This is the On the Media Midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. What with everything that's been going on recently, there's a distinctly apocalyptic feel to our times.

Over the weekend, President Trump posting an AI-generated image of himself with the phrase,

Shypocalypse Now. The caption, I love the smell of deportations in the morning. Floods that seem to me to be a new

stage in climate change, they're like an apocalypse. There we are. It's the zombie apocalypse within

our Social Security administration. We must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse.

So many people look at this and they say, James, is this the apocalypse?

Dorian Linsky is a cultural critic and author of the book, Everything Must Go,

the stories we tell ourselves about the end of the world.

Back in March, I asked him about the ways we've imagined and reimagined our grisly end throughout history,

and where this idea of the world coming to a grand blazing finale first came from.

In Hinduism and Buddhism to this day, history is a cycle, a wheel, and it has different phases.

Destruction and renovation, rebirth, decline.

It was the ancient prophet Zoroaster, who lived around the 7th or 6th century BC,

who offered a new and different scenario.

Zoroaster, and then in Judaism, Christianity, it's a straight line.

That's a seismic change.

The world can actually end.

And that is what dominates the Western imagination.

And it's summed up in the last book of the New Testament revelation.

You were shocked to find it so hard to follow.

The man who wrote it, John of Patmas, it just seems to be a very angry, vindictive man.

In his telling, it's not about forgiving sinners.

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