The post-catastrophic novel began with Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826), in which a plague kills most of humanity and provokes incessant warfare. Plague remains the triggering calamity in much post-catastrophe fiction up through the Manhattan Project; even as late as George Stewart's Earth Abides (1949), plague rather than nuclear war is the problem. But between the invention of James Watt's coal-fired steam engine in 1784 and the start of the Cold War, the most haunting sci-fi visions were not visions of the end of the world. They were visions—in dystopian novels like We, Brave New World, and 1984—of the consolidation of technological civilization into a system of total social control. Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell did not imagine a time when the boots stamping on human faces could no longer be industrially manufactured, so that people would return to smashing one another's faces the old-fashioned way, with stones. The bombing of Hiroshima revived this notion of a reduced, brutally simplified future; and from Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957) to Denis Johnson's Fiskadoro (1985), through many novels in between, the idea of a future more primitive than the past ran alongside the idea of a future ever more technologically advanced. Read More

"Whitney Biennial 2008"

Whitney Museum of American Art

March 6 - June 1

If you want to know how we ended up getting seduced by a woman in a plastic Viking hat chatting away through an already-encrusted bloody nose while holding a piece of Styrofoam cheese in an emergency room parking lot, or if you're wondering why we fell in love as she cheese-guitared Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" on a mountaintop perch—well, that part is pretty hard to explain. But if you're curious just when shaky, hand-held, low-res video became our absolute favorite artistic medium, we can tell you precisely: about three minutes into Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn's "Can't Swallow it, Can't Spit it Out," at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Read More

One recent afternoon, roughly three hundred marchers were setting up camp in a small, dust-layered town in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, a two-weeks' walk northwest of Delhi. There were three or four Europeans among them, and the requisite bearded young Californian with a guitar, but the rest were Tibetans. Most of them had been born in India to refugee parents and were now in their twenties or early thirties; many of them were monks. They had been walking for fifty-three days, and had just covered the twenty-seven kilometers from the city of Rudrapur in one-hundred-degree heat, passing stubble fields, rubber plantations, mango orchards, smoke-belching furnaces, a family or two of lethargic monkeys, and a Tata car plant. The town had little in the way of sights or amenities, but a principal of a local school had agreed to let them use a large patch of gravel in the schoolyard, on which the Tibetans had assembled their canvas tents and laundry lines, a makeshift infirmary, and an impromptu kitchen. Except for a few who had escaped through the mountains at a young age, most of the marchers had never set foot in their homeland. The Olympic torch had already passed through Delhi on its way to China, when hundreds of young Tibetans had been arrested for unauthorized protests (including scaling the walls of the Chinese embassy, to the embarrassment of the Delhi police), and Delhi's always-delicate relationship with Beijing had been strained, yet this group was determined simply to walk across the border into Tibet. Read More

Hummer sales are falling, econobox sales are rising, and pretty much every high-powered SUV now comes in a hybrid model. But all this greenery amounts to little more than cosmetic change in the face of Global Warming—or, more accurately, in the face of 4-dollar-a-gallon gasoline. How can a cash-strapped, environmentally aware, patriotic American do more to limit the rise in temperature? Read More