Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

An adaptation of the book is running in TIME this week. One of the many cool things about this is that TIME included a photograph of Kent Härstedt, who survived the sinking of the Estonia ferry in 1994. I had not photographed him for the book, though I wish I had. A very thoughtful, interesting guy who is now a member of Sweden’s parliament.

Also, the print edition includes a fetching news-you-can-use sidebar about 5 ways to boost your survival IQ. Always nice to have sparkly accessories next to your story, if I do…

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I was in the Los Angeles Airport this weekend when I caught the best headline I have seen in a while: “Hurricane High-Risk Areas Have Lost Residents.” My wheeling suitcase came to a screeching halt.

According to USA Today’s analysis (complete with rad roll-over map), the number of people who live in the most vulnerable areas of Florida, Texas, and the rest of the Gulf Coast has fallen slightly since 2000.

The steepest decline is in the places smashed flat by Hurricane Katrina, naturally. But even excluding those spots, these high-risk zones grew only…

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The New York Times had a telling story about how China tried to suppress media coverage of the massive earthquake that struck Sichuan Province the other day. How a government deals with reporters in the immediate aftermath of a disaster says a lot about how healthy that government was to begin with—and how grueling the recovery may be.

Two and a half hours after the quake, China’s Central Propaganda Department issued a mandate to newspapers: “No media is allowed to send reporters to the disaster zone.”

Wow. That’s a pretty speedy response. You might…

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If you survive the initial jolt of an earthquake, or if you hear a warning of a hurricane or cyclone that’s on its way, your brain will go through certain, somewhat predictable stages in response. Here’s an MSNBC.com interview I recently did on the importance of understanding those phases before you find yourself in a disaster.

Getting to know your disaster personality is just as important as stashing away water and food. And way more interesting.

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I just wrote a story for dead-tree Time about the closing of the last major 9/11 charity for victims and families. Somehow, although the attacks happened almost seven years ago, it seems soon for these charities to be finished… The interesting thing about this one (for the victims of the attack on the Pentagon) is that it will live on in at least two ways.

First, the Survivors’ Fund was designed around giving people help, not just money—the opposite of the much larger, federally financed Victim Compensation Fund, which was built to…

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The Unthinkable will be published in Romania by House of Guides, Bucuresti.

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Earlier, Hillary Clinton said her heart goes out to the victims of “this horrible natural disaster,” which has claimed at least 22,000 lives in Myanmar. I’m sure her sentiment is genuine. But it’s time to stop referring to disasters like this as natural.

Cyclones are hurricanes. Had this same storm hit Florida, with the same resulting flooding and tidal wave, the death toll would have been far lower. Natural implies inevitable, which is simply not the case, as we learned the excruciating way from Hurricane Katrina.

On Friday, May 2, before the storm even hit Burma’s…

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The Chinese version of The Unthinkable will go on sale in November 2008.

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