January 2015

The Doomsday Clock, a simplistic concept created by a posse of guilt-riddled scientists, now allows just three minutes until midnight and the end of the world as we know it.

The apocalyptic clock first appeared on the cover of the 1947 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, established by men who regretted their role in the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.   With catastrophic climate change and the current conflict in Ukraine, the Last Midnight looms.

A ray of hope penetrates the gloom, if you close one eye and squint slightly:  the Doomsday Clock was designed by Martyl Langdorf, an artist married to one of the remorseful physicists of the Manhattan Project–a sort of conjugal alliance of art and science. Martyl (her professional name) lived to be 96.  In her spirited oral history at the Chicago Art Institute, she comments tartly on the ineptness and waste of the so-called intelligence…