Salon.com > Mayan calendar

A brief history of the end of the world

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 19:22:00 +0000

The world did not end! That is great news! Besides meaning that we will all live to see the next season of "Girls," today's notable absence of earthquakes, floods and other apocalyptic ephemera connects us to a long, happy tradition of losing our minds about the end of the world. From 2800 B.C. to 2012, a look back at the apocalypses that got away.

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Parenting through the apocalypse

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

When my daughter was 4, she was afraid of the Humble Bumble from the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer movie. She didn't like his sharp teeth. It was a cute fear. To this day, we joke about things having sharp teeth, like sharks. She body-boards 3-footers in shorties breaking over a sandbar off the southern Massachusetts coast. She's not afraid of sharks. But now that she is 11, she is afraid of the end of the world. My healthy child is afraid of dying.

"Andrew Kirby said that he doesn't have to do homework tonight," she tells me on Dec. 11.

"Why?" I ask. Kirby's a middle-school classmate, a chunky wild man.

"Because he said to the teacher: 'Why bother? The world is going to end on 12-12-12 at midnight.'" She rifles through a Samsung Galaxy tab before she even gets her little ballerina arms through her NorthFace sleeves.

"The world doesn't end on December 12, 2012," I tell her, opening the front door to let her sister out into the cold. “The world ends on December 21, 2012. We have approximately 10 days left."

She lets out an exacerbated argh and climbs into the backseat of her mother's Prius with her younger sister in dance leotards. Ah, yes, the world may be coming to an end soon, but we are still trying to save her while sticking it to Exxon one mile at a time.

John Hodgman’s guide to the apocalypse

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 17:22:00 +0000

As you have almost certainly heard by now, Dec. 21, 2012, marks the end of an age on a 5,000-year-old Mayan calendar, a fact that has prompted certain persons to herald it as the finale of various things, including the world. John Hodgman, humorist and minor television personality (appearing as an excessively authoritative guest on "The Daily Show" and as the PC in a now-retired series of advertisements for Apple computers), has been all over this story from the start. The final volume in his three-book series of "fake trivia," "That Is All," offers a handy guide to the apocalypse, or to use the term Hodgman prefers, Ragnarok.

Hodgman's very funny compendiums of bogus facts and advice would seem to present a particular challenge for audiobook adapters; the books are full of charts, tables and sidebars, along with amusing uses of typography and illustrations. A daily countdown of events culminating in the Dec. 21 climax of Ragnarok appears inside a little box on each printed page of "That Is All." The solution: Create a distinct recorded version, using the book as a rough guide. This, perhaps, explains why the audiobook was released this fall, a full year after the print edition. Without a doubt, the true Hodgmaniac will want to own both.

Do we all secretly want the world to end?

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 19:44:00 +0000

December 21, according to much-hyped misreadings of the Mayan calendar, will mark the end of the world. It’s not the first “end is nigh” proclamation—and it’s unlikely to be the last. That’s because, deep down for various reasons, there’s something appealing—at least to some of us—about the end of the world.

Enjoy the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

University of Minnesota neuroscientist Shmuel Lissek, who studies the fear system, believes that at its heart, the concept of doomsday evokes an innate and ancient bias in most mammals. “The initial response to any hint of alarm is fear. This is the architecture with which we’re built,” Lissek says. Over evolutionary history, organisms with a better-safe-than-sorry approach survive. This mechanism has had consequences for both the body and brain, where the fast-acting amygdala can activate a fearful stress response before “higher” cortical areas have a chance to assess the situation and respond more rationally.

Newtown and Guangshan county: A tale of two massacres

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 15:47:00 +0000

News watchers were quick to point out the two coinciding school attacks that happened Friday, in China and the U.S.: Hours before Adam Lanza began his carnage in Newtown, knife-wielding Min Yingjun went on a rampage in a central China village school. Lanza killed 28 people, including himself. Min didn’t manage to kill anyone, though he left one child with a fractured skull, and several others had to be treated for “cut off fingers and ears,” according to state news media Xinhua.

It’s probably one of the few occasions when some Americans might prefer China’s more heavy-handed rules, where private gun ownership is rare, and even sales of certain knives require permits.

But while American news media has been ablaze with stories on Newtown, Chinese mainstream media have downplayed coverage of their own domestic tragedy.

Online magazine TeaLeafNation noted that state-run China Central Television led the December 14 broadcast with news of the Newtown massacre, despite CCTV’s tradition of reporting domestic news before international news. Notes the piece: “Incredibly, days after the occurrence of the Guangshan knife attack, reporters still do not know the names of the children attacked.”