From the January issue: If you are reading this note, the world has not ended.There is something about the end of the year that lends itself to predictions of the end of the world. “The Late Great Planet Earth,” which, according to Time magazine, was the best-selling nonfiction book of the entire 1970s, predicted that the world would end before Dec. 31, 1988 (nuclear war, communism and violence in the Middle East were the culprits). Then there was Y2K — where at the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, the entire global computer network was slated to crash, causing widespread chaos. [more]
