I sit in a cafe two minutes from my house, wait for my coffee to arrive and listen to what, though I do not know this at the time, will likely be the last episode of The Anthropocene Reviewed.
The Anthropocene Reviewed was a podcast created by John Green which reviews elements of the human-centered world on a five star scale. It has tackled subjects from The QWERTY Keyboard (four stars), to Cholera (one star), to Diet Doctor Pepper (four and a half stars). Like anything, the project is more than it’s premise. It is a rumination on the capacity of mankind, and the role which we have played in shaping our world. Green told stories I’d never heard before, presented with the intimacy only a podcast can capture. As if the host was revealing some deep truth only him and I now share.
There’s a further intimacy too, in the process of seeking out a podcast. There’s no algorithm or YouTube search bar to tell you what to consume next. More often than not, we rely on recommendations from friends. It feels curated, like there is effort put into forging this new relationship which demands so much more time and attention than a three minute song.
The Anthropocene Reviewed always had the courage to create hope and exist in earnestness. There are only 32 episodes, but each feels carefully considered and deeply important. So when I sat down with my coffee and pressed play on “The Anthropocene Reviewed, Reviewed,” – a self conscious and emotional retrospective on the project itself – I was immediately moved. I looked blankly across the table as Green announced that this podcast would be going on indefinite hiatus.
Within minutes I was weeping, feeling exactly how I felt when I first heard the episode I return to most frequently, “Googling Strangers and Kentucky Bluegrass”. In the particular review of Googling Strangers (a two and a half star endeavor), Green bolsters the philosophy of the project, that non-fiction reviews are always a type of memoir. This one feels as much like a prayer. He talks about his previous life as a hospital chaplain, counselling the parents of a child close to death, a child he never knew the fate of— until he Googled him years later. “He is alive. He likes terrible, overly-manufactured country music. He is alive. He calls his girlfriend his bae. Alive. Alive. Alive.” I wept that day too, inside another world for twenty minutes. Yet again, the message was more of a command: hope.
Of course, it is not the case that Green was talking directly to me. Podcasters are people and they are not your best friends, or even people you sort of know, and sometimes they need to take an indefinite break. It feels so intimate for someone to speak directly into your ear while you are doing the dishes or going for a walk, but podcasters have the task of building this intimacy with people who are completely unknown to them. They give a lot, and we lend only our ears. It speaks to the skill of the writer or host that they can bridge this gap, wade through the gulf between them and the audience, and elicit the feeling of companionship.
Despite the manufactured intimacy, it would be a mistake to prohibit ourselves from mourning the end of anything that matters to us, even an art form so frequently the target of derision as the podcast. A sense of routine breaks down when podcasts end. I no longer know what I will do on the last Thursday of every month, where I usually sit with a coffee and The Anthropocene Reviewed.
The final episode felt like being dumped by someone who had never met me. As a salve to this pain, Green says, “To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering… [it] is merely to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance.” The stories forced me to spend time with the mundane, to take the care to explore and sometimes even love what we take for granted. Tetris; Rock, Paper Scissors; Monopoly, all of the things which do not spring to mind when we recall what makes up our little world. To listen to these stories was in many ways, to learn how to fall in love with the world.
The project will return in a new way, with a book of collected essays in May 2021. I don’t doubt that it will have the same heart, the same love, the same promise of hope that I am mourning the loss of today. As Green says, “this whole thing you’ve been doing where almost nothing gets five stars because almost nothing is perfect? That’s b.s. So much is perfect. Starting with this.” I give The Anthropocene Reviewed five stars.
