Never before has the idea of human extinction been as widely discussed, debated and fretted over as it is right now. This peculiarity is underlined by the fact that only about two centuries ago, nearly everyone in the Western world would have agreed that human extinction is impossible. It isn’t how our story ends—because it isn’t how our story could end. There is simply no possibility of our species dying out the way the dodo and dinosaurs did, of disappearing entirely from the universe. Humanity is fundamentally indestructible, these people would have said, a pervasive assumption that dates back to the ancient Greek philosophers.
So, what changed from then to now? How did this idea evolve from being virtually unthinkable two centuries ago to a topic that people can’t stop talking about today? The answer is: through a series of earth-shattering epiphanies that unfolded in abrupt shifts beginning in the mid-19th century. With each shift came a completely new understanding of our existential precarity in the universe — a novel conception of our vulnerability to annihilation — and in every case these shifts were deeply startling and troubling. A close reading of Western history reveals four major ruptures in our thinking about extinction, three of which happened over the past 80 years. Together, they tell a harrowing story of profound psycho-cultural trauma, in which the once-ubiquitous assumption of our collective indestructibility has been undermined and replaced by the now-widespread belief that we stand inches from the precipice.
Until this summer I hadn’t been to the movies in more than 23 years.
What I mean is, even though I had seen more movies in that time than just about anyone I know, it had always been for work, part of my job as a film critic for The Times. Even when I just bought a ticket to go out with family or friends, I never felt as if I were off-duty. I saw movies in the company of my fellow critical clock-punchers, sometimes in specially taped-off rows of regular movie theaters during sneak previews, sometimes at festivals, usually in screening rooms tucked into Manhattan office buildings.
And then one day, like a weary gunslinger who has seen too much, I decided it was time to ride off into the sunset. In March of this year I published my last movie review and walked away. After spending 21 weeks reading books, studying the weather and trying to learn a new musical instrument, I felt sufficiently purged of my old habits to return to the movies like a normal person. In a curious coincidence, this happened to be the very summer that all the other normal people were returning too. We all went to see “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.”
Truth, Russ seems to be telling us, isn’t always enlightenment. Sometimes it’s just an opportunity to identify all the ways the world has taught us to hate ourselves — and to try, always vainly, to drown them out with wild dreams of worlds we’ll never see.
These essays and poems present incarcerated men and women as nothing more or less than our fellow humans. Given the opportunity to embrace that humble yet radical assertion, most readers are likely to reject much of what characterizes incarceration in this country, and perhaps incarceration itself. Prisons are built to separate the incarcerated from the rest of the community, to silence their voices. Jails are an essential part of a system built to make them disappear. Works like That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It expose the cruelty and absurdity of that intention.
Some may see the sheer volume of texts featured for analysis in Diverse Futures as Sanchez-Taylor biting off more than she can chew, and indeed a few texts are left wanting more critical attention. But Sanchez-Taylor is less interested in producing an exhaustive close reading of her featured narratives, many of which have enjoyed their place in the literary spotlight, at least in SF circles. You will find no distanced, sterile elucidation within these pages. Rather, Diverse Futures is a passionate call to democratize the system of categorization at the heart of literary study. And more than that, it’s a call to shake up the norm.
“I remember where I sat.”
These words, this introduction to a memory, launch Foster Hirsch’s sweeping, winningly eccentric new film history book, “Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties,” a study that manages to be both personal and comprehensive. Hirsch, a longtime film professor at Brooklyn College whose previous book subjects include film noir and Woody Allen, is recalling the day — April 30, 1953 — when he joined a packed house at the Warner-Hollywood Theater, “an imposing Spanish-style movie palace on Hollywood Boulevard,” to soak in a new widescreen exhibition format called Cinerama.
Margo Steines knows something about pain. At seventeen, while growing up in New York City, she became a dominatrix, her first-ever job. She was a sex worker for a decade, later running her own S/M dungeon—kicking, punching, and otherwise assaulting consenting, paying adult males for a living. She developed a romantic—albeit increasingly tumultuous and aggressive—long-term relationship with one of her clients, a man who led her into the worlds of farming and metal work, worlds that taught Steines their own kinds of violence. In her debut book, Brutalities: A Love Story, Steines weaves essays examining her past with essays set in present-tense as she nears the end of her pregnancy, which is happening in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Brutalities is a then-and-now study of what Steines has been through and what she’s going through to get to where she is now—among other things, a mother; a partner in a stable, healthy, loving relationship; an MFA graduate; a faculty member at the University of Arizona, where she currently teaches creative writing.