Micah Mattix is back with the new Prufrock newsletter. Subscribe and read higher. Today’s email links to an essay about trauma being a product of our modern age. From that essay, “Furthermore, I will argue that trauma is so widespread precisely because of the ubiquity of traumatogenic technologies in our societies: those of specularity and acceleration, which render us simultaneously unreflective and frenetic. On this analysis, the symptoms deemed evidence of PTSD are in fact only an extreme version of a distinctively modern consciousness.”

Hierarchies in Space: Alexander Hellene writes about boring, fantasy bureaucracies in science fiction. “Captain Kirk is the ultimate pulp hero, a man of action and passion who takes his duty to his crew so seriously he is consistently willing to die for them. Does this sound like a guy who could function on the society of the future dreamed up by Gene Rodenberry, et al.? No wonder Kirk wants to be in space all the time.”

Snapping is crazy fast, researchers at Georgia Tech have concluded, and that means Thanos could never have done that snappy thing he did. Fact-checkers for the win!

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great French poem “The Song of Roland” on BBC4’s In Our Time.

World Magazine’s next issue is their 2021 books edition.

Photo: Modern Diner on Dexter Avenue, Pawtucket, Rhode Island. 1978.  John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.