apocalypse.

Inside the word emergency is emerge; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.

Rebecca Solnit • Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters. For one job that fantasy can do is to lift us out o

As Frank Kermode argued in his classic 1967 book The Sense of an Ending, we resist the idea that we live in the middle of history, unable to know how it all ends or to be a part of the climactic drama. To make sense of life, Kermode wrote, “we need fictions of beginnings and fictions of ends, fictions which unite beginning and end and endow the int... See more

Dorian Lynskey • ‘End of the World Vibes’: Why Culture Can’t Stop Thinking About Apocalypse

With the current preparedness levels of Oregon, we can anticipate being without services and assistance for at least two weeks, if not longer, when the Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake occurs. While this will be difficult to overcome, individuals, businesses, schools, government and communities can take steps to prepare. Take action now by activ... See more

Oregon Department of Emergency Management : Cascadia Subduction Zone : Hazards and Preparedness : State of Oregon

These are the questions that make the genre fizz: do we expect the end of the world? Do we deserve it? Do we secretly long for it? What would we miss and what would we love to banish to oblivion?

Dorian Lynskey • ‘End of the World Vibes’: Why Culture Can’t Stop Thinking About Apocalypse

Horizons have shrunk. Novelists and filmmakers seem far more at home with dystopias than with the possibility that the world might get better. The institutions that once fuelled our shared imagination have, for different reasons, given up, leaving public intellectual culture recycling old ideas, while much of politics has drifted into nostalgia.

Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination

disasters are often moments of strange joy.

Rebecca Solnit • Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

The old science fiction films, and most of the comics, still have an essentially innocent relation to disaster. Mainly they offer new versions of the oldest romance of all—of the strong invulnerable hero with the mysterious lineage come to do battle on behalf of good and against evil. Recent science fiction films have a decided grimness, bolstered ... See more

Susan Sontag • The Imagination of Disaster

A great enough disaster cancels all enmities, and calls upon the utmost concentration of the earth's resources.

Susan Sontag • The Imagination of Disaster

Radiation casualties—ultimately, the conception of the whole world as a casualty of nuclear testing and nuclear warfare—is the most ominous of all the notions with which science fiction films deal. Universes become expendable. Worlds become contaminated, burnt out, exhausted, obsolete.