mass extinctions of flora and fauna are commonplace, climate change is foreclosing the Holocene Era. Apartheid’s dead, as are the Castros in Cuba, as is privacy. The USSR went bankrupt; the Eastern Bloc collapsed; Germany reunified; the EU has gone federal; China’s a powerhouse—though their air is industrial effluence in a gaseous state—and North Korea is still a gulag run by a coiffured cannibal.
