Unrelatable 5. Irony in a moral key

What maddened Rose McGowan wasn’t so much that Weinstein continued to wield power as the fact that he continued to be celebrated and embraced by folk who considered themselves principled people.

There’s a word in Ancient Greek, atē (pronounced “ah-tay”), that means a temporary insanity brought on by extreme moral outrage. Later in the Iliad, when Agamemnon tries to explain what led him to provoke the wrath of Achilles in Book I, he attributes it to Atē, “the accursèd elder daughter of Zeus who beguiles us all.”

Picture “ Isabella moments,” then, as a form of atē that besets beings with less power than, say, an Agamemnon.

I used to have them all the time after I left The New Yorker. I’d have them when I went running. My thoughts would begin spinning in circles I couldn’t break out of, round and round, faster and faster, until I was running so fast that I’d trip over my feet and have to stop. Or I’d have to stop because I couldn’t stand thoughts that had turned suddenly violent. I had to abandon the music I’d always listened to, and instead started listening to hip-hop because for a while the beat seemed to help regulate my thoughts and the words to channel my rage, and the language gave me something to focus on. Eventually, though, I had to stop running entirely.