#RemoteReading: End Times Essentials

Could things get any worse? The answer is yes. Presenting a list of books on economics, health, work, and the end of the world, to help you soberly prepare for what’s to come, and encourage you to take action before it’s too late.

The Glass Half-Empty
Rodrigo Aguilera

“The Glass Half Empty is a highly original, concise and readable polemic that acts as a perfect foil to the confected positivity of the ‘New Optimists’, while reminding us that a better world is, in fact, possible.” – Grace Blakeley

The Glass Half-Empty debunks the most important arguments given by these “New Optimists” and exposes their progress narrative as being little more than a very conservative defence of the status quo.

 

 

 

 

 

How to Justify Torture: Inside the Ticking Bomb Scenario

Alex Adams

“A timely, thoroughly compelling critique that deserves the widest possible readership.”
– Sam Thomas, Durham University

In How to Justify Torture, cultural critic Alex Adams examines the ticking bomb scenario in-depth, looking at the ways it is presented in films, novels, and TV shows — from Batman Begins and Dirty Harry to French military thrillers and home invasion narratives. By critiquing its argument step by step, this short, provocative book reminds us that, despite what the ticking bomb scenario will have us believe, torture can never be justified.

 

 

 

 

A Life Lived Remotely: Being and Work in the Digital Age

Siobhan McKeown

“An honest account of the niggling issues and existential angst… that so often undercut the pleasures of so-called “freedom” from the office… Books like this can help build the kind of solidarity sorely needed in the new economy.”
— New Humanist

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Worst Is Yet To Come
Peter Fleming

“Really excellent… both terrifying and funny.”
– Paul Mason

Capitalism is committing suicide, and threatening to take us down with it. But will it give way to a grand social utopia or the beginning of a new, wifi-enabled dark age?

The Worst Is Yet To Come explores the disturbing possibility that the current crisis of neoliberal capitalism may spawn a world that is much, much worse.

 

 

 

 

 

Infinite Resignation
Eugene Thacker

“Scholarly advice for dark times.”

– New Yorker

By turns melancholic, misanthropic, and darkly funny, (“Birth is a metaphysical injury — healing takes time — the span of one’s life”), many will find Infinite Resignation a welcome antidote to the exuberant imbecility of our times.

 

 

 

 

 

Notes from the Sick Room: Illness in Music, Literature, and Art

Steve Finbow

“A bricolage of ideas that coheres as a sort of image, a story of the necessity of ill health in our lives.”

– Medical Humanities

Notes from the Sick Room takes place in an imaginary hospital that bends the rules of time and space. We meet Virginia Woolf, Kathy Acker, Frida Kahlo, Katherine Mansfield, Bob Dylan Bruce Chatwin and many others as they struggle to produce works of art, literature and music while in denial, acceptance or flight and through periods of serious illness and convalescence.