I
I don’t usually do podcasts1, but I came upon The Anthropocene Reviewed under unusual circumstances.
I’d previously heard of it from a more senior colleague during my days as a postdoc researcher. He’d described it to me as a guy doing five-star reviews of random things ranging from sunsets to the black plague, and that I would probably like it. I remember finding the concept alluring and then completely forgetting about it2. I don’t recall if I may have kept its home website open in some tab buried in a sea of mostly-never-to-be-reopened tabs, but I must have — or else I’ve no idea how I ever thought to type the words “Anthropocene Reviewed” on Google again.
I don’t think I thought about it again for a year or two, before I found myself stuck at home, in the middle of a pandemic, with a newborn demanding all my time and energy. For all the advantages of being introduced to fatherhood during a pandemic3, intellectual stimulation was not one of them. Particularly as constant colicky baby screams were the background noise of those months, which combined with sleep deprivation left me in a state where I just couldn’t get my brain to write the paper I was trying to wring out of my mind at the time. Fortunately for me, my boss at the time was very understanding and reassured me that the right thing was to focus on looking after my family rather than try and produce outputs under such suboptimal conditions — for which I am still immensely grateful. So, long story short: I ended up giving up on doing any physics for a few months and suddenly found myself, during the precious periods when both wife and son slept, doing lots of chores during which my sleep-starved brain tended to space out unless I focused it on some external source of coherent narratives. After going through a few episodes of shows I was following at the time and didn’t really require looking at a screen most of the time, I decided a podcast was the ideal thing to fill these times. And somehow The Anthropocene Reviewed came to mind and I checked it out.
I clearly remember being surprised to discover this podcast was by John Green. I knew him from the excellent Crash Course history series and at this time had already realised he was the author of The Fault In Our Stars (though I’m still yet to read any of his stuff). I read the show’s About page, remembered my friend’s recommendation from over a year earlier, thought that this concept with this guy was sure to deliver interesting new facts (and maybe some light existential comedy) into my brain, and decided to listen to a couple episodes as a trial as I cleaned the bathrooms.
II
The first two episodes were exactly what I expected. I got to learn about Canada Geese, Diet Dr Pepper4, Halley’s Comet, and Cholera. My brain had been nourished with fun facts and the light soothing voice of John Green5 — what more could I want? I kept listening and learning and enjoying it like I imagine a parched plant enjoys water. I remember having particularly loved learning about the history of pineapples in the section reviewing Hawaiian pizza (in episode 5). And then something happened.
It started out very subtly, as mystical experiences are wont to. Episode 6 reviewed the Lascaux Paintings, a group of Paleolithic paintings discovered across the walls of a cave complex in Southern France. It was informative, as usual, but there was something else in that episode. At the time I thought of it as a welcome taste of philosophy of art motivated by the shock of the discovery of art made by humans so remote from anything we’ve ever known. Now I realised it was the welcome taste of John Green opening up his soul and letting me know how he thought about Art, the Universe, and Everything.
Slowly but surely, John Green started sharing a little bit more of himself and how the subjects of his reviews relate to his own life and experience. Before I knew it, I was listening not just to learn fun facts about the world, but also to know more of John Green’s soul. A few times, I got to feel his pain so profoundly I was reduced to tears. It is powerful stuff.
III
John Green doesn’t like getting accosted by fans. He’s very nice and humble about it, and feels really fortunate that people have come to admire his work on such a scale, but you get the distinct feeling that this sort of situation triggers some sort of anxiety reaction which makes the whole thing very uncomfortable for him.
He makes it very clear that there is a mailbox you can write to, but he will never ever under any circumstances write back to you. He’ll appreciate that you do, but it is important to him to be rid of the burden of people expecting him to reply or wondering if he might. If you really want to show your appreciation for The Anthropocene Reviewed, he says the best thing you can do is review it (on Spotify or wherever you listen to it) and recommend it to others.
