Enduring the Ending of the World: On Australia’s climate crisis, by LUKE CARMAN. "The morning routine now begins by checking the news to see which of the hundred or so fires raging out of control across the coast have joined forces to become super-fires, and which of these super-fires have united to become mega-fires. Time between breakfast and the daily commute might well be put aside to send text messages to friends and relatives closest to the hundred or so blazes lately listed as “out of control,” or whose last known location is in danger of immolation. Keeping tabs on where the destruction is taking place is made easier by an app called “Fires Near Me” which sends you an alert when any major fires are moving into your preselected “Watch Zones.” It has become commonplace for social gatherings to end with someone glancing down at their phone and exclaiming “Oh dear, the fires are coming round my place, I better be off.” It is strange, too, that this instinct to run home and fight off the fires is so common. Intelligent, rational people, who know full well the inherent futility, turn to arming themselves with limp garden hoses and standing in their front yards like gimcrack Gandalfs trying to chase off an immense and amorphous Balrog."