Did you make any jokes, last night, about the world ending? I know I did. In the kitchen, I said to my dad that I'd bought some vegan hot dogs "as a treat, in honour of the impending nuclear apocalypse." Whether vegan hot dogs constitute a worthy final meal is beside the point - my joke was met with a reply in the same vein: "Oh, I forgot that was on tonight! I think we're watching something else." What does it mean, that we react in this way? Is it a case of 'laughing through the pain,' or is it something more sinister? *** In her book In the Ruins of Neoliberalism , Wendy Brown writes that Western society is becoming increasingly nihilistic. Written in 2019, the book charts something which has only gotten more relevant since: "When a Martin Luther King Jr. speech about public service is used to advertise Dodge trucks during the Super Bowl, when Catholic clergy are revealed to have molested thousands of children while their superiors looked a...