“This sentiment has a name: declinism. And it has a history, a scholarly one that amounts to much more than the perennial grousing of adults about kids these days. The notion of studying how things go to hell is almost exactly as old as the modern practice of historiography.” Laura Miller casts a gimlet eye on declinism from Gibbon to Spengler to Vargas Llosa – and points out the one way in which “culture” may indeed be dead (for now).