The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

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

One rule of retail marketing maintains that to maximize sales, businesses need to create a sense of urgency. Mega-sale ends soon! Only a few tickets still available! These commercial threats, especially in the age of e-commerce, are almost always a fiction. But they’re effective, an echo of our apocalyptic visions: If we feel a sense of urgency abo

You know the parties are vapid and maybe even evil, but you still want to be invited. And so in bad times, Gatsby feels like a condemnation of the American idea, and in good times it feels like a celebration of that same idea. David Denby has written that the book has “become a kind of national scripture, recited happily or mournfully, as the occas

Part of our fears about the world ending must stem from the strange reality that for each of us our world will end, and soon. In that sense, maybe apocalyptic anxieties are a by-product of humanity’s astonishing capacity for narcissism. How could the world possibly survive the death of its single most important inhabitant—me?

Marveling at the perfection of that leaf, I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see. From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.

We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here. Sendak ended that interview with the last words he ever said in public: “Live your life. Live your life. Live your life.”

The future, even in its inevitabilities, always feels vague and nebulous to me—until it doesn’t.

in the Anthropocene, there are no disinterested observers; there are only participants.

these songs are made great by the communities singing them. They are assertions of unity in sorrow and unity in triumph: Whether the bubble is flying or bursting, we sing together.