With Both Hands

Sign in Subscribe

Apocalypse

The Long View 2008-08-24: A Week before Labor Day

I find this satirical blog post by John J. Reilly pretty apt for the mood of our times. If you want a little context of what he was getting at, try this longer story “After the Eighth Day” for how the universal apocalyptic module in the human mind can transform

The Long View 2008-03-07: Nuclear Apocalypse; Threatening Choirs; The Documentary of Doom; New Jersey; Motorcycling

John’s comment here is apt: The Nuclear Apocalyptic Novel is culturally important in a way that Hitler Wins Alternative History never will be. The Cold War made an impression on the psyche of the West. An absolutely enormous amount of popular art is an attempt to think through the

Linkfest 2020-12-04: Protein Folding and the Apocalypse

Labroots: How Detective Geologists are Tracing Illegal Sand I’ve certainly snarked that glass recycling is silly because we aren’t in danger of running out of sand, but intensive sand mining for use in concrete aggregate can certainly have bad consequences. In the Pipeline: What’s Crucial and What

The Long View 2007-08-30: Anarchy! Orthography! Liturgy!

A bit of a return to current events commentary here. An item of interest is the response of the Patriarch of Moscow commenting on the motu proprio of Benedict XVI allowing greater freedom to celebrate the Latin mass. If you think the Second Vatican Council roiled Catholicism, you should see

The Long View: We All Fall Down

The best paragraph in this fascinating book review by John J. Reilly is this: As an aside, we may note that this solidifying of the self into an entity that acts without regard to desire is also the goal of certain esotericists. The adamantine self becomes a "body of

The Long View: The Translator

John J. Reilly’s book review of John Crowley’s The Translator comes up at an apropos time: I am digesting a history of science fiction in the twentieth century, and The Translator seems to be a good example of science fiction as a kind of secular scripture. There is

The Long View: War in Heaven/Heaven on Earth

If I could find a reasonably-priced copy of this book, something like the proceedings of the annual meeting of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, I might pick it up. I’m sufficiently intrigued by John’s précis that I want to read all the contributions. I’m