Hey there, I'm Jason Gots, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

A Grow Light for Humans that cooks a guy's face.

A pharmaceutical mist that puts you in the right mood for mourning the victims of terrorism.

The year of all hell breaks loose.

The year of the censor. Mudslides. Hurricanes. People who

flee and people who stubbornly stay put. A terrible structure. A grand experiment. Creams and

lotions that induce false prophecies. People who tumble into each other's marriages after they're

dead. Every inch of the earth has a graveyard,

more pharmaceuticals, lives curated by drugs, the pills we swallow and the pills we reject,

the way you never really know anybody. That's a quick trip through some of the images and ideas

the writer Ben Marcus hits the reader with in Notes from the Fog, his latest collection of short

stories.

Reading them is like ingesting a powerful hallucinogen synthesized by a computer that's digested

a good chunk of the internet.

They feel the way life these days often feels, but with its skin peeled off.

Welcome to think again, Ben.

Thank you so much.

It always feels a little weird characterizing somebody's writing right in front of them.

That was weird.

I'm curious what your immediate reaction to what you just started.

Like, what did I miss or what?

I thought that was pretty thorough.

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