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.

Page 207 of 529 · 20 per page

• 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.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  28 Bad Events The concept of loss aversion is certainly the most significant contribution of psychology to behavioral economics. This is odd, because the idea that people evaluate many outcomes as gains and losses, and that losses loom larger than gains, surprises no one. Amos and I often joked that we were engaged in studying a subject about which our grandmothers knew a great deal. In fact, however, we know more than our grandmothers did and can now embed loss aversion in the context of a broader two-systems model of the mind, and specifically a biological and psychological view in which negativity and escape dominate positivity and approach. We can also trace the consequences of loss aversion in surprisingly diverse observations: only out-of-pocket losses are compensated when goods are lost in transport; attempts at large-scale reforms very often fail; and professional golfers putt more accurately for par than for a birdie. Clever as she was, my grandmother would have been surprised by the specific predictions from a general idea she considered obvious. Negativity Dominance Figure 12 Your heartbeat accelerated when you looked at the left-hand figure. It accelerated even before you could label what is so eerie about that picture. After some time you may have recognized the eyes of a terrified person. The eyes on the right, narrowed by the raised cheeks of a smile, express happiness—and they are not nearly as exciting. The two pictures were presented to people lying in a brain scanner. Each picture was shown for less than 2 /100 of a second and

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  There are fears and insecurities peculiar to each sex; your use of strate- gic weakness must always take these differences into account. A woman, for instance, may be attracted by a man's strength and self-confidence, but too much of it can create fear, seeming unnatural, even ugly Particularly intimi- dating is the sense that the man is cold and unfeeling. She may feel insecure that he is only after sex, and nothing else. Male seducers long ago learned to become more feminine—to show their emotions, and to seem interested in their targets' lives. The medieval troubadours were the first to master this strategy; they wrote poetry in honor of women, emoted endlessly about their feelings, and spent hours in their ladies' boudoirs, listening to the women's complaints and soaking up their spirit. In return for their willing- ness to play weak, the troubadours earned the right to love. Little has changed since then. Some of the greatest seducers in recent history—Gabriele D' Annunzio, Duke Ellington, Errol Flynn—understood the value of acting slavishly to a woman, like a troubadour on bended knee. The key is to indulge your softer side while still remaining as masculine as possible. This may include an occasional show of bashfulness, which the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard thought an extremely seductive tactic for a man—it gives the woman a sense of comfort, and even of superiority. Re- member, though, to keep everything in moderation. A glimpse of shyness is sufficient; too much of it and the target will despair, afraid that she will end up having to do all the work. A man's fears and insecurities often concern his sense of masculinity; he usually will feel threatened by a woman who is too overtly manipulative, who is too much in control. The greatest seductresses in history knew how to cover up their manipulations by playing the little girl in need of mascu- line protection. A famous courtesan of ancient China, Su Shou, used to make up her face to look particularly pale and weak. She would also walk in a way that made her seem frail. The great nineteenth-century courtesan Cora Pearl would literally dress and act like a little girl. Marilyn Monroe knew how to give the impression that she depended on a man's strength to survive. In all of these instances, the women were the ones in control of the dynamic, boosting a man's sense of masculinity in order to ultimately enslave him. To make this most effective, a woman should seem both in need of protection and sexually excitable, giving the man his ultimate fantasy.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  outcomes still cancel out, but they have become less significant. The third toss, although worthless if evaluated on its own, has added $62.50 to the total value of the package. By the time Sam is offered five gambles, the expected value of the offer will be $250, his probability of losing anything will be 18.75%, and his cash equivalent will be $203.125. The notable aspect of this story is that Sam never wavers in his aversion to losses. However, the aggregation of favorable gambles rapidly reduces the probability of losing, and the impact of loss aversion on his preferences diminishes accordingly. Now I have a sermon ready for Sam if he rejects the offer of a single highly favorable gamble played once, and for you if you share his unreasonable aversion to losses: I sympathize with your aversion to losing any gamble, but it is costing you a lot of money. Please consider this question: Are you on your deathbed? Is this the last offer of a small favorable gamble that you will ever consider? Of course, you are unlikely to be offered exactly this gamble again, but you will have many opportunities to consider attractive gambles with stakes that are very small relative to your wealth. You will do yourself a large financial favor if you are able to see each of these gambles as part of a bundle of small gambles and rehearse the mantra that will get you significantly closer to economic rationality: you win a few, you lose a few. The main purpose of the mantra is to control your emotional response when you do lose. If you can trust it to be effective, you should remind yourself of it when deciding whether or not to accept a small risk with positive expected value. Remember these qualifications when using the mantra: It works when the gambles are genuinely independent of each other; it does not apply to multiple investments in the same industry, which would all go bad together. It works only when the possible loss does not cause you to worry about your total wealth. If you would take the loss as significant bad news about your economic future, watch it! It should not be applied to long shots, where the probability of winning is very small for each bet. If you have the emotional discipline that this rule requires, you will

