Day 220: Today's Pick — *The Anthropocene Reviewed* by John Green

There is a category of essay that the internet seems to be slowly forgetting how to publish, and it is the small, slightly philosophical, deliberately personal review-essay — 1,500 words on a single subject, written from somewhere between memoir and criticism, ending on a small unbidden note of feeling.

John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed is a book of forty-four of them, and it is one of the small genuine gifts of the last decade.

Some context. John Green is a Young Adult novelist (The Fault in Our Stars, Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, others) who, alongside his brother Hank, has been making YouTube videos and podcasts since approximately the dawn of YouTube. The Anthropocene Reviewed started as a podcast in 2018 — a single episode would be a 20-minute essay in which John reviewed two seemingly random things "on a five-star scale." Diet Dr. Pepper. The Indianapolis 500. Sycamore trees. Auld Lang Syne. The QWERTY keyboard. The book, published by Dutton in 2021, collects forty-four of those essays, lightly revised, and it is, in my opinion, the best thing John Green has ever written.

The conceit is simple and elastic. Each essay takes a single subject from the human-shaped present — what scientists have informally started calling the Anthropocene, the geological era in which humans are the dominant force on the planet — and writes a small, generous, personal-essay-style review of it. The subjects are deliberately mismatched in scale and seriousness. "Plague" sits next to "Sunsets." "Capacity" sits next to "Halley's Comet." The five-star rating, awarded at the end of each essay, is the vehicle for the joke and also for the genuine emotional stakes: how do we evaluate a sunset? With what scale? Compared to what? Five stars or four-and-a-half?

The essays are short — most run between 1,500 and 3,000 words — and they share a consistent shape. John starts with a fact. He digresses through some history and personal anecdote. He arrives, often by surprise, at something close to a small thesis. Then he assigns the rating. The whole thing reads, from a writing-craft perspective, like a small machine designed to take you somewhere unexpected in 12 minutes flat. Used a few at a time, they are gorgeous. Read end to end, the structure starts to feel slightly mechanical — but I would argue this is a non-issue, because the right way to read this book is one or two essays at a time, on a couch, before sleep.

A small list of the essays I would read first.

"Halley's Comet." A small history of a single comet, woven through John's father's Halley's-Comet-related deathbed memories. Will, almost without warning, make you cry on a Tuesday afternoon.

"You'll Never Walk Alone." A history of the Liverpool Football Club anthem and its strange life as a song that has, by accident, become a kind of secular hymn. The ending sentence is a perfect small piece of prose.

"Diet Dr. Pepper." Funny. Stupid. Surprisingly moving. The platonic Anthropocene Reviewed essay.

"Sycamore Trees." John lives in Indianapolis. There is a sycamore tree in his neighborhood. The essay is about more than the tree. Of course it is.

"The QWERTY Keyboard." A small history of the keyboard layout you are almost certainly typing on right now, and an argument for its accidental survival.

"Plague." A history of the bubonic plague, written and published during the early COVID-19 pandemic. Read it now; it lands differently in 2026 than it did in 2021.

A note on the audiobook. John Green narrates the audiobook himself. He has a slightly nasal, kind, careful voice, and a small narrative quirk where he is willing to laugh at his own jokes, which is the audiobook equivalent of a smile across a table. The audiobook is, in my opinion, the slightly better version of the work; the essays were written for podcast performance and they read aloud with a small extra warmth. The unabridged audiobook runs about ten hours and is, in audiobook-currency, eight commutes long.

Practical buying notes. Hardcover is around $26 at retail; paperback (released 2022) is closer to $17. The audiobook is on Audible, Libro.fm, and Spotify Premium. There is, importantly, a deluxe hardcover edition with a stenciled cover and slightly nicer paper that, if you tend to gift books, is the version to gift. (I have given this six times and counting.)

A small final thought. The Anthropocene Reviewed is, in some quiet way, the most successful argument I have read for the small personal-essay form in the era of the internet. The essays are short enough to be readable on a phone, generous enough to feel like a friend talking to you, and structurally rigorous enough to repay close reading. There is a future for this kind of writing. John Green has shown what it looks like.

Day 220. The pick is a book that fits in a back pocket, more or less. Bring it on the train.