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Travel back in time to a magic lost world called the 1990s, a world free of 9/11, communism, Covid and an internet that turned nasty on us.

All scores were settled and the rest of history was going to be a trip to Walmart followed by an Olive Garden dinner followed by nonprocreative sex.

In some ways the 1990s were too good to last. By 1998, daily life began feeling like visiting a department store to buy a shirt and realising your Visa card is likely to be declined, and the darkness of the early nineties began to re-emerge. In 2000 the Spice Girls, who may as well have been named The AntiKurt, disbanded and, when tech crashed later that year, a lot of people lost a lot of money — but nobody, to be honest, was the least bit surprised. And then came 9/11.

A flurry of recent scientific papers has tried to measure the warmth of the "Medieval Warm Period" (MWP) of about 1,000 years ago. Scientists have long debated whether it was cooler or warmer than today, and whether the warmth was global or regional. The point for nonscientists: If recent warming has precedents, some might find it less alarming.

Until the late 1990s, researchers generally agreed that the MWP was warmer than today and that the "Little Ice Age" of 1500-1800 was colder. Then in 2001 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change adopted the "hockey stick" graph devised by Michael Mann at the University of Virginia and colleagues. Using temperature indicators such as tree rings and lake sediments, the graph rewrote history by showing little warmth in the 11th century and little cold in the 17th, but a sharp spike in late-20th-century temperatures. That graph helped to persuade many people (such as me) that recent temperature rises were unprecedented in scale and speed in at least 1,400 years.

Four recent studies have now rehabilitated the MWP as a period of unusual warmth, though they disagree on whether it was as warm or warmer than today.

Genetic studies of ancient bones and later American Indians indicate their ancestors came from northeast Asia, possibly across the Bering land bridge at a time of low sea levels during the last ice age. But it has puzzled scientists that nothing like the Clovis technology has ever been found in Siberia.

This book is different from others that I have read on the subject. Its scope is massive, for a start, covering over ten millennia of human history via painstaking analysis of archaeological records, an incredibly ambitious sweep which is essential to Morris’ thesis. At the very beginning, Morris separates the ‘East vs West’ speculators into two rival camps: the ‘long-term’ theorists (i.e. Westerners have always been preternaturally or genetically born to rule others); and the ‘short-term’ theorists (i.e. Westerners gained some breakaway advantage in the relatively recent past that allowed them to decisively break away from their Eastern competitors). He then contends that both of these theories are wrong.

Dividing the world into its ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ cores of industrial civilisation, he pits the Mediterranean-based core (encompassing the Assyrian, Persian, Roman, and ultimately British and American empires) against the Chinese core (encompassing China, Japan, Korea and other powers).

So, what about China and the West? Again, Morris puts this down to time. Agriculture first arose around 10 000 BCE in the so-called ‘hilly flanks’ of Asia; it was not invented in China until around 8500 BCE. This one and a half millennium advantage—combined with a more diverse variety of animals and crops capable of domestication—was enough to give the West its required head start. After this favourable beginning, the West has retained its small technological lead over the East (with one relatively brief exception around the first millennium AD, when China briefly grasped the lead).

His theorem runs as follows. There is no biological reason why the West came to dominate. People in large groups are much the same everywhere – lazy, greedy and scared, and always looking for easier, more profitable and safer ways to do things, “in the process building stronger states, trading further afield, settling in greater cities”. He portrays the rise and fall of empires as amoeba-like movements, in which individuals have little long-term influence. Collapses follow the same cruel pattern: conquest, riches, babies, competition, starvation. The struggle to control the core brings in people from the margin, who then take over – viz the Phoenicians, the Mongols, the Goths, the Huns.

