A snotty but pertinent question: Why is there no end to endism?

Whenever some writer starts talking about "the end" of something, you can figure it's probably the beginning.

Remember "The End of History," Francis Fukuyama post-Cold-War thesis which said that now that everything was settled between the Soviets and the West, nothing of historical importance would ever happen again? That was like saying "The End of Yugoslavia" would mean nothing interesting would ever happen again in the Balkans.

David Brooks nailed all this in Bobos in Paradise, when he charted the rise of a typical public intellectual:

The title of her first book [his choice of pronoun] will begin with the phrase, "The End of…" The benefit of endism is its dramatic finality; few people will remember a book called Ideology is Aging. But decades after its publication, the title The End of Ideology will still be referred to (even if its contents are utterly forgotten). The difficulty in writing an endist book is in finding things that haven't already ended. History, equality, racism, tragedy, and politics have all been taken, and The Death of…takes in just about everything else. The End of Gardening just doesn't have the ring of a bestseller.

So it isn't too surprising to find emblazoned on the cover of this month's Atlantic Monthly "The End of Men -- How Women are Taking Control of Everything." The author, Hanna Rosin, is another striving public intellectual who has taken a few random statistics and projected them out to infinity, coming up with one of those "end-of-the-world" scenarios reminiscent of environmentalism in the 1970s.