But horror doesn’t just reflect our fears and anxieties back at us. It also helps us process them. Horror is a fun house mirror everybody can use. It exaggerates, distorts and distills whatever it is we’re trying to work through, then delivers it back to us as entertainment.
Horror can offer comfort, can offer solace. Not because it’s an accurate representation or dramatization of our turmoil — who’s that intentional with their media consumption? — but because horror comes packaged for us in 400-page novels, in two-hour movies, in stories that end. Whether those books or films end happily or not, they end. For all of us who sense no end to our own daily horror stories, that’s what’s important.
Leaping, scurrying, flying and swimming through their natural habitats, animals compile a mental map of the world around them — one that they use to navigate home, find food and locate other points of vital interest. Neuroscientists have chiseled away at the problem of how animals do this for decades. A crucial piece of the solution is an elegant neural code that researchers uncovered by monitoring the brains of rats in laboratory settings. That landmark discovery was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2014, and many scientists think the code could be a key component of how the brain handles other abstract forms of information.
Yet lab animals in a box with a flat floor only need to navigate through two dimensions, and researchers are now finding that extending the lessons of that situation to the real world is full of challenges and pitfalls.
I want to estimate the force that would be required for MJ to hang on to Spidey during one of these swings using only her own arms. It's going to require some estimations based on video analysis of the trailer and understanding some basic physics concepts. Let's get started.
Joy Sorman’s “Life Sciences” takes an overtly political premise — the medical establishment’s inability or perhaps refusal to take seriously the physical struggles of women — and transforms it into a surreal and knife-deep work of fiction that asks: What pain can we abide, and what pain must we fight back against, even if the fight hurts more than the disease itself?
Say then that I am overflowing
& nobody’s fool & did not give up