A science-based romp through horror, terror, gross-outs, and other things that go bump in the night.
The dark side of life—and its allure.
Scrivner is a behavioral scientist and a horror entertainment producer interested in why we’re drawn to scenes of carnage and disaster. His book defines the term “morbid curiosity” as interest in things that are threatening or potentially dangerous. This curiosity is a fine thing, he says, because “when the costs of learning about a threat are low, it’s advantageous to pay attention and gather information.” It’s a way of putting us into situations where we can safely learn about the dangers of the world and how we might respond in times of fear and uncertainty. That’s the concept behind training pilots with flight simulators and conducting fire drills in schools and office buildings; you learn how to manage a threat in a nonthreatening environment. Research suggests that prey animals have evolved to do this information gathering, watching predators from a distance to look for clues that indicate that the animal is hungry or hunting, saving their energy to flee only when warranted. “Responding half a second faster to potential danger won’t determine your fate 99 percent of the time. But that 1 percent of the time that it does can be life or death.” Watching horror movies, reading suspense novels and true-crime stories, and participating in creepy events such as Halloween shows can mentally prepare us to recognize a threatening situation early on, Scrivner says. While most of us will never encounter a masked assassin wielding a chainsaw, the fictional experience can mean quicker recognition and response when and if danger occurs. Viewing scary depictions “gives us the push we sometimes need to play with fear and explore our anxieties. In doing this, we develop confidence that we can overcome the challenges that life throws at us, and we prepare our mind for the bad times that we will inevitably face.”
A science-based romp through horror, terror, gross-outs, and other things that go bump in the night.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780143137344
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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