“How the aesthetic, utopian yet pragmatic movement of Solarpunk reimagines a future without a climate catastrophe.”
Apocalypse
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, our editors recommend stories by Ryan Devereaux, Tess McNulty, Alyssa Harad, Leland Cecco, and Caitlin Giddings
To Live in the Ending
In this intense and gorgeous braided essay, Alyssa Harad contemplates the end of the world, alternatives to catastrophe narratives, and the many small endings that occur each day, everywhere, to everyone and everything. It’s that tsunami siren and its relationship to the rest of the novel that haunts me now. Situated in the deep background, […]
Futures From Ruins
Bombay Beach was once a vibrant resort town on the Salton Sea until agricultural pollution, drought, and toxic air led to its demise. Today, an art movement and emerging community hope to bring it back. In this Noema essay, writer Johanna Hoffman and photographer Tao Ruspoli show how a town in ruins is experiencing a […]
This Isn’t the California I Married
“The honeymoon’s over for its residents now that wildfires are almost constant. Has living in this natural wonderland lost its magic?”
‘It’s An iPad, Not An usPad’: Douglas Rushkoff on Digital Isolation
“There’s no Dropbox plan that will let us upload body and soul to the cloud. We are still here on the ground, with the same people and on the same planet we are being encouraged to leave behind.”
The Privileged Have Entered Their Escape Pods
“There’s no Dropbox plan that will let us upload body and soul to the cloud. We are still here on the ground, with the same people and on the same planet we are being encouraged to leave behind.” Author and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff asks: how much are we allowed to use technology and our […]
What Does a Post-Apocalyptic Gated Community Look Like?
For wealthy Americans, a dystopian future includes underground golfing in South Dakota.
Real Estate for the Apocalypse: My Journey into a Survival Bunker
In the Black Hills of South Dakota, entrepreneurs are translating fears of societal collapse into post-apocalyptic gated communities.
‘What Would Social Media Be Like As the World Is Ending?’
In Mark Doten’s “Trump Sky Alpha,” a journalist who has survived Trump’s nuclear apocalypse gets an assignment from what’s left of the New York Times Magazine: find out what people were tweeting as the bombs fell.