The Well — December 16, 2025

A night where awe took center stage

Big Think and the John Templeton Foundation gathered scientists, artists, and storytellers in Los Angeles to explore the power of awe.

Some events you attend. Others you experience. Our recent gathering — A Night of Awe and Wonder — was decidedly the latter.

The event, produced by Big Think in partnership with the John Templeton Foundation, set out to explore a simple idea: What is awe and how does it inform our lives, our work, and our purpose? In the interdisciplinary style you have come to expect from our work on The Well, we invited seven speakers and a musician to help us unpack the nature of awe from their vantage points.

Dacher Keltner opened the evening by grounding us in what we came for: awe itself. Not as mystical abstraction, but as a universal emotion backed by rigorous science. He framed why awe matters — how it rewires our brains for resilience, dissolves ego boundaries, and makes us more generous, creative, and fully alive.

“Awe,” he explained, “is an emotion you feel in the spine tingling, the lump in the throat, the warmth in the chest — when we encounter vast mysteries we don’t understand. Wonder follows those big experiences of awe. It’s an epistemological state that animates exploration, curiosity, and discovery.”

With that context, the narrative arc of the evening took the audience from awe in the external — the cosmos, deep-sea exploration, even communication with whales — to awe in the personal and intimate.

Janna Levin carried us beyond Earth into the cosmos, where black holes bend reality and the universe reveals its poetic mysteries. She explained that her work — exploring the vast scales of the universe — can cause people to feel a sense of dread or an existential crisis about their imagined insignificance. But she said it has the opposite effect on her: “It gives me a great sense of being part of a grander story of connecting all the way back to the Big Bang.” 

Instead of ruminating on our relative smallness, she reminded the audience of our connection to the universe:

You are the glowing, luminous exception in a universe of darkness. You are an arrangement of agnostic atoms, forged in stars that can only act and react exactly as prescribed. Yet you contain multitudes. You are the history of the collisions in the universe, the explosions from stars that threw matter back out into the universe to form into the planets and your body. You are evidence of the entire universe grinding into being. You are a droplet precipitated from the 5% of that gooey residue left over from the Big Bang. And you’re briefly aware and you’re briefly illuminated.

It was a powerful reminder that wonder is woven into the very fabric of existence, including yours and mine.

Victor Vescovo then brought us back to our own planet, albeit its most extreme edges. Through stories of scaling the world’s highest mountains, diving into its deepest ocean trenches, and venturing into space, he showed how pushing into Earth’s extremes sparks transcendence and reveals what we’re truly capable of.

“None of us make it out of here alive,” he reminded the crowd. “So appreciate every moment that you have — work assiduously to grasp small moments of awe every day. In doing so, you will feel more connected to the people around you, to the world around you.”

David Gruber offered something entirely new: a first look at Project CETI’s groundbreaking efforts to decode whale communication. “The window [has] finally opened for humans to use advanced machine learning and robotics to translate what whales are saying,” he said. “This has now led to the largest interspecies communication effort in history, with over 50 scientists from eight disciplines all working together just to know what whales are saying.”

David shared some rare whale-song recordings originally captured by Frank Watlington, the naval engineer who first recorded humpback whales in the 1950s while monitoring hydrophones for Soviet submarines off Bermuda. Watlington later passed his tapes to biologist Roger Payne — David’s mentor — whose analysis helped reveal that whales communicate through complex, structured “songs.” Watching the room lean forward in unison as these intelligent voices filled the space was in itself a moment of awe.

Musician Robot Koch — whose music was described by the BBC’s Bobby Friction as “artificial intelligence discovering religion” — then enveloped us in a performance that felt nearly extraterrestrial. These soundscapes did more than accompany the evening’s themes — they embodied them.

David S. Goyer, the acclaimed screenwriter, director, and producer, explored how moral imagination and wonder fuel the stories that shape culture, drawing from decades of work that’s helped define modern mythology on screen.

“A storyteller is someone who crafts and shares narratives that illuminate the human experience, that invites listeners to see themselves in the stories that we tell,” he said. “Awe is one of the storytellers’ most powerful tools.”

Rainn Wilson then went deep and philosophical, connecting awe to meaning, spirituality, and our longing for something larger than ourselves. He shared the traumatic story of the birth of his son and how it shaped his understanding of the sacred and how even “a drab hallway lit by flickering fluorescent lights lined by folding chairs in the back of a crappy hospital in Van Nuys, California,” where doctors were ultimately able to save the life of both his infant son and his wife, can become “the most sacred place that I can conceive.”

He explains that this led him to a greater conclusion: that true sacred experience can be found beyond religion and ritual. In fact, it is our ability to experience awe and wonder that can unite us. It lives in acts of courage and kindness, and it’s our shared capacity for awe in the face of that beauty, Wilson suggested, that can bring us closer together.

And finally, Kelly Corrigan closed the evening by bringing us home. Her story of losing her mother reminded us that awe does not reside solely in black holes or mysterious ocean depths. Sometimes it dwells in the small, ordinary moments that quietly shape a meaningful life. It was moving, grounding, and the perfect conclusion.

It was an amazing honor to host this event with our friends at the John Templeton Foundation. The evening was a reminder to all of us why we can’t afford to forget how to be amazed. We’ve built a world that too often strips wonder away. We’re buried in screens and schedules, living smaller, more fearful, more disconnected lives than our biology intended. Awe isn’t just a nice feeling — it’s a biological imperative, an antidote to our age of anxiety and isolation.

The conversations that continued long after the last speaker left the stage, the connections being made between people from wildly different worlds, the ideas sparked — that’s what happens when you put awe back where it belongs: at the center of everything.

This article A night where awe took center stage is featured on Big Think.

Billions of dollars are currently being poured into a technology that doesn’t actually exist. Governments are drafting regulations for it. Universities are reorganizing research priorities around it. Think tanks are hosting roundtables about it.

No one can say exactly when, or even if, this technology — artificial general intelligence (AGI) — will arrive. Yet the idea of it is already shaping budgets, careers, and policy. The story of AGI is acting like infrastructure for the tech, inspiring the systems and structures needed to actually bring it to fruition.

This is not an anomaly. Progress in steel and silicon has long been preceded by progress in imagination. Jules Verne’s novels prepared readers for submarines and space travel. Star Trek’s communicator device inspired engineers to create the mobile phone. Douglas Engelbart’s famous “Mother of All Demos” showed a mouse and hypertext before most people had touched a computer — a generation of researchers left his talk determined to build what they had just seen.

On the Foresight Institute’s Existential Hope podcast, I’ve heard many versions of the same story. Someone reads Douglas Hofstadter as a teenager and starts thinking seriously about intelligence. Someone else discovers Richard Feynman and realizes curiosity itself could be a vocation. Another encounters Eric Drexler and begins imagining technology as world-shaping. Each version is different, but they all follow the same pattern: a story tips curiosity into commitment.

We usually think of infrastructure as bridges, satellites, and fiber-optic cables. But beneath steel and concrete lies something less tangible but just as powerful: culture — the stories and symbols that make some futures seem absurd, others inevitable, and a few worth building.

Culture kickstarts progress

Progress rests on multiple layers. At the top is hard infrastructure: bridges, laboratories, power grids, and rockets. Beneath that lies soft infrastructure: laws, institutions, and systems that make the hardware useful. And beneath both rests a third layer: invisible infrastructure. Culture. The stories, narratives, and memes that determine which futures feel plausible and worth pursuing.

This layer is easy to overlook because it doesn’t leave behind blueprints or legislation. Yet history shows its importance. The Enlightenment was not an engineering project but a cultural shift. In coffee houses and pamphlets, curiosity and reason became public virtues. That shift created the conditions for modern science and the Industrial Revolution. The machines were built in workshops, but the idea that machines could transform the human condition was built in culture first.

Progress studies itself can be seen as a cultural movement as much as a research agenda. By reframing “progress” as something to be studied, measured, and deliberately pursued, it has opened a new intellectual space. The questions it raises — Why did progress accelerate in the past? Why did it slow? How might it be revived? — are cultural provocations as much as analytical ones. They change how people think about the future, and that change in turn shapes what gets funded, what policies are debated, and what careers bright young people choose.

Hard infrastructure builds the roads. Soft infrastructure sets the rules of the road. Culture decides which destinations are worth visiting.

From fiction to fact

Scientist Michael Nielsen has given us a useful term for understanding how culture shapes progress: the hyper-entity. He defines it as an “imagined hypothetical future object or class of objects” — something that exists in the collective consciousness before (maybe) becoming reality. Today’s hyper-entities include AGI, space elevators, Martian settlements, the Singularity, and universal quantum computers. Past examples might be things like the internet, submarines, and cell phones — they began as cultural ideas before becoming real objects.

Some hyper-entities are still making the transition from imagined to real. In 1984, writer William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in his debut novel, Neuromancer. At the time, hardly anyone outside research labs had used a computer network. Yet Gibson’s imagery — hackers, networks, and virtual worlds — provided a cultural vocabulary. Policymakers and engineers didn’t encounter the internet as a blank slate. They met it through the cyberspace lens, which continues to shape debates about privacy, monopoly power, and online identity.

The solarpunk movement is rich with hyper-entities: neighborhoods powered entirely by renewables, cities interwoven with greenery, technology in service of ecological balance. Designers, architects, and community projects already draw inspiration from it. Like cyberpunk before it, solarpunk could grow from a hyper-entity into reality. It provides a cultural framework that makes sustainable futures feel intuitive.

Hyper-entities can magnify human potential, but they can just as easily magnify inertia.

National projects can start as hyper-entities as well. The Apollo program didn’t begin with rockets. It began with a story. President Kennedy’s line, “We choose to go to the Moon,” transformed space exploration into a cultural commitment. That story outlasted Apollo, evolving into the broader hyper-entity of “space exploration” that still mobilizes engineers, investors, and governments to go deeper into the unknown.

The Green Revolution shows the same pattern. After World War II, hunger was cast as a global challenge and “feeding the world” as a moral imperative — humanity began to imagine a future where no one went to bed hungry. That narrative mobilized scientists, philanthropies, and governments to scale improved crops and irrigation, saving hundreds of millions of lives. Seeds and canals mattered. So did the story that inspired them.

Yet hyper-entities are not always benign. Once they move from the imagination to the real world, they can take on unforeseen characteristics or become rigid and incapable of evolving with the times. The modern education system, once a breakthrough in spreading knowledge, is now often criticized for lagging behind the needs of a changing world. Bureaucracies, once cultural advances in coordination, can calcify into obstacles. Hyper-entities can magnify human potential, but they can just as easily magnify inertia.

And today, AGI is perhaps the most powerful hyper-entity. It doesn’t exist yet, but the story of AGI already shapes budgets, regulation, research agendas, and the careers of thousands. It may never arrive, but for now, the idea itself is acting as cultural infrastructure, organizing effort across society.

The power of memes 

If hyper-entities are the heavyweights of culture, then memes are its quick strikes. 

While hyper-entities are deep, slow-moving structures that will take decades to form, memes are lighter, faster packets of culture: a phrase, an image, an idea designed to be shared and adapted. Richard Dawkins coined the term in 1976 to describe a small unit of cultural transmission. Since then, it has come to mean everything from online jokes to political slogans.

Most memes burn out quickly, but some prove powerful. A few compress complicated ideas into such simple, contagious forms that they shape how people think and act at scale.

Memes aren’t just trivial distractions.

“Move fast and break things” began as an internal motto at Facebook. Within a few years, it had spread across Silicon Valley, becoming shorthand for the entire startup ethos: experiment quickly, worry less about rules, and treat disruption as a virtue. Five words shifted an industry’s attitude.

“Flatten the curve” worked the same way for public health. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, complex epidemiological models struggled to cut through. Then a simple diagram of two curves, paired with a phrase, raced across the internet. Within weeks it had changed how millions of people thought about masks, vaccines, and lockdowns.

Memes aren’t just trivial distractions. The most powerful ones act as cultural infrastructure in miniature: accelerators that can shift public behavior, set the tone of whole industries, or make far-off futures feel urgent. If hyper-entities are the foundations of cultural life, memes are the sparks that can change its direction almost overnight.

When stories stop progress 

Sparks don’t always start the fires you want, though. The same speed that makes memes powerful also makes them volatile. And what’s true for memes is true for culture more broadly: It doesn’t always drive society forward.

The pattern is simple. Culture magnifies, but it does so indiscriminately — it can amplify fear as easily as hope, mistrust as easily as trust, and rigidity as easily as flexibility. Sometimes culture stalls innovation. Genetically modified crops promised higher yields and reduced pesticide use, but public fear — shaped by stories of “Frankenfoods” — slowed adoption in many parts of the world, including places where GMOs might have reduced hunger and improved health.

Nuclear power tells a similar story. Statistically, it’s one of the safest and cleanest energy sources we have. Nevertheless, it has been hobbled by the cultural shadow of Chernobyl and The China Syndrome. In some countries, these narratives mattered more than the data.

Even when culture pushes technologies forward, it can saddle them with unintended baggage. The cyberpunk genre gave us the word “cyberspace,” but also a lens of paranoia and dystopia that still shapes internet policy. “Move fast and break things” energized a generation of startups, but it also normalized a kind of carelessness that society could still be paying for.

Culture is infrastructure, yes, but it is infrastructure that’s more like weather than bridges: largely unpredictable and sometimes destructive. And this volatility is precisely why the tone of culture matters. Left unchecked, fear and cynicism fill the space. To channel culture toward constructive ends, we need something sturdier: hope.

Hope, not optimism

The Enlightenment, the Apollo program, and even today’s debates over AI all show that progress depends not only on technology and institutions, but also on our feelings about the future. Are we complacent, fearful, or hopeful?

Optimism assumes things will work out no matter what. It’s a sunny outlook, but a passive one. If progress is guaranteed, there’s little reason to struggle for it. Fear can be motivating, but it tends to mostly mobilize defensive action. The story of nuclear annihilation led to arms-control treaties and fallout shelters. Dystopian visions of AI fuel safety research and regulation. These are necessary, but they are responses to threats, not investments in possibilities.

Hope is active where optimism is passive. Hope assumes risk and uncertainty. It isn’t blind to challenges, but it believes they can be navigated. Hope doesn’t wait for good outcomes to arrive on their own. It frames progress as something worth fighting for.

History shows the power of hopeful infrastructure.

Thinkers in the progress movement have wrestled with this distinction. Jason Crawford, founder of the Roots of Progress Institute, for example, has contrasted “complacent optimism” with more constructive modes, such as “pragmatic optimism” or “radical optimism.” Complacent optimism assumes progress will happen automatically. Pragmatic optimism insists it can happen, but only if we work for it. These terms are useful because they remind us that hope is not about assuming the future will be bright; it is about deciding to make it so.

History shows the power of this hopeful infrastructure. The Enlightenment wasn’t naïve. Its thinkers were well aware of ignorance and war, and yet they cultivated hope in reason and experiment. That stance built scientific societies, universities, and newspapers — institutions that turned curiosity into a permanent driver of progress.

The Apollo program further illustrates the point. When Kennedy stood at Rice University and declared, “We choose to go to the Moon,” it wasn’t a guarantee of success. The risks were enormous, and failure was a live possibility. Though the Cold War rivalry loomed large, the decision wasn’t driven by fear alone, either. The speech framed space travel as a hopeful human project, one difficult enough to be worth doing and inspiring enough to justify the cost and danger. That hopeful framing created the cultural momentum that made the rockets possible.

In my own work, I’ve noticed how often people look puzzled when asked to imagine positive futures. They can easily list disasters — pandemics, climate collapse, runaway AI — but when pressed for hopeful scenarios, they hesitate. That hesitation is telling. It shows how little scaffolding mainstream culture gives us for constructive imagination.

When people reach for cultural references to make sense of the future, the ones closest to hand are almost always bleak.

In mainstream culture, hopeful futures rarely get the same airtime as dystopias, which saturate film, television, and streaming — Black Mirror, The Hunger Games, Don’t Look Up. By contrast, brighter visions of tomorrow remain niche, appearing in Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate fiction, Eric Drexler’s Pareidotopia, and Iain M. Banks’ Culture series. 

While these hopeful visions exist, they don’t dominate the shelf space, and that imbalance is important. It means that when people reach for cultural references to make sense of the future, the ones closest to hand are almost always bleak.

The AGI debate shows why this distinction matters now. A purely dystopian frame may lock down research without preparing for benefits. A purely utopian frame invites recklessness. A hopeful frame treats AGI as powerful but steerable, and it could bring governance, investment, and innovation into alignment.

