“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
There are several types of greenhouse gasses, but carbon dioxide is the most important. — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
“The varieties are not like islands, carefully apart,” Perales explained. “They are more like gentle hills in a landscape—you see them, they… — Charles C. Mann 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
“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
“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
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
Scientists have established huge numbers of links between particular diseases and snippets of DNA, but in the great majority of cases, this… — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
The queue of activists, interest groups, and ordinary people wringing their hands over what a President Donald Trump might do in office… — Charles C. Mann Activists Copy Share Image
You know how in movies the new president comes in and promises to perform sweeping actions with a stroke of a pen?… — Charles C. Mann 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
“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
“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
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
“Most of the salt occurred in the sediments on the swamp bottoms. To make the water potable, the Maya laid a layer… — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
“The second myth is that in its appetite for death as spectacle the Triple Alliance was fundamentally different from Europe. Criminals beheaded… — Charles C. Mann Death Copy Share Image
“Carrying their flints and torches, Native Americans were living in balance with Nature—but they had their thumbs on the scale. Shaped for… — Charles C. Mann American landscape Copy Share Image
“What happened in 1518 and 1519 is not. In those years, according to Bartolomé de Las Casas, a missionary priest who lived… — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
“The monks explain that they have been sent by “the one who on the earth is the greater speaker of divine things,”… — Charles C. Mann Nature Copy Share Image
“Likely the milpa cannot be replicated on an industrial scale. But by studying its essential features, researchers may be able to smooth… — Charles C. Mann Agriculture Copy Share Image
Smartphones can relay patients' data to hospital computers in a continuous stream. Doctors can alter treatment regimens remotely, instead of making patients… — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
All parents remember the moment when they first held their children - the tiny crumpled face, an entire new person, emerging from… — Charles C. Mann Children Copy Share Image
“visitors to Andean history note certain ways of doing things that recur in ways striking to the outsider, sometimes in one variant,… — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
“The Maya collapsed because they overshot the carrying capacity of their environment. They exhausted their resource base, began to die of starvation… — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
The way I think of it, economics and ecology occupy two intellectual silos, isolated from each other. Even when they do take… — Charles C. Mann Consideration Copy Share Image
“More than a hundred sets of casta paintings are known. Many are beautifully crafted. Some were painted by mixed people themselves. Looking” — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
As an issue, climate change was unlucky: when nonspecialists first became aware of it in the 1990s, environmental attitudes had already become… — Charles C. Mann Change Copy Share Image
Indeed, for all Donald Trump's railing about the efforts to curb climate change, nobody in his administration seems to have paid any… — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
“export of food from Ireland during the famine: 430,000 tons of grain in 1846 and 1847, the two worst years. “The Almighty… — Charles C. Mann Famine Copy Share Image
Cash-strapped cities in nations from Argentina to Albania have begun to turn over their municipal water systems to Big Water, often under… — Charles C. Mann Argentina Copy Share Image
By the 1980s, businesses had realized that environmental issues had a price tag. Increasingly, they balked. Reflexively, the anticorporate Left pivoted; Earth… — Charles C. Mann Business Copy Share Image
“Drought indeed stressed the system, but the societal disintegration in the south was due not to surpassing inherent ecological limits but the… — Charles C. Mann Climate Copy Share Image
Some Western states have collaborative water agreements with Indian tribes - Washington state, for instance, monitors a number of its rivers to… — Charles C. Mann Indian Copy Share Image
Seoul and Shanghai, Jaipur and Jakarta; shining skyscrapers, pricey hotels, traffic-jammed streets ablaze with neon - all were built atop a foundation… — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
Canceling the climate pact will loudly demonstrate Trump's willingness to fight - an important step for the White House because, on a… — Charles C. Mann Climate Copy Share Image
In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia,… — Charles C. Mann Alliances Copy Share Image
“Chestnut was especially popular—not the imported European chestnut roasted on Manhattan street corners in the fall, but the smaller, soft-shelled, deeply sweet… — Charles C. Mann Copy Share Image
“In contemporary hunting and gathering societies, anthropologists have learned, gathering by women usually supplies most of the daily diet. The meat provided… — Charles C. Mann Hunters Copy Share Image
“The Olmec were but the first of many societies that arose in Mesoamerica in this epoch. Most had religions that focused on… — Charles C. Mann Success Copy Share Image
“all states can be parceled into four types: pluralist, in which the state is seen by its people as having moral legitimacy;… — Charles C. Mann Politics Copy Share Image
