Finally, something else to worry about:

Earth is currently thought to be in the middle of a supercontinent cycle as its present-day continents drift. The last supercontinent, Pangaea, broke apart about 200 million years ago. The next, dubbed Pangaea Ultima, is expected to form at the equator in about 250 million years, as the Atlantic Ocean shrinks and a merged Afro-Eurasian continent crashes into the Americas.

Run for your lives! Well, tell your kids—to, uh, tell their kids, to…

Anyway, this is precisely the sort of thing you expect to read in Scientific American (which is where the above paragraph is from) but not front-page news, where you no doubt saw it last week. Sure, it sounds like a problem—but one for which nature’s given us a good 250 million year head-start.

I’m going to keep saying it: it won’t be actual problems that get us in the end but our failure to focus on those actual problems. Hell, the least we could do is limit our catastrophizing to the present.

Over in the Atlantic, Tom Nichols is absolutely right about a functional opposition being an overlooked healthy necessity in politics.

Not that you need an excuse to think about the Roman Empire but, if you do, and you want to outrun your FOMO, seek out Emma Southon’s exceptional book, A Fatal Thing Happened on The Way to the Forum (2020), without delay.