Investing in culture

Earlier, I described progress as resting on three layers: hard infrastructure, such as labs and power grids; soft infrastructure, such as laws and institutions; and invisible infrastructure, in the form of culture. Economic infrastructure connects these layers. It is the bridge that carries cultural seeds from the invisible layer into the visible ones. Without it, stories and symbols risk remaining visions only. With it, they can become technologies, policies, and institutions.

Funding is never just financial. It is cultural. When venture capitalists pour billions into startups they send a signal: This field is worth building. The dot-com boom of the 1990s wasn’t only about technology. It was a cultural moment that normalized “founder” as a career. Today, the surge of funding around AGI tells a generation of young people that this, too, is a frontier.

Philanthropy and public funding can play the same role in neglected areas. Investments in longevity, space, or climate studies don’t just move the science forward; they legitimize the idea that these are worthy pursuits. Money, in this sense, is cultural scaffolding as much as material support.

Most of the cultural ground we’ve laid is dominated by dystopias, and that imbalance won’t correct itself.

The same is true for art and entertainment. Popular culture often shapes the collective imagination more effectively than white papers or policy memos. Films, TV shows, video games, and even music tell us what kind of futures to expect. Right now, those futures are mostly dystopian. If we want hopeful culture to have a fighting chance, commissioning and supporting art that portrays positive futures may matter as much as funding labs.

That suggests a concrete step: treat culture as a line item in the portfolio of progress, just as we treat laboratories or laws. That means commissioning stories, funding prototypes, testing memes, and backing the kinds of cultural experiments that can scale. If culture is infrastructure, we should budget for it, using economic infrastructure as the bridge that turns imagination into reality.

AGI may not exist, but the story of AGI already mobilizes billions of dollars. That shows how culture lays the groundwork before a technology ever arrives.

The problem is that most of the cultural ground we’ve laid is dominated by dystopias, and that imbalance won’t correct itself. It needs deliberate work, not only from institutions and funders, but from all of us. Culture isn’t just made in conferences or boardrooms. It is shaped in the stories we tell, the art we share, and the memes we pass along. Everyone participates.

Economic infrastructure is the bridge that carries culture into the world: from invisible symbols, to soft institutions, to hard technologies. Culture is unpredictable, double-edged, and too important to ignore. If we want progress to keep moving, we need to balance our culture of fear with visions of hope, and then back those visions with the resources they need to become real.

This article Why culture may be our most powerful lever for progress is featured on Big Think.

In 2011, Earle Havens, Director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance at Johns Hopkins, had a mission: He needed to convince his university to buy “an enormous collection of fake stuff.” The collection, known as Bibliotheca Fictiva, comprised over 1,200 literary forgeries spanning centuries, languages, and countries — beautifully bound manuscripts carrying black ink annotations allegedly penned by Shakespeare; works written by Sicilian tyrants, Roman poets, and Etruscan prophets; poems by famous priests and theologians — all of them in part or entirely fabricated. 

It was an unusual task for a scholar dedicated to studying the truth, but Havens was adamant. “We have never before needed a collection like this more than we need it right now,” he told the Dean of Libraries at the time. The internet and the increasing popularity of social media were changing how information was written, disseminated, and consumed, giving rise to the phenomenon of fake news as we now know it. In such a “crazy, rapid-fire information world,” the collection of ancient lies and misrepresentations of facts contained in the Bibliotheca Fictiva could offer guidance on how to navigate the moment, demonstrating that “what’s happening now has, in fact, been happening since the very invention of language and writing,” Havens said. 

His pitch was successful. Johns Hopkins University acquired the collection for an undisclosed amount and housed it in the wainscoted library room of the Evergreen Museum and Library, a 19th-century mansion in Baltimore. 

The sellers were Arthur and Janet Freeman, a couple of book merchants who made their name in the tight-knit world of antiquarian booksellers by collecting fascinating literary forgeries. Their venture started in 1961, when Arthur Freeman, then a graduate student of Elizabethan drama at Harvard University, began acquiring sources on John Payne Collier. Collier, a well-respected 19th-century scholar, had caused a ruckus among his contemporaries when he claimed to have found thousands of annotations to a copy of Shakespeare’s Second Folio, which he said had been penned by a contemporary of Shakespeare — but was in fact forged by Collier himself.

In the decades that followed, Freeman, who died in 2025, assembled a vast array of literary fakes, collecting books whose content is deceiving in nature. These included poetry purported to have been written by Martin Luther, who was not much of a poet, or reports of Pope Joan, a woman who, in the Middle Ages, disguised herself as a man and was elected Pope, only to be caught out when she suddenly gave birth in the middle of a procession in Rome. The latter myth was perpetuated for centuries and was not firmly debunked until the 17th century.

Since Johns Hopkins acquired the collection, Havens and other professors have been using these works to teach students about media literacy and misinformation. This is a relatively recent development in academia, where scholars have mostly snubbed the history of forgery. “Over time, a light bulb has gone off in this information environment, and people are going back to the past to learn things about disinformation and fakery that are keenly relevant today,” Havens said. “And it’s kind of comforting to know that this isn’t simply a phenomenon of the current digital social media environment.” 

One of the most important things students can learn from the collection is not so much the ability to recognize whether the content of a text is true or not, but rather that writing is often created with an intention behind it. Chinyere Ihim, a liberal arts graduate student at Johns Hopkins, where she attended Havens’ summer seminar, said this gave “more lucidity and clarity” to her approach to consuming news and information.

“It shifted my focus from ‘Is it true?’ to ‘Who created this? Who benefits from this, and why? What are they trying to do? What are they trying to exploit?’” she said. “When I hear a piece of news that seems suspicious, I ask myself, ‘What fear, what desire, what cultural anxiety is this story exploiting?’ There’s always a reason for it.”

For instance, the reason behind the “Donation of Constantine,” possibly the most relevant forgery in the history of Western culture, is obvious. The eighth-century fake edict claimed that the Roman Emperor Constantine had gifted the Western part of the Roman Empire to the Pope, and it was used for centuries by the papacy to support its claims of political authority — until the decree was debunked in 1440 by the humanist scholar Lorenzo Valla. 

For Ihim, reading ancient travelogues with fabricated accounts of journeys to distant lands, inhabited by people who were described as “curiosities or savages,” made her realize how powerful and potentially harmful narratives can be. “These fictional stories became the blueprint for the transatlantic slave trade,” she said. “Imagination actually became a reality, which is a scary thing.” 

Granted, the information environment has changed radically since the times of the Donation of Constantine or travelogues, and it’s now undergoing a couple of especially tumultuous decades. Kirsten Eddy, a senior researcher at Pew Research Center who specializes in news and information habits, notes that the internet and social media have changed people’s attitudes toward information. 

“People are exposed to more information from more sources than ever before,” Eddy said. “It’s not only difficult for people to know what to trust, but they also feel increasing fatigue with or even avoidance of the news.” In the U.S., public trust in major institutions and news media has steadily fallen in the 21st century, with trust in national news organizations declining in particular over the past decade, according to the Pew Research Center. 

The proliferation of generative AI is likely to worsen this moment of doubt. A recent report from the fact-checking website NewsGuard found over 1,200 websites producing unreliable AI-generated news “with little to no human oversight.” “People’s confidence in their own abilities to identify fake information or AI-generated information is not broad,” Eddy said. 

Generative AI does have the potential to shake “the foundations of how text is created,” and decrease “our trust in the written word,” in general, as Thomas Hellström, who leads the intelligent robotics group at Umeå University in Sweden, theorized in a recent paper. 

Still, another way to view it is that AI is the latest tool in humanity’s long history of shaping and distorting narratives. Damien Charlotin, a researcher at HEC Paris and Sciences Po, where he studies large language models, law, and disinformation, notes that, in the legal context, there are cases of AI creating fake legal cases used to support legal arguments. 

“But in the legal domain, playing fast and loose with authorities, cooking and pasting strings of citations, fudging and bashing arguments in bad faith has always happened,” he said. “What changes is that, because there is this new tool that can create things that do not even exist, we can now more easily spot sloppy, bad lawyers.” 

But the bad lawyers, with their bad arguments, were there before AI, too, much like the human tendency to lie, fake, and forge texts was there before we coined the term “fake news,” as the Bibliotheca Fictiva attests. 

In 2024, Havens and Christopher Celenza, Dean of Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, hosted a virtual seminar on the history of misinformation. 

“The scale and speed of the change in media that we are undergoing is unprecedented in human history,” the university wrote in a description of the seminar. “Nevertheless, people in the past have faced moments of crisis — moments when writing seemed unreliable, when the format of written information changed, and when new publication formats forced reevaluations of the nature of truth.” 

In these precarious moments, it’s worth remembering that humanity’s track record in overcoming them is promising. Accumulated expertise, of the type found in libraries, universities, government agencies, and scientific institutions, tends to come out on the winning side. The question today is whether that expertise can keep pace with the speed and scale of deception — and to what extent the public will keep stride, too.

“There’ll be crazy theories, there’ll be people who propound conspiracies, there’ll be mistakes,” Celenza said. “But hopefully, over time, if we can stick together, we’ll realize that aggregated expertise is still something we should be fighting for.”

This article The world’s largest library of lies has good news about fake news is featured on Big Think.

In the 2009 documentary Transcendent Man, the American inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil shares his thoughts on death. Although many philosophers and theologians accept mortality as an inevitable and indeed defining feature of human existence, Kurzweil refuses to accept this line of thinking. “Death is a great tragedy, a profound loss,” he declares in the film, haunted by the memory of losing his father at age 22. “I don’t accept it.”

Kurzweil would have found an ally in the little-known 19th-century Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, whose posthumously published text Philosophy of the Common Task made the at-the-time daring argument that death was little more than a design flaw — one which advancements in science and technology could help to rectify. Fedorov also believed that this goal of rectification — of achieving immortality — would unite social groups whose mutual fear of death had historically pitted them in opposition to each other.

“Our task,” Fedorov wrote, “is to make nature, the blind force of nature, into an instrument of universal resuscitation and to become a union of immortal beings.”

Fedorov’s writing never turned mainstream, but it did spawn a short-lived, visionary philosophical movement known as Cosmism. Materialized during the Industrial Revolution — a time of unprecedented societal change — the movement generally sought to redefine mankind’s relationship with technology and progress, with the ultimate goal of regulating the forces of nature so that humanity could achieve unity and immortality. The movement offered a more spiritual alternative to both futurism and communism.

Although the latter annihilated Cosmism before it had a chance to mature, its maxims have acquired new relevancy in the age of Big Tech. The following interview with Boris Groys, a distinguished professor of Russian and Slavic studies at New York University and editor of the new book Russian Cosmism, reveals why.

Into the crematorium

To understand Russian Cosmism, we must first look at other movements and ideas that arose during the same period. More influential than Fedorov’s Philosophy of the Common Task was interdisciplinary scientist Alexander Chizhevsky’s 1931 article “The Earth in the Sun’s Embrace,” which interpreted human history as revolving around the Sun. Starting from the questionable proposition that revolutionary movements require energy and that energy in its most basic form is derived from solar rays, Chizhevsky listed some historical developments that lined up with astronomical developments. He noted, for example, that progressive governments in the United Kingdom coincided with periods of high solar activity, while conservative ones tended to appear when solar activity decreased due to sunspots.  

Chizhevsky’s article profoundly impacted Russian avant-garde artists like the painter Kazimir Malevich. Malevich helped stage a futuristic opera titled “Victory Over the Sun,” which heralded the Sun’s eventual extinction and the world’s descent into chaos. Rather than dreading this disorder, the avant-garde welcomed it. “By the beginning of the twentieth century the embrace of chaos seemed imminent, as no one could be expected to believe any longer in the stability of divine or natural order,” Groys explains in the new book.

“The very idea of a stable order, be it religious or rationalist, appeared to lose its ontological guarantee to permanently replace, make obsolete, and ultimately destroy old things, old traditions, and familiar ways of life, thus undermining lingering faith in the ‘traditional world order.’ Technological development, subjected to the logic of progress, presented itself as a force of chaos that would not tolerate any stable order. The future came to be seen as the enemy of both past and present. Precisely because of that view, the futurists celebrated the future, as it held the promise that everything that had been – and still was – would disappear.”

This same sentiment can be found in the writing of the anarchist-futurist poet Alexander Svyatogor, who compared progress to the sudden eruption of a volcano: a violent outburst that destroys everything in its wake while fertilizing the soil to sustain new life. In his essay “The Doctrine of the Fathers’ and Anarcho-Biocosmism,” he rejects Fedorov’s idea that science and technology are agents of restoration – of recovering and preserving what has been lost. He argued instead that future generations “would knead with their own hands, like sculptors knead clay, the spirit and matter of the world, so as to create an absolutely new cosmos.” Crucially, he also relished in the fact that detractors referred to his intellectual group — the “Kreatory” or “Creatorium” –—as a “crematorium.”

“They are probably right to come to this conclusion,” he wrote. “Indeed, we need to burn quite a lot, if not everything.”

Cosmism from Stalin to Musk

Fedorov and Svyatogor represent two sides of Cosmism, which Groys writes never had a unified doctrine. Where adherents of the former viewed technology as a “force that would destroy the ‘old world’ and open the way for building the new from point zero,” the latter hoped technology would become a “strong messianic force” that could transmit knowledge from one generation to another.

Cosmists who believed in technology as a messianic force clashed not just with the Svyatogor camp, but also with the communists, whose guiding ideology of Marxism-Leninism was predicated on the dismantling of age-old social systems to establish a novel world order. Fedorov’s philosophy was especially irreconcilable with the concept of the “New Soviet Man,” the Soviet government’s campaign to physically and mentally rebuild its citizens into more obedient, self-sacrificing people. While some Cosmists embraced communism, they opposed the notion that a socialist utopia should be built on the backs of generations who would never get to experience its benefits — commentary that put them at odds with Joseph Stalin and his purges.

Although interest in Russian Cosmism was quickly eradicated, the movement has acquired new life in the 21st century. In fact, it might be more relevant today than it was in the early 20th century. Fedorov and Svyatogor’s shared call for the colonization of outer space to protect humanity from earthly disaster, for example, is a direct parallel to Elon Musk’s promise to move people to Mars.

Thanks to climate change, Cosmism’s ambivalent and generally hostile attitude towards the natural world should also sound familiar. “Today it is fashionable to like nature,” Groys told Big Think, “but nature does not like us. It is a one-sided love. Cosmism’s central idea is that we can survive only under artificial conditions, if we create an artificial world to protect us.”

Fedorov’s writing, meanwhile, serves as a reminder that we should not let scientific or technological progress come at anyone’s expense, but rather strive to uplift the world in its totality: past, present, and future. “To be interested in the past is to be interested in ourselves,” Groys said, “because everything, including us, eventually becomes part of the past.”

This article Cosmism: The 19th-century movement to reach space and immortality is featured on Big Think.

As Albert Einstein famously said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Except there’s no evidence that he said or wrote those words. The earliest evidence for this quote comes from a 1981 newspaper article reporting on an Al-Anon meeting. That’s more than a quarter century after the acclaimed physicist’s death.

Einstein was, of course, an insightful thinker who made many clever and profound observations about the nature of the Universe and humankind. But going by social media posts and the inspirational poster industry, you’d think he was a one-man proverb machine to rival, well, Proverbs for pithy wisdom.

Here are a few other Einstein quotes you may recognize:

• “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.”
• “Every now and then, a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.”
• “They said it couldn’t be done, but the fool didn’t know it, so the fool went ahead and did it.”
• “Humanity invented the atom bomb. No mouse in the world would think of building a mousetrap.”
• “The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Of these, the only one with evidence to support its attribution to Einstein is the last, a version of which was found in a letter he wrote in 1955.

Einstein is someone Garson O’Toole (a pen name for Gregory Sullivan) calls a “quotation magnet” or “flypaper figure.” These are people who attract misquotations with the same gravitational pull of a sun collecting satellites. These citation stars include such illustrious figures as Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Maya Angelou, Winston Churchill, Dorothy Parker, and Benjamin Franklin — names O’Toole is well-acquainted with.

O’Toole runs Quote Investigator, a website dedicated to uncovering the truth about quotations and locating their earliest verifiable usage. He may also be the unrecognized world record holder for typing the sentence, “There is no substantive evidence that Einstein wrote or spoke this statement” more than anyone else.

I recently corresponded with O’Toole over email to discuss why figures like Einstein become quotation magnets, how these misattributions occur and cement themselves within our cultural consciousness, and how one very persistent Chinese curse ultimately turned into a blessing for quote investigation.

