Hi there, I'm K-town, and on this edition of Mysterious Radio.

Right now, reaching the end of my career as a professor of English and American literature

and art history and the movies, and a couple other things.

And I've always been interested, one of my main interests, is sort of the relationship

between emotions and history and the way people feel about things.

I've written a couple books that wrote a book about the history of fame, going back into

the past and about who's the first famous person bringing it up to the present, and how fame

as an idea changes in societies.

That the idea that emotions have histories, and that they relate to not just to individuals,

but they relate to a kind of whole historical and cultural context.

And that's part of the background that I've wanted as well, this book.

Just why do people fear certain things?

Why do people, in general, what things scare us?

What makes us hide under the bed?

Why do we want to hide under the bed?

What's going on?

I mean, we see these things as kind of personal emotions and personal experiences,

but they also have a larger social context as well.

Other people might be feeling the same thing as we do, even though we think this is just me.

Emotion is very, very funny, very weird, as you think about it when it comes to us as individuals,

where one thing may scare somebody and may be totally unaffected by another person,

maybe totally unaffected by it.

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