Volume 6, Issue 19: Oh Mercy

"Seem like every time you stop and turn around, something else just hit the ground."

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On Tuesday evening, my family and I had an early sunset dinner at a place in Anguilla called, appropriately, Sunset Lounge. I had salmon, eel and shrimp nigiri; my son Wynn had chicken fingers. We watched the sun go down. It was very pleasant.

This is the Sunset Lounge.

The purpose of some vacations is to explore, to discover, to open yourself up to worlds and cultures previously unfamiliar. The purpose of other vacations is to unplug, shut down and try to calm everything down for a while, as much as one can. This vacation was absolutely the latter. I didn’t work—these right here are the first words I’ve written in a week, which has to be the longest I’ve gone without writing anything since I was in elementary school—I read two books (one about Jonestown and one about insurance fraud and pelvic mesh, nice light beach reading) and I regularly slept two hours later than I usually do. We were all like that. We are a family built around the concept of forward momentum, of being productive and useful, of always remaining busy. But we took a week off from that. We tried to take a week off from everything.

On Tuesday night, we watched the sun go down, and we made jokes, and we tried to appreciate the time together while we had the time together—it will be gone before any of us will be ready for it to be.

As we looked out on the horizon, my wife pointed to the sky and frowned for a moment. “What’s that?”

It was just a plane, like any other plane. But because the sun was going down, and the light was hitting the sky and reflecting off the ocean at just the right angle, the usual trail planes make was, this time, lit red and orange, so that it looked a little like a plane but also a little bit like a fireball. Or maybe, I dunno, a missile.

I glanced around the restaurant, full of people all out here for the same reasons we were out here, and I noticed many of them doing the same thing, pointing, smiling nervously. No one thought it was anything other than a plane. It was obviously a plane. But it was also lit red and orange, and it was also 6 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, and we had all been told earlier that day that a civilization might die tonight, by 8 p.m. Eastern Time even, and that, well, no matter how much you are trying to unplug, shut down and try to calm everything down for a while, as much as one can, that’s the sort of thing that tends to stick in the mind. It makes you look at normal things abnormally. It gets on your brain.

There were murmurs. Glances down at phones. Pursed grins; dark jokes; changings of subjects. We would all learn later at dinner that there would be no civilizations dying, at least not tonight, not by 8 p.m. The sun went down; the plane moved along to its destination; I finished my salmon. Everything was fine. The world did not explode. We did not believe it was going to. But we all, and you all, thought about it, if just for a second. We will think about it again, sooner than we would like. It will be unreasonable, we’ll tamp it down, it’s all fine. But it is always unreasonable until it is not.

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Eight-and-a-half years ago, in December 2017, for Deadspin, I wrote a piece titled “We’ve Forgotten How To Fear.” Tied to a recent viewing of the great film Testament, which is about a suburban San Francisco family and its community trying to keep itself together in the wake of a nuclear war, I wrote about how the film, so powerful and devastating when it was released, had faded from public consciousness as that era’s fear of annihilation had dissipated: The end of the Cold War led a whole generation to stop thinking about fallout shelters and drills where you ducked under your desk and got away from the windows—about apocalypse. A movie like Testament felt almost quaint, a reflection of past fears but not something that felt in any way current.

It is not a coincidence that Testament was added to the Criterion Collection just last year, and that director Lynne Littman has been regularly doing Q&A screenings of the film (including an American Cinematheque one with Grierson). Thinking about the end of the world isn't fanciful or throwback any longer. It’s inevitable. It’s almost responsible.

And more to the point: It’s incredibly common. It creeps into your mind constantly. How could it not? Whether it’s nuclear brinksmanship, or artificial intelligence, or the slow but undeniable breakdown of norms and services that were once taken for granted, the sense of foreboding is inescapable: You can end up seeing it sometimes even when it isn’t there. This is in some ways unavoidable in a period of such intense change like the one we are currently living in, but then again, this period of intense change has been happening for more than a decade now and I do not get the sense that anyone has gotten used to it or somehow fortified themselves for it. It just remains disorienting and destabilizing. Over and over and over.

