There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.

If you want honey you need a hive of bees. But if you were trying to decide if making honey was a good idea, bees would be the last creatures to ask.

For two hundred years, human economic activity has largely consisted of digging up fossil fuels and setting them alight

One of the great privileges of living in the affluent parts of the modern world is that we've been able to forget that the natural world even exists...a great city seems to produce wealth out of thin air. This is illusion, of course, but powerful illusion.

...a man with a phone more or less permanently affixed to his palm is partway a robot already

The human game is a team sport.

The single most inhospitable cubic meter of the Earth's surface - some waste of Saharan sand, some rocky Himalayan outcrop - is a thousand times more hospitable that the most appealing corner of Mars or Jupiter.

When the peak temperature in leafy suburbs can be lower by as much as fifteen degrees, "landscape is a predictor for mobidity in heatwaves," in the words of one study, which found that African Americans were "52% more likely than white people to live in areas of unnatural 'heat risk-related land cover.'" Imagine what it's like in a refugee camp, or a prison. It's hell, is what it is.

Rebelling against the wishes and hopes of your parents is how a great many of us define who we are. It may be hard, and it may be painful, and some people may never manage it. And some never need to, because their parents were wise and gentle enough to help them down a congenial path.