attorney who wishes to cast doubt on DNA evidence will not tell the jury that “the chance of a false match is 0.1%.” The statement that “a false match occurs in 1 of 1,000 capital cases” is far more likely to pass the threshold of reasonable doubt. The jurors hearing those words are invited to generate the image of the man who sits before them in the courtroom being wrongly convicted because of flawed DNA evidence. The prosecutor, of course, will

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  Look out!” Brother Terrell turned and threw up his bad arm to shield his face just as a wooden folding chair wielded by a short bald man crashed over him. He howled like a cat with his tail on fire. Mama came up behind the man attacking Brother Terrell and brought another chair down over his head, then turned and ran. Go, Mama. Go. Go. The man tried to catch her but was brought down by two tent men. The women screamed and screamed. A police car drove up, lights flashing, and two lawmen got out and waded into the fray, threatening to take everyone to jail. The voices grew quiet and the bodies drifted together again, softly this time. I spotted Mama, chin thrust out, hands moving like birds as she talked to the policemen. Brother Terrell and the tent men told us later they recognized the faces of the three men who had shown up earlier that night among the attackers.The black people stayed away from the next day’s services. Brother Terrell asked everyone to remain in prayer for the safety of those who had been driven out by hatred. I thought of the three kids I had watched pack up and leave the night before.Please let them be okay. Please let them be okay. Please.That evening as the sun flamed out in the windows of the old Fords, Chevys, and Buicks that rimmed the field, the black portion of our congregation gathered in little groups just outside the tent and stood throughout the service. Their numbers increased throughout the week, even as the white audience dwindled.The Klan did not come back in uniform, but we found several anonymous letters on our porch. The writer of one threatened to cut the unborn baby from Betty Ann’s body if we didn’t leave town. Brother Terrell ended the revival early. He told what was left of the congregation that he wasn’t tucking his tail between his legs and running from the devil. He cast our retreat as a victory of sorts. “It may look like we’ve lost the battle, but we haven’t. We stood up to the devil. We showed him we’re not afraid. There is coming a time when those who hide behind the sheets will be spat upon as the scourge of the earth. There’s coming a time when people of all colors will worship together in spirit and in truth, and that’s thus saith the Lord.”Until the dawn of that Edenic age, there would be a new seating arrangement: blacks on one side of the tent, whites on the other, with a sawdust aisle in between. It was for the safety of the congregation, the evangelistic team, and his family. He began every revival with an announcement of the segregated sections.“They threatened to cut the baby out of Sister Terrell’s stomach. They’d do it too. Y’all know who I’m talkin’ about.” Blacks and whites nodded.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  the risk. Later, we will see that the evaluations of the probabilities (90% versus 100%) also contributes to both risk aversion in problem 1 and the preference for the gamble in problem 2. We were not the first to notice that people become risk seeking when all their options are bad, but theory-induced blindness had prevailed. Because the dominant theory did not provide a plausible way to accommodate different attitudes to risk for gains and losses, the fact that the attitudes differed had to be ignored. In contrast, our decision to view outcomes as gains and losses led us to focus precisely on this discrepancy. The observation of contrasting attitudes to risk with favorable and unfavorable prospects soon yielded a significant advance: we found a way to demonstrate the central error in Bernoulli’s model of choice. Have a look: Problem 3: In addition to whatever you own, you have been given $1,000. You are now asked to choose one of these options: 50% chance to win $1,000 OR get $500 for sure Problem 4: In addition to whatever you own, you have been given $2,000. You are now asked to choose one of these options: 50% chance to lose $1,000 OR lose $500 for sure You can easily confirm that in terms of final states of wealth—all that matters for Bernoulli’s theory—problems 3 and 4 are identical. In both cases you have a choice between the same two options: you can have the certainty of being richer than you currently are by $1,500, or accept a gamble in which you have equal chances to be richer by $1,000 or by $2,000. In Bernoulli’s theory, therefore, the two problems should elicit similar preferences. Check your intuitions, and you will probably guess what other people did. In the first choice, a large majority of respondents preferred the sure thing. In the second choice, a large majority preferred the gamble. The finding of different preferences in problems 3 and 4 was a decisive counterexample to the key idea of Bernoulli’s theory. If the utility of wealth is all that matters, then transparently equivalent statements of the same problem

