The Dizzying Contrast in the Past Week or So ⇥ theatlantic.com

Charlie Warzel, the Atlantic:

There is something disorienting, horrible, and somehow fitting in the timing of all of this. That one man with the means to do it would threaten destruction of a part of our planet at the same moment its beauty and fragility are on full display. We are, in this tense moment, living with our own overview effect. Four are watching from afar. But the rest of us are watching too — left to reckon with our own place on the pale blue dot, reminded of all the ways we might die, and all the reasons for which to live.

The effect of toggling between news about Artemis II — which, yes, may not be as scientifically rigorous as one might hope, yet is undeniably a very cool event — and an objective threat of genocide has squeezed me to feel ways I did not know I could at the same time.