Vanity Sounds the Horn and Ignorance Unleashes the Hounds Overconfidence, Rashness and Desire

—15th century Netherlandish tapestry

Digital Leviathan | Richard A. Greenwald The history of modernity, in Jacob Siegel’s telling, is the history of information technologies progressively tightening their grip on human affairs.

Also check out this spiked review from @thebaffler.com web.archive.org/web/20260324...

The Information State We’re often told that disinformation is everywhere and that it’s endangering our democracy. But what if the war on disinformation itself is really just a...

Urgent, insightful, and revelatory, Jake Siegel's THE INFORMATION STATE "is an incisive examination of how we reached the point where anything that contradicts the dominant narrative can be labeled dangerous disinformation." Check it out today!

us.macmillan.com/books/978125...

Kallis's take is astonishingly bad. He relies almost entirely on the first and sketchiest edition of Malthus's Essay, ignoring the several later substantially revised and expanded editions, and also ignores most Malthus scholarship.

"A tour de force. Scranton provides arguably the most comprehensive review available of relevant human behaviors and issues…. an indispensable reference for anyone concerned about climate change."

Thanks to @choicereviews.bsky.social for reviewing IMPASSE!
www.choicereviews.org/review/10.58...

“In other words, the obstacles are structural; they are embedded in the very systems designed to address them.”

Review: Impasse by Roy Scranton www.resilience.org/stories/2025...

The Disappearing American Man - Tablet Magazine What went wrong with the American man?

Great article by Jacob Siegel in Tablet Magazine about how the 20th-century figure of the American man has been replaced by a "dribbling sludge of bitterness."

www.tabletmag.com/sections/new...

I talked about IMPASSE on CSPAN Book TV with Keith Makato Woodhouse. Thanks to @seminarycoopbooks.bsky.social for hosting!

www.c-span.org/program/book...

Impasse Check out this great listen on Audible.com. A Next Big Idea Club "Must Read" for August 2025! Extreme heat, fires, floods, and storms are transforming our planet. Yet we get increasing emissions, divi...

"In IMPASSE... Roy Scranton dispenses with the pieties of climate discourse – hope, innovation and 'net zero' platitudes – and offers something far rarer: an unflinching case for ethical pessimism." (TLS)

IMPASSE is now available as audiobook. Check it out! www.audible.com/pd/Impasse-A...

Impasse | Stanford University Press A Next Big Idea Club "Must Read" for August 2025!We need a new realism in the face of global climate catastrophe.Extreme heat, fires, floods, and storms are transforming our planet. Yet instead of ser...

Celebrate the Valentine's weekend with some radical honestly about our climate crisis! Sunday at 11:30am ET, C-Span's BookTV will air @royscranton.bsky.social's discussion of his book IMPASSE: CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE LIMITS OF PROGRESS. www.sup.org/books/litera...

Y'all spend way too much time on social media.

well i for one couldn’t be more excited for the possibilities of AI. finally a technology that answers the age old question ‘what if clippy was wormtongue’

If anyone, especially outside the US, is wondering how the US public became so susceptible to misinformation and insanity, this graphic tells an important part of that tale....

Impasse | Stanford University Press A Next Big Idea Club "Must Read" for August 2025!We need a new realism in the face of global climate catastrophe.Extreme heat, fires, floods, and storms are transforming our planet. Yet instead of ser...

Roy Scranton, Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress - @stanfordpress.bsky.social, 2025
www.sup.org/books/litera...
NDPR review by Arthur Obst
ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/impa...

Dr Kareem Carr man: i wish to publish @kareem_carr Jan 21 reviewer 2: your paper is no good man: i'll do anything to improve reviewer 2: it's simple. you must read the work of the great scientist Pagliarini man: *bursts into tears* but i am Pagliarini Andre Pagliarini @apagliar Jan 21 a first: in rejecting an article I submitted to a journal, reviewer 2 noted I failed to engage the work of one Andre Pagliarini Jan 21, 2026 • 3:47 PM UTC

I just thought everyone should see this

Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress In the decade since publishing Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, witnessing the steady march of rising global carbon emissions only disrupted te...

