(Immediately, the reader is primed for the sequel: “What Was I Thinking.”) One of the book’s standout preoccupations is whether Trump is an asteroid or a fungus. Which brings me to Carlos Lozada’s new book, “ What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era.” Lozada, the nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post, revisits all the books on Donald Trump that he’s read since 2015: about a hundred and fifty titles, each purporting to illuminate the man and his times. If they do, a scientist informed the podcast’s warm-blooded host, the age of mammals might be revealed for what it is: an epoch-spanning fluke. Our ancient enemies, it seems, are beginning to tolerate dangerously high temperatures, and could soon gain the ability to thrive in warm-blooded hosts. (To the episode’s credit, it didn’t end with the words “and that’s how we got Trump.”) The next segment was about the many thousands of species of fungi that are now evolving in response to climate change. I learned this history from a podcast, “Radiolab,” while desperately seeking distraction from an apocalyptic news cycle. Molds flourished and bloomed, colonizing the flesh of cold-blooded vertebrates meanwhile, the trait that seemed to spell doom for the mammals-their heat-protected them. How did such inefficient life-forms beat the competition? One explanation is that the dark, wet Earth, newly crowded with decaying matter, became a fungal paradise. For years, this rise was a scientific mystery. In the rebooted world, mammals reigned, despite their high body temperatures (which chewed up calories) and relatively low reproductive rates. It was exeunt dinosaurs, along with most life on the planet. Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid slammed into Earth, releasing such a thick plume of toxic particles that most of the creatures spared by tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and wildfires died of asphyxiation, cold, or hunger.
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