History Compresses Vast Sprawls of Time, Lives, Events and Trends

The past feels simpler because we encounter it through maps, not terrain. History is what chaos looks like after it’s been cleaned up—after blind alleys, detours, and parallel parades have been edited out.

The 1900s took billions of people a full century to live—a collective experience amounting to something like a trillion human years. We condense all of that into a book that takes six hours to read or a documentary that runs for an hour.

It’s the difference between a thousand acres of dry-land wheat and a single slice of bread.