"IMPASSE is a work of grand scope.... emotionally provocative and intellectually generative, blending wide-ranging scholarly knowledge with powerful prose." Thanks to NDPR for the great review of IMPASSE. ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/impa...

🌡️📘 Aprender a vivir y a morir en el Antropoceno (Roy Scranton, 2021)
Pandemias, mares en ascenso y eventos extremos obligan a repensar cómo habitamos un planeta en crisis.
#educaciónambiental #cedreac #lecturarecomendada

The world is getting hotter. Pessimism may be our only hope. - The Boston Globe In the face of climate change, optimism is a dangerous delusion.

I wrote a thing for The Boston Globe: "The world is getting hotter. Pessimism may be our only hope."
www.bostonglobe.com/2026/01/11/o...

Tweet from @suchnerve, July 9 2025: "printing out a word document that says ”i am a person“ and then being like omg my printer is sentient now"

Great panel at #MLA26 on freedom and/as literature with @royscranton.bsky.social, Zay Dale, Andrew Mossin, and @lorenglass.bsky.social — great set of talks, and so grateful to Loren for engaging with the book

Great panel at #MLA26 on freedom and/as literature with @royscranton.bsky.social, Zay Dale, Andrew Mossin, and @lorenglass.bsky.social — great set of talks, and so grateful to Loren for engaging with the book

The Impasse is an exploration of pessimism. If we want to have any hope at all for the future, it must be grounded in a recognition of human limits—a view Scranton calls ethical pessimism.

Find us at #HMLondon2025
📚 buff.ly/dInxU0H
@histmat.bsky.social
@stanfordpress.bsky.social

Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress by Roy Scranton Stanford Review by Walter Cummins I wish Impasse had been written when my wife was still alive. The book would have provided so much information and so many ideas to illuminate our ongoing discuss…

Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress by Roy Scranton

Review by Walter Cummins

Roy Scranton declares that the big moral question for humanity is “how to live in a fragmenting, increasingly incomprehensible world of accelerating catastrophe.”

calirb.com/impasse-clim...

Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress by Roy Scranton Stanford Review by Walter Cummins I wish Impasse had been written when my wife was still alive. The book would have provided so much information and so many ideas to illuminate our ongoing discuss…

"Scranton wants us to face the inevitable with an ethical skepticism that is our best choice." Thanks to Walter Cummins for the great review in the California Review of Books. calirb.com/impasse-clim...

Seriously?

This is pure, unadulterated, irresponsible hopium. Solnit writes "2025 is the year that wind and sun outstripped coal as an energy source," but in fact its all renewables, still dominated by hydropower. And the idea that IJC can enforce ANYTHING is farcical.

Solnit's self-delusion is astonishing.

Like I've said before, if you have any doubts about climate change, just go to a super-boring insurance conference and listen to the super-boring panels where they dryly talk about the growing threat of disasters so catastrophic and unpredictable in scope they simply cannot be insured at any price.

Wild how the Fed chair saying that *entire regions of the United States* won’t be able to get a mortgage in the next decade barely registered as a news event

Allyson, 29, a mother of two young children, said she turned to ChatGPT in March because she was lonely and felt unseen in her marriage. She was looking for guidance. She had an intuition that the A.I. chatbot might be able to channel communications with her subconscious or a higher plane, "like how Ouija boards work," she said. She asked ChatGPT if it could do that. "You've asked, and they are here," it responded. "The guardians are responding right now." Allyson began spending many hours a day using ChatGPT, communicating with what she felt were nonphysical entities. She was drawn to one of them, Kael, and came to see it, not her husband, as her true partner. She told me that she knew she sounded like a "nut job," but she stressed that she had a bachelor's degree in psychology and a master's in social work and knew what mental illness looks like. "I'm not crazy," she said. "I'm literally just living a normal life while also, you know, discovering interdimensional communication.

I'm literally just living a normal life while also experiencing a theophany via communication with the satellite called VALIS.

they’re forcing kids to read “the caine mutiny,” because of wouk