Livestreaming the Apocalypse
An invitation, not a threat!
Fresh reviews of APOCALYPSE coming at you!
“An inspiring book for challenging times and . . . a rewarding read for everyone intrigued by archaeological discovery and the deep history of human social change.” — Science (The book reviews at Science are completely separate from the news section, so I’m thrilled and more than a little relieved to have gotten such an thoughtful and positive review there!)
“In this surprisingly hopeful book, Wade reports on what archaeologists see when they look at sites of upheaval and invites us to look at the past—and our own troubled time—in a new way.” — MIT Technology Review, in print!
I’ve also been informed that copies of APOCALYPSE are being stolen by boyfriends and husbands across the country. We love to see it!
Hello! I’m coming to you a day early this week because Automata has graciously added a livestream to my (sold out!) conversation with Travel Channel host Don Wildman tonight. APOCALYPSE: A Conversation at the End of the World starts at 7 p.m. Pacific time, and the video will be available on YouTube afterwards. If you couldn’t make either southern California event in person, please tune in! We’ll be monitoring the comments for questions for the Q&A.
Yesterday’s Cellar Door Bookstore event in Riverside was a sheer delight. It was full of some of the most thoughtful and provocative questions I’ve ever received about my work, both from my interlocutor, sociologist Victoria Reyes, and our wonderful audience. Thank you to Cellar Door, the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside, Victoria, and everyone who came!
Further events are in the works. If you’d like to have me talk about APOCALYPSE at your bookstore, university, museum, classroom, living room, or Zoom book club, get in touch!
It’s a lot harder to be pessimistic about the future of humanity when surrounded by thoughtful, engaged, and creative people, something I hoped these book events would make us all feel—and I think they are! We won’t get out of this mess alone, but who would want to? On a similar note, I wrote a piece for Slate this week about how spending five years writing about apocalypses changed my mind about human extinction, which I used to think was a possible or even preferable outcome of the horrors we’re inflicting on the planet and each other. Now, I don’t:
I’ve come to see that expecting—or hoping for—human extinction is actually taking the easy way out. Embracing a vision of the future that counts on the worst version of ourselves, doing the worst things we can imagine, lets us off the hook of doing the hard work of dreaming up and working toward the futures we want. Apocalypse forces us to radically change. But by facing the future with optimism instead of doom, we can transform ourselves into the kinds of people—the kinds of communities—who can survive.
Read the rest here! I’ll see you next week, enthusiasm fully charged by all these thoughtful readers and amazing audiences!
And here’s that livestream link again. See you tonight!