The yips have many names—whiskey fingers, the waggles, the freezing. But I like “yips” because it’s such an anxious word; I can almost feel the muscle twitch inside the word itself.

Above all, I wanted to understand the contradiction of human power: We are at once far too powerful and not nearly powerful enough. We are powerful enough to radically reshape Earth’s climate and biodiversity, but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape them.

Humans are a threat to our own species and to many others, but the planet will survive us. In fact, it may only take life on Earth a few million years to recover from us. Life has bounced back from far more serious shocks. Two hundred and fifty million years ago, during the Permian extinction, ocean surface waters likely reached 104 degrees

I don’t know how to explain to you how important that bench was to me, how much it mattered that my dad and I had made something together.

Put another way: It took Earth about three billion years to go from single-celled life to multicellular life. It took less than seventy million years to go from Tyrannosaurus rex to humans who can read and write and dig up fossils and approximate the timeline of life and worry about its ending. Unless we somehow manage to eliminate all

The longevity of microcapsules offers a tantalizing possibility: that a smell might disappear from our world before the microencapsulated version of that smell disappears. The last time anyone smells a banana, it might be via a scratch ’n’ sniff sticker, or some futuristic version of one.

the most famous cover came in 1963 from Gerry and the Pacemakers,

Sometimes, that still feels true. To tell a story of my own horrifying excess, I once stayed at the famous Plaza Hotel in New York City and received a “free upgrade” to the Great Gatsby suite. The room was a study in visual overstimulation—sparkling silver wallpaper, ornate furniture, fake trophies and autographed footballs lining the mantel. The

Do I believe in God? I believe around God. But I can only believe in what I am in—sunlight and shadow, oxygen and carbon dioxide, solar systems and galaxies.