As a person, he told me, your biggest problem is other people. You are vulnerable to people, and reliant upon them. But imagine instead that you are a twenty-first-century river, or desert, or polar bear. Your biggest problem is still people. You are still vulnerable to them, and reliant upon them.

“I’ve wondered where home is, and I realized, it’s not Mars or some place like that. It’s Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and father and uncles and aunts. And there’s no way I can get there again.”

climate anxiety, or eco-anxiety—terms that did not exist a few decades ago but are now widespread phenomena.

A Cornell University study in 2004 found that office temperatures affect workplace productivity.

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.

Sometimes, when I feel burnt out and exhausted and I don’t know what to do with myself or whether my work matters or if I’m ever going to do anything of use to anyone, I ask my publisher to send me ten or twenty thousand sheets of paper, and I sign them just to have something specific and measurable to do for a week or so. I don’t even know whether

“An illness which has long hung about me in all probability will speedily send me beyond that bourne whence no traveler returns.” Even on his deathbed, Burns could turn a phrase. Within a few decades of Burns’s death,

For professional athletes, the yips are a threat not just to their livelihood but also to their identity.

These communities hunted and gathered, and there were no large caloric surpluses, so every healthy person would have had to contribute to the acquisition of food and water—and yet somehow, they still made time to create art, almost as if art isn’t optional for humans.