There are serious worries about unconventional gas and oil, especially those concerning the environment. — Charles C. Mann Climate Copy Share Image
Japanese maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering. — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
Not only are utilities switching from coal and oil to gas, but also trucking, schoolbuses, garbage trucks, and even taxi fleets. — Charles C. Mann Climate Copy Share Image
“Farmers learned to plant fallow fields with clover, which recharges the soil with nutrients.” — Charles C. Mann Farmers Copy Share Image
The human propensity is to believe that flukes of good fortune will never come to an end. — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
The Japanese are great at inventing complex systems of rules, and not so great at explaining those rules to foreign visitors. — Charles C. Mann Complex systems Copy Share Image
Like other parents, I want my children to be comfortable in their adult lives. — Charles C. Mann Children Copy Share Image
The Japanese drive on the left side of the road. Most streets literally do not have names. — Charles C. Mann Drive Copy Share Image
The legal fight over climate change begins in the United States with the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977. Under the Act,… — Charles C. Mann Air pollution Copy Share Image
“Half of the 102 people on the Mayflower made it through the first winter, which to me seemed amazing. How did they… — Charles C. Mann History Copy Share Image
“At Marajó, Meggers and Evans soon noticed an oddity: the earliest traces of Marajóara culture were the most elaborate. As the centuries… — Charles C. Mann Ceramics Copy Share Image
Under the Paris agreement, every one of the 147 signatories issues what is called an 'intended nationally determined contribution' (INDC), which amounts… — Charles C. Mann Climate Copy Share Image
Obama issued a slew of executive orders about climate change during the eight years of his presidency. Inexplicably, President Trump revoked about… — Charles C. Mann Change Copy Share Image
“Monte Albán is today a decorous sprawl of walls and pyramids enveloped by a lush lawn (this last is an import from… — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
“That was why archaeologists and anthropologists had come across the ruins of complex societies throughout Mesoamerica and the Andes, but saw only… — Charles C. Mann Archaeologists Copy Share Image
Artificial lighting, air-conditioning, and automobiles, all powered by fossil fuels, swaddle us in our giddy modernity. In our ergonomic chairs and acoustical-panel… — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
Farmers can't plant much more land because almost every accessible acre of arable soil is already in use. Nor can the use… — Charles C. Mann Agriculture Copy Share Image
“Colonial writers knew that disease tilled the virgin soil of the Americas countless times in the sixteenth century. But what they did… — Charles C. Mann Writing Copy Share Image
“Every society, big or little, misses out on “obvious” technologies. The lacunae have enormous impact on people’s lives—imagine Europe with efficient plows… — Charles C. Mann Civilization Copy Share Image
So many wells have been dug in Changzhou that its groundwater has been over-exploited, and the local ground level has sunk by… — Charles C. Mann City Copy Share Image
“The viruses that cause smallpox, influenza, hepatitis, measles, encephalitis, and viral pneumonia; the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera, typhus, scarlet fever,… — Charles C. Mann History Copy Share Image
Big Water makes an argument straight out of Economics 101. The best way to deliver water to people's homes efficiently, the water… — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
“I kept waiting for the book to appear. The wait grew more frustrating when my son entered school and was taught the… — Charles C. Mann Book Copy Share Image
“Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all… — Charles C. Mann Dreams Copy Share Image
“In Mesoamerica, timekeeping provided the stimulus that accounting gave to the Middle East. Like contemporary astrologers, the Olmec, Maya, and Zapotec believed… — Charles C. Mann Daily life Copy Share Image
“With its federal government that can supersede state and local law, its dependence on rule by the majority rather than consensus, its… — Charles C. Mann Federal government Copy Share Image
“Menaced by environmental problems, torn by struggles between the tiny coterie of wealthy Spaniards at the center and a teeming, fractious polyglot… — Charles C. Mann Environmental problems Copy Share Image
“Early farming villages worldwide were much less authoritarian places than later societies. But the Indians of the eastern seaboard institutionalized their liberty… — Charles C. Mann Free people Copy Share Image
“Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the… — Charles C. Mann Around the world Copy Share Image
“The portraits were intended to parade their fellows like specimens in a zoo. Yet at the same time most show the castizos,… — Charles C. Mann Business Copy Share Image
“At the same time, Wari and Tiwanaku kept themselves separate. Although they shared resources, there is little evidence that people from one… — Charles C. Mann Different languages Copy Share Image
“the king was talking with Bartolomé de las Casas, a fiery Dominican priest who had just completed Brief Account of the Destruction… — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
“Criminals beheaded in Palermo, heretics burned alive in Toledo, assassins drawn and quartered in Paris—Europeans flocked to every form of painful death… — Charles C. Mann Colonialism Copy Share Image
“After 1492 the world’s ecosystems collided and mixed as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans.” — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
There are several types of greenhouse gasses, but carbon dioxide is the most important. — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent. — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
“It is always easy for those living in the present to feel superior to those who lived in the past.” — Charles C. Mann Life Copy Share Image
“mounting a sustained war. Unhappily, these intriguing speculations” — Charles C. Mann Peace Copy Share Image
Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter. — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
“Anything goes now, apparently,” Fiedel told me. “The lunatics have taken over the asylum.” — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
