Today’s most vital cultural forms are your identity, personality, and image. And in this new cultural paradigm, the artist’s performance of themself is often more important than the art they make. The persona is the message.

The Village , a group of disillusioned 20th-century support-group members choose to retreat from what they see as a violent, baffling urban present into a simulacrum of a 19th-century agrarian commune, and in their attempts to escape violence, end up creating their own form of it.

The new book "Everything Must Go" surveys apocalyptic thinking from the Book of Revelation to Michael Bay's Armageddon.