Geography, Morris argues, is the main reason why the West rules. An early lead was established at the end of the last Ice Age by nomadic hunter-gatherers from Africa who settled in an agriculturally benign area known as the Hilly Flanks (modern Israel, Syria, Iraq). Farming replaced foraging; from then on, Western rule by 2000 was “a long-term probability”. Not that China didn’t catch up. In fact, for 1,200 years (between 550 to 1776), China pulled ahead of the West. Marco Polo described China’s commerce as being “on such a stupendous scale that no one who hears tell of it without seeing it for himself can possibly credit it”. Sound familiar? Long before we did, the Chinese had compasses, paper, guns – and maritime superiority. Between 1405 and 1433 a fleet of 300 ships sailed as far afield as East Africa. So why weren’t there Chinese conquistadors? Geography again. America was twice as far away as from Europe – and in 1424 long-distance voyages were banned.

Under the plan, the bulk of the estimated 5 million people who could be protected from deportation would be parents of U.S. citizens or green card holders who have lived in the country for more than five years. According to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, as many as 3.7 million undocumented immigrants could fall into this category; beginning next spring, they could register with the government, undergo a background check, start paying taxes, and gain protected status for up to three years.

Another 290,000 immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children would also be newly protected under an expansion of Obama's original Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The administration is eliminating the age cutoff for DACA, which had been open only to people under 31, and it is allowing immigrants to apply if they have lived in the U.S. since 2010, not 2007 as before. The changes will increase the number of people eligible for that program to about 1.5 million,

another 1 million immigrants would be newly protected from deportation under the other reforms in the president's directive.

In A.D. 410, Roman authority in Britain collapsed and Romano-British society disappeared from history under the invading tides of Angles and Saxons from northern Europe. Historians have been debating ever since whether the Romano-British were wiped out or survived by adopting their conquerors’ language and culture

A fine-scale genetic analysis of the British population has now provided the answer. The invaders and the existing population lived side by side and eventually intermarried extensively. The people of south and central England are now genetically well mixed, with Saxon genes accounting for only about 20 percent of the mix

The British Isles were wiped clean of people by the glaciers that descended toward the end of the last ice age, and were repopulated some 10,000 years ago by people who trekked over the broad land bridge that then joined eastern England to Europe north of the Rhine. The researchers say they can identify the genetic signature of this early migration, which survives most strongly in people from the western extremity of Wales.

My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth

Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

Just as important, our record is long enough that we could search for the fingerprint of solar variability, based on the historical record of sunspots. That fingerprint is absent. Although the I.P.C.C. allowed for the possibility that variations in sunlight could have ended the “Little Ice Age,” a period of cooling from the 14th century to about 1850, our data argues strongly that the temperature rise of the past 250 years cannot be attributed to solar changes

In the last half-billion years, life on Earth has been nearly wiped out five times—by such things as climate change, an intense ice age, volcanoes, and that space rock that smashed into the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago, obliterating the dinosaurs and a bunch of other species. These events are known as the Big Five mass extinctions, and all signs suggest we are now on the precipice of a sixth.

So, places that have been isolated for a long time. Those are very vulnerable. Species that have a very restricted range, that exist only in one spot in the world, those tend to be extremely vulnerable. They have nowhere to go and if their habitat is destroyed, say, then they’re gone.

I don’t think there’s any dispute that we are responsible for the elevated extinction rates we see now. There are very few, if any, extinctions that we know about in the last 100 years that would have taken place without human activity. I have never heard anyone argue, “oh extinction rates, that’s just a natural thing that would have happened with or without humans.” It’s just pretty much impossible to argue that.

we’re in a recession and everyone knows it. And what we’re experiencing is so much more than that: a black swan, a financial war, a plague

To quantify the present reality, we have to rely on anecdotes from businesses, surveys of workers, shreds of private data, and a few state numbers. They show an economy not in a downturn or a contraction or a soft patch, not experiencing losses or selling off or correcting. They show evaporation, disappearance on what feels like a religious scale.

What is happening is a shock to the American economy more sudden and severe than anyone alive has ever experienced

Lombardo and colleagues reveal how they made their discovery after investigating “forest islands” – raised, wooded areas, about 70 meters in diameter – within savanna in Llanos de Moxos, Bolivia.

