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The quest to find a mean sea level for the whole world was part and parcel of the quest to make the world governable. And thus, von Hardenberg writes, did our idea of sea level as a benchmark emerge from a very specific time and place, becoming intertwined with the colonial project and “a long-held perception of holocenic stability.”

I didn’t really think about how outlandish Michel’s proposal was to make “copies that are accurate to within fractions of a millimeter” of fragments of rock until I was at the Met recently, looking at damaged ancient relics, thinking about the meticulous effort that would have to go into replicating such objects’ singular histories of contingency

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everything starts to matter because a context has arisen; expectations arise.

If I showed you a risk-free way to make a dollar, theory would tell you to replicate that exact trade a billion times. If I showed you a riskier way to make five dollars, theory would tell you to reject it in favor of the first trade and make up the foregone four dollars in volume.

But in the real world, that’s not how things work. As it turns out,... See more

the world is massively more connected now than it has ever been, naturally groupthink is on the rise

Lyell turned out to be right: the Scandinavian peninsula was, and still is, rising relative to the sea, as a result of the phenomenon known as “postglacial uplift”—the slow bounce-back of land that was long compressed by the great weight of earlier glaciers.

for all the uncertainty in the world, people are largely humane to one another (certainly in person; especially in person (scale and abstraction are one of the things we don’t handle / process well and are the root of many contemporary issues))

Literature, to me, is about adding as much complicating information as possible, since this kind of storytelling gets closer and closer to “the real truth” – that is, to the actuality of things just as they are.