Pre-Extinction Follies: Addendum

I am usually so slow getting posts finalized that the subject matter has already been treated voluminously by others better equipped than me in terms of timeliness and comprehensiveness, often in book form rather than news reports or blog posts. However, I sometimes get to something first, such as a brief article in the New […]

Pre-Extinction Follies, pt. 4

This is the fourth of four parts discussing approaches to the prospect of NTE, specifically, “Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene” (DH in the A) by Bethany Nowviskie, which is a transcript of a talk given at the Digital Humanities 2014 conference in Lausanne, Switzerland. Part one is found here; part two is here; part three is […]

Pre-Extinction Follies, pt. 3

This is the third of four parts discussing approaches to the prospect of NTE, specifically, “The Last of Everything” by Daniel Drumright, a blog essay for denizens of Nature Bats Last, which has recently narrowed its focus to discussion of NTE. Part one is found here; part two is here. Despite having had the longest […]

Pre-Extinction Follies, pt. 2

This is the second of four parts discussing approaches to the prospect of NTE, specifically “Consume, Screw, Kill” by Daniel Smith in Harper’s Magazine (behind a paywall), which is a review of The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. Part one is found here. I don’t plan to read The Sixth Extinction any more than Guy McPherson’s […]

Pre-Extinction Follies, pt. 1

I’ve been working my way (as always, slowly) through three different approaches and a fair number of hyperlinks found therein to the prospect of Near-Term Extinction (NTE — modifying that as Near-Term Human Extinction, or NTHE, is an unnecessary and self-absorbed embellishment). The three are these: “Consume, Screw, Kill” by Daniel Smith in Harper’s Magazine […]

Tab Dump 04

I simply can’t keep up with all the reading, viewing, and listening in my queue. Waking hours are too few, and concentration dissipates long before sleep overtakes. Accordingly, it’s much easier to settle into couch-potato mode and watch some mindless drivel, such as the Netflix hit Bridgerton binged in two sittings. (Unlike cinema critics, I’m […]

Mad World Preamble

Regular readers of this blog understand that for a decade plus, my thinking has been darkened and clouded by impending disaster regarding multiple, interlocking dilemmas: epistemological crisis, social disintegration, periodic financial crashes impoverishing tens of millions of people at a time, ecological collapse and mass extinction stemming from climate change, and at least two bits […]

What on Earth Were We Thinking?

Not a person alive having reached even a modest level of maturity hasn’t looked back at some choice or attitude of his or her past and wondered “What on earth was I thinking?” Maybe it was some physical stunt resulting in a fall or broken bone (or worse), or maybe it was an intolerant attitude […]

Review: On the Beach (novel)

Be forewarned: this is long and self-indulgent. Kinda threw everything and the kitchen sink at it. In the August 2017 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Walter Kirn’s “Easy Chair” column called “Apocalypse Always” revealed his brief, boyhood fascination with dystopian fiction. This genre has been around for a very long time, to which the Cassandra myth […]

Trained and Twisted Minds

Before continuing with my series on “Pre-Extinction Follies,” I want to divert to an idea I’ve struggled with for some time, namely, that by virtue of socialization and education (and especially higher education), we train our minds to think according to a variety of different filters. Which filter is most powerful and for what objectives […]