How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

by Ryan North

Congratulations! You have used the labor of microscopic animals to produce a more pleasant bread, then killed them the instant they were no longer useful. Millions of these microscopic animal corpses are baked into every slice of bread you eat.

WHAT THEY ARE A way to produce energy, up to and beyond 1.21 gigawatts BEFORE THEY WERE INVENTED The only way to get 1.21 gigawatts of electricity was to wait for a bolt of lightning, and unfortunately, you never know when or where one’s ever gonna strike

high-fives, which are universally cool and fun.

Antitheism: Gods handing out high-fives do not exist, but if they did, I would totally leave them hangin’.

Secular humanism: There are no gods to high-five us, but we can still be kind . . . and we can still high-five each other.

The invention of perspective was no different, and since it coincided with the Renaissance going on in Europe at the same time, some of the greatest art in the European canon is dripping with the 1400s CE equivalent of lens flares and hovering chrome spheres.