Just once, I want to meet the villain in a cheerful, brightly lit room. Possibly one with kittens.

Remember how pissed you got when we had to do all that reading about the Rising back in sixth grade? I thought you were going to get us both expelled. You said the only way things could've gotten as bad as they did was if people were willing to take the first easy answer they could find and cling to it, rather than doing anything as complicated as actually thinking.

Growing up in my family meant ambushes on your birthday, crossbows for Christmas, and games of dodge ball where the balls were occasionally rigged to explode. It also meant learning how to work your way out of a wide variety of death traps. Failure to get loose on your own could lead to missing dinner, or worse, being forced to admit that you missed dinner because your baby sister had tied you to the couch. Again.

That's the nice thing about insanity: evil people kill you, but crazy ones try to make you understand.

If anything attacked us, we could just panic at it until it went away.

I am a zombie fan, but all of the zombie stories Ive enjoyed started when the dead rose and ended three days later with everybody looking exhausted. I was thinking, What happens in 20 years?

There comes a point when you need to get over the fear and get on with your life, and a lot of people don’t seem to be capable of that anymore. From blood tests to gated communities, we have embraced the cult of fear, and now we don’t seem to know how to put it back where it belongs.