“By now, you might know the phrase “compassion fatigue.” The original science focused on the secondary trauma that caregivers, like nurses or emergency technicians, would experience when helping people in distress. On a broader level, though, compassion fatigue is “caring too much and the pain that comes from it,” says Larissa Krauss, an associate clinical social worker who specializes in trauma and neurofeedback. The idea is one that’s entered our popular consciousness. On Netflix’s weekly Patriot Act, series, Hasan Minhaj described the compassion fatigue felt by most people as having “50 tabs open in our mental browsers.” Minhaj encouraged viewers to give themselves a break for the sake of their sanity: “I’m not saying, ‘Shut down your browser.’ Just close a couple tabs.” But for teens, compassion fatigue manifests much differently.” Amen to closing tabs (good grief), taking breaks, and finding some peace! “According to the Telegraph’s Henry Samuel, authorities recovered 174 of the stolen works during a 2011 “raid on the home of another Iranian pensioner who had befriended [Ghazi].” But the Divan—arguably the most precious of the missing manuscripts—was nowhere to be found. A major break in the case came in 2018, when a man known as the “Indiana Jones of the art world” arrived on the scene. Arthur Brand, a Dutch art historian and investigator, has been involved in a number of high-profile cases, including the recovery of a stolen Picasso swiped from a billionaire’s yacht in 1999.” I’d watch that movie. “As the world struggles to come to terms with the growing COVID-19 crisis, many of us are turning to fiction as a way of understanding the scope of the danger—and, perhaps paradoxically, a way of finding comfort. If the last thing you want to think about right now is global epidemic disease, we get that! But novels can also help people wrap their heads around something that may seem too big and scary to process. If you feel like you’re living in the first pages of a post-apocalyptic story, these books about historical and speculative future pandemics might help you feel less alone. Pick one up, and then wash your hands.” I’m very Team Be Informed But Don’t Panic and Please Wash Your Hands.
