If you think alarm clocks are bad, imagine what it feels like to be jolted awake by your own head.

The first time it happened, Kaitlin Ugolik — then a stressed-out 20-something — was terrified. As she drifted off to sleep, the sound of a gunshot rang out and jolted her awake. She scanned her surroundings; nothing seemed awry.

As it continued happening, several times a month, Ugolik’s fear transformed into curiosity. Sometimes the sound would resemble a cascading wave, other times crashing cymbals. What’s more, she says, it wasn’t just a sound. It was almost a feeling, “like something was happening inside my head,” says the journalist, now 30 years old.

Perhaps that’s why science gave this condition the most terrifying name ever: exploding head syndrome (EHS). While the condition is mostly harmless, researchers are realizing it’s more common than they first thought: nearly 30 percent of respondents in a recent study say they've experience the condition at some point in their lives.

If you were a naughty Nazi languishing in the lefty wonderland of San Francisco, wouldn’t you think the zeitgeist was right for a comedy invasion?

If you’ve not strolled around the streets of San Francisco, or any city really, with a man in fully historically accurate SS officer gear, then you might have missed the fact that this is beyond loaded, beyond trigger warnings, beyond, well, beyond. Which is why, I imagine, at the start of the walk, the SS officer I am walking with, Heinrich von Arent, hisses at me.

“Are you ready for this?” His accent is lilting and Schwarzenegger-esque. “I just want to make sure that you don’t run off. Like a small child. These are strange times.” As he toys with his eye patch, I finally get what he’s driving at, and it’s this: There’s a strong possibility we’ll be assaulted. You see, in these fraught times, Nazis are not a punchline that gets delivered without being punched, and so it goes that immersive comedian Heinrich von Arent, real name Damien Noorbakhsh, is either very committed or very stupid or, a third possibility, a total genius.

Varvara Melnikova hopes to turn Moscow into an urban planning mecca.

Whenever Varvara Melnikova travels around Russia, she tends to run into her father — or reminders of him, anyway. The jet-setting construction engineer helped build bridges for decades throughout his career, including, she says, the structure in the far eastern city of Khabarovsk that’s currently featured on the 5,000-ruble note. Even while abroad, such as in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, Melnikova has found herself walking on pavement stones laid by her dad.

So you might say helping shape cities runs in the family. As CEO of the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, a pioneering urban studies think tank, the 38-year-old has overseen a concerted effort to promote the discipline in Russia while also attempting to fashion Moscow into a global destination for city planning. So far, it’s working: The institute has sparked a newfound appreciation among Russians for urban studies — “We’ve made urbanism cool in this country,” Melnikova says — and attracts foreign students and researchers who come to Strelka to trade ideas and boost their knowledge. Her firm has attracted widespread acclaim for its role in giving Moscow's streets and squares a fresh, European-style face-lift.

Depending on how you look at it, Russia is either the best or the worst place to study urban issues. These days, three-quarters of the country’s population lives in cities — around half of which went up under the Soviet Union to power the planned economy, meaning many population centers were built around single factories, enterprises or industries. Dubbed “monotowns,” they collectively drove the communist superstate but were later plunged into socioeconomic despair after it collapsed. Even in major cities like Moscow, where massive Stalinist structures anchor broad boulevards, the socialist architectural legacy makes one thing abundantly clear: A strong state came first, and people’s interests a distant second.