A Digest
February 2026
A couple news items reminded me of old essays.
Last week, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the hand of their Doomsday Clock to “85 seconds till midnight,” which is “the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its history.” If this sounds familiar, then that’s because they almost always move it closer to midnight with a grim pronouncement. By 2030, they might start counting the milliseconds.
I wrote about their fear-mongering in 2023, after the Bulletin announced that the Clock was “the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.” This piece was an Idea Worth Drawing For about Jonah Goldberg’s complaint that “There’s nothing particularly “scientific” about the clock. There’s no complicated risk-assessment algorithm or anything resembling the scientific method involved. It’s just a bunch of experts expressing an opinion and boiling it down to a dopey clock intended to scare the bejeebus out of people.”:
On Jonah Goldberg’s “Threat Level Midnight Forever”
Humanity has coped with mortality by making memento mori like Philippe de Champaigne’s 17th century painting “Still Life with a Skull,” which features a tulip, a skull, and an hourglass — life, death, and time — lined up in a row.
Claudette Colvin died a few weeks ago at age 86. I discussed her civil right activism in another Idea Worth Drawing For, this time riffing off one of Sarah Haider’s best essays about the difference between activists and thinkers. Haider writes that the activist game is about results — “every minute in which her goals are not achieved is a minute in which a harm has been achieved” — while the thinker game is about truth — “Meanwhile, from the thinker’s perspective, the only activism that doesn’t look like dishonorable demagoguery is, in practice, ineffective activism”:
On Sarah Haider's "On Effective Activism and Intellectual Honesty"
Why did Claudette Colvin fade into the background of Rosa Parks’ image? Colvin refused to give up her seat on a racially segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama nine months before Parks, but few remember her.
And if you’re concluding dry January with a February cocktail, then you might enjoy my Ode to Martinis — a short, fun piece:
Great connections across these essays. The Doomsday Clock critique really nails it, counting down milliseconds by 2030 is probly inevitable at this rate. Goldberg's point about it being an opinion dressed as science is spot-on. I actually think that type of performative alarmism undermines real conversations about existential risks becuase it trains people to tune out.