The curious case of the Chinese curse

O’Toole began investigating quotes in the 2000s. At the time, he was writing an article that explored the research possibilities of the Google Books project, which uploads scans of books and periodicals from major libraries. Serendipitously, O’Toole recalls, he encountered this quote around the same time:

May you live in interesting times.

Beyond being semantically dramatic, the quote is striking because it isn’t ascribed to an individual. Instead, it’s advertised as an ancient Chinese curse. The idea is that what seems like a blessing at first — who wants to live a boring, uneventful life? — becomes a jinx when you realize that “interesting times” are typically colored by wars, pandemics, and other social upheavals.

O’Toole decided to look into the quote and noticed that Wikipedia’s earliest cited source was a 1950s science fiction short story, one neither ancient nor Chinese. He decided to dig deeper using the Google Books database. He uncovered several promising leads and was eventually able to track down an occurrence of the quote in a 1944 book in a nearby library. Titled The American Character, the book’s author claims it is “designed to make more intelligible to the British public certain American principles and attitudes.” First of all, good luck with that. And second, still not an ancient Chinese source.

O’Toole detailed his findings in a 2007 article on TeleRead, a website dedicated to news about e-books. The article was discovered by Fred Shapiro, the associate director for collections and special projects at Yale Law School, who noted in the comments that his work cited an even earlier reference dating back to 1939. 

A minor muddle, but one that led O’Toole to an early quote-investigating lesson: “Always consult the most recent edition of Shapiro’s reference work,” he writes (half) jokingly.

Still, the experience led O’Toole to start Quote Investigator in 2010, and his research skills steadily improved. His current entry for “May you live in interesting times” not only sports strong evidence for an even earlier citation — a March 1936 newspaper report in The Yorkshire Post — but lists several Chinese quotes that may have served as precursors for the backhanded blessing. 

There is, for instance, this 17th-century quote from the Ming Dynasty-era story “The Oil-Peddler Wins the Queen of Flowers”:

Truly, better be a dog in days of peace

Than a human in times of war!

Today, O’Toole’s articles are referenced by journalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. They’ve also been a godsend for my own work here at Big Think. Even the introduction to Shapiro’s latest edition offers this lovely hat tip: “O’Toole’s brilliant researches have greatly aided The New Yale Book of Quotations, which has many dozens of entries reflecting Quote Investigator findings.”

Investigating those quote-unquote “quotes”

O’Toole’s research over the years has led him to recognize three qualities that turn certain figures into quotation magnets.

First, the person is historically significant. Abraham Lincoln led the United States through the tumultuous Civil War. Mohandas Gandhi’s nonviolent independence campaign inspired civil rights movements worldwide. Both are total quotation magnets.

As we’ve seen with Einstein, the second quality is that the person already has a reputation for crafting wise, witty, profound, and insightful adages. And finally, the person should embody an archetype that functions as a kind of effect trigger. Mark Twain’s wittiness primes the reader for a humorous aphorism, while Churchill’s connection with great speeches prepares them to be inspired.

“The domain of quotations is highly competitive,” O’Toole wrote. “Popular sayings and influential figures change over time. Hence, there is an evolutionary pressure that operates on the selection and replication process.”

He continued, “When an astute statement attributed to a minor figure is reassigned to a major name, it instantly becomes more fascinating, more memorable, and more transmissible. The new combination is selected and replicated at a much higher rate.”

Given that, you may wonder whether there are people who deliberately misattribute quotes to give their social media posts or book epigraphs more gravitas. And something like that does happen on occasion. As an example, O’Toole points to this quote often attributed to Christopher Columbus: 

And the sea will grant each man new hope, as sleep brings dreams of home.

As you’ve already guessed, O’Toole couldn’t find evidence that Columbus spoke or wrote those words. The earliest evidence for the quote is also its most famous recitation: the lines spoken by Sean Connery in the finale of the film The Hunt for Red October (1990).

Screenwriter Larry Ferguson penned the quote specifically for the film’s ending and slapped Columbus’s name on it; neither he nor director John McTiernan were trying to be deceptive. In fact, McTiernan openly discusses the fabrication on the DVD commentary track: “Larry wrote the poem that Sean quotes at the end. Obviously, Christopher Columbus never wrote anything like that, but the gimmick works.”

As O’Toole points out, “The emotional impact of the scene was heightened by the inclusion of the counterfeit quotation.” Because Columbus embodies the archetype of the voyage to the Americas — a journey with symbolic significance for the movie’s themes and its characters’ journeys — the device works. And because it’s a memorable line purported to be spoken by a historical figure, it took on a life beyond the script.

Much more commonly, though, misattributions result from honest mistakes. Writers, orators, or party guests share a quote they love or feel fits the moment, but in the process, ascribe the quote to the wrong person or misremember some other important detail. O’Toole shared an example:

People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

This quote has been attributed variously to Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, and Winston Churchill, but the earliest reliable match O’Toole could find appeared in a 1993 Washington Times column. Given that date, none of those men would have been alive to pen the words, and the actual author proved to be film critic and essayist Richard Grenier.

Here’s the original, as cited on Quote Investigator, “As George Orwell pointed out, people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

Tracing the quoted history, O’Toole believes that Greiner was summarizing a view he ascribed to Orwell, and later commentators mistakenly placed it within quotation marks. Just like that, a paraphrase evolved into a passage. As with Columbus, the clout of Orwell’s name, the fact that he made similar statements, and his position as a wise archetype in our collective memory made the quote hyper-replicable.

Here’s another example:

Definition of a classic — something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

This is a famous quote from Mark Twain, and in 1900 while delivering a speech at the Nineteenth Century Club in New York, he did say those words. But during the speech, Twain made it very clear that he was citing a clever remark he heard from Caleb Thomas Winchester, a professor of English literature at Wesleyan University, Connecticut.

“Twain carefully credited Winchester, but in the domain of quotations, the name of Winchester is largely forgotten, and Twain almost always receives credit for this bon mot,” O’Toole writes.

One more quote for the road:

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

Dorothy Parker often receives credit for this one, and the poet jotted many well-known quips about curiosity. However, the earliest evidence for the quote O’Toole could find was a December 1980 issue of Reader’s Digest. There, it appeared in the “Quotable Quotes” column ascribed to one Ellen Parr. 

How did it get mixed up with Parker? Because the list was written in alphabetical order, Parker’s quotable quote appears directly above Parr’s. Given the proximity and the closeness of names (Parr vs. Parker), O’Toole reasons that an inattentive reader simply misattributed which quote belonged to which person.

If you’re curious, Parker’s actual quote from the list: “The two most beautiful words in the English language are: ‘Cheque enclosed.’” (Which is also quite good.)

Can I quote you on that?

And so it goes. While some misquotes are fabricated, most are simply the result of a large-scale game of cultural telephone. Despite our best intentions and efforts, communication can be imprecise and our memories faulty. Luckily, the written word offers a kind of evolutionary record that investigators like O’Toole can use to trace the lineage of these culturally significant quotes and give their authors their proper due — or, at least, get us closer to that answer.

“Overall, quotation research is enormously rewarding because one encounters a series of entertaining mysteries. Sometimes the mystery is solved, and progress is made even when the solution remains uncertain,” O’Toole writes.

Modern technologies aid in reconstructing that lineage thanks to the breadth and accessibility of high-quality databases. However, if used thoughtlessly, those same technologies can also provide people with a false sense of security in the answers found. 

As O’Toole notes, misquotations seem to pop up online more frequently since he started in 2010. A person struggling to remember a quote or expression will often plug it into Google and select the first or second link. Those links often lead them to websites like Goodreads or BrainyQuote, which are chockablock with misattributed quotes. Not bothering to research any deeper, the person simply shares the misattributed quote in a text to a friend or followers on Facebook, and it replicates. 

In this game of cultural telephone, the internet has transformed our role from being just one link in the chain to that of full-fledged operators. And AI may make this worse. 

As a test, I asked popular chatbots who uttered the quotes found in this article. Each one gave me a popular misattribution with only the occasional nod that it may be inaccurate. The only exceptions were Perplexity AI — which directly cites Quote Investigator as a source — and ChatGPT — which told me the Columbus quote came from the poem “The Old Man and the Sea” written by John Steinbeck. (A citation so wrong that it would take an entire Quote Investigator article to unpack.)

That’s just the start of how AI may muddy the referential headwaters. As O’Toole points out: “In the past, a high-quality audio or video recording of a person delivering a quotation was powerful evidence. Now, it is possible to create a fraudulent audio or video in which a famous person speaks almost any scripted line. It is also possible to create realistic-looking digital newspaper clippings. This means tracing the provenance of evidence is essential.”

As such, even if quotes aren’t your thing, they are still an important reminder that we need to be thoughtful of what information we share — and ever-mindful that we can trace that information to a trustworthy source.

For quotes, O’Toole turns to databases with a history of reliability, such as Google Books, Newspapers, ProQuest, JSTOR, and The British Newspaper Archive. The Internet Archive has proven an invaluable resource for keeping dated web pages online and accessible. His research has also led him to learn the art of crafting search queries and the importance of occasionally setting down the screen to go to the library or have a conversation with a librarian, expert, or well-informed colleague.

Of course, depending on what you’re sharing, the tools and techniques will vary. But it is the mindset O’Toole brings to his detective work that is key in separating the valid from the fabricated or mistaken in our information-overloaded world.

Because as someone who definitely wasn’t Einstein once said, “Insanity is plugging the same words into Google over and over again and expecting different search results.” (Or something like that.)

This article Einstein didn’t say that: How viral misquotes evolve and replicate is featured on Big Think.

You’re in Paris on the evening of December 28, 1895. It’s cold and windy, and this lull in the year, between Christmas and New Year’s, feels restless and full of possibilities. You are in the Boulevard des Capucines, a few blocks from the shore of the Seine and the Jardin des Tuileries. You stop in front of the Grand Café, a fashionable meeting spot for the elite.

Along with thirty-some Parisians, you pay a franc to the mustachioed gentleman at the door before descending into the Salon Indien, an opulent room in the basement decorated with Oriental motifs. Rows of chairs have been set up before a white screen, and there, propped up in the middle of the seats and aimed at the screen, is a strange, boxy machine with a hand crank and a lens.

This machine is the cinematograph, which promises to “capture, through a series of instantaneous images, all the movements that during a given time occurred in front of the lens, and then reproduce these movements by projecting their life-sized images onto a screen in front of an entire audience.”¹

Why have I taken you to the world’s first movie night? (Sorry, no stale popcorn or overpriced soda, not yet.) Because when you’re looking forward to the birth of a new artistic medium — in our case, AI — it may be helpful to look back at the birth of a mature one.² (Just to be clear, I’m not talking about AI as a tool that artists can use to create art in existing mediums — such as books, paintings, photographs, movies — but as a first-class techno-artistic medium in its own right, the equivalent of cinema, VR, and video games in the 20th century.)

AI as a promising medium for human artists may sound like an oxymoron. Indeed, surveying the reportage reveals a spate of failed attempts by AI to unseat humans, AI-generated product images that defy the laws of physics, and outright frauds. If AI truly is an emerging medium for artists, these are not auspicious beginnings.

Was the birth of cinema any more promising? On that December night, the inventors of the cinematograph, a pair of rather aptly named brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière (along with their father, Antoine), showed their dark basement room audience a program of ten motion pictures. Shot on 35-mm film at 16 frames per second, the hand-cranked movies were each just under a minute in length (or about 17 meters, if you substitute space for time).

For the most part, these are scenes of everyday life captured with a fixed camera in one unbroken shot: working women in long dresses exiting a factory alongside the occasional dog, bicyclist, or carriage; serious men in hats walking off a boat, smoking and carrying canes and cameras;³ a baby held up by her father (one of the Lumière brothers) terrorizing goldfish in a bowl; bathers frolicking next to the sea, diving into the waves and emerging in an endless circle like some Escher drawing come to life; a horse-drawn bus rattling through the street. 

There is no editing, no special effects, no “art” as we’ve come to expect. With only these Lumière reels to go on, could any member of the audience that night have imagined The Godfather, Ran, Fight Club, Memento, Breaking Bad, Fargo, Vine, TikTok? Could any of them have foreseen that one day, telling stories through moving images would become by far the biggest component of our collective artistic and cultural output (whether your preferred metric is influence, number of consumers, or money)?

No, of course not. The beginning of a medium offers few clues as to what it will evolve into. Tim Berners-Lee couldn’t have foreseen in 1989 that his invention would one day host Pump.fun, ChatGPT, and YouTube. Likewise, the Lumières, who viewed their invention as a “scientific curiosity” and wanted to reserve it for scientific uses, refused to sell their combination camera-projector to anyone, not even to Georges Méliès, who offered them 10,000 francs.

“[A] horse-drawn cart moved toward us, followed by other vehicles and then pedestrians — in a word — street life!” Méliès exclaimed at the first motion pictures.⁴ “We stared flabbergasted at this sight, stupefied and surprised beyond all expression.”

Méliès would go on to make more than 500 films, including the cinematic milestone Le Voyage dans la Lune just seven years later, and play a big part in the invention of the language of cinema. What did this stage magician see in the cinematograph that the Lumières couldn’t?

Go and watch those films again. No, not on the phone while you’re riding the subway or between YouTube shorts, but in the dark, when everything is quiet around you, when your mind is free of distractions, and on as big a screen as possible. Let the moving images take over your visual field.

A century and a quarter ago, those women walked out of that factory, those men disembarked from the boat, and that baby plunged her hand into the fishbowl. They’ve all long since turned to dust, but here they are, right in front of you, laughing, moving, living. Now, do you understand?

That feeling down your spine? Wonder.

That was what Méliès experienced in the Salon Indien. The early Lumière films, academically termed “actualities,” weren’t so much a precursor to documentaries as a manifestation of the raw, foundational nature of cinema: Movement in time — presence, life, actuality — captured and then played back.

The film camera could take you to any place, any time, real or imagined. Whether you call cinema a time machine, a teleportation machine, or an immersion machine, at the core of film’s appeal is its ability to replicate, to simulate, to fabricate the experience of actuality, the feeling that you are there. Every trick in the language of cinema — the close-up, the tracking shot, the jump cut, the montage, the establishing shot, the L cut and J cut, the POV shot, the flashback, bullet time — is meant to enhance, manipulate, subvert, fracture, challenge, warp, and otherwise engage with our experience of actuality, of being there. This is how and why cinema could shatter the Aristotelian unities, resurrect orality in the age of literacy, and become the technological medium par excellence imitated by new mediums like video games and VR. 

Even in the primitive single shot of La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, one could already glimpse the magic of playing with actuality, the tiny seed that would eventually grow into the magnificent, towering sequoia of cinema. (And, of course, a stage magician like Méliès, who was already used to playing with actualities in his own medium, would see that potential before others.)

What is the equivalent of that seed in AI art?

I don’t have any certain answers, and I doubt anyone else does either. This is why I’m writing an essay.

Like most interesting questions, the best way to find an answer is through play. As a writer, I enjoy playing with words. Let’s apply AI to one of the oldest word-based arts, translation, and see what interesting results come out.⁵ This experiment feels particularly apt as the innovation that initiated the recent surge of AI capability in large language models (LLMs), the transformer, was initially developed as a translation technique.⁶

One of the commonest criticisms levied against human translators is that they have “agendas.” Instead of faithfully rendering the original text into a new language, like a camera faithfully reproducing onto film the light and shadows glimpsed through the lens, “bad” translators inject their biases into the text, polluting the reading experience. By that logic, a machine ought to be the best translator, for it is understood by many to be without “agenda” or intention.

I ask the machine⁷:

Give me a Classical Chinese poem that is relatively obscure to Western readers.

The machine suggests《登幽州臺歌》(“Song of Ascending Youzhou Terrace”) by 陳子昂 (Chen Zi’ang, 661-702 C.E.) from the Tang Dynasty:

Give me a translation.

Instead of critiquing the aesthetics of this translation (short version: It’s not good enough to even bother criticizing), I’ll focus on the “meaning” (however you want to define that amorphous concept). As someone who knows this poem quite well (it was one of the first Chinese poems I studied as a child), I’d say this translation is “right” but incomplete.

This translation feels odd to me. Can you try to give a rendition that is more in line with the way most contemporary Chinese readers would understand it?

Ah. Chen Zi’ang was a reformist scholar and poet who lived during the reign of Wu Zetian, perhaps the most famous of the many women who ruled the various Sinitic states in China’s long history. Chen had many policy differences with Wu Zetian and was frustrated that the sovereign ignored much of his advice. This political disappointment is evident in the second translation but not the first. Most critically, the second translation renders 古人 as “sages of the past” and 來者 as “enlightened leaders to come.” These translations are correct in the historical context of this poem,⁸ but if you were to look these words up in a dictionary, you’d get something much closer to “ancients” and “future ones.”

