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The idea would be that not only do you have a multigenerational project of building a new world, but obviously the human civilization occupying it would also be new. And culturally and politically, it would be an achievement that would have no reason to stick with old forms from the history of Earth. It’s a multigenerational project, somewhat like building these cathedrals in Europe where no generation expects to end the job. By the time the job is near completion, the civilization operating it will be different to the one that began the project.

what the Mars scenario gave me – and gives all of humanity – is the idea that the physical substrate of the planet itself is also a part of the project, and it’s something that we are strong enough to influence. Not create, not completely control, not completely engineer because it’s too big and we don´t have that much ability to manipulate the large systems involved, nor the amount of power involved. But we do have enough to mess things up and we do have enough to finesse the system.This, I think, was a precursor to the idea of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is precisely the geological moment when humanity becomes a geological force, and it’s a science-fiction exercise to say that 50 million years from now, humanity’s descendants, or some other alien civilization, will be able to look at Earth and say: “This is when humanity began to impact things as much as volcanos or earthquakes.” So it’s a sci-fi story being told in contemporary culture as one way to define what we are doing now. So, that was what my Mars project was doing, and now we are in the Anthropocene as a mental space.

if humanity’s impact on the Earth is mostly negative in ecological terms, if you mark humanity’s impact as being so significant that we have produced a new geological age, then we have to think differently in our attitudes towards what we are doing with our biophysical substrate. And one of the things I think the Anthropocene brings up is that the Earth is our body, and we can finesse it, we can impact it, we can make ourselves sick.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.

During the entire history of America, the US has not been at war for 17 years. That's incredible, mainly because if you talk to people who maybe aren't that much that interested in history, they would say, “That’s crazy. What are you talking about? There’s no war.”

Our relationship with war and how our country functions in the world is so warped and twisted. Every time the word “war” is introduced into the cultural discourse, you know that it is already corrupted. That's why it’s paired here with “back to normal,” because it's another combination of phrases that stood out…Everybody keeps talking about things getting back to normal. Then the pronouncements that this is a war and we’re fighting an invisible enemy. It just seems so disturbing really because what that means is that we're about to start doing things that are ethically questionable. To me, what was happening is that the pronouncement was made so that anything goes, and there's no culpability, nobody will be held responsible for making any decisions whatsoever because it was war and things had to be done.

if I think about how “war” has been used strategically in this context of COVID-19, it doesn’t feel like rhetoric that was raised to be alarmist, but almost to be comforting. That this is a familiar experience. We have a handle on it. We are attacking it like a war. War is our normal.

Endtime for Hitler: On the Downfall of the Downfall Parodies

Hitler left an inexhaustible fund of unforgettable images; Riefenstahl’sTriumph of the Will alone is enough to make him a household deity of the TV age.

The Third Reich was the first thoroughly modern totalitarian horror, scripted by Hitler and mass-marketed by Goebbels, a tour de force of media spectacle and opinion management that America’s hidden persuaders—admen, P.R. flacks, political campaign managers—studied assiduously.  A Mad Man in both senses, Hitler sold the German volk on a racially cleansed utopia, a thousand-year empire whose kitschy grandeur was strictly Forest Lawn Parthenon.

Dystopian parables like “The Walking Dead,” where zombies rule the earth, are an increasingly fashionable genre of entertainment, but the degree of apocalyptic pessimism is very different depending on the size of the screen.The dividing line between television and movies seems to be class conflict.Television shows posit a hideous future with a silver lining; survivors, good or bad, are more or less equals. Movies like “Divergent,” “Snowpiercer” and “Elysium” foresee societal divisions that last into Armageddon and beyond and that define a new, inevitably Orwellian world order that emerges from the ruins of civilization.

Movies project a morose, scary future where man is his own worst enemy, whereas television can’t entirely suppress a smile.There is something positive about the end of the world on shows like “The Walking Dead,” and “Z Nation” on Syfy and “The Last Ship,” on TNT. True, civilization as we know it is gone, but so is social stratification. Survivors don’t group into castes according to birth, race, income or religion. People of all kinds bond with whomever seems friendly, or at least unthreatening.

Dystopian movies based on young-adult novels understandably focus on the oppression of young adults, but in “Divergent” and “The Hunger Games,” a despotic elite divides the little people into cliques, only there is no prom in sight.Engels wrote about “contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes.” He meant in the movies. On TV, all men are equal and equally at peril in the apocalypse.

Art Deco is the new Steampunk

Terreform expects that with all the trash at the landfill and disposed of each year, they could remake seven entirely new Manhattan islands at full scale. Eventually, the purpose is to make no distinction between the city and the waste it generates.

What Masdar really represents, in fact, is the crystallization of another global phenomenon: the growing division of the world into refined, high-end enclaves and vast formless ghettos where issues like sustainability have little immediate relevance. That’s obviously not how Mr. Foster sees it. He said the city was intended to house a cross-section of society, from students to service workers. “It is not about social exclusion,” he added. And yet Masdar seems like the fulfillment of that idea. Ever since the notion that thoughtful planning could improve the lot of humankind died out, sometime in the 1970s, both the megarich and the educated middle classes have increasingly found solace by walling themselves off inside a variety of mini-utopias. This has involved not only the proliferation of suburban gated communities, but also the transformation of city centers in places like Paris and New York into playgrounds for tourists and the rich. Masdar is the culmination of this trend: a self-sufficient society, lifted on a pedestal and outside the reach of most of the world’s citizens.