Hi, this is Chris Sauer, the plug-in of Chris Out of podcast, and I'm taking the nuggets over

the Lakers in their game, May 16th. But Alon has free eyes, alons available online, or on your

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If you were certain that the world was ending, what would you do?

Let me clarify that. I'm not talking about the imminent threat of war between nuclear powers.

I'm not talking about fretting about a future ravaged by climate change. Those things are

scary and anxiety-producing to be sure. But there's a difference between seeing the end of days on

the horizon and being right in the middle of the apocalypse. Imagine if all of a sudden almost

everyone you knew suddenly contracted a terrible illness and was dead within a year.

Imagine the streets of your hometown lined with corpses. Imagine if law and order was holding

on by a thread and in most places it had completely broken down. Imagine you were living through that,

and you were certain that death was going to find you at any moment.

Then what would you do? How would you spend what you thought were your last days?

It's a crazy thought experiment, but amazingly human history offers us a few dramatic examples

of this very scenario. The most dramatic of them all might be the plague, later called the Black

Death, that hit Europe in the mid-1300s. The thing that fascinates me most about this dark

chapter in human history isn't so much the death, it's the life. The psychological and spiritual

impact this pandemic had on survivors is fascinating. The end of the world only pops up every so

often in history. The writer who is credited with giving us one of the most poetic descriptions of

the impact of the Black Death is the celebrated Florentine Giovanni Baccaccio. For those of you who

don't know Baccaccio, he's known for writing one of the most important pieces of European literature

to come out of the medieval era. In fact, some historians and literary scholars argue that his

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