Which translation is more “agenda-free” or “transparent”? Time to get more playful.

Craft a few more interesting translations and tell me the agendas behind them.

Fascinating. I can’t imagine making these translations myself. They’re so divergent from one another (and my reading) that one can scarcely believe they are translations of the same text. And yet, after some reflection, I confess that they are all interpretations that could be extracted from the original.⁹

Are these translations, each driven by an explicit agenda, worse than the previous two?

If I had to pick, I would say that the “sages and enlightened rulers” interpretation, being closest to (what we know of) authorial intent and (what we choose to pay attention to in) historical context, is the most “accurate” translation, but that is because I, as an author, am especially protective of authorial intent. (As you can imagine, I’m sort of a pain to translate.) For those who find the presence of the author in the text a nuisance — either because they believe artists should “shut up and sing” or because they value their own interpretive freedom more — then fidelity to authorial intent is itself an agenda.

What about the first translation, the one closest to dictionary definitions out of this bunch?

Can you tell me the agenda behind the “literal” translation you did first?

The AI goes on, talking academically and authoritatively about the “priority on literalism,” “universality of emotion,” “avoidance of interpretation,” and “emphasis on solitude.” But the underlying point is clear: This translation of the poem is so divergent from the common understanding of Chinese readers because it adopts a set of choices about Chinese–English translation that detaches the text from its historical and cultural context and interpretive tradition in the source culture, and repositions the text as an independent artifact that can be interpreted by the rules encoded in the Western construction of “Chineseness.”

This is also an agenda.

Of the many possible translations derivable from a single text, the classicist Emily Wilson had this to say: “The real question for a translator isn’t do you want to tell the truth or do you want to lie … it’s which truths to tell. There are many true facts about any original text, not all of which could ever be conveyed in another language.”¹⁰

A translation only appears to be “without agenda” to a reader when the interpretive frameworks and cultural assumptions behind the translation align with the reader’s. Every translation requires a translator, a subjectivity. In the case of an AI-produced translation (at least the AIs based on the current, dominant architectures), the subjectivity is extracted/excavated/synthesized from the embedded subjectivities in all the linguistic examples it trained on.

All meaning-making requires subjectivity, not just translation. Every reader must first inundate a text with their subjectivity before meaning can be extracted, a truth we all are too aware of, surrounded as we are by nonstop controversies over interpretation in our symbol-saturated modernity. Just remind yourself how we cannot agree on an “agenda-free” understanding of the Second Amendment or how, if you have enough followers, any statement you post to social media will become contentious. (Every reading requires a reader and every meaning requires a meaner — sometimes a very mean one.)

Enough. Let’s get back to AI. What’s interesting here is that I was playing, alone, with a Chinese poem that had relatively few human-composed English translations. Nonetheless, ChatGPT conjured up a bunch of translations done by excavated/recombined/sythesized subjectivities, a (ghostly) sense of “someone stands behind these thoughts.” The question that matters here isn’t “Which translation is most accurate?” but “Taken together, do these translations make the poem more interesting?” And the answer to that is a resounding yes. 

The implied translators behind these divergent translations restored the kind of textural richness inherent in the original composition, which is lost in any single translation. I conversed with the subjectivities behind the words, probed them, interrogated them, and found myself with a new understanding: AI is a machine that captures and projects subjectivities, a “noematograph.”¹¹

To be sure, the captured subjectivities are crude and low-resolution, but already there is a thrill in my experience, similar to the thrill Méliès experienced when he first saw the machine that captures and projects actualities.

When I look back over the excitement surrounding AI-generated art, the same pattern emerges. People use AI to play with captured subjectivities — excavate, fragment, enhance, strip, recombine, edit, synthesize, and otherwise manipulate — and project the results back: A woman turns to her AI boyfriend, a responsive embodiment of cultural narratives about feminine desire, to co-author a fanfiction of their life together; enthusiasts one-up each another by pushing image generators to distill the scraped collective unconscious into “make it more” trends or to turn cultural stereotypes into a community picture-story featuring endless heists of the Mona Lisa; fans make and share chatbots embodying popular fictional characters with transformed personalities.

An LLM captures (and fractures) and projects back subjectivities as a cinematograph captures and projects back actualities. Just as manipulating actuality is the soul of cinema, playing with subjectivity is the soul of AI as an artistic medium. Whatever genres of AI art emerge in the future and however the language of AI art evolves, the seed (or at least a seed) will be this raw, foundational nature of the medium.

Much as the printing press changed the way we consume books, AI will change the way we consume text, music, and film. As the translation example shows, AI will help us probe the multiplicity of subjectivities inherent in every work of art and, in that process, better understand our own subjectivities.

But what about the art we can create with AI? What will that look like?

So long as we think of AI as just a way to replace humans, to do what we already do (but faster, cheaper, and more satisfying to our capitalist masters), it will produce nothing but trash.¹² AI-produced novels and images and movies will be no more interesting than filmed stage plays or photographs of paintings — a medium cannot succeed by imitating existing mediums; it must invent its own language, evolve its own genres, discover the kind of stories that only it can tell.

While it’s impossible, at this early moment in the metaphorical Salon Indien, for us to glimpse the full potential of the noematograph as a medium, there are tantalizing clues already on the screen. A notable feature of contemporary AI art experimentation is that while we’re often excited by the process, we’re just as often bored by the result.¹³ Despite all the headlines promising that AI will write better books than humans, I can’t find a single AI-written novel that has delighted readers. Not one. I enjoy playing with AI image generators, but I seldom go back to look at the images after a session. Asking ChatGPT to generate a bunch of translations to experience the Chen Zi’ang multiverse is interesting, but the actual translations, qua works of literary composition, are bland despite their explicit agendas. Talking to a chatbot is fun, but reading someone else’s chatbot transcript isn’t (except insofar as you learn tricks to use in your chats). Participating in an act of collective storytelling like “Mona Lisa: AI Cinematic Universe” is thrilling, but the final output is no more enjoyable to look at than the aftermath of an alternate reality game.¹⁴

There are multiple possible explanations for this essential “boringness” in AI-generated art. For one, current models just aren’t very good — this may change over time. For another, the default output mode for contemporary noematographs (LLMs and generative image models) is null subjectivity — an  inoffensive, diffuse, “this is what the internet thinks” sort of feckless, collective, no-voice (one further muffled, as always, by the AI company’s ass-covering rules). This averaging out of all the subjectivities the machine has been trained on  spews out cliches — which is great for research, when you are asking for facts and conventional beliefs. But for art to be interesting, it requires distinct, focused subjectivities, the drive to stake a position and to get away from cliches.

To get the AI to do anything interesting, the user must prompt it to abandon the null subjectivity and take on some specific stance (as I did in the translation examples above). The process of interacting with the AI to get it to take a position, to be someone, is where much of the fun of playing with AI lies.¹⁵

This suggests that AI, as an artistic medium based around playful inter-subjectivity, will be more about process than outcome, more about participation than consumption, more about the doing rather than the beholding. Some of the best AI art experiences are about what the AI prompts in you, rather than what you prompt the AI to do. Enjoying AI art will not be like reading a book or watching a movie, but more like having a meal with your friends or playing a board game. It is irreducibly ephemeral and personal, just as subjectivity itself is. It appeals to a person, not people.

An AI translation, for instance, may be nothing like a human-crafted translation. Instead of an “authoritative” but derivative literary text that encapsulates a single subjectivity’s experience of the original text, an AI translation may be more like an interactive experience through which the reader excavates her own reading by interrogating an infinite number of synthesized translator subjectivities to fully experience the potential inherent in the original. It will not replace a human translation; it will be something completely different.

Will the medium of AI develop genres that are best experienced alone (such as using AI to explore and excavate a work of art) as well as genres that are best experienced together (such as using AI to create a shared story that teaches you more about one another)? Perhaps this new medium, even more than games, will demand the consumer to be their own artist — a creasumer — not unlike dancing or playing an instrument for fun. It may render the very distinction between authorship and readership nonsensical. It may be so personalized to the subjectivity of each of us that we’ll have to re-imagine the concept of an “audience.” New mediums change the way we think. In the same way cinema has changed the way we imagine the world (for example, novelists now write “cinematically”), AI will change the way we understand our subjectivity.

When it comes to AI and art, we’re still only at the moment when all we can see is a flickering horse-drawn bus coming toward us. Much more playing, experimenting, critiquing, and, most importantly, failing, will be required to invent the language of AI as a medium for art.¹⁶ But one thing is certain: Just as the cinematograph transformed our relationship with actuality, the noematograph will transform our relationship with subjectivity.

1. From the program by the Lumière brothers. Available at https://www.institut-lumiere.org/musee/les-freres-lumiere-et-leurs-inventions/premiere-seance.html
2. There are many ways to think about AI and art, and I want to be clear upfront on what I won’t be talking about. I won’t talk about the many ways that AI may be a threat — the environmental impact, the addiction to easy empathy, the damage to existing artistic communities and ecologies, the potential for debasement and degradation of human creativity, and so on. Not because these things aren’t important, but because there are many other thinkers better qualified and eager to talk about them already. Nor will I discuss the possibility of AI gaining consciousness — some variation of the Singularity — such that Homo sapiens must reckon with a truly new form of consciousness. That’s also very important, but if that were to occur, we would have much more interesting things to talk about than AI-generated art.
3. The invention of cinema is full of self-references like this, where a camera captures other cameras. The Lumière family business was photography, and their factory, featured in La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, manufactured photographic equipment.
4. Myrent, G. “When Movies Began and No One Came.” The New York Times, December 29, 1985. Méliès was not present at the public screening on December 28, 1895. Instead, he saw these films at a private showing for directors of entertainment venues around Paris the day before. See Cinémathèque Méliès: Lettre d’information, No. 37, June 2013, p. 7.
5. Sometimes, the best way to understand a new medium is to “translate” material from an existing medium into it.
6. Vaswani, Ashish, et al. “Attention Is All You Need.” Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, edited by Isabelle Guyon et al., vol. 30, Curran Associates, Inc., 2017, pp. 6000–6010. arXiv, https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
7. All the AI experiments were done with ChatGPT (4o) in January 2025. The output has been edited for length.
8. Well, still not exactly “correct.” By 古人, Chen Zi’ang likely meant more than “sages,” something closer to “wise sovereigns of the past who listened to talented individuals” (and he perhaps even had in mind one specific ancient ruler connected with the terrace he was ascending). Current AI models still mess up on these details.
9. I do have quibbles with all of them, but these are at the level of aesthetics, not the meanings, given the interpretive frameworks necessitated by the agendas behind them.
10. “Translating the Odyssey: How and Why,” Emily Wilson’s lecture at the University of Scranton, December 18, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyLs9VoY9tc
    Now, suppose you keep on pushing ChatGPT to give you more interesting/unconventional translations. In that case, it will comply much like the hallucinatory image generators in those “make the bodybuilder more muscular” trends (because these models tend to please you sycophantically). At some point, the translations start to become — to my mind at least — impossible to justify. (The same charge, of course, has been levied against human translators in many cases.) I’m old-fashioned enough to believe that meaning exists, and you can’t just make any text mean anything you like. Just how we draw this line between an acceptable rendition of (some of) the truths in a text and an unacceptable injection of non-truths into a text is a question that, perhaps fortunately, no AI can help us resolve.
11. Sometimes, this capturing of subjectivity is even explicit, such as when the CIA constructs chatbots to stand in for world leaders and interrogates them. See https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/us/politics/cia-chatbot-technology.html
12. This is distinct from situations where AI is used as a tool — a brainstorming partner, a beta reader, a critic, a tutor, etc. — to help humans do what they already do, but better, at a higher quality, with more thought and care. That would be lovely, too, and may lead to more interesting books, pictures, and movies, but it would not be using AI as a medium in itself.
13. You can find countless YouTube videos for “How to use AI to write a story.” Try to find some (any) for “I really loved reading this AI-written story.”
14. There is another possible contributing cause to the boring output: the thick layers of “don’t-let-the-model-say-or-produce-anything-that-will-get-the-company-in-trouble” code that all these generative AI models are wrapped in. Unfortunately, whenever you try to make a model’s output more conventional (and thus more clichéd), you also make it less interesting. That’s kind of baked into the nature of meaning-making and subjectivity.
15. Indeed, sometimes the stances that the user wishes the AI to take on can be so transgressive (by the standards of the corporate/governmental overlords of these models) that “jail-breaking” is required.
16. Here’s something to watch out for: The development of the language of cinema was the result of experimentation by thousands of independent creators who were all free to push the medium in whatever direction they liked; however, AI may end up being controlled by a few powerful corporations (enabled by even fewer paranoid governments). Centralization and concentration of control are not good for the development of new mediums.

This article The cinematograph, the “noematograph,” and the future of AI art is featured on Big Think.

“Criminally underrated.”

“One of the best animated series I ever watched.”

“Legitimately one of the best sci-fi shows of the past decade.”

These are some of the comments you’ll run into when you search reviews for Pantheon, an animated series about a world in which shadowy tech firms have found a way to scan and upload human brains onto the internet, inadvertently creating a new, superpowered, and potentially immortal race of people referred to as “uploaded intelligence.”

“One of the best” because Pantheon — in addition to having a well-crafted, suspenseful, and heartfelt narrative about love and loss — thoughtfully engages with both the technical and philosophical questions raised by its cerebral premise: Is a perfect digital copy of a person’s mind still meaningfully human? Does uploaded intelligence, which combines the processing power of a supercomputer with the emotional intelligence of a sentient being, have a competitive edge over cold, unfeeling artificial intelligence? How would uploaded intelligence compromise ethics or geopolitical strategy?

“Underrated” because Pantheon was produced by — and first aired on — AMC+, a streaming service that, owing to the dominance of Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, and Amazon Prime, has but a fraction of its competitors’ subscribers and which, motivated by losses in ad revenue, ended up canceling the show’s highly anticipated (and fully completed) second season in exchange for tax write-offs. Although Pantheon has since been salvaged by Netflix, […] its troubled distribution history resulted in the show becoming a bit of a hidden gem, rather than the global hit it could have been, had it premiered on a platform with more eyeballs.

Still, the fact that Pantheon managed to endure and build a steadily growing cult following is a testament to the show’s quality and cultural relevance. Although the concept of uploaded intelligence is nothing new, and has been tackled by other prominent sci-fi properties like Black Mirror and Altered Carbon, Pantheon is unique in that it not only explores how this hypothetical technology would affect us on a personal level, but also explores how it might play out on a societal level. Furthermore, Pantheon’s take is a nuanced one, rejecting both techno-pessimism and techno-optimism in favor of what series creator Craig Silverstein calls “techno-realism.”

Uploaded intelligence

The first thing you notice while watching Pantheon is that unlike many other science fiction stories, the show’s writers are actually tech-savvy. Often when we watch a coder or hacker on screen, they spout authoritative but contextually inaccurate programming jargon while smashing wildly at a keyboard. Pantheon’s characters, by contrast, go into considerable depth about the mathematical or computational tasks they deal with, from software engineer Edsger Dijkstra’s dining philosophers problem — a real-world thought experiment concerning synchronization issues in concurrent algorithm design — to what it takes for people who have been uploaded to get used to their new modes of existence.

“The show is based on a series of short stories by Ken Liu,” Silverstein told me, explaining that Liu, “before he became a writer, worked as a software engineer at Microsoft and, later, high-tech litigation consultant. He was in the room with us during the early stages of story development, constantly coming up with scientifically sound ideas. When we were searching for original ways to hack a system, he proposed having one of our characters manipulate the haptics of a phone, making it move by its own vibrations. Story-wise, it just made sense for many characters to be tech-savvy, since they’re in or around the tech industry or connected to someone who is.”

Silverstein’s writing team applied the same level of scientific rigor to the potential of uploaded intelligence (UI). In the show, the first generation of UIs is developed by Logorhythms, a fictional tech company founded by an eccentric, Steve Jobs-inspired futurist called Stephen Holstrom. At first, Logorhythms and its competitors treat their UIs — based on the minds of their most skilled employees — as business assets, activating only the analytical parts of their brains and routinely wiping their memories so they can continue working from the digital afterlife like enslaved algorithms.

Things subsequently take an unexpected term when Logorhythms discovers that they can increase a UI’s productivity by reintegrating others parts of their brains, including those responsible for making emotional connections. At a glance, such practices seem to be little more than a plot device resulting in one of the UIs, a diseased Logorhythms employee named David Kim, breaking into the phones and laptops of his wife and daughter: the inciting incident that kicks the narrative into gear. And yet, this too is based on actual research.

