Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

Round and round we go. Any bets on how long until we get to Hurricane Omar? Check out my latest Time.com story about Why Disasters are Getting Worse. (Hint: It’s not because of climate change. Not mostly, anyway.)

Gustav is churning through the Cayman Islands today, just in time for the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. It’s already clear that Gustav will be a serious hurricane when it makes landfall on the Gulf Coast late Monday or early Tuesday. Right now, it sure looks like it’s aiming for Louisiana, just like old times—although it could smack down anywhere from the Florida Panhandle to South Texas.

Other than that, Gustav feels a lot different from Katrina so far. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has been in Baton Rouge since Thursday. FEMA has been filling my inbox with eager beaver press releases and teleconference alerts. And Louisiana’s new governor, Bobby Jindal, seems to be in close touch with the locals in New Orleans and the feds in Washington.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is still around (the more things change…), but this time he is saying he will probably call for a mandatory evacuation as early as Saturday morning—which would be a day before he did the same thing in advance of Katrina. This time, there is a plan for evacuating people who don’t have a way out of the city. And the Army Corps of Engineers is saying the city is better protected from flooding than it was three years ago. (But only barely.)

It’s worth remembering, though, that Katrina was only a Category 3 hurricane. And it did not directly hit New Orleans. So even though it may feel like the Gulf Coast has already seen the worst possible scenario, it just ain’t so. Here’s hoping Gustav is a friendly ghost.

I did a short piece for Time this week on the new book, The Obama Nation, by the guy who co-wrote the 2004 hit job on John Kerry, Unfit for Command. Both books were bestsellers.

I didn’t like it, I think it’s safe to say. Let me know if I was too subtle.

The crash of the Spanair flight in Madrid on Wednesday was exceptionally awful, even within the already grim category of plane crashes. Only 19 of the 172 people on board survived. In most serious plane accidents, the survival rate is higher, and passenger behavior can make a big difference. (The cause of the crash is still unknown.)

In this case, I was particularly struck by the story of one survivor from the crash—a young boy who was rescued by a firefighter. Moments after he was pulled from the fiery wreck, he repeatedly asked the firefighter where his father was—and if what was happening was real. “When will this film end?” he asked.

This is a heartbreaking example of how the brain strives to normalize even the most atrocious of catastrophes. I’ve seen different versions of this behavior in all kinds of disasters from terrorist attacks to shipwrecks.

Our brains work by recognizing patterns; when something happens, we sort through our database of experiences to make sense of it. But in a disaster, the only precedent we have in our heads may be what we have seen in the movie theater. So that is naturally what we think of.

There is something poignant about the way this boy’s mind was coping with the violence he had just experienced; he was wishing hard for the movie to be over.

There is an unexpected irony that comes with publishing a book. You spend years scouring the Earth for stories; then the book comes out, and the stories start coming to you.

All summer, people from all over the world have been sending me unforgettable stories of human behavior in near-death experiences. Some of these stories arrived in private email messages that I can’t share; others are embedded in the comments on this site; and many more are floating in the ether, in blogs, articles and on TV. Check out this TV News segment that aired last night, from an ABC affiliate in Phoenix, AZ. They did a nice job with the book, and they also found a classic story of delay and denial.