Hello and welcome to the Anthropocene Reviewed, a podcast where we review different facets

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

I'm John Green, still recording at home, and today I'll be reviewing a song called

You'll Never Walk Alone, and the performance of a Polish goalkeeper named Jersey DuDec

on May 25, 2005.

But let's begin with the song.

I don't know about you, but I've had a real one-star month, not least because I do not have

a brain that is very well suited to this.

I find more and more incidentally that I refer to it as it and this without naming or

needing to name, because we are sharing the rare human experience so ubiquitous that

the pronouns require no antecedent.

Horror and suffering abound in every direction, and I want this podcast to be a break from it

for you and for me.

But still, it makes its way in, like light through window blinds, like floodwater through

shut doors.

It occurs to me that you are listening in my future, a fact that has always been true,

but now seems relevant.

Maybe you are listening in a future so distant from my present that this is over.

I mean, I know it will never fully end.

The next normal will be different from the last one, but there will be a next normal,

and I hope you are living in it, and I hope I am living in it with you.

But in the meantime, we have to live in this.

...