A richly imagined new view on the great human tradition of apocalypse, from the rise of Homo sapiens to the climate instability of our present, that defies conventional wisdom and long-held stories about our deep past to reveal how cataclysmic events are not irrevocable endings, but transformations.
A drought lasts for decades, a disease rips through a city, a civilization collapses. When we finally uncover the ruins, we ask: What happened? The good news is, we’ve been here before. History is long, and people have already confronted just about every apocalypse we’re facing today. But these days, archaeologists are getting better at seeing stories of survival, transformation, and even progress hidden within those histories of collapse and destruction. Perhaps, we begin to see, apocalypses do not destroy worlds, but create them anew.
Apocalypse offers a new way of understanding human history, reframing it as a series of crises and cataclysms that we survived, moments of choice in an evolution of humanity that has never been predetermined or even linear. Here Lizzie Wade asks us to reckon with our long-held narratives of these events, from the end of Old Kingdom Egypt, the collapse of the Classic Maya, to the Black Death, and shows us how people lived through and beyond them—and even considered what a new world could look like in their wake.
The more we learn about apocalypses past, the more hope we have that we will survive our own. It won’t be pleasant. It won’t be fair. The world will be different on the other side, and our cultures and communities—perhaps even our species—will be different too.
Lizzie Wade is an award-winning journalist and correspondent for Science, one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals. She covers archaeology, anthropology, and Latin America for the magazine's print and online news sections. Her work has also appeared in Wired, The Atlantic, Slate, The New York Times, Aeon, Smithsonian, Archaeology, and California Sunday, among other publications.
Gene-George Earle is currently a PhD candidate in Anthropology at East China Normal University in Shanghai.
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Michael #1:rumdl - A Markdown Linter written in Rust
patch allows coverage to run better when a covered project uses
subprocesses
os._exit()
execv family of functions
Looking at subprocess
“Coverage works great when you start your program with coverage measurement, but has long had the problem of how to also measure the coverage of sub-processes that your program created. The existing solution had been a complicated two-step process of creating obscure .pth files and setting environment variables. Whole projects appeared on PyPI to handle this for you.”
From release notes
for 7.10.0
A new configuration option: “
[run] patch
” specifies named patches to work around some limitations in coverage measurement. These patches are available:
patch = execv adjusts the <code>execv</code> family of functions to save coverage data before ending the current program and starting the next. Not available on Windows. Closes issue 43 after 15 years!
Leah and guest co-host Mark Joseph Stern of Slate and the Amicus podcast run through what’s been happening in the courts this week, including disturbing attacks on judges, the confirmation of the extremely unsavory Emile Bove, and Amy Coney Barrett’s upcoming appearance with Bari Weiss. Then, Kate and Melissa speak with Jessica Calarco, sociologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, about her book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.
U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff traveled to Gaza Friday to tour an Israeli-backed aid site, amid growing global outcry over the country’s handling of its war with Hamas. New polling from Gallup shows barely a third of Americans support Israel’s actions in Gaza, a new low. And two Israeli human rights organizations last week concluded Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a first since the start of the war almost two years ago. But as of now, there’s no indication Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government have any plans to wind down the war. Yair Rosenberg, a staff writer at The Atlantic, talks about the ‘corrupt bargain’ that went into the making of Netanyahu’s coalition.
And in headlines: White House officials defended President Donald Trump’s decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a bad jobs report, Texas House Democrats fled the state to block Republicans from redrawing the state’s congressional map, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting said it would shut down.
We’re talking about the big cracks starting to show up in the labor market, and why President Trump says not to believe the data.
Also, a national redistricting battle is playing out that threatens to upend the election map for the midterms.
Plus: the parts of the U.S. dealing with wildfires and air quality concerns, the average cost for parents and teachers this back-to-school season, and the good cause that’s uniting online creators around the world.
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The bathypelagic zone of the ocean is 1,000 to 4,000 meters below the surface. Sometimes it's called the midnight zone, because it's too deep for sunlight to reach. Most animals here are much smaller than their shallow-water counterparts. But occasionally, researchers find the rare deep sea giant: giant isopods, giant squids, colossal squids, sea spiders.
While these giants sound like the subjects of some people's nightmares, deep sea biologist Craig McClaindreams about them. And today on the show, he helps unravel the mystery and research behind these creatures.
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Interested in more ocean mysteries? Let us know at shortwave@npr.org.
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On Friday, we reported on the latest jobs numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which showed weaker than expected growth. On Friday afternoon, President Trump fired the person in charge of those numbers.
The monthly jobs report is a critical tool for the economy, used by businesses to make decisions and the Federal Reserve to set rates. So how exactly are those figures collected? Today, we're re-airing our behind-the-scenes look at how the BLS puts together the jobs report ... one call at a time.
Belief in democracy was, until quite recently, taken for granted in America. But what if democracy is less a static noun, and more of a dynamic ideal we (could be) working towards?
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Podcast production by Ethan Oberman, Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
