One of the many benefits of loving Liverpool Football Club is that over time, knowledge about the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone” seeps into you via osmosis. The quote about Molnár not wanting Liliom to become a Puccini opera comes from Frederick Nolan’s The Sound of Their Music, as did much of the other information about the musical and Molnár’s relationship with it. I learned about the musical changes Gerry and the Pacemakers made to the song from Niki Hua. Gerry Marsden, who died in early 2021, often told the story about meeting Shankly, including in an Independent interview with Simon Hart from 2013. No human life is complete without joining with sixty thousand people singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” together, and I hope that is an experience available to you at some point, and also that it is available to me again soon.

Humanity’s Temporal Range

The idea for this essay came from a conversation with my friend and longtime collaborator Stan Muller. There are many versions of the Earth-history-in-a-year analogy, but I relied mostly on a timeline developed by the Kentucky Geological Survey. The poll about people in different countries having different beliefs about our proximity to the Apocalypse was conducted by Ipsos Global Affairs. Most of the information about the Permian extinction came from a 2012 National Geographic story by Christine Dell’Amore called “‘Lethally Hot’ Earth Was Devoid of Life—Could It Happen Again?” (Spoiler alert: It could. Actually, it will.) The Octavia Butler quotes are from Parable of the Talents. The idea of seeing things you’ll never see came to me from the work of the artist David Brooks, via his art assignment challenge printed in Sarah Urist Green’s book You Are an Artist. The information on global average temperature rise since the Industrial Revolution came from the National Climatic Data Center of the NOAA.

Halley’s Comet

As noted in the review, much of the background for understanding Edmond Halley and his comety calculations came from two very enjoyable books: Julie Wakefield’s Halley’s Quest, about Halley’s time as a ship captain and explorer, and John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin’s Out of the Shadow of a Giant: Hooke, Halley, and the Birth of Science. I learned of Fred Whipple’s “dirty snowball” theory of comets from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. More information on responses to the 1910 apparition of the comet can be found in Chris Riddell’s 2012 Guardian article “Apocalypse Postponed?” (It’s only ever postponed, that Apocalypse.)

Our Capacity for Wonder

I’m indebted to Matthew J. Bruccoli’s book about F. Scott Fitzgerald, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, and also to Nancy Mitford’s Zelda, about Zelda Fitzgerald. I learned a lot about Armed Services Editions from a 2015 article in Mental Floss magazine called “How WWII Saved The Great Gatsby from Obscurity.” I was able to stay in the Plaza Hotel due to the largesse of Fox 2000, a filmmaking enterprise that no longer exists. “The Crack-Up” was initially published in Esquire magazine in 1936 and is now available online. Various manuscripts for The Great Gatsby are available online through Princeton University’s library, and it’s fascinating to see what changed (and what didn’t) among the revisions. The David Denby quote comes from a review published in the New Yorker on May 13, 2013.

Lascaux Cave Paintings

I first learned of these paintings and the story of our separation from them in Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I learned more from Judith Thurman’s essay “First Impressions,” in the June 16, 2008, issue of the New Yorker. Simon Coencas recorded an oral history for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is available online at its website. Coencas’s quote about the “little gang” came from a 2016 interview with the AFP. The Barbara Ehrenreich essay “The Humanoid Stain” was first published in The Baffler in November 2019. The Lascaux website, at archeologie.culture.fr, was especially helpful, and included references to hand stencils at Lascaux. I learned of Genevieve von Petzinger’s work from a 2016 New Scientist article by Alison George called “Code Hidden in Stone Age Art May Be the Root of Human Writing.”Last, I would not have been able to write this review without Thierry Félix’s work to preserve both the cave and the stories of those who discovered it.

Scratch ’n’ Sniff Stickers

The Helen Keller quote about smell is from her wonderful book The World I Live In. The Baltimore Gas and Electric debacle is described in an AP News story from September 4, 1987.

When I was in middle school, one of my teachers took me aside after class one day. She knew that I had been struggling academically as well as socially, and she went out of her way to tell me that she liked something I’d written. She also said to me, “You’re going to be okay, you know. Not in the short run . . .” and then she paused before saying, “And also not in the long run, I guess. But in the medium run.” This moment of kindness stayed with me, and helped hold me together in tough days, and I don’t know if this book would exist without it. I have forgotten this teacher’s name, as I have forgotten almost everything, but I am so grateful to her.

Diet Dr Pepper

The history of Dr Pepper is told succinctly (if somewhat self-aggrandizingly) at the Dr Pepper Museum and Free Enterprise Institute in Waco, Texas. (Foots Clements, a staunch anti-communist, insisted that the museum be a celebration of not only Dr Pepper but also free markets.) Charles Alderton was a member of the Masons, and so far as I know, the fullest biography written of him was put together by the Waco Masonic Lodge, and is available at its website. I am also indebted to two histories of Dr Pepper: The Legend of Dr Pepper/7-Up by Jeffrey L. Rodengen, and The Road to Dr Pepper, Texas by Karen Wright, which explores the astonishing story of the Dublin Dr Pepper bottling plant, which produced a unique cane-sugar version of Dr Pepper until 2012.

Velociraptors

When writing Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton consulted with the paleontologist John Ostrom, whose research helped revolutionize our understanding of dinosaurs. In a New York Times interview with Fred Musante on June 29, 1997, Ostrom discussed his relationship with Crichton and how Crichton chose the name velociraptor because it was “more dramatic.” As explained in a Yale News article from 2015, the team behind the Jurassic Park film asked for all of Ostrom’s research on deinonychus when deciding how to portray the film’s velociraptors. I learned much of the truth about velociraptors from my son, Henry, and then from the American Museum of Natural History, where I also read of the velociraptor that died in the midst of fighting a protoceratops. My favorite reading on the resurrection of the brontosaurus is Charles Choi’s “The Brontosaurus Is Back,” published by Scientific American on April 7, 2015.

Canada Geese

For a bird I actively dislike, the Canada goose is a joy to read about. Much of the information from this essay came from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (allaboutbirds.org), which is so wondrously comprehensive and accessible that the rest of the internet should take a lesson from it. Harold C. Hanson’s book The Giant Canada Goose is one of those highly specialized books that is nonetheless thoroughly fun. Joe Van Wormer’s 1968 book The World of the Canada Goose is lovely, too. The Philip Habermann quote came from the book History Afield by Robert C. Willging. If you want to learn more about the history of lawns, I recommend Krystal D’Costa’s Scientific American piece, “The American Obsession with Lawns.”

Teddy Bears

I first heard the story of Teddy Roosevelt sparing the bear that died anyway from a TED Talk given by Jon Mooallem, whose book Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America is as enjoyable as you’d expect from that subtitle. The taboo avoidance etymology of the word bear is described in the incredibly helpful online etymology dictionary (etymonline.com). The Smithsonian’s history of the teddy bear was also very helpful to me; this is how I learned of the 1902 Washington Post article about Roosevelt sparing (sorta?) the bear. The figures of Earth’s biomass distribution come from “The Biomass Distribution on Earth,” lead author Yinon M. Bar-On, first published on May 21, 2018, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. I was introduced to the concept of species biomass in Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens. The Sarah Dessen quote is from her wonderful novel What Happened to Goodbye.

The Hall of Presidents