As much as we try to focus on solutions and the possibility of success in dealing with global problems, we have to acknowledge the perverse attraction of disaster. Along those lines, Alex managed to dig up a word that was almost lost to the depths of time, and give it new resonance: terriblisma.

The Renaissance Italians had a term, "terriblisma," by which they meant the strange, gratified awe one feels when beholding dreadful disasters and acts of God from afar. The term may be six hundred years old, but the sentiment could not be more contemporary. In fact, terriblisma is a quite native 21st Century aesthetic.