QUOTE : Consensus was the world was ending, or would begin to end soon, if not by exponential environmental catastrophe then by some combination of nuclear war, the American two-party system, patriarchy, white supremacy, gentrification, globalization, data breaches, and social media. People looked sad on the subway, in the bars; decisions were questioned, opinions rearranged. The same grave epiphany was dragged around everywhere: We were transitioning from an only retrospectively easy past to an inarguably more difficult future; we were, it could no longer be denied, unstoppably bad. Although the death of any hope for humanity had surely been decades in the making, the result of many intersecting systems described forbiddingly well, it was only that short period—between the election of a new president and his holding up a hand to swear to serve the people—that made clear what had happened, and showed that we were too late.