ABSTRACT
Why are images [of destruction] ubiquitous? What makes disaster so fascinating, so thrilling, so involving? […] Who, exactly, needs disaster? In one sense everybody, or nearly everybody. The culture of calamity reveals a general psychological addiction to images and stories of disaster in our society, though this varies in significant ways across registers of class, gender, and race. There is also a decisive structural or ideological component to the American dependency on disasters.
