The Harvard Gazette is running an excerpt from the start of the concluding chapter of Superbloom, in which I discuss media’s Nietzschean ability to absorb threats by turning them into content. The excerpt opens with the cautionary tale of Frank Walsh, the first man to shoot a television set.

It was a Sunday night, October 19, 1952, and Frank Walsh, a Long Island electrician who moonlighted as a security guard, was worn out. He headed upstairs to...