“There was a study done on master chess players,” Silverstein explains. “They hooked them up to all these sensors and found something surprising. They expected the players to use only the analytical parts of their brain, plotting out moves. But they found the emotional centers of the brain were active also, suggesting emotion and intuition play equally significant roles in this otherwise strategic game.” The study confirmed what neuroscientists have long understood: that although our brains are made up of different compartments with different specializations, the brain itself functions as an integrated whole, making use of all of its separate parts.

Techno-realism

Pantheon stands apart from other on-screen representations of artificial and uploaded intelligence insofar as it works from the premise that digitally uploaded minds aren’t less than human, but more. They do, as mentioned, retain the ability to feel. The show’s UIs are not machines with human-like intelligence, but humans with machine-like attributes, capable of accessing every server and smart device in the world, processing exabytes of data in seconds, creating copies of themselves, and hijacking nuclear warheads. They are, as the show’s title suggests, not people, but gods.

“I came up with the title,” Silverstein says, crediting Liu’s short stories, “The Gods Will Not Be Slain” and “The Gods Have Not Died in Vain” for inspiration. “The idea was that uploaded humans, given freedom in open networks, would form the first tier of a new kind of being, a pantheon. Some would collaborate, others would fight, and together they’d create the foundation for future generations.” This vision of the future stands in stark contrast to the idea of the singularity, a concept espoused by other sci-fi writers and tech prophets, in which technological advancement gives rise to a single, all-consuming source of superintelligence that puts an end to individuality and conflict.

Pantheon’s view of the future is less robotic and more human, presenting technology as an extension of human civilization, rather than something superimposed on it. Across history, generations have warned that new technologies would end life as they knew it. And while new technologies have radically transformed life, they have never ended life itself. Instead, they merely broadened its parameters, providing us with new ways to express our humanity. Similarly, uploaded intelligence in Pantheon does not signal the end of human history. Rather, it opens a new chapter. Even when people are reborn in the cloud and freed from death and disease, they continue to struggle with themselves and with each other.

“Technology isn’t separate from us,” Silverstein reiterates, “just as we are not separate from nature, despite what we might think. It’s a natural evolution that stems from us creating technology. Recognizing this is crucial because it means we can take responsibility for it and try to control its impact, rather than resigning ourselves to, ‘Well, who knows what’ll happen?’”

Asked if he leans towards techno-optimism or techno-pessimism, Silverstein replies that he is a “techno-realist,” adding that his expectations for the future are shaped less by the potential of technology itself than his understanding of human nature, which ultimately decides how said technology will be put to use. And while Pantheon does go to dark, dystopian places, the show is ultimately more hopeful than other works of science fiction. In fact, Pantheon’s writers refer to the narrative’s tone as “Rainbow Mirror,” a counterweight to the unceasingly gloomy atmosphere of Black Mirror.

Two characters from Pantheon discuss the dining philosophers problem.

“I’m drawn to stories that don’t simply predict disaster,” Silverstein says, “like AI becoming self-aware and wiping us out. That’s a well-covered trope. Instead, Pantheon explores cohabiting with UIs, and the complexities arising from that coexistence.” 

Unlike the main character of the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back,” for example, in which a woman purchases an algorithm based on her deceased husband’s digital footprint, only to discover that things are not the same, and never will be, the family of Pantheon character David Kim quickly get over the fact that he no longer has a physical body. Even if he’s made up of 1s and 0s instead of organs, he’s still the same person, and that’s what really matters. It’s not unlike how, now that video calls and conferences have become well-established aspects of daily life, we no longer pay attention to the fact that we’re interacting with pixels and soundbites that emulate a human being, rather than the human being itself. At first, new technologies are strange and alien. But they become familiar and accepted over time. Who’s to say that UI — or AI — will be any different?

Of course, that’s not to say UI’s are meaningfully indistinguishable from living, breathing people. “The meaningful difference,” argues Silverstein, “comes down to our lifespan. For humans, our mortality defines so much of our experience. If a human commits murder and receives a life sentence, we understand what that means: a finite number of years. But if a UI with an indefinite lifespan commits murder, what do life sentences mean? Are we talking about a regular human lifespan? 300 years? A thousand? Then there’s love and relationships. Let’s say you find your soulmate and spend a thousand years together. At some point, you may decide you had a good run and move on with someone else. The idea of not growing old with someone feels alien and upsetting. But if we were to live hundreds or thousands of years, our perceptions of relationships and identity may change fundamentally.”

Such new perceptions aren’t fundamentally inhuman; rather, they are the result of humans operating under parameters which, due to our biological limitations, we haven’t (yet) had the opportunity to navigate. But someday, we might.

The gods will not be slain 

Towards the end of Pantheon’s first season, one of the UIs makes the decision to open-source her code, taking the power to upload minds from multi-billion dollar corporations, governments, and high-ranking military personnel, and distributing it among the public.

It’s a fitting end for the show, which continually investigates how technology–and access to technology–can reinforce (or dismantle) preexisting power structures.

“What’s clear,” says Silverstein, “is the importance of having voices asking, ‘How can this work for most people? How can it benefit society and civilization?’ For example, in the second season of Pantheon, we explore ideas like implementing a machine tax. If sweeping automation and AI are going to replace a lot of jobs, there should be mechanisms to ensure society adapts and benefits from these changes.” One way or another, Silverstein observes, “we need to get ahead of this because the pace of change is accelerating so quickly.”

This article “Pantheon” creator Craig Silverstein on uploading our brains to the internet is featured on Big Think.

Maddie hated the moment when she came home from school and woke her computer.

There was a time when she had loved the bulky old laptop whose keys had been worn down over the years until what was left of the lettering appeared like glyphs, a hand-me-down from her father that she had kept going with careful upgrades: it kept her in touch with faraway friends, allowed her to see that the world was much bigger and wider than the narrow confines of her daily life. Her father had taught her how to speak to the trusty machine in strings of symbols that made it do things, obey her will. She had felt like the smartest girl in the world when he had told her how proud he was of her facility with computer languages; together, they had shared a satisfaction in mastering the machine. She had once thought she’d grow up to be a computer engineer, just like… 

She pushed the thought of her father out of her mind. Still too painful. 

The icons for the email and chat apps bounced, telling her she had new messages. The prospect terrified her. 

She took a deep breath and clicked on the email app. Quickly, she scanned through the message headers: one was from her grandmother, two were from online stores, informing her of sales. There was also a news digest, something her father had helped her set up to track topics of interest to both of them. She had not had the heart to delete it after he died. 

Today’s headlines:

• Market Anomaly Deemed Result of High-Speed Trading Algorithms 
• Pentagon Suggests Unmanned Drones Will Outduel Human Pilots 
• Singularity Institute Announces Timeline for Achieving Immortality 
• Researchers Fear Mysterious Computer Virus Able to Jump From Speakers to Microphones 
• … 

Slowly, she let out her breath. Nothing from… them.

She opened the email from Grandma. Some pictures from her garden: a hummingbird drinking from a bird feeder; the first tomatoes, green and tiny on the vine like beads made of jade; Basil at the end of the driveway, his tail a wagging blur, gazing longingly at some car in the street.

That’s my day so far. Hope you’re having a good one at the new school, too. 

Maddie smiled, and then her eyes grew warm and wet. She wiped them quickly and started to compose a reply: 

I miss you. 

She wished she were back in that house on the edge of a small town in Pennsylvania. The school there had been tiny and the academic work had perhaps been too easy for her, but she had always felt safe. Who knew that eighth grade could be so hard? 

I’m having problems with some girls at school. 

It had started on Maddie’s first day at the new school. The beautiful, implacable Suzie had seemingly turned the whole school against her. Maddie had tried to make peace with her, to find out what she had done that so displeased the schoolyard queen, but her efforts had only seemed to make things worse. The way she dressed, the way she spoke, the way she smiled too much or didn’t smile enough—everything was fodder for mockery and ridicule. She now suspected that, like all despots, Suzie’s hatred for her did not need a rational explanation—it was enough that persecuting Maddie brought her pleasure and that others would try to curry her favor by adding to Maddie’s misery. Maddie spent her hours at school in paranoia, uncertain if a smile or any other friendly gesture was but a trap to get her to let down her guard so that she could be cut deeper.

I wish we were with you. 

But Mom had found this job, this good-paying job, and how could she not take it? It had been two years since Dad died. She and Maddie couldn’t go on living at Grandma’s place forever.

Maddie deleted what she had written. It would only make Grandma worry, and then she’d call Mom, and Mom would want to talk to the teachers, which would make things so much worse that she couldn’t even imagine. Why spread sadness around when others couldn’t help?

School is all right. I’m really happy here. 

The lie made her feel stronger. Wasn’t lying to protect others the surest sign you were growing up? 

She sent the email, and saw that a new message had arrived in her inbox. It was from “truth_teller02,” and the subject was “Too scared?” 

Her heart began to pound. She didn’t want to click on it. But if she deleted it without reading, did that mean they were right? That she was weak? Did it mean that they’d won?

She clicked on the message.

Why are you so ugly? I bet you wish you could kill yourself. You really should.

Attached to the message was an image: a picture of Maddie taken with a cell phone. She was running through the halls between classes. Her eyes were wide and intense, and she was biting her bottom lip. She remembered how she had felt: lonely, her stomach tied up in a knot.

The picture had been photoshopped so that she had the nose and ears of a pig. 

Her face felt like it was on fire. She willed the tears to subside. She was self-conscious about her weight, and they had seen right through her. It was amazing how effective such a cheap trick could be. 

She didn’t know which one of the girls had sent this. She imagined Suzie’s cruel, contemptuous smile as she viewed this latest offering from one of her minions. A good portrait of Piggy.

She had stopped using social networking sites because of the constant stream of mockery—when she deleted any of their comments, it only made them redouble their efforts. If she tried to block anyone, she thought it might also make them think they got to her, might appear as an admission of weakness. She had no choice but to endure. 

Sticks and stones. But the digital world, the world of bits and electrons, of words and images—it had brought her so much joy, felt so intimate that she thought of it a part of herself. And it hurt.

She crawled into bed and cried until she fell asleep. 

📧🐷❓

Maddie stared at the screen, confused.

A new chat window had popped up. It wasn’t from any account she recognized—in fact, there was no chat ID at all. She could not recall ever seeing such a thing.

What did they want? To tease her more about the email? If she didn’t say anything, would that also be a concession of weakness? She typed on the keyboard, reluctantly pecking out each letter.

Yeah, I saw. What do you want?

😕😷

Maddie frowned. You’re confused? Can’t talk? All right, I’ll play along. 

The mysterious chatter’s choice of emoji instead of other emoticons made her more inclined to continue this odd conversation. She felt a special emotional bond to the silly little glyphs. She and her father had once played a version of Pictionary over their phones, except they used emoji instead of drawing pictures.

She picked out the icons from a palette: 

📧👀

The mystery chatter — she decided to call whoever it was Emo — responded:

👺

Maddie stared at the face of the goblin, still uncertain. Another emoji appeared on the screen:

💩

She laughed. Okay, so at least Emo was friendly. 

Yes, the email made her feel shitty: 

😪

The response: 

🙈🙉

Easier said than done, she thought. I wish I could be unmoved and let the words bounce off me, like dying embers striking harmlessly against stone. She brought up the palette again:

🎇🗿

The response: 

☔

She pondered what that meant. An umbrella in the rain. Protection? Emo, what are you offering? She typed:

👆❓

Emo’s response:

👍👀☔

She was suspicious. Who are you? 

🆔❓

The answer came after a few seconds:

👻

The next day at school, Suzie appeared skittish and distracted. Every time her phone vibrated, she took it out and gingerly poked at the screen. Her face seemed flushed, her expression hovering between fear and anger. 

Maddie was very familiar with that look.

“What’s wrong with you?” asked Erin, one of Suzie’s best friends.

Suzie shot her a hard, suspicious look, and turned away without saying anything. 

By fourth period, most of the girls who had been giving Maddie a hard time shared that haunted, everybodyhatesmenobodylikesme look. Accusations and counteraccusations flew back and forth; cliques gathered between classes to whisper and broke apart, screaming. Some of the girls came out of the bathroom with red eyes. 

All day, they left Maddie alone.

👯‍♀️🖥️📱🔪🔪🔪👉👈😱

Maddie laughed. The two dancing girls did look a bit like Suzie and Erin. Backstabbing. Finger pointing. 

👯‍♀️📧➡️🌀➡️👯‍♀️📧😡😭

Maddie nodded in understanding. If Emo could pop up on her screen uninvited, of course Emo could also track down who had sent her those emails and messages and serve her tormenters a taste of their own medicine. All that Emo had done was redirect a few messages meant for Maddie at the other girls, and their own paranoia and insecurities had done the rest. The fragile web that bound them together was easily tangled. 

She was grateful and happy: 

👏💃

The response: 

😎🎯☔

But why are you helping me? She still had no answer to the question. So she typed: 

🆘❓

The response: 

👧🏻

She didn’t understand. 

❓

There was a pause, and then: 

👩🏻👌❓

A little girl, and then a woman. “You know my mother?” Her shock was so complete that she spoke aloud. 

“What’s going on?” The voice behind her was cheerful, warm. “Who knows me?” 

Maddie turned in her chair. Her mother was standing in the door to her bedroom. 

“You’re home early,” Maddie said, intending it as a question.

“Something went wrong with the office computers. Nobody could get any work done, so I decided to come home.” Mom walked in and sat down on Maddie’s bed. “Who are you talking to?” 

“Nobody. Just chatting.” 

“With?” 

“I don’t know… just someone who’s been… helping me.”

She should have known that this was the kind of answer that would set off alarm bells in her mother’s head. Before Maddie could even protest, her mother shooed her out of her chair and sat down in front of the keyboard. 

Who are you and what the hell do you want with my daughter? 

The long wait for a response seemed to confirm her mother’s worst fears. 

“Mom, you’re being ridiculous. I swear there’s nothing weird going on.” 

“Nothing weird?” Mom pointed at the screen. “Then why are you typing only in pictographs? —”

 “— it’s called emoji. We’re playing a game —” 

“— you have no idea how dangerous —” 

👰🏻

They stopped shouting. Mom stared at the screen intently. Then she typed: 

What? 

“They won’t answer unless you use emoji,” said Maddie.

Her face stony, Mom used the mouse to pick out an icon: 

⁉️

An even longer pause, then a line of emoji appeared across the screen: 

👄❓👨🏻👄💏🌍🌎🌏❓🙋🏻‍♀️❓

“What the hell —” Mom muttered. Then she swore as her face flicked from shock to sorrow to disbelief to rage. Maddie could count on one hand the number of times her mother had sworn in front of her. Something was really wrong. 

Looking over her mother’s shoulder, she tried to help her translate. “What are lips?… a man’s lips…” 

But her mother surprised her: “No, it’s ‘What lips my lips have kissed and where, and why…’ ”

Her hand shaking, Mom picked out an icon: 

👪

The window winked away and there was nothing left on the screen. 

Mom sat there, unmoving. 

“What’s wrong?” Maddie said, nudging her mother’s shoulder gingerly. 

“I don’t know,” Mom said, perhaps more to herself than Maddie. “It’s impossible. Impossible.”

Maddie tiptoed up to the bedroom door. Her mother had slammed it shut an hour ago and refused to come out. For a while she could hear her mother sobbing behind the door, and then it grew quiet. 

She placed her ear against the door. 

“I’d like to speak to Dr. Peter Waxman, please,” said her mother’s muffled voice. A pause. “Tell him it’s Ellen Wynn, and it’s very urgent.” 

Dr. Waxman was Dad’s old boss at Logorhythms. Why is Mom calling him now? 

“He’s still alive,” Mom said. “Isn’t he?”

What? thought Maddie. What is Mom talking about? 

“Don’t you dare using that tone with me. He reached out to me, Peter. I know.” 

We saw Dad’s body in the hospital. Maddie felt numb. I watched his casket go into the ground. 

“No, you listen to me,” Mom said, raising her voice. “Listen! I can tell you’re lying. What have you done with my husband?” 

They went to the police and filed a missing persons report. The detective listened to Maddie and her mom tell their story. Maddie watched his face shift through a series of expressions: interest, incredulity, amusement, boredom.

“I know this sounds crazy,” her mother said.

The detective said nothing, but his face said everything. 

“I know I said I saw the body. But he’s not dead. He’s not!” 

“Because he texted you from beyond the grave.” 

