I asked the board to generate a question they would ask their fear. CBT and creative writing prompt books sold at Barnes & Noble seem to have re-connotated this kind of exercise, so no one entertained me. Instead they made many thoughtful-but-sprawling remarks on fear writ large that I have done my best to pin down and translate into generative questions. Below is our response to ourselves. —Tess Wayland, Features Editor 2025
When are we allowed to laugh at fear?
Laughing in the face of fear may be almost as natural as screaming or crying. I think about Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which one user in Ebert’s comment section called “UNBELIEVABLY vile, sadistic, annoying, and dumb.” In the final scene, Sally leaps out the window of the Sawyer house, pursued by Leatherface in the breaking light of day, and hitches a ride in the bed of a passerby’s pickup truck. The film ends at sunrise: Sally is soaked in blood and screaming hysterically as she rides away. But as Hooper’s lens holds on Sally for just a bit longer, we notice she’s not screaming anymore: she’s laughing. Leatherface dances alone in the street to the sounds of his chainsaw, and the scene resolves into a kind of bucolic tranquility, beneath the golden light in the vast green pastures. Sally’s laughter at her fear does not give her power over it—that would be the truck—but it acts as a sort of pressure valve for her abject terror. — SC
How does Fear (Spring 2026) overlap with Diagnosis (Fall 2025)? How is fear given permission through clinical language?
If diagnosis is knowing, then fear is the lack thereof—fear rests in the unknown, the ever-looming “what now?” and “what if?” The ability to make a diagnosis rests on the agency to know, the agency to make a judgement with reasonable certainty behind it. Diagnosis is in some ways about control. Fear? Well, fear is what happens when we lose control. –– RH
What happens when a fear is transplanted?
Sawyer has thalassophobia: a fear of deep bodies of water and the Leviathans who may lurk under the deep. Sawyer is from Indiana. Then Sawyer joined the Navy. — TW
I suppose growing up it wasn’t much of an issue, only occasionally if the grandparents rented a pontoon or some other freak occurrence. My little sister got a kick watching me play Subnautica, a first-person video game that puts you behind the mask of a scuba diver on an alien water-planet. Whatever wreckage I felt below my feet and the freaky fast creatures that’d pop out from behind kelp trees invariably made me cringe, panic, and turn it off after a few minutes. I hadn’t thought about it going in, but when I went out with my first ship, I realized the absurdity of placing myself in direct proximity to my only gimmicky phobia. — SC
In 2011, we laughed at the Doomsday Preppers on reality television. What did we have to prep about? But with a rise in doomsday malaise—oh, yes, the climate apocalypse, here comes food and water shortage, soon we’ll be paying for the air we breathe—at what point do we start prepping? What is the difference between feeling fear and reacting to danger?
What strikes me about the Preppers phenomenon is the question of why they seemed, still seem, so absurd. I think the mindset betrays a discomfort with death that we find slightly embarrassing, or maybe it was unfashionable. The fatalist, Millennial response to an impending apocalypse has always been “Just kill me.” But the neurotic hoarding of (very unappetizing) canned food, the reflexive individualism, and the “Don’t come crawling to me when…” attitude begged the question: What are they sacrificing while they try to postpone the inevitable? It’s easy to laugh. Of course, who among us isn’t occasionally terrified of our own deaths? The idea of an inevitable and sudden mass starvation, or toxic airborne event, is dread-inspiring if it finds you in the right place and the right time: trying to sleep at night and facing the pale morning, or sapped of serotonin the afternoon after a night out. Maybe we shouldn’t laugh at the preppers, but I think it’s more proper that we should—they take the mantle so we can feel less ridiculous. — SC
Does fear have a face?
I read 1984 for the first time last week. –– RH
How to resist fear-farmers and demagoguery when there is real impetus to be fearful? Who possesses fear, and who controls it?
I don’t know if the real impetus to be fearful makes me resistant to fear-farming. If anything, it affirms my sense that fears are abundant, even airborne, or at least fertile, emerging from the earth as a little radish harvested. All of us can metaphorically and materially arm ourselves against each other; all of us can inflict violence—intimate or mass, gentle or seismic. It’s in our possession, the decision to be a source of lightness or a source of fear. Lightness is a day-to-day endeavor. What we don’t possess is a knowledge of whether people in the other room, a town over, across the ocean, will seize the hour, provoke fear. How can I resist fear-farmers when violence is inevitable, proximate, ever-encroaching? We should face them straight-eyed, in dutiful expectation. So long as this fear doesn’t swallow us whole. — VAMK
Are we hosts for common fears that live in the air? How does history dictate fears? How do fears exchange hosts?
Humans are born with two basic fears: a fear of loud noises and a fear of falling. I imagine they have their evolutionary and biological merits (FYCL, back me up here), but I find it somewhat reassuring that there are two intrinsic phobias that tie all of us, at the most basic biological level, together. Of course, people can and do overcome these basic fears (otherwise the tightrope walking industry would cease to be possible), but I do find comfort in the fact that you, I, and most of the world had all shared at one point a fear so basic it’s congenital. –– RH
Is fear something we need to “beat”? Is there an opposite emotion with which to counter fear — joy? confidence? denial? Or is it an emotion that can only be felt through and faced?
I spend most of my time battling fears that are, in reality, cute and little. Will my roommates be psychopaths? Will I get into the cool literary magazine at my college? Now that I am here, what will I do with my life? I let these baby-fears sit on my palms and watch as they tie up my hands. Eventually, I catch a glimpse of a note pinned to my desktop, from a history teacher who taught me about some of my greatest fears—fascism, totalitarianism, things like that. The note reads: CX, keep working. Action absorbs anxiety. –– CX
Do we owe something to our lizard brain? Is the problem with western-bourgeois-etc. modernity that our fears are directed towards TSA lines instead of bear hunts—or should we be suspicious of those who advance state-of-nature-esque models of fear?
I have a memory of declaring Alex Honnold (known to most as the “Free Solo guy”) a grifter. I don’t like to take my counsel on fear from a man with no amygdala, I suppose. I remember being on the side of the Charles River that runs right against the highway among the sweatered masses of Head of the Charles; I don’t have much of a memory of why, exactly, I had been ready to send Honnold the way of raw milk and all-steak diets. I think I reacted against his idea, as I understood it, that fear is among our “most primal” emotions. To Honnold, the fear response is so involuntary, so constant, so “inherent” to us sapiens that systems which protect us from “real” fear (re: bear hunts) instead condition the fear response to be triggered in situations that don’t warrant it. This conditioning has created a genre of fear we might call the Whole Foods panic attack. It is true that the WFPA, belonging so fiercely to the HOTC population, is to some extent a bourgeois ridiculousness. But ascribing its origins to the lizard-brain not only makes fear-mongering demagogues more persuasive—your fear is a reality coming from the truest, most eternal part of yourself—but also completely desocializes fear. The “misplacement” rhetoric tasks us with recalibrating our evolutionary infrastructure instead of social infrastructure. Take it from someone who took their first class in human evolutionary biology this fall: the Paleolithic world was an entirely social one, too. — TW
2026