I find ads inside of books a bit gauche, but then again, my publisher tells me they’re effective. The hope is that if you’ve made it all the way to the back page of this book, you might be interested to learn that I have written some other ones. And I would like for you to read those books. Have you ever played the game “Marco Polo”? One person says “Marco,” and the other players answer “Polo.” Writing is like that for me. For years I’m in my basement, trying to write, saying “Marco, Marco, Marco, Marco.” And then one day, a reader says, “Polo.” Hearing that response never gets old. For me, this is the real thrill of both reading and writing. The connections forged by books make me feel less alone in the way down deep. So if this ad leads to a few more “Polo” moments, I can’t begrudge its presence. I give back page book ads three stars.
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* Why? When I was twelve, I was on my middle school soccer team. I was awful, of course, and rarely played. We had one good player on our team, a guy named James. James was from England, and he told us that in England, there were professional soccer teams, and thousands of fans would stand together, shoulder to shoulder, and sing all through the games. He told us that the best team in England was Liverpool. And I believed him.
* Agriculture and large human communities and the building of monolithic structures all occur within the last minute of this calendar year. The Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the invention of basketball, recorded music, the electric dishwasher, and vehicles that travel faster than horses all happen in the last couple of seconds.
* Or possibly Edmund.
* In Out of the Shadow of a Giant, Mary Gribbin and John Gribbin argue that while the Principia is of course important, it also relied upon—and at times outright stole—research from others, especially Robert Hooke. They write, “The famous story of the falling apple seen during the plague year of 1665 is a myth, invented by Newton to bolster his (false) claim that he had the idea for a universal theory of gravity before Hooke.” It’s sort of comforting to know that even Isaac Newton exaggerated what he got done during his plague year.
* Barbara Ehrenreich, in her essay “The Humanoid Stain,” proposes one reason why cave art might not have focused on humans: We weren’t yet living on a human-centered planet. “The marginality of human figures in cave paintings suggests that, at least from a human point of view, the central drama of the Paleolithic went on between the various megafauna—carnivores and large herbivores.” At any rate, there is only one human-like image at Lascaux—a sort of stick figure with long legs and what appears to be a bird’s head.
* This is explored in wondrous detail in Werner Herzog’s movie Cave of Forgotten Dreams, where I first learned of the Lascaux cave paintings.
* Ravidat told the version of the story with the dog, but his earliest version of the story did not feature the dog as a central character. Even when history is only a few decades old, it can be difficult to piece together. Nothing lies like memory.
* There is no period in the Dr of Dr Pepper. The company dropped it in the 1950s because the bubbly lettering at the time made “Dr. Pepper” look to many readers like “Dri Pepper,” which sounds like maybe the worst soda imaginable.
* Bear Bryant became a legendary football coach in Alabama—so legendary that when I attended high school outside of Birmingham in the 1990s, I knew three kids named Bryant and one kid named Bear.
* Dr Pepper is a drug, too, of course. Caffeine and sugar are two of the defining chemical compounds of the Anthropocene. Pepsi, Coca-Cola, root beer, and most other flavored sodas were invented either by chemists or pharmacists, and in the nineteenth century, there was no bright line between medicinal cocktails and recreational ones.
* That bone, incidentally, was named Scrotum humanum, which is a reasonable description of its approximate shape.
* See Kentucky Bluegrass
* You may wonder, as I have, whether U.S. ornithologists assigned “Canada” to the goose’s name for the same reason the Italians called syphilis “the French disease,” while the