June 4 | this email will end in the heat death of the universe

You don’t have to read tea-leaves or watch patterns of birds to see that the end of the world isn’t that far off. No crystal balls, divination, or oracles necessary. You can pick your own poison: microplastics in the blood stream, rumblings of war in the East, enough nuclear bombs to end hundreds of planets, society on the brink of death.

Then there’s the whole business of your own death: heart failure, cancer, the brakes going out on your car, there’s a thousand things that could kill you before old age does the job instead. 

There’s a great deal of evidence that the world is ending. Shockingly good evidence that gets better by the day, trudging forward and compiling with all the power of efficiency.

Would you believe that all the art you love was made by people acutely aware that the world was going to end? Each stroke of Monet’s brush, each note and chord of Beethoven, every fall of the finger onto Hemingway’s typewriter, made with the present knowledge of impending doom?

And here we are, too. The heat death of the universe just around the corner, still writing, and you, still reading.… Read the rest