How has the experience of being a refugee changed in a world of drones, 24-hour live news feeds, and text messages that zip across the globe in seconds? How does contemporary fiction capture the contradictions of being a refugee in a hyperconnected 21st century?

In Roland Emmerich’s schlocky disaster film The Day After Tomorrow (2004), a tsunami swamps the New York Public Library and enables some ham-handed scenarios about the fate of books after an environmental apocalypse.

Reaction to the roll-out of healthcare.gov has taken many predictable forms, among them the false equation whereby Grand Tech Failure = Evidence of the Unconstitutionality of the Affordable Care Act itself.