The Terrible Twenties? The Assholocene? What to Call Our Chaotic Era

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” The critic and novelist Namwali Serpell told me that the quotation appeals to her in this moment, even though Žižek’s translation is slightly unfaithful to the original. The phrase “now is the time of monsters,” Serpell said, “allows us to think about the... See more

Humanity has never faced anything like the combination of climate change, the rise of a vastly powerful industrialized China, and the “total collapse of the neoliberal paradigm,” he said. “It is a non-repeating pattern; it’s a one-way street into radical unhinging,” he continued. Tooze isn’t a pessimist, per se. “We aren’t on the point of World War... See more