We live during a time of live, real-time culture. Telecasts, spontaneous tweetstorms, on-the-scene streams, rapid-response analysis, war rooms, Clubhouses, vlogging. We have to interact with the here and now, feel that frisson of action. It’s a compulsion: we’re enraptured by the dangers that are terrorizing whole segments of the planet.
Just this past month, we saw Hurricane Ida strike New Orleans and the Eastern Seaboard, with some of the fiercest winds in the Gulf of Mexico since Hurricane Katrina. In Kabul, daily videos and streams show up-to-the-minute horrors of a country in the throes of chaos. Dangers are omnipresent. Intersect these pulses to the amygdala with the penchant for