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Alyssa Rosenberg

Alyssa Rosenberg - Alyssa Rosenberg is a correspondent for TheAtlantic.com. She is the pop culture blogger for ThinkProgress, where she writes about the intersection of politics and culture at thinkprogress.org/alyssa. More

Alyssa Rosenberg is a correspondent for TheAtlantic.com. She is the pop culture blogger for ThinkProgress, where she writes about the intersection of politics and culture at http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa.   

Alyssa is also a columnist for the Washington Monthly and The Loop 21. Her career as a critic began at 8, when she began a children's book review column for her local paper, taking payments in gift certificates to the neighborhood bookstore. Since then, her interests have expanded to include Atlanta hip-hop, procedural television shows, and action movies she watches without any sense of irony whatsoever. Her writing on culture has appearedin Esquire.com, The Daily, The Daily Beast and the American Prospect, and she has written about politics and the executive branch for Government Executive, The New Republic and National Journal.   
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The New American Wild

By Alyssa Rosenberg

Aug 26 2010, 8:00 AM ET Comment

So, in between The Passage, Year Zero, and now, low-budget high-buzz indie Monsters, is our pop culture really obsessed with American cataclysm or what? In The Passage, a virus gets loose and depopulates most of North America. Ditto in Year Zero. In Monsters, it's not so much vampires as it is very large creepy-crawlies, but the quarantine-and-everybody-dies concepts are otherwise pretty much the same:



I kind of wonder if this has something to do with particularly American conceptions of frontier and Manifest Destiny. Having reached the coast and filled it up with people and development, do we need to depopulate the continent in order to feel like our main characters can explore, and discover things, and have adventures?
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