“Welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where every week I’m trying to make you feel worse about life, even though life makes you feel worse about life, every week.” It is on this optimistic, high-vibe note that my favorite host, Robert Evans, welcomes listeners. And don’t you dare expect things to be any less grim in this article! Produced by Cool Zone Media, Behind the Bastards delves into the lives of some of the worst people to have ever plagued humanity and marks more than a million downloads monthly. ...

Isn’t it funny realizing the consequences of seemingly insignificant day to day choices? We often consume the narrative à la How I Met Your Mother where every tiny event, new encounter, romantic disappointment leads the protagonist Ted Mosby one step closer to the moment he meets the future mother of his children (which would be impossible without every random occurrence beforehand). Well, I feel that I had my own little HIMYM loop closed the other day when [drum rolls] I finally got on Reddit! And what was the tiny seemingly insignificant step leading to it? None other than me picking up Žižek’s Living in The End Times at a moment where I had all of my books packed in boxes. ...

What do we choose to live in denial of? One Sunday evening, I picked up a book from the common shelves at my now former apartment in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. It was my last night at the place I called home for over a year, so I was a bit anxious before going to bed. Having all of mybooks packed and already sent to Grenoble, I almost jokingly picked up Slavoj Žižek’s Living in the End Times, which was left in the living room by the previous tenant, a Marxist urbanism graduate who now lives in Barcelona. ...