In some ways, it does feel a little ridiculous to think that, after centuries and centuries of people thinking the end of the world is somehow nigh, after humanity surviving for millennia, we’re the ones who are correct about it ending. Every generation thinks it’s the end of the world. We all bring our own anxieties to the table too. It sure would be quite the coincidence that the moment when I—as a parent of middle-schoolers who will soon be entering a world that I’m terrified won’t be safe for them—am most worried about the future is in fact the moment that future ends: How unfortunate! Alas! Tough break! My parents were worried about the Cuban Missile Crisis, their parents were worried about World War II, their parents were worried about World War I and the so-called Spanish Flu, and so on and so on. We always worry. We always fret that it’s all going to come apart. That just means our lives have stakes, that we have skin in the game—that we have something we are afraid to lose.

But then again, as historian Garrett Graff put it, the odds that the President was going to drop a nuclear weapon on Iran on Tuesday were low … but they were not zero. As Slate’s Jim Newell noted this morning, “we should only expect more maniacal threats as time goes on. The idea that [the President] will chicken out from his wild threats is so built into markets and diplomacy that he needs to resort to progressively more extreme threats in order to get the reaction he needs to change course—typically a market downturn, or a panicked response from his counterparties. There are still nearly three years left in his term. That is not a formula for civilizational security.” Global alliances are crumbling; the world is reordering itself; America is tearing itself apart. It would be absurd not to be at least a little worried.

But what can you do? Run around screaming? Freak out every time the sun hits a plane just right? Make your own fears everybody else’s … and force them upon your children?

The best you can do, I guess, is just move forward, try to make the world that’s in front of you as safe and open and warm a place as you can for the people you care about, to try to improve what you can, to fix what you can fix, to make your little corner of the planet slightly better than it was when you found it. And you’ve got to have faith that enough people are trying to do the same thing. There’s hope in that, and evidence to support it. We’re sending people around the moon and back. We’re making breathtaking and original art. We’re dunking basketballs. We’re signing guys to contracts through 2033; if the Mets and Juan Soto think we’re gonna make it, then dammit, I can too.

But there is a psychic cost to all this. There has to be. We can keep ourselves centered however we can, we can keep our eyes looking forward, but it can’t help but bubble underneath. We averted apocalypse today, so, yeah, finish your dinner, what’s the score of the game, get to bed early, you’ve got a test tomorrow. The world has never been truly stable. But it has, not in my lifetime, ever felt quite like this, that we are barely keeping your head above water, that we must be careful not to look down, lest we realize we have in fact already run off the cliff.

I believe we are going to make it through this. I truly do. I don’t even think I’m being unreasonably optimistic about that, dancing between the raindrops, whistling past the graveyard. The world is a good place, full of good people, who want to protect it—who are invested in the same future that we all are.

But I do think about it. I think we all do. How could you not? What mark will this era end up leaving on all of us, on our children? I guess I’ll be grateful to eventually find out.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. On Steven Soderbergh, Who Always Does It His Way, The Washington Post. I actually wrote this piece last week, so, seriously, I swear I took the whole week off. By the way, if you’re not subscribed to my free WashPo newsletter, you can subscribe to it here.

2. Keanu Reeves Movies, Ranked, Vulture. Updated with Outcome.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, off this week.

Morning Lineup, off this week.

Seeing Red, off this week.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“The Great Travel Meltdown of 2026,” Kaitlyn Tiffany, The Atlantic. This piece accurately pinpoints what it’s like to travel right now. (I very vividly just experienced it.)

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers! I am finally all caught up on these! (For now.)

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Sappy,” Nirvana. My son William, out of nowhere, has suddenly gotten really into Nirvana, and I’m proud to say I had nothing to do with it. (Frankly, if I’d pushed it, he likely wouldn’t have given them a chance.) There really is something about teen spirit, apparently. Anyway, I did direct him to one of the greatest non-album Nirvana songs of all, though it’ll always be “Verse Chorus Verse” to me.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section. Let this drive your listening, not the algorithm!

I am proud of the Illini and believe they will be back to do this next year. What a season. And hold those newspapers high, kids.

Best,
Will