I did at the time write to that black hole of a mailbox, sending a few paragraphs of awkward thanks like I would throw a bottle with a letter into the ocean. Now that I finally have a bit more time in my life, I am writing this to actually give it the proper recommendation I think it deserves. To me, this podcast transcended its genre and everything I’d seen of John Green’s before. It became about so much more than learning, without learning having ceased to be central. It became a work of art showing us not just the interesting hidden aspect of the world around us but also the world around us as experience by John Green. I cannot recommend it enough.
Now it’s been a while since I last listened to this podcast. So I thought the best thing to do would be to revisit one of its last episodes and review that. I chose The Anthropocene Reviewed, Reviewed, because it reviews the show itself and because it allows me to write what I think is an objectively hilarious title.
IV
The episode begins with the announcement of an “indefinite hiatus” of the podcast. John Green tells us the next episode will be the last, that he thinks he’ll be back with more reviews, but that it “will be a while”6. The rest of the episode are 20 minutes of explaining why the hiatus is coming, and a farewell of sorts for listeners.
Soothing background music kicks in, and on we go. Green’s narration takes its time, transporting me to his property in which he builds a path just after finishing a round of exhausting promotion of his then-latest book, Turtles All The Way Down. He admires the fruit of his labour and relishes in the thought of relishing in something he made for himself and not for others to see7. And suddenly he becomes afflicted with crippling vertigo. The diagnosis is:
“labirinthitis, a disease of the inner ear with a wondrously resonant name that is nonetheless unambiguously a one-star disorder”
Labirinthitis becomes the pretext to contemplate the extent to which writing had left John Green exposed to the outside world. How he’d willingly made himself a public figure with mental health issues, and thus invited interviews with all sorts of probing personal questions, and people making judgements of value not just about his work but also about him as a person. All this he doesn’t exactly resent, but suddenly he looks at himself and finds himself exhausted by the exposure.
He describes random strangers starting to regularly show up at his doorstep asking for autographs, trying to peek into his home, and even one who commented on why he didn’t live in a nicer house. He describes being asked about whether he has panic attacks when he kisses, like one if his characters. And he conveys a certain feeling that he’d poured so much of himself into his writing that he now found himself empty of true intimacy.
“My self wasn’t really mine, but instead something I was selling — or at least renting out in exchange for good press and book sales”
The symptoms of labirinthitis get under control, but the name of the disease still ostensively moulds the meandering format of the episode. Again and again we return to the same themes, go off on different tangents, and return again from a different angle. Get it? We are caught in a labyrinth of John Green’s mind. The metaphor is eventually ended by a comment about how Green is usually against giving in to these types of metaphors as they risk unduly romanticising disease and imbuing it with undeserved meaning. Green insists the Universe did not give him labirinthitis so he could learn a lesson about balance — he got it for no reason and he has to live with it as well as he can. (But hey, it does work as a nice metaphorical theme!)
At this point Green’s routine is going back to normal but for one detail: he’s not writing. He’s doing podcasts and other work, but he’s not writing. We get a sense of aimlessness, like writing had become an irreplaceable part of his life yet one he dared not suffer for the time being.
Green then recounts going through some of his past writing in hopes some answer to his woes might be found there, and rediscovering an idea he had written in 2014: for Yelp-style five-star reviews of aspects of the human experience. There were two essays he’d written for that at the time: about Canada Geese and about Diet Dr Pepper. He showed these to his wife, who found them interesting but chafed a little against the use of an impersonal third person. She argued this style of review is usually one in which people describe their personal experience of products, rather than omniscient collections of facts. He agrees and reflects on how his ability to share himself in his work is part of his strength as a writer and decides to give this a go. After getting in touch with his usual “partners in crime”, they settle on a podcast format and The Anthropocene Reviewed was born.
And, of course, now it is going on a hiatus. Indefinitely.
