Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create

I am reading Rings of Saturn, and in chapter VII, W. G. Sebald writes that the entire British Isles were covered with dense forests after the last ice age. This phase of evolution was halted when the first …

The trap the world has become

I am reading The Art of the Novel, where Milan Kundera, in conversation with Christian Salmon, is asked to explain what he means by the term “trap” as used in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In the …

Contests of civilization

I am reading The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, and I was fascinated by the stories that describe how, during the time of European settlement in the Americas, white settlers who had …