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  The next day, Ames mustered great bravery and called the sperm bank. He did not want to think about fatherhood, that final plume in the cap of manhood, but he forced himself to call anyway. A receptionist on the other end of the line quoted annual prices for sperm storage akin to his cable subscription, which he supposed was a reasonable cost for preserving the viability of his future genetic line. The receptionist put him on hold to make an appointment and as Vivaldi played, Ames pondered whether he ought to cancel his subscription to HBO in order to afford this sperm bank. He couldn’t fully comprehend the enormous weight of fatherhood and generational lineage, but he could easily comprehend how much he did not want to cancel HBO. Without further consideration, he hung up. By the time his nipples began to ache that spring, he figured it was too late anyhow. The more his nipples hurt, the less he suffocated from the dread that came from thoughts of fatherhood. Now, with Katrina sitting in his office, for the first time in a long time, he had to think about the possibility of having sired a child. Shortly, very shortly, he was going to be called upon to make some decision, which would lead to other decisions, generations of decisions generated by this decision. “Your testicles atrophied?” Katrina asks, baffled. “But they felt normal to me!” “Yes,” he agrees. “I mean, they’re not huge or anything.” “No, not huge,” Katrina affirms, and then adds encouragingly, “but fine!” On the other side of his office’s glass wall, Karen from the art department pauses in the hallway to unwrap a granola bar. Ames becomes suddenly aware that Katrina and he are casually discussing his balls in the middle of a workday. Coworkers had shared the office gossip about Katrina almost immediately after Ames had joined the agency: bad divorce. She’d left her husband a few months before he’d interviewed. She cried in her office, the coworkers told him, then told her secretary not to put her husband’s calls through. He had cheated on her, said one. No, no, she’d had a miscarriage. Incorrect, said another, they'd had money problems. The speculation took on a tone both lurid and compulsory—to have a boss is so commonplace that one rarely remarks on its strangeness, yet its structure compels a cult of personality around even the most quotidian of managers. As an underling, one needs to furnish an epistemology of how it came to pass that she has sway over one’s precious autonomy. Basic comprehension of capitalism’s arbitrary mechanics doesn’t satisfy— the heart demands a human explanation. Or at least that’s what Ames said to justify his initial crush.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  In public school, I’d known plenty of people who made it a habit to hate this kind of person or that kind—the geeks hated the preps, etc.—and it always seemed like a big waste of time to me. The Colonel didn’t tell me where he’d spent the afternoon, or where he was going to spend the evening, but he closed the door behind him when he left, so I guessed I wasn’t welcome. Just as well: I spent the night surfing the Web (no porn, I swear) and reading The Final Days, a book about Richard Nixon and Watergate. For dinner, I microwaved a refrigerated bufriedo the Colonel had snuck out of the cafeteria. It reminded me of nights in Florida—except with better food and no air- conditioning. Lying in bed and reading felt pleasantly familiar. I decided to heed what I’m sure would have been my mother’s advice and get a good night’s sleep before my first day of classes. French II started at 8:10, and figuring it couldn’t take more than eight minutes to put on some clothes and walk to the classrooms, I set my alarm for 8:02. I took a shower, and then lay in bed waiting for sleep to save me from the heat. Around 11:00, I realized that the tiny fan clipped to my bunk might make more of a difference if I took off my shirt, and I finally fell asleep on top of the sheets wearing just boxers. A decision I found myself regretting some hours later when I awoke to two sweaty, meaty hands shaking the holy hell out of me. I woke up completely and instantly, sitting up straight in bed, terrified, and I couldn’t understand the voices for some reason, couldn’t understand why there were any voices at all, and what the hell time was it anyway? And finally my head cleared enough to hear, “C’mon, kid. Don’t make us kick your ass. Just get up,” and then from the top bunk, I heard, “Christ, Pudge. Just get up.” So I got up, and saw for the first time three shadowy figures. Two of them grabbed me, one with a hand on each of my upper arms, and walked me out of the room. On the way out, the Colonel mumbled, “Have a good time. Go easy on him, Kevin.” They led me, almost at a jog, behind my dorm building, and then across the soccer field. The ground was grassy but gravelly, too, and I wondered why no one had shown the common courtesy to tell me to put on shoes, and why was I out there in my underwear, chicken legs exposed to the world? A thousand humiliations crossed my mind: There’s the new junior, Miles Halter, handcuffed to the soccer goal wearing only his boxers. I imagined them taking me into the woods, where we now seemed headed, and beating the shit out of me so that I looked great for my first day of school.