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Leonard Mlodinow has a great piece in his Happy Days NYT blog on our need for control, even the illusion of it, and how we deal with losing that illusion. Killer opening, bringing in a cat.

My mother had always feared domestic animals, but now as a plump neighborhood cat ran up our driveway, she gazed at the feline, and revealed that 70 years ago she had had a pet cat. Her 87-year-old eyes teared up. Her cat was white, she said, and so thin you could see its ribs. Still, she loved to cuddle it. It wasn’t a house cat – it couldn’t have been, because she was imprisoned at the time, in a forced-labor camp the Nazis set up in Poland, the country where my mother was born and raised. Back then she was as emaciated as the cat, but still she shared her food with it. It gave her comfort she said, and it was a way of fighting back, to help this animal that, like her, the Germans planned to let die.

The psychologist Bruno Bettelheim concluded that survival in Nazi concentration camps depended on “one’s ability to arrange to preserve some areas of independent action, to keep control of some important aspects of one’s life despite an environment that seemed overwhelming.” Studies suggest that, even in normal conditions, to be happy, humans must feel in control. We are currently confronting economic hardship that, though a far cry from the horrors of World War II, has eroded the feeling of self-determination for many of us. . .

Mlodinow teaches randomness at Caltech, authored the bestselling book The Drunkard’s Walk, and was a writer on Star Trek: The Next Generation.