Charles C. Mann:

If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants leaving?

Elizabeth Fenn:

You have to wonder: what were all those people up to in all that time?

Dean R. Snow:

It's really easy to kid yourself.

On Drew Gilpin Faust:

She wanted to understand how whole classes of people can get caught up in a shared worldview, to the point that they simply can't see.

Jose Saramago:

If only all life's deceptions were like this one, and all they had to do was to come to some agreement ... Were it not for the fact that we're blind this mix-up would never have happened, You're right, our problem is that we're blind.

Joe Nocera:

They just want theirs. That is the culture they have created.

Charles C. Mann:

Minute changes in baseline assumptions produce wildly different results.

Paul Graham:

Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get.

Lucas Foglia:

Rewilding: the process of creating a lifestyle that is independent of the domestication of civilization.

Dan Kildee:

Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow.

Freeman Dyson:

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over.

Charles C. Mann:

I felt alone and small, but in a way that was curiously like feeling exalted.

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Erickson and Balée belong to a cohort of scholars that has radically challenged conventional notions of what the Western Hemisphere was like before Columbus. When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago, that they lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation it remained mostly wilderness.

The 'sacred' rainforest concept is invented by postmodern new agers, who mourn its destruction - when in fact its a product of european contact/decimation?

Dunno if its true, but gold star. Amazing article in the Atlantic.

Every tomato in Italy, every potato in Ireland, and every hot pepper in Thailand came from this hemisphere. Worldwide, more than half the crops grown today were initially developed in the Americas...

Indian agriculture long sustained some of the world's largest cities. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán dazzled Hernán Cortés in 1519; it was bigger than Paris, Europe's greatest metropolis. The Spaniards gawped like hayseeds at the wide streets, ornately carved buildings, and markets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away. They had never before seen a city with botanical gardens, for the excellent reason that none existed in Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate. (Streets that weren't ankle-deep in sewage! The conquistadors had never heard of such a thing.) Central America was not the only locus of prosperity. Thousands of miles north, John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, visited Massachusetts in 1614, before it was emptied by disease, and declared that the land was "so planted with Gardens and Corne fields, and so well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well proportioned people ... [that] I would rather live here than any where."