We feel more engrossed in the Happenings of the world when they're directly relevant to our life and limb and the welfare of our family and friends. This is the

We feel more engrossed in the Happenings of the world when they're directly relevant to our life and limb and the welfare of our family and friends. This is the sensation the author appears to have been experiencing during the Bataclan attacks; the spontaneous ad-hoc information-sharing networks that develop after such crises are enduring and timeless, as the author's research reveals -- especially when such crises are relatively rare, such that we are not yet conditioned to "accept" them. Despite an enchanting retrospective on the moods of news-consumers and news-suppliers throughout the ages and across the world, as well as a recap of the less-than-flattering Eurocentric malobversations of olden times, the essay's sophistication ends here; not really making or refuting a coherent point about modern news and how it relates to anything that was said. Seemingly, the implication is that some have suggested that "current panic about false news" is in part because of peer-to-peer dissemination of news made easier by today's social media, though it's not clear until the last paragraph that the essay set out to disprove this particular hypothesis. The article recounts that peer-to-peer spread of news has been commonplace for as long as people communicated at all, notwithstanding whether organizations came together to process sources, gather facts, and disseminate them many-to-one; but otherwise falsely equates others' incredulity at manufactured fiction, misleading reporting, and cargo-cult cognitive dissonance with his post-adrenaline sensory overload of trying to make sense of nearly becoming a piece of news himself; that, I think, is too much of a reach.