Pushkin.

If you feel like five out of six new books.

If you feel like five out of six new books, movies, and TV shows are about how the world is ending,

or they take place in a future where the world has just ended,

then this essay is for you.

It's about the history of dystopian fiction.

And Jill Lepore spins an argument about the relationship between real world political utopianism,

disaffection, and are fictional

dystopias.

So this piece was me trying to understand like, you know,

hunger games, squid games as a moment as a response to the realization that

my God you know the internet didn't actually fix anything and neither did Obama.

Here's the essay, No, we cannot.

Stick around after for a conversation with Jill about writing and reading

dystopias. No, we cannot. Here are the plots of some dystopian novels set in the near future.

The world got too hot, so a wealthy celebrity persuaded a small number of very rich people to move to a makeshift satire. A leaving everyone else to starve. The people on the satellite have lost their genitals

through some kind of instant mutation or super quick evolution,

but there is a lot of sex anyway.

Since it's become fashionable to have surgical procedures to give yourself a variety of appendages and openings, along with decorative skin grafts and tattoos, there being so little else to do.

There are no children, but the celebrity who rules the

satellite has been trying to create them by torturing women from the Earth's

surface. We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power, the novel's narrator says.

...