So, Afa, we've been talking about natural disasters, environmental challenges, catastrophe.

Do you think it's easier to talk about that in the kind of distant past that sort of feels

further away? Is there something that's harder to talk about things that we've seen in our lifetime?

Why does it feel worse to be talking about the modern age?

I think about that all the time. Like, how come Jack the Ripper murder is like fun, juicy,

whereas a murder yesterday is horrible and upsetting. It's like we have this kind of cognitive

dissonance that people lived in the past. We don't really have to apply the same empathy to them

because we just so don't know them. And when we were talking about

the Justinian play, my mind immediately went to scenes from movies I've watched about the Black

Death or Game of Thrones where you see kind of ancient bodies piling up in the street. But if we

come and talk about contemporary disasters, I am connecting with the shock and trauma and distress of seeing things on the news and seeing

children who could be your child or older people who could be your parents. And it just lands

different. And I'm not saying that's great, by the way. I don't like the way we talk about

Jack the Ripper's victims or about terrible things that happen in the past as if they're kind of

fun and juicy. But you can

see how that distance does make it feel like a different kind of event. Do you think it's because of

TV that we can see those images and we can see them again and again and they kind of sear themselves

in? Or do you think it's because these have happened in our own lifetime and therefore it feels

that much more real? And it's just a way which we think about history as kind of these guys are all dead anyway. So if there were tens of thousands of bodies piling up on the streets of a city, you know, a few hundred years ago, you know, it's all awful. But I've got no way of connecting to it. Do you think it's about because it's, we can see that it's part of our own lives? It's been dehumanized, hasn't it?

I mean, we think about the ancients

as always dying these terrible premature deaths

from famine and disease or gladiator battles.

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