The Doomsday Clock, Human Dignity, and Paying Attention

The board of the peace magazine The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists changes the hands of its famous “Doomsday Clock” only for existential threats. As an editor of the magazine, I watched the hands tick unimaginibly from fourteen to seven minutes to midnight. Today we are at 85 seconds to midnight. What the Doomsday Clock invites, however, isn’t a state of fear but awareness. What should we be paying attention to right now, in this era?