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"What the Rise of Apocalyptic Thinking Tells Us About America"

Aired on Monday, April 30th.
Aired on Monday, April 30th.

On today's show, we speak with the writer and new-media strategist Mathew Gross, who (along with Mel Gilles) is one of the two authors of a thought-provoking and quite timely non-fiction book called "The Last Myth: What the Rise of Apocalyptic Thinking Tells Us About America." It's an engaging historical study that mainly explores two separate yet related queries: "Why are contemporary Americans so obsessed with the end of the world?" and "What does this obsession actually say about us, as a people?" Did you know, for example, that nearly 60 percent of Americans believe that the events foretold in the Book of Revelation will come true? From Y2K and 9/11 to global warming and the demise of humanity asserted by the Mayan calendar, anticipating the apocalypse has moved from being a cultish worldview in this country to a fairly mainstream mindset. How the heck did this happen, you ask? That's the key question behind today's edition of StudioTulsa.

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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