Hello and welcome to the Anthropocene Reviewed, a podcast reviewing different facets of

the Human-Centered Planet on a five-star scale.

I'm John Green and today I'll be reviewing my hometown of Indianapolis and the concept

of love at first sight, a phenomenon that I don't believe in and yet have experienced.

Let's begin with the city of Indianapolis, the 16th largest city in the U.S. by both population

and land area. My wife Sarah and I moved here in the summer of 2007. We drove a U-Haul with all

our worldly belongings from the corner of 88th in Columbus and New York City to the corner of 86th

and ditch road in Indianapolis, an incredibly stressful 16-hour drive. When we finally arrived in

Indianapolis, we unpacked all our stuff and slept on an air mattress in our new home. The first

place we'd ever owned, we were in our late 20s and we'd bought this house a few weeks earlier

after spending maybe a half hour inside of it. The house had three bedrooms, two and a half

baths and a half finished basement and our mortgage payment was a third of what our New York rented

in. I couldn't get over how quiet and dark the house was that first night. I kept telling Sarah that

someone could be standing right outside our bedroom window and we wouldn't even know. And then Sarah

would say, well, but probably not. And I'm just not the sort of person who is effectively comforted

by probabilities. So several times through the night, I got up from the air mattress and pressed my

face against the glass of the bedroom window, expecting to see eyes staring back at me, but instead

finding only darkness. The next morning, I insisted we buy some curtains, but first we had to drop

off that U-Haul. At the U-Haul return place, a guy handed us some paperwork to fill out and asked

us where we were coming from. Sarah explained that we'd moved from New York for her job at the Indian

apolis Museum of Art and the guy said he'd been to the museum once as a kid. And then Sarah said,

so what do you think of Indianapolis? And then the guy standing behind the counter at the U-Haul

...