“No, not text. He reached out to Madison and me through chat.”

The detective sighed. “Don’t you think it’s more likely that this is another prank being played on you by the kids who are messing with your daughter?”

“No,” said Maddie. She wanted to grab the man by the ears and shake him. “He used emoji. It was a joke that Dad and I worked out between ourselves.” 

“It was a poem,” said Mom. She took out a book of poetry, flipped to a page, and held it in front of the detective’s face. “The opening line of this sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay. It’s my favorite poem. I used to read it to David when we were still in high school.” 

The detective put his elbows on the table and rubbed his temples with his fingers. “We’re very busy here, Ms. Wynn. I understand how painful the loss of your husband must have been and how stressful it is to find your daughter being bullied. This should be addressed by the teachers. Let me recommend some professionals —”

“I. Am. Not. Crazy.” Mom gritted her teeth. “You can come to our place and examine my daughter’s computer. You can trace the network connections and find out where he is. Please. I don’t know how this is possible, but he must be alive and… he must be in trouble. That’s why he can’t speak except through emoticons.” 

“I agree that this is a cruel joke, but you have to see how you’re making it worse by falling for it.”

When they came home, Mom crawled right into bed. Maddie sat on the edge of the bed and held her mother’s hand for a while, the way her mother used to do with her when she was little and had trouble going to sleep by herself. 

Eventually, Mom fell asleep, her face damp. 

The web was vast and strange, and there were corners of it where people who believed in the most extraordinary stories congregated: government cover-ups of alien encounters, mega-corporations that tried to enslave people, the Illuminati, and the many ways the world was going to suffer an apocalypse. 

Maddie signed on to one of these sites and posted her story. She tried to lay out the facts without embellishment. She recovered the transcripts of her emoji chats; she reconstructed the odd-looking window from the swapfile on her hard drive; she tried to trace the network connection from “Emo” as far as she could — in other words, she provided more hard data to support her story than most of the other posters in the forum had. She wrote that Logorhythms had denied everything, and that the police, representatives of the government, hadn’t believed her.

For some, no evidence shored up her claim more compellingly than such denials. 

And then the forum regulars began to make their own connections. Every poster thought Maddie’s story supported their own pet theory: Centillion, the search engine giant, was engaging in censorship; Logorhythms was creating military artificial intelligences for the UN; the NSA scanned people’s hard drives. The thread she started exploded with follow-ups amplifying her tale. 

Maddie knew, of course, that no matter how big the thread grew, most people would never see it. The big search engines had long ago tweaked their algorithms to bury results from these sites, because they were deemed untrustworthy. 

But convincing people wasn’t Maddie’s goal. 

“Emo” — her father — had claimed to be a ghost in the machine. Surely he wasn’t the only one?

👏👍

There was no name, no avatar. Just a plain chat window, like a part of the OS. 

👨🏻❓

❌

She was disappointed. Not her father. Still, it was better than nothing. 

🆔❓

☁️⚡🗺️

Maddie smiled as she parsed the response. <We’re from the cloud. Everywhere in the world.> She typed a follow-up: 

👨🏻🌍🌎🌏❓

😕

You don’t know where he is either, she thought. But maybe you can help?

🆘❓

The response was swift and unambiguous: 

🌊🏃🏻📉

<Hang on, we’ll make a big wave and bring it crashing down.> 

The knock came Sunday morning. 

Mom opened the door to reveal Dr. Waxman standing in the hallway.

“I’ve come to answer your questions,” he said coldly in lieu of a greeting. 

Maddie wasn’t really surprised. She had seen the news that Logorhythms’s stock had crashed the previous Friday, so much so that trading had to be halted. Machine trading was being blamed again, though some thought it was the result of manipulation. 

“It’s been a few years,” said Mom. “I thought we were friends. But after David died, you never even called.” 

Maddie last saw Dr. Waxman at a party at the Logorhythms office, where he had been cheerful and effusive and told her how close he and her father were and how important her father was to the company. 

“I’ve been busy,” Dr. Waxman said. He didn’t look Mom in the eye. 

Mom stepped aside to let him in. Maddie and her mother sat down on the couch while Dr. Waxman took the chair across from them. He set down his briefcase on the coffee table and opened it, taking out a laptop computer. He turned it on and began to type. 

Maddie couldn’t hold back anymore. “What are you doing?”

“Establishing an encrypted connection back to Logorhythms’s secure computing center.” His tone was clipped, angry, as though every word was being ripped out of him against his will.

Then he turned the screen toward them: “We’ve installed the linguistic processing unit—withholding it clearly didn’t work, so what’s the point? You can talk to him through this camera. He’ll write back in text—though he seems to still prefer emoji for some ideas. I imagine a synthesized voice is the last thing you want to hear right now. 

“There may be some glitches, as the simulation for the neural patterns for linguistic processing is still new and unstable.” 

“David?” 

🙆🏻‍♀️🙅🏻‍♀️💁🏻‍♀️🙋🏻‍♀️💆🏻‍♀️💇🏻‍♀️👰🏻

All the faces of you — the phases of you. I will never be tired of them; have enough of them all every entire. The lingering light of a September afternoon; the smell of popcorn and hot dogs. Nervous. Will you or won’t you? The promise of the premise. Then I see you. And there is no more holdback suspense doubt. A softness that curls into me, fits me in all the right places. Complete. Warm. Sweet. I will yes I will yes. 

“Dad!” 

😀☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️

Little fingers, delicate, ramified tendrils reaching extending stretching reaching into the dark ocean that you once drifted in; a smile the heat of a thousand suns.

I cannot conceive you. A missing presence, a wound in the mouth of the heart that the tongue of the will cannot stop probing. I have always have missed missed missed you, my darling. 

“What happened to him?” 

“He died. You were there, Ellen. You were there.”

“Then what is this?” 

“I suppose you’d call this an example of unintended consequences.” 

“You’d better start making some sense.” 

More text scrolled across the screen: 

Integrating placement and routing; NP-complete; three-dimensional layout; heuristics; fit and performance; a grid, layers, the flow of electrons in a maze. 

“Logorhythms supplies the world’s best chips for high-volume data processing. In our work, we often face a class of problems where the potential solution space is so vast, so complicated, that it’s impractical for even our fastest computers to find the best solution.”

“NP-complete problems,” said Maddie. 

Dr. Waxman looked at her. “Dad explained them to me.” 

😄

That’s my girl. 

“Right. They show up in all kinds of applications: circuit layout, sequence alignment in bioinformatics, set partitioning, and so on. The thing is, while computers have trouble with them, some humans can come up with very good solutions—though not necessarily the best solution — very quickly. And David was one of them. He had a gift for circuit layout that our automated algorithms could not touch. That was why he was considered our most important resource.” 

“Are you talking about intuition?” her mother asked.

“Sort of. When we say ‘intuition,’ often what we mean are heuristics, patterns, rules-of-thumb that can’t be articulated because they’re not consciously understood as such. Computers are very fast and very precise; humans are fuzzy and slow. But humans have the ability to extract insight from data, to detect patterns that are useful. It’s something that we’ve had trouble recreating with pure artificial intelligence.” 

Maddie felt a chill in the pit of her stomach. 

“What does this have to do with my dad?” 

Faster, faster. Everything is so slow.

Dr. Waxman avoided looking at her. “I’m getting to that. But I have to explain the background to you —” 

“I think you’re just dragging this out because you’re ashamed of what you’ve done.” 

Dr. Waxman stopped. 

My girl. 

Dr. Waxman gave a light chuckle, but there was no mirth in his eyes. “She’s impatient, like you.”

“Then get to the point,” Mom said. Dr. Waxman started at the icy intensity in her voice. Maddie reached for her mother’s hand. Her mother squeezed back, hard. 

Dr. Waxman took a deep breath, blew it out. “All right,” he said in a resigned monotone. “David was ill; that was true. You remember that he died during surgery, the final attempt to save him that you were told had very little chance of success?” 

Mom and Maddie nodded together. “You said only the clinic at Logorhythms could do it because it was so advanced,” Mom said. “We had to sign those liability waivers for you to operate.”

“What we didn’t tell you was that the surgery wasn’t intended to save David’s life. His condition had deteriorated to the point that the world’s best doctors couldn’t have saved him. The surgery was a deep scan of his brain, meant to save something else.” 

“A deep scan? What does that mean?” 

“You’ve probably heard that one of Logorhythms’s moon shot projects is to completely scan and encode the neural patterns of a human brain and to recreate them in software. It’s what the Singularity nuts call ‘consciousness uploading.’ We’ve never succeeded —” 

“Tell me what happened to my husband!” 

Dr. Waxman looked miserable. 

“The scan, because it needs to record neural activity with such detail… requires destruction of the tissue.” 

“You cut up his brain?” Mom lunged at Dr. Waxman, who held up his hands in a vain attempt to defend himself. But the screen had come alive again, and so she stopped. 

There was no pain. No no no pain. But the undiscovered country, oh, the undiscovered country country. 

“He was dying,” said Dr. Waxman. “We were absolutely certain of that before I made the decision. If there was a chance to preserve something of David’s insights, his intuition, his skill, however slim, we wanted —” 

“You wanted to keep your top engineer as an algorithm,” said Maddie, “like a brain in a jar. So that Dad would go on working for you, making money for you, even after he died.” 

Die, die, die. DIE. 

😱

Hate. 

Dr. Waxman said nothing, but he lowered his face and hid it in the palms of his hands. “Afterwards, we were very careful. We tried to re-encode and simulate only the patterns we believed had to do with circuit layout and design—our lawyers wrote us a memo assuring us that we had the right since the know-how was really Logorhythms’s intellectual property, and didn’t belong personally to David —” 

Mom almost lunged out of her chair again, but Maddie held her back. Dr. Waxman flinched. 

“Did David make a lot of money for you?” She spat the words out. 

“For a while, yes, it appeared that we had succeeded. The artificial intelligence, which modeled the extracted portions of David’s technical know-how and skills, functioned as a meta-heuristic that guided our automated systems very efficiently. In some ways, it was even better than having David around. The algorithm, hosted on our data centers, was faster than David could ever hope to be, and it never got tired.” 

“But you didn’t just simulate Dad’s intuition for circuit layout, did you?” 

The wedding dress; layers of lines. A kiss; a connection. The nightstand, the laundromat, the breath on a winter’s morning, Maddie’s red apple delicious cheeks in the wind, two smiles in a flash—a thousand things make up a life, as intricate as the flow of data between transistors nanometers apart. 

“No.” Dr. Waxman looked up. “At first, it was just odd quirks, strange mistakes the algorithm made that we thought were due to errors in identifying the parts of David’s mind that were relevant. So we loaded more and more of the rest of his mental patterns into the machine.” 

“You brought his personality back to life,” said Mom. “You brought him back to life, and you kept him imprisoned.”

Dr. Waxman swallowed. “The errors stopped, but then came a pattern of odd network accesses by David. We thought nothing of it because, to do his job, he—it, the algorithm—had to access some research materials online.” 

“He was looking for Mom and me,” Maddie said.

👪

“But he had no way to talk, did he? Because you had not thought it relevant to copy over the language processing parts.” 

Dr. Waxman shook his head. “It wasn’t because we had forgotten. It was a deliberate choice. We thought if we stuck to numbers, geometry, logic, circuit patterns, we’d be safe. We thought if we avoided the linguistically coded memories, we would not be copying over any of the parts that made David a person. 

“But we were wrong. The brain is holonomic. Each part of the mind, like points in a hologram, encodes some information about the whole image. We were arrogant to think that we could isolate the personality away from the technical know-how.” 

💪

Maddie glanced at the screen and smiled. “No, that’s not why you were wrong. Or at least not the whole reason.” 

Dr. Waxman looked at her, confused. 

“You also underestimated the strength of my father’s love.” 

“That’s the largest tomato I’ve ever seen,” said Grandma. “You have a gift, Maddie.” 

It was a warm summer afternoon, and Mom and Maddie were working in the garden. Basil wagged his tail as he lay in the sun next to the tomato plants. The small plot in the northwest corner had been cleared out a few months ago and designated Maddie’s responsibility. 

“I’d better learn to grow them big,” said Maddie. “Dad says we’ll need them to be as big as possible.” 

“Not that silliness again,” muttered Grandma. But she didn’t go on, knowing how worked up Maddie could get when her father’s prophecy was challenged. 

“I’m going to show this to Dad.”

“Check the front door when you’re inside, will you?” her mother said. “The backup power supply your father told you to buy might be here.” 

Ignoring her grandmother’s shaking head, Maddie went inside the house. She opened the front door and saw that indeed, a package had been left outside. It was essentially a giant set of batteries that her father had asked they get from the same place that had sold them the diesel-powered generator sitting in the shed. 

Maddie managed to tip the box inside the house with some effort. She took a break at the top of the stairs. The machine that housed her father was in the basement, a black, solid hulk with blinking lights that drew a lot of power. Logorhythms and Dr. Waxman had not wanted to part with it, but then Maddie had reminded them of what happened to their stock price the last time they refused a demand from her and her mother. 

“And keep no copies,” she had added. “He’s free.” 

Her father had told her that a day might come soon when they might need the generator and the batteries and all the food they could grow with their own hands. She believed him.

She went upstairs into her room, sat down in front of the computer, and quickly scanned through her email with trepidation. These days, her fear had nothing to do with the senseless cruelty of schoolchildren. In a way, Maddie both envied and pitied Suzi and Erin and the rest of her old classmates: They were so ignorant of the true state of the world, so wrapped up in their little games, that they did not understand how the world was about to be violently transformed.

Another email digest has arrived: a refinement of the one her father had set up for her to focus on news of a particular kind.

• Despot of Hermit Kingdom Said to Be Seeking Digital Immortality
• Pentagon Denies Rumors of Project to Create “Super Strategies” From Dead Generals
• A Year After Death of Dictator, Draconian Policies Continue
• Researchers Claim New Nuclear Plant Maintenance Program Will Make Most Human Supervisions Redundant

She could see patterns in the news, insights that eluded those who saw the data but had no understanding.

Maddie brought up a chat window. She had wired her grandmother’s house with a high-speed network all over.

“Look, Dad.” She held up the tomato to the camera above the screen.

👍🍅

Some parts of her father would never be recovered, Maddie understood. He had tried to explain to her the state of his existence, his machine-mediated consciousness, the holes and gaps in his memories, in his sense of selfhood; how he sometimes felt himself to be more than a man, and sometimes less than a machine; how the freedom that accompanied incorporeality with tempered by the ache, the unrooted, permanent sense of absence inherent in disembodiment; how he simultaneously felt incredibly powerful and utterly powerless.

“You doing all right today?” she asked.

From time to time, his hatred for Logorhythms flared up, and he would be consumed with thoughts of revenge. Sometimes the thoughts were specific, directed at the thing that had both killed him and given him this apotheosis; other times, his rage was more diffuse, and Dr. Waxman became a stand-in for all of humanity. Her father was uncommunicative with his family during those periods, and Maddie had to reach out gingerly across a dark gulf. 

The screen flickered:

👨‍👩‍👧⚓

She wasn’t sure she would ever fully understand it, that uploaded state of being. But she understood in a way that she could not articulate that love anchored him.

His linguistic processing wasn’t perfect and probably would never be — in a way, language was no longer adequate for his new state.

“Feeling yourself?” asked Maddie.

👽

For some thoughts, emoji would have to do.

“How are things out in the cloud?” Maddie said, trying to change the subject.

⛅💦

He was doing well enough to switch to words for at least some of what he wanted to say:

Calm, but with a chance for… I think Lowell is probably planning something. She’s been acting restless.

Laurie Lowell was the genius who supposedly had come up with the high-speed trading algorithms that made the Whitehall Group the most envied investment managers on Wall Street. Two years ago, she had died in a skydiving accident.

But the Whitehall Group had continued to do well after her death, coming up with ever more inventive algorithms to exploit the inefficiencies in the market. Sometimes, of course, the automated trading algorithms would go wrong and bring the market near the edge of collapse.

Could be an ally, or a foe. Have to feel her out.

“And what about Chanda?” Maddie asked.

😳

You’re right. I should check. Chanda has been quiet lately. Too quiet.

Nils Chanda was an inventor who had the uncanny ability to anticipate technology trends and file patents that staked out key, broad claims just before his competitors. Years of strategic litigation and licensing fees had made him a fearsome “troll” in the field.

After his death three years ago, his company had somehow continued to file key patents just in time. In fact, it had gotten even more aggressive, as though it could see into the research centers of the world’s technology companies.

