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.
The End of the World with Michael and Stu
88: What's in Your Head?
This week we have bowed to pressure and are at last covering a 2013 National Geographic documentary called "How to Survive the End of the World: Zombie Earth." This is the first entry in a six part series to which we shall be returning periodically. The zombie apocalypse scenario set out in this infotainment feature is really about rabies, and not just regular, terrifying rabies, no. The documentary dares to ask, "What if rabies went airborne?"
It's interesting to look back on this cultural artifact from the 2010s with the knowledge we now possess of how the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic played out, and we do just that in this episode, noting the things the documentary gets right and those things it gets...completely wrong...or misses entirely.
We open up the episode by talking about YouTube's recent settlement with Donald Trump over his ban in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection. Has a golden age of free speech really begun, or is something else afoot?
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