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
124: Radioactivity is in the Air for You And Me
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This week we're discussing the April 28, 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union and its aftermath. We use the 2019 HBO mini-series Chernobyl as our guide, despite some of its historical inaccuracies and acts of dramatic compression. We note, in particular, how those very acts of dramatic compression in fact work as a metonymy for the residual Cold War ideology that animates much of the show, which seems very concerned with depicting the ways that Soviet bureaucracy contributed to the disaster while failing to adequately acknowledge how that same bureaucracy contributed to containing what could have been a much graver disaster.
This episode contains spoilers for Chernobyl.
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