Whether it’s the irony of Don’t Look Up, or the resignation of Bo Burnham’s Inside, the apocalypse is represented as frightfully close these days. Yet we keep the end of the world at a cynical distance. So much bears down on us—the echo-chamber of distorted facts and hateful rhetoric, the narcissism of internet culture, consumerist individualism, the unending pandemic, and, of course, man-made global warming. The collapse of complex systems at an extreme scale generates its own type of denial. How do we engage as a community that can flourish in an unknown future when we inhabit a present that seems, at once, already played out and unreal? The failed promises of Western liberalism, and their falsely consoling narratives, make it obvious that "we can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them" (Albert Einstein). Who is this “we”? What kind of thinking keeps us at a comfortable distance from the frenetic news feeds that hurtle viewers from one crisis to another? How does the media-propelled ascension of Greta Thunberg as climate savior render us merely passive witnesses? We read historians and cultural theorists but also draw on artists who, reflecting on war, genocide, plague, or species extinction, have expressed renewing visions to guide and inspire us forward. Materials may include epics, myths, works by Plato, Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Timothy Morton, Byun Chul Han, Toni Morrison, and Stuart Hall, and stories by Italo Calvino, J.L.Borges, Patricia Lockwood, Joseph Conrad, Yoko Tawada among others. Assessments: presentations, research, and creative projects.