Culture Feature

This Haunts Me: Did Scientists at CERN End the World in 2012?

Can the strangeness of recent history be blamed on scientists meddling with forces beyond their comprehension?

Do you remember 2012?

People were convinced that the world was going to end — that the Mayan calendar had predicted it more than 2,000 years earlier. Protesters and time-travelers continued to decry the cataclysmic dangers of CERN's Large Hadron Collider, where scientists were taking apart the building blocks of the universe to understand how they worked...

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Culture Feature

The Official 2020 Apocalypse Gift Guide

Because not even the end times can interfere with consumerism.

The holidays can be a stressful time.

What with the travel, the family drama, the global pandemic, and the militia groups threatening to upend our democracy, it might start to seem like the world is about to fall apart around you. Also, the world might really be about to fall apart around you. Suddenly the "preppers" who spend all their time getting ready for some imagined doomsday don't seem so crazy.

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Culture Feature

This Haunts Me: The Human Heater from "Silicon Valley" and the Death of Civilization

A throwaway gag about a "crazy" invention points to everything wrong with our species.

Silicon Valley - Making the World a Better Place

HBO's Silicon Valley is one of the great satires of modern capitalism.

The main cast is a blend of absurd personalities that are somehow still believable. The clashing of world-changing ideas with massive egos and even larger sums of money perfectly captures the tragicomic nature of a modern era when we are ruled over by technocrats with questionable senses of morality and humanity—who are made billionaires overnight.

Still, the show is far from perfect. The depiction of Jimmy O. Yang's character, Jian-Yang, is often pretty offensive, and T.J. Miller's personal life and history are troubling enough that maybe the show as a whole shouldn't be given a pass. But Silicon Valley, especially in its early seasons, does such a good job of converting the alienating weirdness of its real-world setting into fodder for both high-brow and low-brow comedy that I'm drawn back to it again and again.

And each time I return to the show, there is one scene in season one that haunts me more than anything else...

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Music Lists

Quarantine Playlist: Songs for the Coronavirus

The flu is much deadlier than the coronavirus, but everyone loves a good panic.

Frank Ocean - In My Room (Lyric Video)

The first cases of coronavirus in New York have appeared, as predicted, meaning that we might have a full-on pandemic on our hands.

Fortunately, as always, music will be there to get us through whatever happens—from quarantine to revolution to everything in between.

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MUSIC

Who Is "Miss Anthropocene"?

Grimes's newest album is apocalyptic zombie pop, filled with dreams of destruction.

Grimes & i_o - Violence (Official Video)

At one point on Grimes' "4AEM," you hear something that sounds like a million little ghostly Internet children popping up from the digital world and laughing hysterically.

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MUSIC

Grimes' New Song Connects Assault on Women and Assault on the Earth

The single, "So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth," comes in two forms.

Grimes

Grimes has finally released the first single from her forthcoming album, Miss Anthropocene, due February 2020.

The single, "So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth," comes in two forms: a six-minute "Art Mix" and a four-minute "Algorithm Mix," the latter more radio-ready, the former more expansive and dreamlike.

In March 2019, she told Pitchforkthat her next album, Miss Anthropocene, was going to be "a concept album about the anthropomorphic goddess of climate Change." Each song, she said, would be "a different embodiment of human extinction as depicted through a Pop star Demonology."

NME.com

It's not exactly clear what form of apocalypse "So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth" describes, though it does appear to be about some kind of assault. "Oh, silly love," she sings. "Coming here / when I say go." Back in April, she told The Faderthat the song is about "when a dude comes inside you, you become in their thrall—how it's an attack on your feminist freedom."

Below all the layers of synth and abstraction, it does seem like the single is critiquing patriarchal abuse of women. In light of her description of the album's overall theme, it could also be a critique of mankind's aggression towards the Earth.

These two impulses—man's impulse to dominate women and humankind's insistence on dominating the planet—are, in some ways, quite related. They're also connected (though certainly not equivalent) to white people's habit of colonizing, enslaving, and dominating the rest of the planet, and on capitalism's insistence on building up a select few on top of the bodies of others.

Humans, particularly those in positions of power, have always dominated others, at terrible costs, in order to maintain their status. Today, that tendency threatens to destroy the world. Perhaps, by connecting various forms of oppression and embodying Earth's and humanity's growing frustration with them, Grimes is tapping into a truly revolutionary sentiment. Time will tell if it's enough to cut through the haze.

Grimes - So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth (Visualizer)www.youtube.com