One Third

Processing Charles Mann & Jared Diamond I’m particularly interested in the Americas before they were the Americas, that is, before the Europeans arrived and took over and pretty much ruined everything, either enslaved, murdered, raped (or all three) most of the people living in the Americas at the time. There’s a book I read a bit ago, 1491 , about this very momentous period. In it, the author, Charles Mann, a science journalist, claims that past accountings of the number of people living in the Americas before the Europeans laid anchor has been off by millions. In fact, the American cities of Tenotchilcán and others were home to more people in their day than the European gems of Paris and London. In the year 1491, the world population was roughly 500 million of whom at least 100 million lived in the New World. This is a lot more people than we were told about when we were in grade school. A whole lot more. The book goes on to explore who they were, what happened to them, and why ...

12. This Morning I ran into Jennie, a ginger-haired young woman who works at the same company I do (should it remain nameless? have I already let its name slip?), this morning while parking our bikes. She sports a bright pink helmet, one of those not meant for cyclists but for skateboarders. It serves its purpose just the same, I bet, and helps her out by making her flashy (and, for those safety-conscious readers out there, quite visible) on the street. We headed into the hall to wait for the elevators to suck us out of level P1 when we spotted what at first looked like a cockroach on the brown tiled floor. She nudged it with her sandal. She asked me, “Is that what I think it is?” I responded, “Looks like a cross between a multivitamin and a button from my ankle-length mauve winter coat from the mid-'80s.” She then told me about a woman in her department who died two days before while eating out. Some sort of violent food allergy. Here's her story (I’m not mentioning this to b...