The Anthropocene Reviewed

The Anthropocene Reviewed is the shared name of a podcast and 2021 nonfiction book by John Green. The podcast started in January 2018, with each episode featuring Green reviewing "different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale". The name comes from the Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch that includes significant human impact on the environment. Episodes typically contain Green reviewing two topics, accompanied by stories on how they have affected his life. These topics included intangible concepts like humanity's capacity for wonder; artificial products like Diet Dr. Pepper; natural species, such as the Canada goose, whose fates have been altered by human influence; and phenomena that primarily influence humanity, such as Halley's Comet.

The podcast was released monthly until September 2020, when Green announced he was putting it on hiatus as he adapted it into a book. The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet, was published by Dutton Penguin on May 18, 2021, featuring revised essays from the podcast and several new essays. The book received positive reviews and debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list. After the release of a four-episode season accompanying the book's publication, Green announced he had no plans to release any more episodes.

Each podcast typically covers two topics, which have included celestial phenomena, works of art, diseases, and human emotions. The subjects serve as starting points for explorations of Green's own life and perspectives in the form of memoir-like essays, which have been described as "thought-provoking reviews [that] use a blend of poetry, historical detail and humor."

The premise for the podcast was born from a number of sources. Green worked for the book review journal Booklist in the early 2000s, where he reviewed hundreds of books over five years, sparking his interest in reviews as a literary format.

In October 2017, after the release of Green's novel Turtles All the Way Down, he and his brother Hank Green went on a book tour. As they traveled the country, they passed time by finding Google user reviews for the places they were passing that they considered absurd, such as a one-star review for Badlands National Park. While reflecting on the increased prevalence of reviews and the five-star scale in modern life, John told Hank he had once had an idea to write a review of Canada geese, to which Hank responded, "The Anthropocene... reviewed!"

A few months later, John shared some reviews he had written in 2014 on Canada geese and Diet Dr Pepper with his wife, Sarah Urist Green. After noting that John wrote the reviews in a nonfiction form of third-person omniscient narration, Sarah pointed out that reviews often act as a form of memoir, saying, "in the Anthropocene, there are no disinterested observers; there are only participants." John cited this as a major reason he chose to put more of himself into the reviews.

In the introduction to The Anthropocene Reviewed book, Green also revealed that he had begun to have trouble writing fiction because of the ways readers were conflating his protagonists' views with his own. Green specifically referenced a 2017 Allegra Goodman quote; Goodman was asked who she would like to have write her life story, to which she responded, "I seem to be writing it myself, but since I'm a novelist, it's all in code." In a 2021 interview with The New York Times, Green elaborated, saying, "I didn't want to write in code anymore. I wanted to try to write as myself because I've never done that in any formal way."

The podcast's first episode was published on January 29, 2018. In a November 2018 interview with Vulture, Green said, "The Anthropocene Reviewed is an opportunity for me to get back to my roots. With the podcast, I want to pay careful and sustained attention to the world around me, and that's something I often feel like I don't do, especially when I'm on the internet."