This Wont Help Modest Proposals For A More Enjoyable Apocalypse

Download or read book This Won't Help: Modest Proposals for a More Enjoyable Apocalypse written by Eli Grober and published by The Experiment, LLC. This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part catharsis, part diagnosis, this divinely wry collection from New Yorker and McSweeney’s satirist Eli Grober will strike a chord with readers who are dismayed by the chaos of our times. None of it will help—but a few good laughs won’t hurt. Probably. There’s a lot going on, all the time. It may feel overwhelming. Don’t worry. It will end. This Won’t Help is here for you in the meantime—with 100 short, sharp, satirical essays that skewer a world raging with inaction, while maximizing the profits of self-destruction. As if that would help! Eli Grober’s biting, Swiftian prose spares no one—not the megalomaniacal billionaire fleeing Earth for a better life on unlivable Mars, not an extremely online family living completely off-grid, not even a fossil-fuel lobbyist insisting we all stop using straws. (Eli does spare a kind thought for the supremely intelligent readers with the good sense to buy this book.) Maybe, just maybe, descending through the inferno of our environmental, economic, and political landscape will help us find real solutions to the hypocrisy and dysfunction that surrounds us. But probably not.

Download or read book Ink written by Sabrina Vourvoulias and published by . This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What happens when rhetoric about immigrants escalates to an institutionalized population control system? Ink opens as a biometric tattoo is approved for use to mark temporary workers, permanent residents and citizens with recent immigration history--collectively known as inks"--Page 4 of cover.

Download or read book Apocalypse Against Empire written by Anathea Portier-Young and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2014-01-09 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The year 167 B.C.E. marked the beginning of a period of intense persecution for the people of Judea, as Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes attempted -- forcibly and brutally -- to eradicate traditional Jewish religious practices. In Apocalypse against Empire Anathea Portier-Young reconstructs the historical events and key players in this traumatic episode in Jewish history and provides a sophisticated treatment of resistance in early Judaism. Building on a solid contextual foundation, Portier-Young argues that the first Jewish apocalypses emerged as a literature of resistance to Hellenistic imperial rule. In particular, Portier-Young contends, the book of Daniel, the Apocalypse of Weeks, and the Book of Dreams were written to supply an oppressed people with a potent antidote to the destructive propaganda of the empire -- renewing their faith in the God of the covenant and answering state terror with radical visions of hope.

Download or read book Apocalypse Never written by Michael Shellenberger and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a National Bestseller! Climate change is real but it’s not the end of the world. It is not even our most serious environmental problem. Michael Shellenberger has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. He helped save the world’s last unprotected redwoods. He co-created the predecessor to today’s Green New Deal. And he led a successful effort by climate scientists and activists to keep nuclear plants operating, preventing a spike of emissions. But in 2019, as some claimed “billions of people are going to die,” contributing to rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided that, as a lifelong environmental activist, leading energy expert, and father of a teenage daughter, he needed to speak out to separate science from fiction. Despite decades of news media attention, many remain ignorant of basic facts. Carbon emissions peaked and have been declining in most developed nations for over a decade. Deaths from extreme weather, even in poor nations, declined 80 percent over the last four decades. And the risk of Earth warming to very high temperatures is increasingly unlikely thanks to slowing population growth and abundant natural gas. Curiously, the people who are the most alarmist about the problems also tend to oppose the obvious solutions. What’s really behind the rise of apocalyptic environmentalism? There are powerful financial interests. There are desires for status and power. But most of all there is a desire among supposedly secular people for transcendence. This spiritual impulse can be natural and healthy. But in preaching fear without love, and guilt without redemption, the new religion is failing to satisfy our deepest psychological and existential needs.

Download or read book How to Survive the Apocalypse written by Robert Joustra and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Incisive insights into contemporary pop culture and its apocalyptic bent The world is going to hell. So begins this book, pointing to the prevalence of apocalypse — cataclysmic destruction and nightmarish end-of-the-world scenarios — in contemporary entertainment. In How to Survive the Apocalypse Robert Joustra and Alissa Wilkinson examine a number of popular stories — from the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica to the purging of innocence in Game of Thrones to the hordes of zombies in The Walking Dead — and argue that such apocalyptic stories reveal a lot about us here and now, about how we conceive of our life together, including some of our deepest tensions and anxieties. Besides analyzing the dsytopian shift in popular culture, Joustra and Wilkinson also suggest how Christians can live faithfully and with integrity in such a cultural context.

Download or read book Make Room! Make Room! written by Harry Harrison and published by Rosetta Books. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detective hunts down a killer in a dystopian, overpopulated NYC in this classic science fiction novel that inspired the film Soylent Green. Originally published in 1966, Make Room! Make Room! imagines a world at the end of the twentieth century where Earth is so overwhelmed by rampant population growth that it teeters on the edge of self-destruction. In New York City alone, thirty-five million people are squeezed into its packed boroughs, scrambling like rats for the world’s dwindling resources. The only food available is a product called soylent. And while the government tries to maintain order, the rich get richer and the poor stay underfoot. Finding a killer in this broken world is one hell of a job. But that’s exactly what Det. Andy Rusch has been assigned to do. If he can stay alive long enough, he might just solve the biggest case he’s ever been on—unless humanity finally fulfills its promise and destroys itself first.

Download or read book To Be a Machine written by Mark O'Connell and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This gonzo-journalistic exploration of the Silicon Valley techno-utopians’ pursuit of escaping mortality is a breezy romp full of colorful characters.” —New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice) Transhumanism is a movement pushing the limits of our bodies—our capabilities, intelligence, and lifespans—in the hopes that, through technology, we can become something better than ourselves. It has found support among Silicon Valley billionaires and some of the world’s biggest businesses. In To Be a Machine, journalist Mark O'Connell explores the staggering possibilities and moral quandaries that present themselves when you of think of your body as a device. He visits the world's foremost cryonics facility to witness how some have chosen to forestall death. He discovers an underground collective of biohackers, implanting electronics under their skin to enhance their senses. He meets a team of scientists urgently investigating how to protect mankind from artificial superintelligence. Where is our obsession with technology leading us? What does the rise of AI mean not just for our offices and homes, but for our humanity? Could the technologies we create to help us eventually bring us to harm? Addressing these questions, O'Connell presents a profound, provocative, often laugh-out-loud-funny look at an influential movement. In investigating what it means to be a machine, he offers a surprising meditation on what it means to be human.