The End of the World with Michael and Stu
The Apocalypse is Everywhere. The End of the World with Michael and Stu is a (hopefully) insightful and (hopefully) humorous exploration of the rise of apocalyptic news, apocalyptic thinking and apocalyptic culture. Each week, we’ll be looking at a work of art, a piece of media, or an historical event related to the (hopefully not) impending End of the World.
Episodes
46 episodes
Episode 46: Shadow on the Things You Know
This week we are discussing avian flu and the possibility that it might be the next pandemic ahead of us, just over the horizon. We get into the history of influenza outbreaks originating in domesticated animals, such as, most famously, the so-...
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Season 1
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Episode 46
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54:56
Episode 45: It's a Godawful Small Affair
This week we are covering the 2005 Spielberg/Cruise film War of the Worlds. Made in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the film attempts to make some kind of connection between the H.G. Wells's classic story of alien invas...
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Season 1
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Episode 45
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53:53
Episode 44: Turn and Face the Strain
This week we are covering the COP29 climate conference which took place over the last two weeks in Baku, Azerbaijan. Have they solved the issue? Was this climate conference in actuality a "meet up" for lobbyists in the fossil fuel industry? Wha...
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Season 1
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Episode 44
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49:01
Episode 43: Our Shadows Taller Than Our Souls
This week we are discussing Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel The Road. A bleak but simultaneously uplifting depiction of a journey through a world in which nature has been totally destroyed, the story offers glimmers of hope in spite ...
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Season 1
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Episode 43
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53:10
Episode 42: Project for a New American Violence
This week we are talking about 2013's The Purge, a low budget high concept home invasion thriller directed by James DeMonaco. We discuss the Aristotelian overtones of the notion that an annual night of violence might allow for a c...
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Season 1
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Episode 42
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46:25
Episode 41: The End of America with Michael and Stu
It's our election recap episode where we take accountability for our...mistaken belief that Harris would pull out a tight election, when, obviously...that did not happen. We discuss what went wrong for the Harris campaign, while analyzi...
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Season 1
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Episode 41
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47:59
Episode 40: There is No Turning Back
It's our election day special where we go out on a limb and predict who we think will triumph in the 2024 US presidential election. Is the seeming late swing to Harris real, and if it is real, will it be enough? Has Kill Tony doomed the Trump c...
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Season 1
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Episode 40
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47:00
Episode 39: Hurry Up Please It's Time
We're back on our election beat, in this episode gaming out potential outcomes of the November 5th US presidential elections. What would happen if Trump wins the popular vote but loses the electoral college? What if Harris wins in a landslide? ...
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Season 1
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Episode 39
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49:07
Episode 38: They've All Come to Look for America
This week we are diving back into politics, looking at the platforms of both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, paying particular attention to where each candidate stands on apocalypse-adjacent issues like climate change and military weaponry. The...
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Season 1
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Episode 38
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47:12
Episode 37: Hail Atlantis! Part Two
In the second and final episode of our series on Atlantis we get into the modern vision of the mythical lost land, touching on such singular figures as Ignatius Donnelly, Madame Blavatsky, and Edgar Cayce. What was it about this ancient story f...
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Season 1
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Episode 37
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51:02
Episode 36: Hail Atlantis! Part One
At long last we are covering one of the greatest apocalyptic narratives of them all! That's right, it's the Atlantis episode! And for a subject so massive, so important, we had to make it a two parter. In this first episode we will cover Plato'...
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Season 1
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Episode 36
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47:43
Episode 35: Monkey See Monkey Doom
This week we are covering the 1995 Wolfgang Petersen blockbuster Outbreak. Having lived through a pandemic of our own, can we glean new wisdom by revisiting this terrifying tale of an even-deadlier-than-Ebola virus set loose on a ...
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Season 1
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Episode 35
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55:04
Episode 34: This is the End Beautiful Friend
This week we're talking about James Cameron's 1984 masterpiece The Terminator. How relevant is this movie to our current fears about a potential future AI dystopia? How was such a tight, well-written film executed on such a comparative...
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Season 1
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Episode 34
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49:34
Episode 33: The End of the World with Donald and Kamala
This week we are discussing the highs and lows of the September 10, 2024 Presidential Debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. We get into where they stand on the issues, the depths to which the immigration debate has now plunged, and the...
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Season 1
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Episode 33
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53:34
Episode 32: Rainbows Have Nothing to Hide
This week we are discussing Karen Tei Yamashita's novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest, a magical realist look at the realities of corporate exploitation in the developing world. By turns comedic and tragic, the book weaves tog...
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Season 1
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Episode 32
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59:01
Episode 31: Into the Great Wide Open
We're turning back the clock to 2009 to discuss an epochal turning point in our society, namely, the Balloon Boy incident. While perhaps not as "earth shattering" as some of the other topics we've covered, we make the argument that this inciden...
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Season 1
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Episode 31
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53:57
Episode 30: We're Not Going Back?
This week we're covering the recently concluded DNC, noting the ways in which, despite the theme of "not going back," in many ways it feels as if the Democratic party has, in fact, gone back to previous eras of its strength, the Obama Era, the ...
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Season 1
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Episode 30
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55:02
Episode 29: It's Getting Hot in Here
This episode is about the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius which buried and preserved the Roman city of Pompeii as an example of a real world apocalyptic event. We go over the mechanics of what happened, relying on the account of Pliny the Youn...
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Season 1
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Episode 29
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59:56
Episode 28: I Don't Want to Miss a Thing
We're journeying back to 1998 to consider one of the greatest of all cinematic masterpieces, Michael Bay's Armageddon. Along the way we point out a few of the more...improbable...scientific elements of the film, while also noting ...
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Season 1
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Episode 28
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1:00:37
Episode 27: I'll Never be your Beast of Burden
This week we're discussing Bertrand Bonello's 2023 filmThe Beast. Starring the brilliant Léa Seydoux and George MacKay, the movie is set in a not too distant future where AI rules human society and has deemed our petty, combustible emo...
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Season 1
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Episode 27
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1:02:18
Episode 26: It's Easier to Imagine the End of the World than the End of Capitalism
This week we discuss the Democrats' strategy of calling their electoral opponents "weird" before plunging into a consideration of Alfonso Cuarón's 2006 dystopian masterpiece, Children of Men, paying particular attention to the analysis...
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Season 1
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Episode 26
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56:00
Episode 25: What You Thought Would Be Your Future
This week we are discussing Omar El Akkad's 2017 novel American War, which imagines a civil war in a future America driven by conflict over the continued use of fossil fuels. Charting the lives of the Chestnut family, the book paints a...
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Season 1
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Episode 25
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58:50
Episode 24: The 2012 Phenomenon and the Current Looming Catastrophe
This week we spend the first twenty minutes of the show discussing the ramifications of the attempted assassination of former President Trump before diving into a consideration of the apocalyptic 2012 Phenomenon, with special attention paid to ...
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Season 1
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Episode 24
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54:53
Episode 23: Do the Collapse
We follow up on the state of contemporary politics as covered in our last episode before turning back the clock to discuss one of the genuinely apocalyptic periods of the past, namely the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Does the sudden dissolution of...
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Season 1
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Episode 23
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59:57
Episode 22: The End of the World with Donald and Joe
Election fever has gripped the United States and we are here to break it down, specifically the June 27, 2024 debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. We discuss the debate itself briefly, but focus mostly on the aftermath, and what it bodes ...
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Season 1
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Episode 22
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56:37