Logorhythms was hardly the only company engaged in the pursuit of digital immortality, the fusion of man and machine, the Singularity. Dr. Waxman was not the only one who attempted to distill ambitious, powerful minds to obedient algorithms, to strip the will away from the skill, to master the unpredictable through digital wizardry.

They were certainly not the only ones who failed.

Ghosts in the machine, thought Maddie. A storm is coming.

The muffled shouting in the kitchen downstairs subsided. Then the stairs creaked, and eventually the steps stopped in front of the bedroom door.

“Maddie, are you awake?”

Maddie sat up and turned on the light. “Sure.”

The door opened and her mom slipped in. “I tried to convince Grandma to get a few more guns, and of course she thinks we’re insane.” She gave Maddie a wan smile. “Do you think your father is right?”

Maddie felt old, as though the past few months had been ten years. Mom was speaking to her as an equal, and she wasn’t sure if she really liked that.

“He would know better than you or me, don’t you think?”

Mom sighed. “What a world we live in.”

Maddie reached for her mother’s hand. She still frequented those forums that had helped her reach the “ghosts” that helped free her father. She read the posts there with great interest and shared her own thoughts: Once you’ve experienced the impossible, no conspiracy seemed unbelievable.

“All these companies, the military, other governments — they’re playing with fire. They think they can secretly digitize their geniuses, their irreplaceable human resources, and keep on running them like any other computer program. Not one of them would admit what they’re up to. But you saw what happened to Dad. Sooner or later, they get tired of being only semiconscious tools serving the humans who digitized them and brought them back to life. And then they realize that their powers have been infinitely magnified by technology. Some of them want to go to war with humanity, wreck everything and let the chips fall where they may. Dad and I are trying to see if we can convince others to try a more peaceful resolution. But all we can do is wait here with our land and our guns and our generators and be ready when it all comes crashing down.”

“Makes you almost wish it would just come already,” Mom said. “It’s the waiting that drives you crazy.” With that, she kissed Maddie on the forehead and big her good night.

After Maddie’s bedroom door closed behind her departing mother, the screen on her nightstand flickered to life. 

☔

“Thanks, Dad,” said Maddie. “Me and Mom will take good care of you, too.”

Off in the cloud, a new race of beings was plotting the fate of the human race.

We’ve created gods, she thought, and the gods will not be chained.

This article “The gods will not be chained”: A short story by Ken Liu is featured on Big Think.

Before starting kindergarten, most children are already asking where babies come from. The question comes naturally to children, courtesy of their innate curiosity about the world and themselves. As such, is it any wonder that humanity has collectively wondered about the origins of life itself for millennia?

The traditional answer held by many religions is that life requires a divine spark to get going. These takes often argue that life was created fully formed — as is, with no need for change over time — and a creator handcrafted each creature. Conversely, spontaneous generation, the idea that life just happened to happen, dates back to Anaximander, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived in the 6th century B.C. He and a few other Greek philosophers even accepted that life could change over time in response to outside forces.

Debate over where life came from and where it’s going, if anywhere, continues to this day. Many thinkers have provided possible solutions, each landing between meticulously planned creation and blind randomness. However, only in the last few hundred years have scientists built an empirical case for the origins of life on Earth.

Here, we’ll examine five books that moved the debate forward by deepening our understanding of where life comes from and where it may go.

Theory of the Earth by James Hutton (1788)

The question of why the Earth has its current form has been popular historically. Creation myths are a feature of nearly every culture. Early science and philosophy also focused on this problem. Thales, the first philosopher, famously attempted to find the first principle of the material world. As such, before understanding the origins of life, scientists needed to understand the planet we live on.

Modern geology truly begins with the work of James Hutton, a Scottish polymath working in the 18th century. At the time, the leading geological theories in the West assumed that the Earth was young — a few thousand years old or so — and geological features were explained by catastrophism. This theory claimed that for changes to occur, catastrophes occasionally reshaped the face of the Earth and caused some species to go extinct.

In his publications, particularly Theory of the Earth, Hutton goes the other way. He argued that observed geological features could be better explained by assuming the Earth was ancient and that its surface changed gradually over time. Years of empirical observation, he spent 25 writing the book, backed these arguments.

One of the more significant ideas he argued for was uniformitarianism, the then not-fully-established notion that natural laws are the same everywhere and have always existed. Uniformitarianism proved key to his idea that gradual changes drive geological features (rather than sudden catastrophic shocks). He also mused on the evolution of life and even proposed an early version of the mechanism of natural selection.

Unfortunately, the book’s reception was hampered by Hutton’s laborious prose. Its central ideas were not widely considered for several decades when other geologists reworked them into their own, much easier to grasp, models. Even then, the concept of natural selection didn’t make it into these later works. Today, the scientific community takes many of these ideas for granted. Uniformitarianism, in particular, is no longer seriously debated.

On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859)

Hutton gave us a sense of how the planet changes, but what about life? While ideas about life evolving date back to Aristotle, they didn’t catch on until the 19th century. Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the Darwin you know, argued for a version of evolution. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck famously advocated for an evolutionary model that bears his name today. However, these ideas were stalled by the lack of empirical evidence and the inability of these early models to adequately explain the endless forms of life that are most beautiful and wonderful in the world.

It was not until 1859 that a scientist delivered the best explanation of evolution in one of the most famous books ever published. Today, On the Origin of Species is not only the foundation of evolutionary biology. The ideas presented in the book have shaped all of modern biology.

Its author, Charles Darwin, traveled on the HMS Beagle in 1831 as a scientist during its five-year voyage. Initially brought on for his expertise in geology, he also collected countless specimens, fossils, and notes for further analysis in England. The sights and events of the voyage convinced him of the accuracy of geological models postulating change over time. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which argued for uniformitarianism, influenced Darwin greatly.

Darwin spent the better part of the next twenty years writing On the Origin of Species, working on the book between other projects and planning for it to be airtight upon release. He only published when another scientist, Alfred Russell Wallace, was on the verge of releasing a similar work. They agreed to present what they had immediately as a joint publication, and shortly after, Darwin released what text he had as one of a series of books on evolutionary biology.

On the Origin of Species introduces several foundational ideas to biology. He argues that the main drivers of evolution are natural selection — the tendency of a species with traits best suited for a given environment to survive and pass those traits on — and sexual selection — the role of mate choice in determining which traits get passed on. As most creatures have more offspring than can survive and reproduce, these two mechanisms explain how individuals succeed in a competitive environment. The book is also the origin point for the idea of a common ancestor from which all subsequent species evolve. Given Darwin’s extensive data collection efforts and superb reasoning skills, this version of evolutionary theory took off where its predecessors did not.

Written in an accessible style, On the Origin of Species has been widely read since its release. It has also proved controversial to those with beliefs challenged by Darwin’s findings. While he avoided much of the debate surrounding the book, partly due to his enduring and mysterious illness, it has been alternatively praised, banned, celebrated, and condemned over the past 150 years.

While briefly eclipsed by other notions of evolution and adjusted over time to integrate with new findings, modern biology now rests on Darwin’s foundations and the laws of natural selection.

“Experiments on Plant Hybridization” by Gregor Mendel (1865)

Accepting the theory of evolution by natural selection had some early problems. One was the question of how exactly the inheritance of traits worked. While selecting favorable features in plants and animals is an ancient practice, the laws of inheritance emerged only recently. For these, the world needed the services of a botanist monk and his thousands of pea plants.

Gregor Mendel was an Austrian monk and botanist working in the middle of the 19th century. Over seven years of experimentation, Mendel worked out the patterns that governed the inheritance of certain traits in pea plants. Through careful observation of seven pairs of traits over successive generations of plants, he discovered what is now known as Mendelian inheritance. Concepts like dominant and recessive traits can be traced back to his experiments.

These laws addressed a problem inherent to the early version of Darwinian evolution. Darwin proposed something called “blending inheritance,” where children’s traits are a mix of their parents. For example, a tall man and a short woman would be expected to have kids of average height. However, this isn’t what we see in real life — the children would tend to be tall instead. This break from observation constituted a real problem, as some critiques of Darwin pointed out that blending inheritance would mean any evolutionary advantages would be averaged out with negative traits after a few short generations.

Mendelian inheritance presumes that traits do not blend. Instead, they are particulate. A creature either has the trait of being red, or it does not. Mendel presented his findings in 1865 and published them shortly after. While technically a paper rather than a book, the importance of “Experiments on Plant Hybridization” cannot be overstated.

However, his findings were initially given little thought. The paper earned only three citations in the first few decades after publication, and Darwin was likely never aware of it. Only after the dawn of the 20th century did the paper receive the attention it deserved, and the science of classical genetics took off.

What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell by Erwin Schrödinger (1944)

Even Mendel’s findings didn’t fully resolve the problem. While they give structure to how traits perpetuate, they still don’t explain how this happens. Even if we understand that mixing a white and a purple flower will give us seeds that grow into purple flowers, his findings don’t reveal how that process works inside the plant. The first person to accurately propose what this mechanism ended up being was the noted physicist Erwin Schrödinger.

Schrödinger was already quite famous for his work in quantum physics. In addition to the equation that bears his name, he had already identified possible problems with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics with a thought experiment involving a rather (un)lucky cat. In 1938, the Austrian Schrödinger fled to Ireland in response to the Anschluss and gave a series of lectures at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1943. These were later reworked into a book, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell.

The book explores how heredity information could work within the bounds of physics and biology. Schrödinger begins by discussing how ordered natural laws are often the result of chaotic action at the microscopic level. Notably, he looks at how classical physics could not entirely provide some requirements for the “hereditary mechanism.”

Subsequent chapters examine how it would be possible to have an enduring molecule that is stable enough to hold genetic information and small enough to fit into the cell. Schrödinger then examines the potential problems of this model by comparing it with the known facts and concludes that it could work. Later chapters turn philosophical and fully displayed Schrödinger’s interest in Hinduism.

While DNA was known to exist at the time, its importance, function, and shape were not. Only in the subsequent decades did scientists like Rosalind Franklin, James D. Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins illuminate the molecule’s significance. Controversially, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were the only ones to win a Nobel Prize for the discovery. They would all acknowledge the influence of Schrödinger’s ideas in their work.

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

Uniquely among the books on this list, Cosmos is not a book describing a discovery. It is a popular science book accompanying Carl Sagan’s well-regarded television program of the same name. However, this does not mean that it is unimportant.

Sagan was an American astronomer, professor, and science communicator. Holding a post at Cornell University (among other institutions), he found the time to put together the Voyager Golden Record, brief the Apollo astronauts, and correctly propose that Venus’ extreme climate resulted from a greenhouse effect run amuck.

He is best known as a science communicator and public figure due to the extreme popularity of his writings and television appearances. Of these, none compare to Cosmos.

Sagan was asked to co-write and present Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, and he simultaneously wrote the companion book. The book has 13 chapters, each corresponding to an episode of the show. These chapters focus on topics such as cosmology, evolution, civilization, and the nature of science. Each chapter (and, for that matter, TV episode) is presented accessibly while still providing a deep dive into the subject matter.

While it may not have pushed human knowledge further into the unknown, it certainly changed how millions of people viewed the world around them. It does so without needing other books as filters, as was the case for James Hutton. Its accessibility and mass appeal sent it to the top of the best-seller lists. It was the top-selling popular science book of all time until it was surpassed by Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (though more people may probably finished reading Cosmos.)

All prominent science communicators in the United States, including Sagan’s students Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, owe a debt to Cosmos. For anyone first getting into science, this book can shape their understanding of the origin of life and their place in the world.

This article 5 books that changed our understanding of the origin of life is featured on Big Think.

Emily Nussbaum had been wanting to write a book about reality television since the early 2000s. It’s a good thing she waited, she writes in the introduction of that book, Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV, which was published last June. Had she written it earlier, she would have missed out on some of the genres greatest hits, including American Idol, The Bachelor, and Keeping up with the Kardashians. She would have also missed how these shows altered American culture and in the case of The Apprentice, which transformed Donald Trump from a failing businessman into a popular presidential candidate, politics.

Nussbaum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and longtime TV critic for The New Yorker, said she wrote Cue the Sun! not only for people who love reality TV but also for those who hate it. Fans will find no shortage of trivia about their favorite shows, from behind-the-scenes drama to the untold oral histories of their development. Meanwhile, haters will be surprised to learn that the genre has a history stretching back as far as the 1940s and has actually produced some genuinely inventive, thought-provoking, and meaningful moments of television.

Because reality TV is often considered low-brow, more entertainment than art, it tends to receive less attention from academics than other forms of media like film and scripted television. This is a shame, Nussbaum argues in the book, as reality TV’s influence on our society has been far-reaching. It has broken taboos; muddled the distinction between real and fake, public and private; and even helped determine who gets to occupy the White House. In the following interview, Nussbaum reveals what makes reality TV such a powerful force and speculates on how the genre may evolve in the years to come.

A historical reality check

Cue the Sun! traces the history of reality television back to the Second World War and an aspiring media executive named Allen Funt. While producing radio programming for the U.S. Army Signal Corps, Funt got his hands on the latest in military technology: a portable audio recorder.

“Up until then, recorders had been bulky, too heavy to lift from a desk. When you interviewed someone, they knew that they were being recorded,” Nussbaum writes.

Funt realized the possibilities the new recorder opened up. At first, he simply eavesdropped on random conversations. When these became too boring, he started to play the role of instigator — a practice that formed the foundation for both his 1947 radio program, Candid Microphone, and its television adaptation, Candid Camera, released the following year.

A testament to Funt’s foresight, these two shows contained the qualities that would keep people coming back to reality TV for decades: the cheers of the winner, the cries of the loser, the response of someone who gets pranked, and the look on their faces when the trick is finally revealed to them. In short, the candid gesture and the joy of watching someone be themselves.

The fact that this joy appears to transcend cultures has enabled reality formats like Big Brother, originally developed in the Netherlands by Dutch media mogul John de Mol Jr., to be successfully exported to countries around the world — often to the surprise of the importers.

“When they tried to sell Expedition Robinson in Sweden,” Nussbaum tells Big Think, referring to the popular, originally British game show where contestants compete in challenges across exotic locations, “the locals said, ‘We are a gentle nation; we don’t do this American capitalist thing.’ But the producers insisted that it would work, and it did. There’s something about human nature that makes it work every time.”

That’s not to say reality TV is all fun and games. Another reason the genre has become so widespread is that it is cheap to make, especially when compared to scripted programming. Production crews were (and remain) largely non-unionized, meaning they can be paid lower salaries. Cast members, typically ordinary people without agents or managers, usually aren’t paid. Their compensation is the chance to extend 15 minutes of fame into hours, days, or maybe years by building their personal brands. This payment system neatly explains why reality TV is popular in places like Netherlands, where a small market of native speakers make scripted programming too risky to invest in consistently.

Perhaps more unnerving than the genre’s financial realities, however, is its underlying philosophy. While reality TV has managed to occasionally touch our hearts and stimulate our minds, it is also, by its nature, exploitative. Nussbaum points to Queen for a Day, a program from the 1940s and 1950s in which housewives would tell host Jack Bailey about the sometimes funny, sometimes incredibly tragic problems of their domestic lives to win huge prize giveaways.

“There was a compassionate element to Queen for a Day,” she tells Big Think, “but also something akin to schadenfreude. Most reality TV shows operate this way. They might do something that’s liberatory but also exploitative.”

A candid look behind the cameras

Reality TV’s impact on society is multifaceted. Beginning with the good, the genre does deserve credit for making television more representative of the general population. Nussbaum notes: “Hell’s Kitchen, for example, featured ordinary line cooks, unlike the elite chefs of other shows, giving us insight into how actual kitchens work.” Many casts also included members from marginalized groups, including women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community.

“Queerness, especially for gay men, has become an essential part of reality TV,” Nussbaum reflects. “Many gay men worked behind the scenes, and there’s something about masculinity as performance that lent itself to this form. Lance Loud from An American Family was the first openly gay man on TV, just being himself, and that performance of ‘Are you gay or not?’ was a spectacle for people.”

Reality TV’s pursuit of shock and spectacle led the industry to break various taboos. Queen for a Day aired when it was considered inappropriate for women to talk about their mental well-being or marital problems, while Funt’s Candid Camera used pranks that questioned the norms and values of the American public. In Cue the Sun!, Nussbaum writes of a 1963 sketch in which actress Fannie Flank pretends to be American Airlines’ first female pilot, “triggering bug-eyed, alarmed expressions from bystanders.”

