Wasteland wrap-up #78

A book award, the new Catacombs, a book about intrigue and a dragon eye, a Star Wars show actually worth watching...

I was recently informed that my latest book, The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age (HarperCollins, 2025), has been awarded the Harry S. Truman Book Award for 2026 from the Truman Library Institute.

I am quite honored and more than a little surprised. One never knows with a book, and I have no experience with awards of this sort, and while I am happy to stand by my book, whether other Truman scholars would find it in the least compelling remained somewhat unclear to me. So this feels very vindicating.

I had some family visiting in town for the last two days, and we took a trip to the Paris Catacombs. I had been to them a decade or so ago while visiting the city, and when we had moved here at the end of 2025 they were closed for major renovations, and only re-opened a few weeks ago. So I was interested to see what, if anything, had changed in the subterranean land of the dead.

The renovations are impressive. The original Catacombs, as I remember them, had very little signage. You took an elevator down, followed a long pathway, and then eventually ended up among stacked sculls and femurs and so on. You walked and walked and eventually ended up at a tight, claustrophobic stairway that dumped you unceremoniously back out on the street. I thought this was all pretty enjoyable at the time, because the distinctly un-polished approach had its own charm.

They’ve polished the experience up quite a bit. The skulls are basically the same, obviously. But now there is an audio tour that is proximity triggered, so you wear headphones as you walk through, and as you approach certain areas the audio track changes. The audio is mostly fine — a little cheesy (most of it is the voice of the fellow who was tasked with designing the Catacombs after the Parisian cemeteries started overflowing, and the actor hams it up a bit), and perhaps a little too much ambient music for my taste (I think the goal is to keep people from talking too much), but some of the things it pointed out were indeed interesting.

There is also just a lot more signage, including projected videos showing how the limestone had been dug out from under the city, and how the bodies were removed from the cemeteries. There are also some interesting exhibit changes in the name of accessibility, like the above tactile depiction for the blind. There is just quite a lot more to read while down there (in both English and French) in order to understand the broader context of the Catacombs.

Interestingly, there were no elevators at all, this time. I suspect they have them hidden away somewhere, but they expect the average visitor to use the stairs going both up and down. The stairwells have been completely renovated and, while still spiral stairs, are much larger than they used to be. The stairway down (but not up) also has landings every couple of stories, which breaks up the sense of claustrophobia. It’s about 110 stairs up and down by my count.

The Catacombs themselves were well-ventilated — an important thing for the last couple of days, as we’ve been in a heat wave here. My sense is that they upgraded the lighting as well; it is deliberately atmospheric, and made to look like candle and torchlight.

There will at some point be a Catacombs gift shop at the end, but that wasn’t open yet.

While walking Lyndon last Thursday, we happened to be going by Montparnasse Tower while someone was (illegally) free-soloing it. The photo above was taken from basically right underneath it, when the climber was maybe 1/4th of the way up. The police showed up right after I took the photo, and they made people clear the area. Then they just watched up, because it isn’t like they could do all that much, either. I watched until he was about 1/3rd of the way up and then went about my business. It was a hot day to do it! He made it look pretty easy though.

I’ve found very little online about the incident, other than a report that said that he did make it to the top, where he was (predictably) arrested. The tower is currently undergoing a major renovation, so I guess if there is ever a time to do such a thing, now is the time.

A photo of Lyndon watching for birds at the Jardin du Luxembourg, taken by my father.

For Doomsday Machines this week, I wrote about a famous episode of The Twilight Zone from 1961: “The Shelter.” I have watched a number of Twilight Zone episodes that feature nuclear war, and most of them just treat “nuclear war” the same way you might treat any other generic “end of the world.” This one, however, really tried to grapple with some of the underlying issues from a human perspective, and, as I discovered while looking for more information about the writing of it, came out of personal anxieties that Rod Serling himself had about the ethics of fallout shelters.

It’s a pretty good episode. Many of the Twilight Zone “twists” are predictable at this point, just because there’s only so many times you can do the “they’re actually on/not on Earth“ thing before it becomes obvious to expect it. “The Shelter” really doesn’t do anything bizarre — bomb shelters and false alarms were and are real things — and instead is just a little “play” meant to illustrate some deeper questions.

I suspect that for next week I will have something about nuclear war planning, either American or Soviet; I’ve been digging deep into some documents about those things, and keep finding things where I think, “oh, that would be interesting to share with people.” But we shall see…!