Jack Butler, a 2015 graduate of Hillsdale College, is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute. His views are his own, and not those of AEI.
After reading Mary Aiken's The Cyber Effect, one is tempted to hope that an attack succeeds in bringing the whole Internet down. 
When I started drafting this review of James Gleick's Time Travel: A History, I had a severe case of writer's block. I stared at my computer, at the keyboard, at the book itself. All in vain. No words came. So I walked away from my computer, hoping that doing something else would help. Suddenly, there was a brilliant flash of light. Shielding my eyes from the blinding beam, I saw a shadow emerge from a portal in front of me. When the portal disappeared, the light went with it, and I could make out the shadow. It was me. "What’s going on?" I asked myself, and... my self. 
Last fall, Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio attempted to rebut “Make America Great Again,” the slogan of his rival, Donald Trump. America, Rubio said, is great right now. Trump responded thus: “You can’t be satisfied [with where the country is now]. You have to use the word ‘again.’ It’s very important, because if he’s saying that, then that means there’s no room for improvement...” 
Permanence may be the illusion of every age, but predictions are hard, and so history is littered with Paul Ehrlichs and Harold Campings whose premonitions of apocalypse fail to come true. Yet one does also see the occasional Cassandra, whose warnings go unheeded until too late. It thus seems understandable that James Piereson, president of the William E. Simon Foundation and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, hedges his bets in Shattered Consensus: The Rise and Decline of America’s Postwar Political Order, his new book about the imminent collapse of the political order that has dominated America since World War II. 
Are American animals—including humans—inherently weaker than their European counterparts? That’s what esteemed 18th century French scientist Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon argued in his opus Histoire Naturelle. Buffon had no real evidence for this, as Charles Cooke—a British transplant to America who now writes for National Review—once pointed out. But it was, to Cooke, a fine illustration of the rest of the world’s frequent failure to understand America. 
In 2011, Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, worried that the future might be over.
In a cover story for National Review, the entrepreneur and investor argued that, “when tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains.” Only drastic changes, he said, could sustain the centuries-long (and historically atypical) stream of progress that the rise of the West has represented. 
It didn’t take long for Jesse Jackson to come to Ferguson. 
When Edward Bellamy published his utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887 in 1888, he did not fancy himself a reformer, nor had he intended to fashion a social blueprint. “The idea,” he later wrote, “was of a mere literary fantasy, a fairy tale of social felicity.” 
In the 1966 film A Man For All Seasons, which depicts Sir Thomas More’s steadfast disapproval of King Henry VIII’s marital infidelities, More stirringly defends the rule of law. Rebutting his son-in-law, who says he would hypothetically “cut down every law in England” to find the devil, More asks, “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?” 
In the wake of the 2012 election, as conservatives sought a return to electoral success, Jim Geraghty lightly chastised them. “Hey, remember how everybody on the right decided after the excruciating debacle of the 2012 election, we had to focus on the culture?” he asked in the Feb.15, 2013, edition of the Morning Jolt, his daily morning political newsletter. “It's mid-February, so about three and a half months since this discussion began. Anyone seen any new cultural offerings from the Right?” 