The Anthropocene Reviewed

by John Green

A user named Lucas, for example, gave Badlands National Park one star. “Not enough mountain,” he reported.

A scene in the movie adaptation of my book The Fault in Our Stars was filmed on a bench in Amsterdam; that bench now has hundreds of Google reviews. (My favorite, a three-star review, reads in its entirety: “It is a bench.”)

Knowing the facts doesn’t help me picture the truth.

It is easy for me to feel like climate is mostly an outside phenomenon, whereas I am mostly an inside phenomenon.

What’s absurd is reducing workplace productivity by using precious fossil fuels to excessively cool an office building so that men wearing ornamental jackets will feel more comfortable.

On the Road when he writes, “Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields . . . the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries”?

great taste in quotes

If you turned yourself away from a magnificent landscape and looked instead at the landscape’s reflection in the Claude glass, it was said to appear more “picturesque.” Named after seventeenth-century French landscape painter Claude Lorrain, the glass not only framed the scene but also simplified its tonal range, making reality look like a painting. Thomas Gray wrote that only through the Claude glass could he “see the sun set in all its glory.”

I think I, mistakenly, try to look at people in my life through Claude glass

“At some point in life, the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”

another quote !? John, you sly dog

experience of eating one amid the clamor of Coney Island. And the hot dogs have a pedigree—they’ve been eaten by King George VI and Jacqueline Kennedy.

But a big part of visiting Coney Island today is imagining how it must have once felt.

“Nothing too special,” one wrote. “Not that good had better at a gas station,” reported a visitor named Doug. Like Doug, I am often disappointed by much-hyped culinary experiences, perhaps because of the weight of expectation, and perhaps because I just don’t like food that much. And yet, I found the hot dog at Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur not just worthy of the hype but, if anything, underappreciated. I don’t even particularly like hot dogs, but that hot dog was among the most joyous culinary experiences of my life.

John Green gets it. He is on that wave length

To tempt you away from the cruise-controlled straightforwardness of the American highway requires something extraordinary. Something unprecedented. The world’s largest ______.

My girlfriend and I pull into a McDonald’s parking lot in Milan, Tennessee, and then we stay in the car for a couple of minutes listening to the end of “New Partner.”

I should go there

I scrunch my sleeves up and feel the sun on my forearms for the first time in months.

The neural pathways activated on this olne

It is here that my life, and the ginkgo tree, intersect with the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who grew up in Indianapolis before becoming one of the most beloved and popular American writers of the twentieth century. Kurt Vonnegut’s grandfather was this very same hard-drinking, big-spending, garden-funding, ginkgo-planting Albert Lieber.