Status Updates From Everything Must Go: The Sto...

In moments of crisis, the sentimental clichés prove true. Nobody has come up with a better idea than love.

Are we – have we been – worrying about the right things? Have our fears made the world better or worse? Which warnings are essential to our future and which lead us to battle phantoms? Centuries of predictions reveal that there is no sure way of knowing which fears to prioritize even if you factor in every bias and listen to the majority of scientists – even if you are a scientist....

One in three people on earth contracted influenza, including T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, President Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, Haile Selassie, Kemal Atatürk and Mahatma Gandhi....
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....The art critic Peter Schjeldahl suggested that it was precisely the non-event of nuclear war that explained the decade’s uncommon morbidity: ‘What makes the ’70s so eerie is the sneaking conviction we all have that this decade wasn’t supposed to happen. In a civilization living as if there were no tomorrow, we are the tomorrow.’

Moving into the 1970s, the whole world seemed to be suffering from a surplus of calamitous options. We have seen that the Bomb swallowed the imagination after 1945, relegating all other problems to secondary concerns. Now, thanks to successful arms-limitation diplomacy, the imagination was spat out and exposed to a confounding array of dilemmas.

The only thing better than end of the world art is a historical survey of end of the world art.