Apocalypse
Story Stream
The Big Finish February 06, 2025
“The worst is not. So long as we can say ‘This is the worst,’ ” go the lines from King Lear quoted in Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven. Any stories we tell about the end of the world will have to be fictional, since once the real thi...
Moderation as Pursuit of Justice February 04, 2025
There are perhaps no more cited words of poetry, at least poetry of a genuinely high order, than the opening stanza of W. B. Yeats’s haunting 1919 poem “The Second Coming.” There the Irish poet evokes a true apocalypse where “Things fall apart; the c...
Apocalypse Soon? August 13, 2024
In November 1983, the ABC network premiered The Day After, a film dramatizing World War III from the vantage point of ordinary Americans in and around Lawrence, Kansas. The film provided a plausible flashpoint for conflict: the Warsaw Pact begins a m...
Joy Williams’s Beautiful Apocalypse August 01, 2024
The writer Joy Williams, whose latest book, Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael, was published July 2, has become one of our foremost scribes of environmental destruction and the moral and spiritual questions it raises. Animals and t...
The Prophet Who Failed May 21, 2024
Like many, I had assumed that her name, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, was an alias or affectation. Given what I knew of her—of the strange books she wrote, of the strange church she led—it seemed a little on the nose. But in fact it was her actual married...
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of 'Fallout' May 06, 2024
In terms of popular franchises that were ripe for adaptation, Fallout had to be one of the best candidates available. It’s an immensely popular video game series with a devoted fanbase, several bestselling games, and endless source material that a te...
