Alex Foster

…These days, the apocalypse seems to be on everyone’s minds. Four in ten U.S. adults believe humanity is “living in the end times.” Our climate crisis, our presidential campaigns, war, and AI are all routinely assigned existential stakes—not without reason. Every generation believes it might be the last, but some generations have a stronger basis for that belief than others. Ours seems to be a generation particularly preoccupied by the possibility. Even, I argue, enamored with it: In all the fervor with which we anticipate our doom these days, it seems the prospect of an “end” holds some kind of perverse appeal…

Alex Foster, the author of the latest read for the New Scientist Book Club, Circular Motion, on imagining a world that is spinning ever faster. “The faster the planet, the fiercer the storms…”

Common are post-apocalyptic books, which take for granted the end of the world as we know it and explore how we’ll fare in the aftermath. Somewhat less explored is the pre-apocalyptic moment—the moment we see ourselves in now. Each of these eight pre-apocalyptic books is set in the run-up to a particular apocalypse that only arrives near the end of the book, if ever.

…In The Big Short, the risktakers are those who tried to subvert the financial crisis. They’re the ones who blew their whistles and refused to bet with the market. The crooks, on the other hand, were just keeping their heads down and going with the flow. This account runs quietly contrary to received wisdom, which holds that the crisis was caused by “risky” financial behavior. Lewis’s insight here can’t just be attributed to a good grasp of financial-system incentive structures, nor is that all the readers are left with. Rather, it lives in a deep understanding of what it feels like to be a human in society, what feels risky to people, what things we’re afraid to lose…

Petty Clarke woke up beside an effluent canal, his eye purple like a broken plum, lovesick and seventeen. The sun was high. It was Wednesday. He crossed the stockyard to Premium Wholesale Meat Co., where he was employed as a slaughter-line dancer.

“You’re early,” said Raul. “And you look like shit.”

Petty apologized. The Premium Wholesale Meat sign outside Raul’s window said: GET IT WHILE IT’S STILL WARM…

We were watching one of those summer blockbusters where the fun is in seeing your own city destroyed, when you squeezed my knee above the tan line and said you were ready.

“Right now?”

You laughed. “I mean, when we get back to my house.”

“Let’s go then.” I tugged your hand, horny as hell. No time to lose. Your parents would be home by midnight.

“Wait.” The screen lit up the teenage glitter on your eyelids. You wanted to see how the movie would end! I assured you Will Smith would be okay.

He’s still okay twenty-five years later. Last month I took the boys to see his new one while you were getting more X-rays. He plays every character and goes back in time to kill himself, or something, I was distracted, but the movie did its job of keeping the kids occupied…

…She doesn’t know how to tell her mom that in school that day, her teacher put black construction paper over the classroom windows and turned off all the lights and told the students that every star is a sun, that suns flood the universe like drops of water in an ocean, tumbling over one another, some are Phoenician purple suns, others are white like giant pearls, some suns are ten times hotter than ours, and a thousand times bigger, and a million times brighter, but the warmth and pull and light of all these suns is drowned out by our own, which is the warmest, most attractive, most luminous Sun because it’s Ours, claiming us from the expanse and wrapping us up in its heat, and it occurred to Dahlia that this was exactly and precisely how she felt about her mom…

Eight p.m. Saturday. We’re sharing a booth at Tank U Ramen (4.5 stars; basement chic), both of us swiping at one iPad menu to keep our hands busy while our date night derails.

You: “I don’t know why you say the things you say.”

Me: “I said I love you.” …