Michelle Nijhuis

"When Godwin was 14, writes Richard Holmes in The Age of Wonder, her father took her to hear lectures by the renowned chemist Humphry Davy. Davy envisioned a future when humans would “interrogate Nature with Power,” words later echoed by the fictional Professor Waldman, who tells young Victor Frankenstein that the “modern masters … have acquired new and unlimited Powers: they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadow.” Some of Davy’s experiments with electricity inspired the proponents of Vitalism, who believed in the existence of an invisible life force—one that could, perhaps, be tamed and put to monstrous use by “modern masters.” Both Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley followed the vociferous public debate over Vitalism, and Frankenstein was a direct response to it."

"Psychologists have studied the dynamics of what advertisers call “fear appeals,” and they have found that while fear is very good at getting our attention, it’s not very good at keeping it. For that, the scary stuff must be followed by solutions that are small enough to be practical but large enough to be meaningful."