My name is Massimo Sandal and I am an Italian freelance science writer (based however in Germany). In November 2019 I published a book on extinction(s) and de-extinction, La malinconia del mammut (“The Melancholy of Mammoths”) for the publishing house Il Saggiatore.
This blog is a sort of technical-ish notebook on updates on the topics touched in the book: past, present and future extinctions and their meaning to us. It is not meant for a general audience but meant to be broadly comprehensible by a public familiar with the general topics. The idea is a tone like the wonderful blog Centauri Dreams by Paul Gilson.
The name of the blog comes from this Residents’ song. While the song actually talks about addiction, here the title would suggest that we, the demons of the sixth extinction, will end up “dancing alone”, having wiped out other species. Or that creatures surviving mass extinctions dance alone in an empty world. Either way, it’s evocative enough.
I had hoped to fill my years
With more than melancholy tears
But the demon makes me dance alone.