Carrying the Weight of History on Your Shoulders

Adam Tanner of Reuters extrapolates from the suicide of Iris Chang to consider how historians who study tragedy cope, speaking to Raul Hilberg and Robert Conquest, who have lived intimately with the Holocaust and Stalinist repression, respectively. "There are details, not necessarily the most horrible in theory, that somehow make you feel this is somehow a worse world than we thought," the article quotes Conquest as saying, but both authors believed that these were stories that needed to be told and remembered. That kind of objective can help writers dealing with such subjects keep depression at bay, suggests Stanford psychologist David Spiegel: "The idea is perhaps in some way that this is contributing to something like this not happening again."