The Unthinkable is the thinking person's manual for getting out alive. ”
NPR, National Public Radio
“Engrossing and lucid … An absorbing study of the psychology and physiology of panic, heroism, and trauma … Facing the truth about the human capacity for risk and disaster turns out to be a lot less scary than staying in the dark.”
O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE
subscribeOnce again, California is proving itself way ahead of the rest of the country when it comes to disaster resilience. Check out my Time.com story on the Great Shakeout here.
Exciting news! The Unthinkable has been chosen by Hudson Booksellers as one of the best books published in 2008.
Honestly, it is just a ridiculous thrill to be on any list with the 8 other nonfiction books Hudson selected. Check it: The Animal Dialogues by Craig Childs, Hot, Flat & Crowded by Thomas Friedman, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ by Hooman Majd, Out of Mao’s Shadow by Philip P. Pan, In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, Beautiful Boy by David Sheff, The Way of the World by Ron Suskind, and The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria. See what I’m saying?
Also a shout out to my colleague and friend at Time, Jeff Kluger, whose smart, fabulous book, Simplexity, was chosen in the business category. You should now be able to find both our books at Hudson’s 400 newsstands in airports and train stations around the country.
Saturday’s Russian sub disaster, which killed 20 people, is mystifying. Russian officials said that the Nerpa’s automatic fire-suppression system accidentally went off, releasing Freon gas and suffocating the victims. But submarine crews are normally trained to put on oxygen masks whenever this happens (and it is not all that uncommon). So what happened?
This Newsweek interview with Mikhail Barabanov, editor-in-chief of Moscow Defense Brief, speculates that this was a case of too many people onboard with too little training. Once again, the human factor matters most of all:
Besides the crew, there was a crowd of civilians aboard—127 of the people on board at the time were civilian port workers and engineers. That means the boat was overcrowded. And the civilian guests on the boat did not know what to do in an emergency situation
Thanks to Kaitlyn Andrews-Rice, master sleuth, for alerting me to this report.
I spent some time yesterday watching images of the country’s response to Obama’s victory. I thought I’d share some of the best videos here.
Generally speaking, Americans don’t tend to take to the streets in joy. Except for Tuesday night. What a night…
Check out the scene… in Brooklyn
In Washington, DC, on U Street, birthplace of Duke Ellington, destroyed in the 1968 riots and brought back to life just the past few years:
On Pennsylvania Avenue, across from the White House:
In Boulder, CO:
Thanks for the comment, Valerie. I should have mentioned this in the story. You’re right, early voting has really revolutionized everything, and I think the day is coming when we will all vote early.
But to answer your question, this year, exit pollsters dealt with early voting by doing telephone surveys of early voters in 18 states before the election. The phone survey had its own problems (it only included landline phones, for example), but it was in other ways easier to control than physically surveying people at polling places. The data was then merged with the data from the exit polls.
For more on early voting and polling, check out this helpful New York Times piece.
For more on polling in general (something all of us could stand to be more literate in, given the way the world works today), I strongly recommend Pollster.com. Mark Blumenthal is a particularly invaluable explainer.
Amanda Ripley, a senior writer at TIME Magazine, has traveled the world studying disasters, natural and manmade. Her book, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes — and Why, is the first mass-market book to explain how the brain works in disasters — and how we can learn to do better. It is being published in 15 countries.
