Magical Thinking

In 2005, Joan Didion published “The Year of Magical Thinking” about grieving the loss of her husband, the unavoidable instant reduction of a rich marriage to aimless solitude.

Beyond the obvious arena of modern imperial foreign policy, magical thinking is a well-known psychological concept. It is “the belief that wishes can impose their own order on the material world.” It is driven by human goals of fulfillment “without consideration of the constraints of the external world.”

We’ve been reminded of this concept in many different ways over the. . .