Most frightening and/or depressing story: Hurricanes are hitting us (i.e., the United States: New Orleans and Puerto Rico being the examples) and we are not quite recovering back to the trend we were on before the hurricane. This seems to be happening elsewhere too, like the Philippines. This is how a system can decline and eventually collapse – it appears stable in the face of internal stressors until it is faced with an external shock, and then it doesn’t bounce back quite all the way, and each time this happens it bounces back a bit less.
Most hopeful story: Gorbachev believed in the international order and in 1992 proposed a recipe for fixing it: elimination of nuclear and chemical weapons [we might want to add biological weapons today], elimination of the international arms trade, peaceful sharing and oversight of civilian nuclear technology, strong intervention in regional conflicts [he seemed to envision troops under Security Council control], promotion of food security, human rights, population control [seems a bit quaint, but maybe we would replace this with a broader concept of ecological footprint reduction today], economic assistance to poorer countries, and expansion of the Security Council to include at least India, Italy, Indonesia, Canada, Poland, Brazil, Mexico, and Egypt [maybe this list would be a bit different today but would almost certainly include Germany, Japan, Brazil, India, and Indonesia].
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Here is a big, maybe dumb idea: Maybe the U.S. could build out a modern high speed rail system and electric grid along its interstate highways. Maybe some experts can write me and explain if there are technical reasons this can’t be done. It the reason it can’t be done is that bureaucracy A owns the highways and bureaucracy B owns the tracks and bureaucracy C the power lines, that is not an excuse to fail. You can also charge electric vehicles while they are on the move.