Editor's Note: January 2012

Apocalypse Now?

by Brian K. Mahoney, December 28, 2011

It’s the new year, and a thoughtful editor’s mind turns to endings—or at least predictions of endings. Apocalypse, in other words. Like every year that passes without the universe actually going kablooey, 2011 wasn’t great for doomsayers. Just ask Harold Camping of Christian Radio, who predicted the end of the world on May 21, and then again on October 21. (Camping had previously prophesied the Rapture—the righteous flying up to heaven like William Katt in “The Greatest American Hero,” the wicked visited with plagues of hackey-sacking rollerbladers and other bits of nastiness.)

This year was looking like a good year for the apocalypse for a while, what with the Mayan calendar ending and all, but in recent months, experts have been backpedaling on what the actual “end” of the Mayan calendar means. As Sandra Noble of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies tells Eric Francis Coppolino in “The Most Important Year of  Your Life,” (p. 106), a doomsday event associated with the end of the Mayan calendar is “a complete fabrication.” According to Noble, the ancient Maya were not hamstrung by notions of cataclysm, instead they viewed reaching the end of the calendar as a cause for “a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle.”

Our house astrologer makes another salient point about how we incorporate the End Times into our cultural DNA: Christianity has always been waiting on the Four Horsemen, like a bus that never arrives, since just after the death of Christ and the writing of the Book of Revelation (also known as the Apocalypse of John) in the first century.

The word apocalypse itself is dominated by its stapling to John’s morbid chronicle of torment and savagery presaging Christ’s triumphant return. Though John probably wrote his Gospel in Aramaic, the root form is the Greek apokálypsis, “lifting of the veil,” or “revelation.” As I’ve never found the revelations in the Book of Revelations all that revelatory (other than the excited imagination of its author), I’d like to shelve the “bad” apocalypse and bring on the “good” apocalypse, invoking the pulling-back-the-curtain quality of its meaning to highlight some the revelations we have in store this month.

Nutritional Apocalypse
Harvard scientist Victor Herbert famously noted 20 years ago that Americans have the most expensive urine on Earth, due to our consumption of expensive vitamins that have little effect on overall health. The efficacy of nutritional supplements has been much debated in the ensuing two decades, and a pair of new studies that link supplements to worse health outcomes has brought the issue into bright relief. In “The Vitamin Debate: To Pop Them or Toss Them” (p.88), Wendy Kagan reports on what nutritional supplements actually are and how to think about whole health nutrition.