When Climate Deniers Weep

The Mangione Effect and How it Impacts the Way We Process the L.A. Fires

As Southern California burned this week (and continues to), the scenes coming out of the Los Angeles area didn’t seem quite real. Our brain, conditioned by social media, is now used to receiving only a few moments of information before different information is presented to it. These apps were designed to obliterate our attention spans so that we would ingest more and more content. What this means, of course, is that our ability to process complex and, especially, novel information has been damaged. Some of us may experience this when we start reading. Maybe it takes you a a little longer now to get focused, to suspend disbelief (a requirement for reading fiction).

It feels like we’re being asked to suspend disbelief in order to process what is happening in California right now. The images we’re seeing provoke something in us that other wildfires have not, although if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve had the sense that the nature of these fires have been changing over the last five…