The two young men were graduate students from the Disaster Research Center at Ohio State University, a new, first-of-its-kind institute devoted to studying how society functions in a crisis—or how it falls apart. The center aimed to dispatch teams of researchers to wherever disaster struck, as quickly as possible, to meticulously and dispassionately document people’s behavior in the throes of that disarray—all while standing in the disarray themselves. If their work sounded preposterous, or futile, the sociologists were apparently too focused on doing it well to recognize that. They didn’t
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