Holdengräber reminded him of the dictum, attributed to Blaise Pascal, that opens Lessons of Darkness, Herzog’s 1992 documentary: “The collapse of the stellar universe will occur – like creation – in grandiose splendour.”

Herzog repeated it. He said, “Actually, Pascal didn’t write that. I wrote that.”

Holdengräber said: “But it sounds so very like Pascal.”

“Pascal should have written it,” Herzog said, of the 17th-century philosopher. “That’s why I signed his name.”

…the busters’ typical enemies are ghosts of the Poltergeist persuasion, the Big Bad of the movie, a formless alien god from Before Time summoned by a mad cultist-cum-art deco architect, is basically Lovecraftian. From Gozer’s perspective—or the perspective of the Gozer cultist—human beings are small mammals clustered close to the firelight of their pathetic “reason,” etc. etc. etc. Standard Lovecraftian spiel. The skyscraper (and by extension New York and all human civilization) is the illusion. Scratch its skin and you’ll find a heartless alien reality beneath.

But Gozer loses. And the shape and consequences of his loss undercut the Lovecraftian dichotomy between apparent reality and actual horrifying reality. In Ghostbusters that horrorscape isn’t the truth either—it’s a mistaken interpretation of an underlying world that’s gross, evolving, playful, social, compassionate, and way more interesting than the dry surface layer.

BUFFY: My shoulders are naked and I am drenched in the blood of my enemies. You are my physical and mental equal. I wish to express my respect for you in the physical embodiment of my ideals: the act of love. Let us have sex now.

ANGEL: Buffy, I can’t. You know that if I were to experience even a moment of perfect happiness I would lose my soul.

BUFFY: This sounds like a problem for you, not a problem for me.

ANGEL: I can’t –

BUFFY: We’ll just do me, then. Kneel.

In the decorous company of sixth-formers or international businesspeople, Farage will insist he isn’t against immigration, or Europe, or Europeans – only against British membership of the European Union. Being anti-immigration, he has said, would be ‘moronic’. He says he wants a Switzerland-style trade relationship with the EU, and an Australian-style immigration system, based on points, with the world: fewer Polish builders, more Indian scientists. But this isn’t the message Ukip is putting out on the street, where, as Lord Ashcroft correctly noted, EU membership isn’t an issue. Immigration is. All immigration. Foreignness. Otherness. ‘Say no to mass immigration,’ a Ukip flyer in Thanet says. Rumours and urban legends about victimised indigenous Britons and pampered foreigners fly across the internet. Hate anecdotes in the right-wing press become generalised: if one foreigner is found to be cheating the system, there must be thousands like them, millions. Farage is the beneficiary. Ukip’s discourse isn’t so much a dog whistle as the full dog orchestra.

I can’t pin down exactly what she did with what ingredients. I can’t even be sure that she really did the things I think she did. All I have, really, are pieces of circumstantial evidence and hunches that have coalesced over the years. In my narrative of suspicions, she preferred to use vitamin A (which can cause sleepiness, blurred vision, and nausea, among other things), then she used laxatives, and then, as she got older and lazier, she moved on to prescription drugs.

Grandma never cooked the same thing twice, and her creations were greasy beyond belief and usually really weird. For example: chicken baked with apricots and canned tomatoes, or mixed-up ground meats with prunes, or pickled things. She was infamous at the local grocery store. They saved the shark livers for her.

Q: Do you think much about what your legacy will be?

King: No, not very much. For one, it’s out of my control. Only two things happen to writers when they die: Either their work survives, or it becomes forgotten. Someone will turn up an old box and say, “Who’s this guy Irving Wallace?” There’s no rhyme or reason to it. Ask kids in high school, “Who is Somerset Maugham?” They’re not going to know. He wrote books that were bestsellers in their time. But he’s well-forgotten now, whereas Agatha Christie has never been more popular. She just goes from one generation to another. She’s not as good a writer as Maugham, and she certainly didn’t try to do anything other than entertain people. So I don’t know what will happen.

The Goldsboro bomb that almost detonated was known as Weapon No. 1. As the plane was spinning and breaking apart, the centrifugal forces pulled a lanyard in the cockpit–and that lanyard was what a crew member would manually pull during wartime to release the bomb. This hydrogen bomb was a machine, a dumb object. It had no idea whether the lanyard was being pulled by a person or by a centrifugal force. Once the lanyard was pulled, the weapon just behaved like it was designed to.

The bomb went through all of its arming steps except for one, and a single switch prevented a full-scale nuclear detonation. That type of switch was later found to be defective. It had failed in dozens of other cases, allowing weapons to be inadvertently armed. And that safety switch could have very easily been circumvented by stray electricity in the B-52 as it was breaking apart. As Secretary of Defense McNamara said, “By the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted.” That’s literally correct, a short circuit could’ve fully armed the bomb.

“Can we even have the certainty that all is uncertainty?” I ask.

“Here’s my problem,” Morris replies. “My article of faith is that there’s a real world out there in which things happen. The real world is not indeterminate. I don’t want to hear people misinterpreting the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Something happened. The problem is not about the nature of reality. We know somebody killed Kennedy and there’s an answer to the question of who and why.

“Another thing we know is that we may never learn. And we can never know that we can never learn it. We can never know that we can’t know something. This is the detective’s nightmare. It’s the ultimate detective’s nightmare.”

The professor claims that, while his DMT experience is largely ineffable and almost impossible to describe to anyone who hasn’t also been through it, he “saw the self transforming machine elves that Terence McKenna was talking about” and that they communicated with him.

“I can’t believe I’ve been so wrong all of these years,” raged an exasperated Dawkins while smashing his private collection of dinosaur bones. “I always thought I’d be able to explain away any experience I had on the basis of evolutionary theory but I just wasn’t able to apply it to this, it was mental.”

Then the camera cuts to Max from a slightly new angle, facing off screen and bent over. His mask dangles near the camera; his face is off screen and his buttocks are hanging out, front and center. “They’re coming to get me!” he screams. On the right side of the screen, a woman lazily spanks his ass with a flyswatter. “Come get me bitch!” he yells. The scream becomes a distorted, symphonic drone. And then just as quickly as his arrival, the signal cuts out, and Chicago was back to the eerie quiet of the regularly scheduled Dr. Who episode.

“As far as I can tell,” the Doctor observes at that very moment, “a massive electric shock. He must have died instantly.”

Recently Tanveer actually found himself on the phone with Adnan, trying to explain the online furor over Serial. Adnan has no experience of social media, he says, so Tanveer had to find another metaphor to explain things. “Reddit is like road rage,” he says he told Adnan. People were very reactive and emotional. And under cover of anonymity, lots felt free to say things they would never say to Adnan’s face. “For Adnan, it was hard to fathom because Adnan’s been in jail,” Tanveer said. “Adnan said: ‘In my world, if you’re not ready to say something to someone’s face, you don’t say it.’”