[Forget about my lists … Derek Thompson’s is much better. The problem is, his are depressing. Mine are mostly feel-good. Give a look and decide for yourself. SB SM]
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-26-most-important-ideas-for-2026
Here’s a sample:
- The Past Sucked, Part I: Be glad you don’t live in Italy in the mid-500s
I consider myself an optimist, not because I think the present is so wonderful, but rather because I’m confident that the past was so terrible. I was recently reminded of the pure horribleness of our ancestors while reading about the depopulation of Europe during the Dark Ages. In his review of the book The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages by Shane Bobrycki, Pablo Scheffer writes in the London Review of Books about one of the worst times to be alive in the last few thousand years, which was Italy in the mid-500s CE.
In the late 530s, a series of volcanic eruptions sent temperatures plummeting throughout Europe, which was already grappling with plagues, food shortages, social crises, and the political fallout of the end of the Roman Empire. Rome itself, once a metropolis of more than a million people, saw its population shrink to about 30,000—about half the capacity of the Colosseum. Wars cut off the city from trade. Aqueducts were demolished, pinching off the water supply. In the 540s, the Justinianic Plague decimated the already decimated ruins of the empire. As grain harvests collapsed, starvation spread like yet another epidemic. “Cities [lie] in ruin,” Pope Gregory I wrote at the end of the sixth century. Scheffer continues:
Between 500 and 1000 there was a trend of population decline and deurbanisation, the result of a degrading climate (the cold, arid period between the volcanic winter of 536 and 660 is sometimes called the Late Antique Little Ice Age), continuous warfare and a series of plague epidemics …
All over Europe buildings stood empty. The eighth-century writer Paul the Deacon described Metz as ‘abounding with crowds’, but also noted that its old amphitheatre had been ‘given over to wild snakes’. Bath, as depicted in the Old English poem ‘The Ruin’, had been all but abandoned: ‘Hrofas sind gehrorene, hreorge torras/hringeat berofen, hrim on lime’ (’Roofs are collapsed, towers ruined/the ring-gate destroyed, rime on mortar’). The crumbling Roman buildings hint at a past so grand and distant that the poem’s speaker imagines them as enta geweorc, the work of giants.