It’s impossible to avoid the apocalypse these days. Whether we encounter the End in the form of news reports on Global Warming, or fears of Iran getting bomb, or plague panics such as H1N1, we seem to be living in a high point of apocalyptic anxiety, with horrible Doomsdays lurking round every corner.

And yet, the End has never been so much fun.  Roland Emmerich released his latest apocalyptic blockbuster 2012 in November, and since then we have enjoyed Zombieland, The Road, The Book of Eli, Legion and even Al Gore’s dreadful poem read aloud on morning TV in the presence of a fawning sycophant. Much more is to come, and this is to say nothing of video games, books, comics, or half the output of the History Channel.

What lies behind this fascination with the End? Dr. Richard Landes, professor of mediaeval history at Boston University, is a renowned scholar of apocalyptic movements who has been thinking about Doomsday for forty years. He is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Millennialism and author of the upcoming Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of Millennial Experience. Landes is an exceptionally interesting thinker who applies his knowledge of past apocalypses to our present fears, an analysis which frequently informs the articles he publishes at his website The Augean Stables.

Recently I phoned him from my base in Texas, to chat about mankind’s enduring love affair with the apocalypse. I caught him in Tel Aviv airport at 2 a.m, and it was then, against a backdrop of deepest night, that we spent two hours discussing the end of the world: (more…)

Andrew Breitbart has already welcomed you all to Big Journalism. Now I’d like to add my voice to his.

As you can see from our logo, Big Journalism will be a throwback in spirit to the freewheeling moxie of the glory days of American newspapers, long before a “school of journalism” was a gleam in some college provost’s eye, and before reporters got hired more for their telegenic qualities than their writing, reporting or critical-thinking skills.

So let me be blunt:  we’re not here to compete for Pulitzer Prizes, to sit on committees, to scratch each other’s backs on the weekend television wagfests or to conform to some arbitrary code of ethics cooked up in the days when the mainstream media was the only game in town, and had already begun to cozy up to the government and the establishment, thus abandoning its constitutional mission of keeping a finger on the pulse of America, and an eye on the crooks:

Listen, I spent 25 years working in the MSM, beginning at the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, where a young pianist fresh out of the Eastman School of Music was turned into a pretty good police reporter in three months flat.  I made friendships there that have lasted a lifetime, worked with colleagues who went on to become important editors at outfits like Knight-Ridder, the AP and USA Today, as well as national sports columnists and star magazine writers.  I moved on to the San Francisco Examiner where, even as the paper’s classical music critic, I had a front-row seat for some of the biggest stories in recent American history, including the Peoples Temple disaster and the murders of George Moscone and Harvey Milk.  And then I moved to Time Magazine in New York City, where I spent 16 years writing about music and reporting from locations all over the world, particularly Berlin, Eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union.  It was a great life, and I don’t regret a minute of it.

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