“While I was working on the book,” Mr. Selznick said, “there were people who said, ‘You’re doing a book about French silent movies and clocks for kids? That sounds like a very bad idea.’ ”

“The Taliban came in two vehicles,” Mr. Sherpao said. “They said to the intelligence officer, ‘Are you so and so?’ When he said ‘Yes,’ they shot him dead.”

For all its power, the Fed cannot change this troubling fact: trust in much of the financial system -- banks, brokerage houses, ratings agencies, bond insurers, regulators -- has been severely damaged by the subprime mortgage crisis. And that damage cannot be reversed with a quick cut in interest rates.

The Fed cannot turn a bad mortgage loan into a good one.

In other words, it is likely to take many more months to plumb this well of losses. And it will far exceed the $150 billion federal stimulus plan being hashed out in Washington.

Just as surely as the SUV will yield to the hybrid, the half-pound-a-day meat era will end.

We are living in a post-bubble world, following the stock market bubble of the 1990s and the real estate bubble of the 2000s. That is the backdrop for the current crisis. We need to restore confidence in the markets’ basic ability to function, not in their presumed tendency to make us all rich by always going up.

People who are extremely color-conscious will have to wait another few years before they can happily leave incandescents.

It would take manufacturers about one year to produce a billion doses of any vaccine based on a new pandemic strain. But the pandemic would have circled the globe within three months.

“Right now, all they’ve done is shown they can buy a bunch of DNA and put it together.”

The problem with all these neo-Lovecraft jobs, though, is that even when they’re as impressively peculiar as Laird Barron’s, they feel secondhand, pointless, helplessly de trop.