Using a range of sources, including Google Earth, the team report more than 6,600 forest islands in Llanos de Moxos, adding that they looked at the makeup of soil samples at 82 of the sites, finding more than 60 showed telltale signs of human occupation – such as charcoal, shells and bone fragments. From these findings, the team estimated at least 4,700 of the “forest islands” identified were sites where humans once lived – and chucked their waste.

“They are places where people just threw their rubbish after eating or whatever they did,” said Lombardo, noting the accumulation went on for thousands of years, resulting in a raised platform that, safe from the savannah’s seasonal floods, eventually became colonised by trees.

Hurricane Harvey offers a glimpse of a likely global future; a future whose average temperatures are as different from ours as ours are from those of the last ice age.

It is a future in which emergency becomes the norm, and no state has the capacity to respond.

It is a future in which, as a paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters notes, disasters like Houston’s occur in some cities several times a year. It is a future that, for people in countries such as Bangladesh, has already arrived, almost unremarked on by the rich world’s media.

I was dismissive of the Anthropocene, a proposed new epoch of Earth history that has long since escaped its geoscience origins to become a dimly defined buzzword and, as such (I argued), serves to inflate humanity’s eventual geological legacy to those unfamiliar with deep time.

Wing is on the Anthropocene Working Group, a group of scientists working to define just such an epoch. He hated my essay. In his manner, though, he was extremely nice about it.

the essence of a lot of Faulkner is, before you can be something new and different, slavery is always there, the legacy of slavery is not erased, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past,’

Although historians differ on our most crucial presidential elections, four of them seem especially significant: those of 1800, 1860, 1932, and 1940. In 2007, Harvard historian Jill Lepore wrote that the 1800 election pitting John Adams against Thomas Jefferson “is the most important election in American history.” In 2012, another scholar, David Mayhew of Yale, considering various criteria, selected the election of 1860 as the most important one, followed by that of 1932. Finally, FDR scholar Paul Sparrow considers the 1940 election our most important: “If you step back and look at its impact on the world, no election was more important.”

But why these four? Regarding 1800, Lepore notes that the election “marked the first transition of power from one party to another. It led to the passage, in 1804, of the Twelfth Amendment, separating the election of Presidents and Vice-Presidents. . . . It might have—and should have—spelled the end of the Electoral College.” Mayhew concurs that 1800 “settled the point that the incumbent party would accept a loss and hand power over to the opposition--thus ensuring that we would continue to have elections

Lincoln’s 1860 election was followed by the Civil War and the end of slavery. If any of Lincoln’s three main opponentshad won, secession, the civil war, and the abolition of slavery would likely not have immediately followed

Decades of growing crisis are already locked into the global ecosystem and cannot be reversed.

This means the kinds of cascading disasters occurring today — drought in the West fueling historic wildfires that send smoke all the way to the East Coast, or parades of tropical storms lining up across the Atlantic to march destructively toward North America — are no longer features of some dystopian future. They are the here and now, worsening for the next generation and perhaps longer, depending on humanity’s willingness to take action.

“And I think it’s a lot harder for people to say that I’m being alarmist now.”

Lawmakers are interrogating tech C.E.O.s on Capitol Hill while the Justice Department pursues a landmark antitrust case against Google. For decades, tech giants have avoided such scrutiny — hiding behind the idea that their products are free, beneficial, even beloved.

Ms. Khan served as counsel to the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee in this summer’s investigation, helping expose how Silicon Valley’s most revered companies use data and power to undercut, threaten and swallow up their competition.

Big Tech’s practices have had a “chilling effect” on the American economy, and that it’s time to drag the nation’s antitrust thinking out of the “ice age.”

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

Some of the most popular sports, like athletics and swimming, have had unofficial world rankings based largely on form in any given season. But generally onlookers have had to rely on the odds produced by bookmakers for a guide of who is likely to win Olympic glory.

The most comprehensive publicly available projection belongs to Gracenote Sports, an analytics company owned by Nielsen, an American market-research firm.