People will help each other because there is a sense of camaraderie that springs up, which is a survival tactic. You help them because you know you might need their help later. And that is incredibly reassuring.

Well, there isn't any one profile of a survivor, but there are profiles. Depending on the disaster you have certain advantages and disadvantages just based on who you are. Women are more likely to survive hurricanes. In hurricanes the deaths come from floods and people driving through high water. That's much more likely to be a man who dies that way.

Boredom is the specter that haunts children from kindergarten to graduation on every continent.

A lot of the time you see a warning, in the subway, or in a movie theater, the main thrust of the warning will be to not panic if there is an emergency. To listen to directions. Now that's a waste. They could have given you information, but you can see their expectation that you're going to screw up.

Most Korean parents saw themselves as coaches, while American parents tended to act more like cheerleaders.

The evil genius of terrorism is that that maximizes unfamiliarity, imaginability, suffering, scale of destruction, unfairness. It's really important to understand why terrorism is so frightening because it is a psychological war and until you understand it and try to reduce the dread, until then you become like a force multiplier for the terrorists inadvertently because you'll tend to overreact to terrorist attacks because the dread factor is so high.

People will help each other because there is a sense of camaraderie that springs up, which is a survival tactic. You help them because you know you might need their help later. And that is incredibly reassuring.