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  suggests between probability and decision weight. In utility theory, decision weights and probabilities are the same. The decision weight of a sure thing is 100, and the weight that corresponds to a 90% chance is exactly 90, which is 9 times more than the decision weight for a 10% chance. In prospect theory, variations of probability have less effect on decision weights. An experiment that I mentioned earlier found that the decision weight for a 90% chance was 71.2 and the decision weight for a 10% chance was 18.6. The ratio of the probabilities was 9.0, but the ratio of the decision weights was only 3.83, indicating insufficient sensitivity to probability in that range. In both theories, the decision weights depend only on probability, not on the outcome. Both theories predict that the decision weight for a 90% chance is the same for winning $100, receiving a dozen roses, or getting an electric shock. This theoretical prediction turns out to be wrong. Psychologists at the University of Chicago published an article with the attractive title “Money, Kisses, and Electric Shocks: On the Affective Psychology of Risk.” Their finding was that the valuation of gambles was much less sensitive to probability when the (fictitious) outcomes were emotional (“meeting and kissing your favorite movie star” or “getting a painful, but not dangerous, electric shock”) than when the outcomes were gains or losses of cash. This was not an isolated finding. Other researchers had found, using physiological measures such as heart rate, that the fear of an impending electric shock was essentially uncorrelated with the probability of receiving the shock. The mere possibility of a shock triggered the full-blown fear response. The Chicago team proposed that “affect-laden imagery” overwhelmed the response to probability. Ten years later, a team of psychologists at Princeton challenged that conclusion. The Princeton team argued that the low sensitivity to probability that had been observed for emotional outcomes is normal. Gambles on money are the exception. The sensitivity to probability is relatively high for these gambles, because they have a definite expected value. What amount of cash is as attractive as each of these gambles? A. 84% chance to win $59 B. 84% chance to receive one dozen red roses in a glass vase What do you notice? The salient difference is that question A is much easier than

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Since childhood she had been afraid of dependence on anyone; now no one could take her for granted. This only made impre- sarios chase her and the public appreciate her the more. Second, she was aware that although black culture had become the vogue, what the French had fallen in love with was a kind of caricature. If that was what it took to be successful, so be it, but Josephine made it clear that she did not take the caricature seriously; instead she reversed it, becoming the ultimate The Natural • 63 Frenchwoman of fashion, a caricature not of blackness but of whiteness. Everything was a role to play—the comedienne, the primitive dancer, the ultrastylish Parisian. And everything Josephine did, she did with such a light spirit, such a lack of pretension, that she continued to seduce the jaded French for years. Her funeral, in 1975, was nationally televised, a huge cul- tural event. She was buried with the kind of pomp normally reserved only for heads of state. From very early on, Josephine Baker could not stand the feeling of having no control over the world. Yet what could she do in the face of her un- promising circumstances? Some young girls put all their hopes on a hus- band, but Josephine's father had left her mother soon after she was born, and she saw marriage as something that would only make her more misera- ble. Her solution was something children often do: confronted with a hopeless environment, she closed herself off in a world of her own making, oblivious to the ugliness around her. This world was filled with dancing, clowning, dreams of great things. Let other people wail and moan; Jose- phine would smile, remain confident and self-reliant. Almost everyone who met her, from her earliest years to her last, commented on how seductive this quality was. Her refusal to compromise, or to be what she was expected to be, made everything she did seem authentic and natural. A child loves to play, and to create a little self-contained world. When children are absorbed in make believe, they are hopelessly charming. They infuse their imaginings with such seriousness and feeling. Adult Naturals do something similar, particularly if they are artists: they create their own fan- tasy world, and live in it as if it were the real one. Fantasy is so much more pleasant than reality, and since most people do not have the power or courage to create such a world, they enjoy being around those who do. Re- member: the role you were given in life is not the role you have to accept. You can always live out a role of your own creation, a role that fits your fantasy. Learn to play with your image, never taking it too seriously.