Abstract
It is ill-advised to begin with a cliché. Yet there are moments when clichés reveal something essential about our human condition. In 1982, Laurie Anderson said the future is “a place, about seventy miles east of here.” Yet the future, it seems, is no longer a direction or an aspiration—it is an arrival. For those of us who write, edit, and publish anthropology, its arrival has been sudden, almost brusque. What had once felt like a gradual evolution now appears as a rupture. Change is no longer unfolding; it is cascading.