The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

It has taken me all my life up to now to fall in love with the world, but I've started to feel it in the last couple years. To fall in love with the world isn't to ignore or overlook suffering, both human and otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is merely to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and

there’s something else at play with smells that try to mimic nature, which is that nothing in the real world ever smells quite like we imagine it should. Actual spring rain, for instance, seems like it ought to smell at once moist and crisp, like the artificial scent does. But in fact, springtime rain smells earthy and acidic.

Just the act of looking at something can ruin it, I guess.

“I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.”

Humans making fake cave art to save real cave art may feel like Peak Anthropocene absurdity, but I confess I find it overwhelmingly hopeful that four kids and a dog named Robot discovered a cave containing seventeen-thousand-year-old handprints, that the two teenagers who could stay devoted themselves to the cave’s protection, and that when humans

Here’s the plain truth, at least as it has been shown to me: We are never far from wonders.

somehow, they still made time to create art, almost as if art isn’t optional for humans.

To me, though, the hand stencils say, “I was here.” They say, “You are not new.”

The Council on Books in Wartime’s slogan was “Books are weapons in the war of ideas,” which was the kind of slogan generals could get behind even if many of the books chosen, including Gatsby, weren’t particularly patriotic.