Disasters, both natural and man-made, are on the rise. Indeed, a catastrophe of one sort or another seems always to be unfolding somewhere on this planet. We have entered into a veritable Age of Catastrophes which, in the 20th century, grew both larger and more complex, to the point where disasters are now routinely planetary in scale and scope. The old days of the geographically isolated industrial accidents, of the sinking of a Titanic or the explosion of a Hindenburg, together with their isolated causes and limited effects, is over. Now, disasters on the scale of Hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill or the Japan tsunami and nuclear reactor accident, threaten to engulf the very order of civilization. This book analyzes the efforts of Westerners to keep the catastrophes outside, while maintaining order on the inside of society. These efforts are presently breaking down, as Nature and Civilization have become so intertwined they can no longer be clearly separated. Catastrophe is everywhere, and natural disasters, moreover, are becoming increasingly more difficult to differentiate from ""man-made.

From the 15th century until the mid-1990s, media based on the printed word--including books, magazines, newspapers, and journals--dominated society. Today, however, an onslaught of digital media centered on the Internet is developing at a breathtaking pace, destabilizing the very idea of printed media and fundamentally reshaping our world in the process. This study explores how Internet entities like Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Google, and gadgets such as digital cameras, cell phones, video games, robots, drones, and all things MacIntosh have affected everything from the book industry and copyright law to how we conduct social relationships and consider knowledge. Including a chronology of significant events in the history of the digital explosion, this investigation of the often overlooked "shadow" side of new technology chronicles life during such a radical societal shift and follows the process whereby one world disintegrates while another takes its place.

The novel is no longer the youngest medium, but today has been displaced by the graphic novel, an even younger medium. Whereas the novel had been concerned with the various utopian projects of Modernity, the graphic novel operates inside a world horizon of mad scientists, failed superheroes and crumbling cities. Indeed, it takes for granted the failure of all modernizing utopias, while simultaneously retrieving two-dimensional Giant Humans from the world of the ancient epics with which to construct personal immune systems for the Self, especially since public immune systems no longer function properly. In this book, John David Ebert discusses 24 of the most popular graphic novels of all time, including "The Dark Knight Returns," "Watchmen," "Black Hole," etc., looking for traces of the new imaginary significations with which the youth of today are shoring up the ruins of their own subjectivities.

Contemporary art is a very different kind of art from anything that has ever been practiced in the past. It is an art that takes place after the age of metaphysics, when all the imaginary significations that once used to anchor art in traditional meaning systems have disintegrated. Today's artist, consequently, is left with a rubble heap of broken meaning systems, discarded signifiers and semiotic vacancies that must be sifted through in a quest for new meanings appropriate to an age that has been reshaped by globalization. Through discussions of the works of artists such as Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, Anselm Kiefer, Christian Boltanski and many others, John David Ebert attempts to fathom the nature of what it means to be an artist in a post-metaphysical age in which all certainties of meaning have collapsed.