Introducing the Summer 2026 Print Issue
Key takeaways
- Remember the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”?
- Long after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the optimistic pop sounds of the ’90s that came with it, this particular R.E.M. song has endured as an earworm—and a recurring vibe.
- Will it eventually lead, as it did at least once before, to a more hopeful moment?
Remember the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”? It’s been in my head recently. The track was released in November 1987, about a month before U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed an arms control treaty that set the stage for the end of the Cold War. Michael Stipe, the band’s frontman, has said the idea came to him after a deep sleep. But its resonance with listeners could have been because it came at the end of a worrying time for the world, right before a geopolitical dawn. It’s not so far from the “end of the world” to the “end of history,” a term this magazine’s readers know all too well.
Long after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the optimistic pop sounds of the ’90s that came with it, this particular R.E.M. song has endured as an earworm—and a recurring vibe. It made a brief comeback around December 2012, when people worldwide seized on the idea of a Maya-predicted apocalypse. And then the track reportedly saw a surge in streaming during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, in 2026, I would wager that songs about the end of the world are once again back in vogue, neatly mirroring news of endless war and its accompanying crises of food, energy, inflation, migration, and much else.
Remember the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”? It’s been in my head recently. The track was released in November 1987, about a month before U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed an arms control treaty that set the stage for the end of the Cold War. Michael Stipe, the band’s frontman, has said the idea came to him after a deep sleep. But its resonance with listeners could have been because it came at the end of a worrying time for the world, right before a geopolitical dawn. It’s not so far from the “end of the world” to the “end of history,” a term this magazine’s readers know all too well.