 That's not, like, a rhetorical question. I really don't know. Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. So in wonderful news, the Anthropocene Reviewed book is here. It's so beautiful. I'm so grateful to the people who made this book. There are so many wonderful details. Like, these are the endpapers. They're based on my circle drawings. And then if you go to the endpaper opposite the signature page, there's a review of autographs. And yes, even my copy is signed because there are no unsigned copies. I've got just a regular green signature, by the way, but it's a good-looking signature. I mean, I'd say it's like a three-and-a-half-star signature. Okay, so writers are often told to distill their work into an elevator pitch. Like, if you had a short elevator ride with someone to tell them about your book, what would you say? And I think this is always pretty hard because books usually aren't about whatever they're about, right? Like, Turtles All The Way Down isn't really about the disappearance of a local billionaire. It's about mental illness and free will and how it feels to have your consciousness hijacked by intrusive thoughts. An absolutely remarkable thing isn't really about its plot either. This is actually one of the things I wanted to write about in the Anthropocene Reviewed. We want to distill life down into single data points or elevator pitches, but the reality of human experience is so nuanced and multitudinous. So what do I say? Like, here's my actual elevator pitch. Being human in 2021 is very weird. It's weird because we are unprecedentedly powerful, but can still be brought to our knees by a strand of RNA. It's weird because we are, like, made out of Earth, and it's weird because human attention itself is weird. How we pay attention and what we pay attention to ends up shaping the world we share in ways we often don't pay attention to. So I tried to write a book about that. But if I say that, people don't know the premise of the book, so maybe instead I should say that the Anthropocene Reviewed is a book of essays that take the form of extremely in-depth Yelp reviews, except instead of reviewing, like, barbershops and restaurants, I'm reviewing Viral Menengitis and this photograph and the first five minutes of the movie Penguins of Madagascar. Or maybe I should just stick to explanatory facts, like it's my first book of nonfiction, and most of the reviews are adapted from a podcast I write, but some are new to the book. Or maybe I should just quote the blurbs, like, I can hardly do better than my podcast hero Anna Sayle of Death, Sex, and Money, who said, The Anthropocene Reviewed somehow satisfies all the contradictory demands I have for a book right now. It stimulates my brain while getting me out of my head, while taking me to faraway places, while grounding me in the wonders of my every day. That's lovely. But I wonder if I should also say that, like, the book is intended to be a memoir? It begins in my childhood when I saw Haley's Comet and smelled scratch-and-sniff stickers and moved through my adolescence, when I became fascinated by the internet, and then through my 20s when I worked at a children's hospital and survived a mental health crisis, and then into adulthood and becoming a parent. And so in that sense, it's a really personal book, but it's also about, like, Canada Geese and the Black Death and this particular kind of wintry precipitation called Garoppel. I don't know what the book is about. I guess it's about whether E.E. Cummings was right when he wrote that snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. It's about how it feels to live in what Mary Oliver called this the one world we all belong to, where everything sooner or later is part of everything else. It's about the terror of time passing and me with it. It's about the silliness and indispensability of the five-star scale, and it's about how this last year changed all the past ones and also all the future ones. But that all makes it sound quite serious when, hopefully, it's often funny. So yeah, I don't know. If you've listened to the podcast, maybe you know what the book is about and can tell me in comments because I cannot seem to figure out how to talk about it. I do know, however, that signed copies of The Anthropocene Reviewed are available for pre-order now and that Grace Hahn's cover is so, so lovely. All right, Hank, I'm off to figure out what The Anthropocene Reviewed is about and then pretend I knew all along. I will see you on Friday.