Charles C. Mann

“Indeed, for all Donald Trump's railing about the efforts to curb climate change, nobody in his administration seems to have paid any attention to what they actually are.”

“Japanese maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering.”

“Criminals beheaded in Palermo, heretics burned alive in Toledo, assassins drawn and quartered in Paris—Europeans flocked to every form of painful death imaginable, free entertainment that drew huge crowds. London, the historian Fernand Braudel tells us, held public executions eight times a year at Tyburn, just north of Hyde Park. (The diplomat Samuel Pepys paid a shilling for a good view of a Tyburn hanging in 1664; watching the victim beg for mercy, he wrote, was a crowd of "at least 12 or 14,000 people.") In most if not all European nations, the bodies were impaled on city walls and strung along highways as warnings. "The corpses dangling from trees whose distant silhouettes stand out against the sky, in so many old paintings, are merely a realistic detail," Braudel observed. "They were part of the landscape." Between 1530 and 1630, according to Cambridge historian V.A.C. Gatrell, England executed seventy-five thousand people. At that time, its population was about three million, perhaps a tenth that of the Mexica empire. Arithmetic suggests that if England had been the size of the Triple Alliance, it would have executed, on average, 7,500 people per year, roughly twice the number Cortes estimated for the empire. France and Spain were still more bloodthirsty than England, according to Braudel.”

“Rather than forcing local factories to clean up after themselves, Changzhou decided to outsource the job of managing its water supply to a French company named Veolia - one of a handful of corporate giants now scrambling to take over city water systems around the planet, especially in the often polluted and water-short developing world.”

“The queue of activists, interest groups, and ordinary people wringing their hands over what a President Donald Trump might do in office is long, and environmentalists are at the front of the line.”

“Smartphones can relay patients' data to hospital computers in a continuous stream. Doctors can alter treatment regimens remotely, instead of making patients come in for a visit.”

“There are serious worries about unconventional gas and oil, especially those concerning the environment.”

“By the 1980s, businesses had realized that environmental issues had a price tag. Increasingly, they balked. Reflexively, the anticorporate Left pivoted; Earth Day, erstwhile snow job, became an opportunity to denounce capitalist greed.”

“The Japanese are great at inventing complex systems of rules, and not so great at explaining those rules to foreign visitors.”

“The Japanese drive on the left side of the road. Most streets literally do not have names.”

“Under the Paris agreement, every one of the 147 signatories issues what is called an 'intended nationally determined contribution' (INDC), which amounts to a promise that the nation will take certain actions to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by a certain date.”

“A smartphone links patients' bodies and doctors' computers, which in turn are connected to the Internet, which in turn is connected to any smartphone anywhere. The new devices could put the management of an individual's internal organs in the hands of every hacker, online scammer, and digital vandal on Earth.”

“The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.”

“Canceling the climate pact will loudly demonstrate Trump's willingness to fight - an important step for the White House because, on a concrete level, few tools are available to revive the coal industry.”

“A whole bunch of big technological shocks occurred when Asian innovations - paper, gunpowder, the stirrup, the moldboard plow and so on - came to Europe via the Silk Road.”

“Americans are willing to cheer on politicians who denounce bureaucratic overreach and job-killing red tape in abstract terms. But they turn out to like specific regulations against toxic chemicals in their drinking water.”

“Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter.”

“Prediction is a mug's game, but taking the side of water polluters has not been a winning political strategy for 50 years. Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II all undertook to weaken water regulations in the name of economic growth. They left office; the regulations remained.”

“Farmers can't plant much more land because almost every accessible acre of arable soil is already in use. Nor can the use of fertilizer be increased: it is already being overused everywhere except some parts of Africa, and the runoff is polluting rivers, lakes, and oceans.”

“Major power and telephone grids have long been controlled by computer networks, but now similar systems are embedded in such mundane objects as electric meters, alarm clocks, home refrigerators and thermostats, video cameras, bathroom scales, and Christmas-tree lights - all of which are, or soon will be, accessible remotely.”