Green jubilantly claims that writing The Anthropocene Reviewed was the “most fun [he]’d had writing since before [he] wrote [his] first novel”. He waxes lyrical about how amazing he’s found doing the podcast, how much it’s improved his life. He particularly focuses on how it brought him quiet — the music stops and he speaks nice and slowly for this explanation. He describes his life before this podcast as full of noise: not just from strangers and interviews, but also from his trade’s abhorrence of silence. He describes how his every breath his carefully edited out of his YouTube videos to minimise the number of frames with silence. He doesn’t say it, but the listeners feel like the arrival of The Anthropocene Reviewed felt to him like emerging from underwater and finally taking a deep breath for the first time in an eternity.
Then we’re treated to an ad8.
And then we’re back to John Green’s show about why John Green is pausing his show. He right away confesses that a big part of it is he’s basically said all he wanted to say on the show, it’s already given him hope, and he’d like to avoid repeating himself.
He talks about how this project has become his full-time job and about how pausing it will give him precious time: time with his family (especially for homeschooling his children in what were still the times of Covid) but also to work on the book version of The Anthropocene Reviewed, which he advertises a little by mentioning some new reviews that will be found there.
He then talks about the contradictions of human condition in himself. He goes back to the woes he’d described to us, all the attacks from the outside world, and surprisingly comes out saying he actually likes them. He even tells us he actually likes interviews — especially overly personal ones! And somehow this lands. It makes sense. He likes all these things, it just so happened that too much of them left him drained and The Anthropocene Reviewed helped him recover from that and rediscover his love of creating as a separate thing from all that noise. But he does like all that noise too!
John Green is masterful in his narration. This entire review has been a winding road in all directions, including inwards and outwards, it is riddled with contradictions, yet it feels so natural and understanding, like we’re being guided by our own undisciplined meandering thoughts. But he has one last literary flourish reserved for the end.
He goes on a lyrical tirade about falling in love in the world — how it was a long road for him, but how he is getting there. Me? I’m getting goose bumps listening to this (for the second time!):
“but to fall in love with the world is to let the world crack you open anyway.“
He then intimately addresses the listener:
“You’ve helped me to live my life again”
“Your kind and compassionate listening has made this 3-star podcast a 5-star experience. Thank you.“
It’s the end. It’s an emotional end. I feel his reasons for the hiatus, and I’m saddened by both the hiatus and the reasons. I’m in mourning mode. And I still cry a little throughout the credits as Green thanks all the people who have helped him make the show… and his wife… and finally the listeners.
His last words are a repetition of a repetition he’d recited just a couple minutes earlier:
“Live your life, live your life, live your life…”
Thank you, John Green. I will.
I just find the format so awkward! If I have the means I prefer reading or watching, so it always feels like listening to podcasts is only ever appropriate when I have rote chores to do and I want to keep my mind from wandering aimlessly (which tends not to bode well for said chores).
Because, again, it was a podcast and when was I ever going to find an appropriate time for that?
And there were many, from the extra support I was able to give my wife to all the baby milestones I would surely have missed if I had been working at an office during this period.
Which, as a non-American, has always sounded to me like some sort of fantasy potion which is not part of the real world. And I must say learning more about it has only reinforced this view.
I don’t care that he makes self-deprecating jokes about how he is a “one-note baritone” — I like that note!
Do we know if the podcast will come back after all? Or have all the new reviews gone into the book? I’d love to know!
Yes, he does realise the irony that he is sharing this with listeners. Later on he wonders whether he can truly build a path just for himself to see.
When I say “treated”, I mean it. Usually these ads come in between the two reviews in each episode, so they’re not unexpected. Like the show itself, they are always entertaining and informative. Coming in the middle of a longer review doesn’t take anything away from them — and arguably it improves the review by sticking a literal financial necessity of his business right in the middle of it. Anyway, the ad starts talking about how Edmond Halley once pored through reams of birth and death certificates to calculate statistics on life expectancy. He makes fun of the comically long title of Halley’s resulting publication. Only after a while does he make the connection between this and the insurance business that’s funding the show, Policygenius. The ad concludes with “Policygenius: better life insurance than even Edmond Halley could have imagined… I’m really gonna miss coming out with new slogans for Policygenius!”