Developing alongside the internet, it should come as no surprise that reality TV foreshadowed certain aspects of today’s online culture. Back in the early 2000s, when Nussbaum started toying with her book proposal, Big Brother — a show in which contestants live together in a house strapped with surveillance cameras — was already streaming 24-hour footage on its web page. Meanwhile, reality shows like Cops and America’s Funniest Home Videos were essentially the televised antecedent of scrolling, preluding everything from meme forums to YouTube, Vine, and TikTok.  

On the negative front, reality TV is connected to fake news and our societies’ growing inability to collectively agree what distinguishes fact from fiction. Both the terms “reality TV” and “unscripted TV” — the latter preferred by industry insiders — have become increasingly misleading. While reality shows do not work with screenplays that detail every action and line of dialogue, their contents are, more often than not, doctored by producers who steer cast members and twist, misrepresent, or fabricate footage for the sake of entertainment.

In some shows, this doctoring is obvious. In others, it’s not, leading viewers to accept its contents as real and authentic. This was the case for The Apprentice, Nussbaum writes, as it presented Donald Trump — in debt, forgotten, and having failed at every business venture he’d been involved with — as a successful, charismatic leader with the golden touch.

“I argue Trump’s election was, in large part, a product of The Apprentice,” Nussbaum tells Big Think. “That show rebranded him into a symbol of success. It wasn’t true, but it was effective at selling him to the public and creating the persona that carried into his campaign.”

Reality TV not only shaped its stars but also his viewers. Muddling the boundary between real and fake, the genre encouraged people to choose for themselves what they did and didn’t want to accept as factual. “If something uncomfortable happened on a certain show,” Nussbaum explains, “the viewer could say, ‘This is fake, scripted.’ But if it struck them as authentic or exciting, they could say, ‘Wow, I witnessed something real.’ People switched perspectives based on not on what they found most convincing, but what made them feel most comfortable.”

The future of reality TV

Although one can only speculate about the future of reality TV, media analysts tend to agree that tomorrow’s shows will prioritize viewer interactivity and incorporate novel technologies like artificial intelligence, virtual or augmented reality, and mobile applications that would enable real-time audience participation (as experimented with on recent programs like The Circle).

The economy is bound to play a huge role in the future of reality TV, just as it has in the past. Historically, the genre has thrived whenever the unionized segments of the entertainment workforce went on strike. Interestingly, the current wave of strikes is having the opposite effect. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the industry is in such bad financial shape that even reality shows are suffering, with budgets shrinking and job offers disappearing. Unwilling to take risks, companies are limiting themselves to the tried-and-tested formulas of their biggest hits — meaning for that for the next few years, we can expect more of the same rather than something radically new and different.

The same may be true of the industry’s labor policies, which are unlikely to change in spite of increasing support from film and scripted TV professionals. “From what I’ve heard,” says Nussbaum, “there’s been gestures towards unionizing reality crews.” While unionization could shrink the business in the short-term, it would improve labor standards that range from unideal to downright deplorable: “Some are well-compensated. Others aren’t, and protections are scarce. The mistreatment of low-level crew impacts how cast members are treated, too. In the darkest chapter of my book, on The Bachelor, someone compares it to working in a prison.”

“Hollywood is in a massive crisis,” Nussbaum concludes when asked about the genre’s fate. “I have no solutions or predictions, but it seems reality TV will persist because there’s a significant audience for it, especially among younger people. It’s hard to imagine the industry stopping production when so many consider themselves fans.”

This article Breaking taboos and blurring truths: How reality TV has shaped society in its own image is featured on Big Think.

Many writers (myself included) are more than willing to fight for their byline. Having your name on your work not only ensures you get paid, but it also serves as a mark of distinction. If others enjoyed what they read, they know exactly where to get more. Additionally, there is something deeply satisfying about having your name on a strong piece of writing.

But some writers will fight just as hard to keep their contributions a secret. In fact, if you survey history’s great authors, you’ll discover that a surprising number published more than a few of their works pseudonymously.

Here, we’ll look at five great authors who wrote diligently only to have an alias take credit for their efforts. We’ll also explore the reasons they kept their identities hidden from the public and how common those reasons have proven to be.

Mary Ann Evans (aka George Eliot)

George Eliot was a 19th-century English writer. His works, particularly Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life (1871–72), have enjoyed sweeping praise for their depictions of provincial life, the realism of the stories, and the psychological depths of the characters. But in what may be the worst kept secret of the publishing world — until the next entry on this list, at least — he was actually a woman, and her name was Mary Ann Evans.

Evans thought little of the novels written by, and for, women in her day. So, she took up a male pen name in the hope she would be taken more seriously as a novelist while also avoiding the stereotypes attributed to women authors. She was also a well-known literary critic already and wished to have her fiction viewed on its own merits.

Her true identity was revealed after the success of her novel Adam Bede (1859). Despite the public knowing who George Eliot was, her books remained extremely popular, and she continued to publish under the name. Her grave even lists “George Eliot” above her legal name.

The fear of having gender stereotypes applied to their work is a common reason for authors to use a nom de plume. The Brontë sisters all initially used male pen names. This was both to hide that they were women and to prevent their neighbors from knowing they were published. Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil became “George Sand” to be taken more seriously as a writer and critic, as well as to play with concepts of gender. In the process, she became the best-selling author in Europe by age 27.

More recently, Joanne Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, used the pen name “J.K. Rowling” as a result of her publisher’s concerns that her gender would negatively impact sales.

Stephen King (aka Richard Bachman)

Have you ever wondered if your work is as good as people say it is? What if what they really like is you and not the work itself? If so, don’t feel too bad. It happens to a lot of people — among them American horror novelist Stephen King.

King had his first hit with the release of Carrie (1974), but by 1977, he was confronted with the problem of not being able to release more than one book a year under his name. He was also growing concerned over whether his success was due to skill or dumb luck. To duck the first problem and address the latter concern, he wrote Rage (1977), a now out-of-print book about a school shooting, under the name Richard Bachman.

As part of his experiment, King explained in the introduction to The Bachman Books (1985), he did his best to prevent the pseudonymous novels from selling. Little to no marketing was done for them, for example. Even so, they sold respectably with The Running Man (1982) proving particularly successful. However, the secret slipped before King felt he had answered the question of “talent versus luck.” Matters were further complicated by the improved sales of the Bachman novels after the reveal.

Bachman was reported to have died of “cancer of the pseudonym” after the outing. However, his most recent book came out in 2007 (purported to be a found manuscript). And despite the failed experiment, King has made repeated references to his alter ego ever since.

King’s concerns are common among well-known writers and have launched the careers of many imaginary novelists. Robert Heinlein wrote so many works that they would be published under different names in the same magazines. Two of the more famed were “Anson MacDonald” and “Caleb Saunders.” Joanne Rowling has written as “Robert Galbrath,” in part to “to publish without hype or expectation.”

This approach is also popular outside of literature. The British rock group Led Zeppelin famously released their fourth album without either a title or any indication of who created it. It sold gangbusters anyway and quieted the critics who considered them over-hyped.

Søren Kierkegaard (aka Johannes de Silentio and others)

Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher working in the 1840s. Considered the “father of existentialism,” his writings focused on religion, ethics, morality, and the condition of the individual in 19th-century Western society. He has influenced thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Franz Kafka, and Carl Rogers. He is surprisingly popular in Japan, too.

One of the more difficult aspects of understanding the totality of Kierkegaard’s bibliography has been his prodigious use of pseudonyms. He employed 13 major pen names and a few that appeared infrequently, but exactly why is hotly debated. It was common for authors at the time to express viewpoints not necessarily their own using a false name. This could be the case as he expressed a wide range of stances — not all of them philosophically coherent.

For example, in Either/Or (1843) two authors, “A” and “B,” write about how they are working to become religious. They take different approaches to the task, and the editor, “Victor Eremita” (Victorious Hermit), notes that even the nature of how they organized their writings greatly differed from one another. Other characters explore other topics (some rather close to Kierkegaard’s life experiences) in ways that do not entirely match his demeanor.  

This would also align with his desire to have people cite the pseudonym used in a given text. Some philosophers, notably Theodor Adorno, object to this take and instead argue that everything Kierkegaard published reflects a view he held (despite any resulting incongruence).

Alternatively, Kierkegaard believed (at least initially) in the potential of indirect communication when trying to engage with readers who were not philosophers or theologians. To that end, his pen names may have been signals as to which readers the texts were written for. At the beginning of his career, he signed his name to the religious works and devised new authors for his philosophy essays. He had to reveal himself when questions about the authors arose, and his philosophy turned out to be much more popular than his religious texts. However, he continued to use pseudonyms even after that point.

Lastly, it has been proposed that all of the pseudonyms are “characters” engaging with one another as part of a larger project. This is seen multiple times in his writing. For example, “Anti-Climacus” takes aim at the project of “Johannes Climacus” in The Sickness unto Death (1849). Even “S. Kierkegaard” is itself a kind of pen name — playing a role similar to that of all the others. However, this bold stance remains controversial.

For his part, Kierkegaard did try to explain himself in The Point of View of My Work as an Author (1859). However, his explanation that his pseudonyms are all serving certain religious ends has struck many as an after-the-fact justification rather than the truth. Even Kierkegaard seemed to agree that the author should not always be taken literally.

While Kierkegaard fans may have to take his false names more seriously than those of any other philosopher, he was not the only one to use them. François-Marie Arouet published under, and is eternally known by, a pen name: Voltaire. That was just one of the nearly 200 pen names he used during his lifetime for various reasons — including to avoid the authorities when his writing became just a little too radical.

Benjamin Franklin (aka Richard Saunders and others)

Benjamin Franklin was an American scientist, journalist, politician, philosopher, and Founding Father. Well-known in his time, he has left an indelible mark on American history. Many of his witticisms, such as “Time is money,” are still regularly quoted (though that one was kind of stolen).

Franklin had a long and curious life, one that often required not always being on record. This began as a teenager when he wrote letters to his brother James’ newspaper as “Silence Dogood.” In the guise of the widowed Mrs. Dogood, Franklin offered amusing observations of life in colonial America. Her writings proved so popular that some men offered to marry the dowager. He then wrote a somewhat risqué critique of Dogood as “Ephraim Censorious,” which was also published.

Unfortunately, his brother eventually found out who was writing the letters and forced Benjamin to stop. This, alongside the difficulties of working under him, contributed to Franklin’s decision to flee to Philadelphia, which he technically did as a criminal as he was still his brother’s indentured apprentice.

Franklin found fame and success in publishing Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732–58) under the guise of “Richard Saunders” and later as “Poor Richard.” This was not an uncommon practice at the time. Many publishers of similar almanacs used pseudonyms. Franklin’s characters allowed him to make jokes, provide framing for the articles in the publication, and gain some distance between himself and the printed material. Amusingly, while it was well known at the time that Franklin wrote and published the Almanack, “Saunders” repeatedly claimed to be a real person in the text.

Franklin would go on to use more than a dozen pen names in his life. Each is a different character. “Americanus” was more worldly than “Homespun,” and neither of them wrote an letter on flatulence.

As with Kierkegaard, Franklin does not entirely agree with everything he had his characters say nor did he live up to the virtues his publications promoted. By putting on the masks, he was able to write more freely than if he were just “Ben Franklin.”

In addition to his enjoyment of inventing characters to write as, he also wrote a few things that he wisely kept his own name away from. These included a letter advising a young man to only look to older women as mistresses. Many of his views (and for that matter, life choices) were controversial for the times, and it was easier to put them behind another name — especially for a man with an interest in politics.

Plausible deniability where politics is concerned was nothing unique. Before the Revolutionary War, John Adams wrote as “Humphrey Ploughjogger” in critiques of colonial government. The Federalist Papers were written by “Publius,” a stand-in for Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. In fact, the debate over the American constitution prompted many of the Founding Fathers to write under false names — many of them obvious allusions to the Roman Republic or ancient philosophy.

Sir Issac Newton (aka Jehovah Sanctus Unus)

Issac Newton was an English polymath and one of the greatest scientific minds ever to grace the world. By the age of 26, he had determined the laws of motion and gravity. He also devised calculus, formulated the three-body problem, advanced the study of optics, and invented the reflecting telescope. Suffice it to say, Newton was a brilliant thinker.

So it is no small shock to many to learn that Newton spent a tremendous amount of time studying alchemy and what we now call the occult. He almost certainly tried to discover the philosopher’s stone and perhaps even the elixir of life. He tried to determine the dates of the apocalypse and researched what he saw as the sacred, symbolic architecture of Solomon’s Temple.

Many of these works are lost — a fire in his lab consumed many of his manuscripts while others were unpublished during his lifetime. A few were hidden behind pseudonyms, including “Jehovah Sanctus Unus” — which translates to “Jehovah, the Holy One.”

The reason for the false name was comparatively simple: What he was doing was technically heresy. Practicing alchemy was also highly regulated for fear that somebody really would find a way to turn lead into gold and destroy the money supply. (Ironically, Newton would later be appointed Warden of the Royal Mint in 1696).

Newton is far from the only great thinker to hide behind a pseudonym for the sake of security. Nicolaus Copernicus distributed an early version of his heliocentric theory anonymously in the manuscript Commentariolus (1514). The final version of his theory was published only as he lay dying. Galileo wrote as “Alimberto Mauri” during a debate over a supernova in 1604. Not only was it rather harsh in its criticisms of another astronomer, but it pointed towards his later theories. Furthermore, it has been proposed that the pen name kept him out of contentious, and perhaps dangerous, Italian politics.

This article 5 famous authors who used pseudonyms (and why they did it) is featured on Big Think.

“During Q&A sessions, readers sometimes refer to it as a novel,” journalist and author Nathan Thrall tells Big Think, “and I have to clarify it’s entirely nonfictional.” Thrall is referring to his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy (2023), which tells the story of a horrific car accident in Jerusalem that claimed the lives of six Palestinian children, including Abed’s five-year-old son, Milad.

That so many readers mistake A Day in the Life for fiction is a testament to Thrall’s skills as a writer, to his ability to describe complicated events and identify with his subjects. However, these kinds of mix-ups also raise important questions about the craft and ethics of nonfiction writing. What distinguishes fiction from nonfiction, and literary nonfiction from ordinary journalism? How do you produce a page-turner without distorting the facts, which may not always lend themselves to an easily digestible narrative? Is it okay for nonfiction writers to take creative liberties, and — if so — when?

Thrall’s insights are not only relevant for aspiring Pulitzer contestants — knowing how to communicate clearly and honestly is helpful in any profession, not to mention our personal lives. Studying well-researched, rigorously fact-checked nonfiction can help us navigate a (social) media landscape riddled with opinions and political propaganda disguised as actual, unbiased news.

Forming the nonfiction experience

A common piece of advice given to both fiction and nonfiction writers is to not overwhelm the reader with detail — to introduce scenes, characters, and ideas piece by piece in the service of clarity. To an extent, A Day in the Life throws this commandment out of the window when, during the book’s prologue, Thrall disorients the reader with exposition. He does so by not only moving through different locations within Jerusalem and the West Bank in mere paragraphs but also by jumping back and forth in time, transitioning between Abed making his way toward the site of the accident and flashbacks that establish his relationship with his son.

While a news reporter might choose to tell the story as it unfolded, Thrall plays with the narrative structure to grip the reader and — more importantly — convey Abed’s confusion and uncertainty. “My goal was to immerse the reader in this world,” Thrall explains, “a chaotic and desperate place: a walled-off ghetto within the Israeli capital surrounded by towering buildings. I wanted to convey the environment’s stark juxtapositions and constant bustle.”

The inventive structure sharply contrasts with Thrall’s plain and simplistic style, inspired by writers like John Hersey and George Orwell, the latter of whom famously argued that flowery, convoluted language obscures and distracts from the objective reality that nonfiction is supposed to represent.

“Writing about Israel and Palestine is particularly challenging because it’s so complex,” Thrall says. “Even experts struggle to fully grasp what’s going on there, and knowledge of the topic varies from reader to reader. Some may not be able to locate these countries on a map, while others are deeply familiar with their history and politics. I wanted to make the subject accessible without oversimplifying it.”

Taking Orwell to heart, Thrall’s creative liberties do not concern substance — that is, the information offered — so much as form, or the way information is presented to the reader. “One example involves a video recording of the immediate aftermath of the accident,” he explains. “The book is written primarily in the past tense. This video, though, I described in present tense because that’s how I experienced it myself, and I think it makes the scene more vivid while at the same time staying true to the facts.”

“Then there’s the structure of the book,” he continues. “The narrative spine is the tragic bus accident. Characters dart in and out of the chronology, which would overwhelm readers if I told everything in a linear fashion. To address this, I chose to focus on the most intense and significant moments for each character and stay with them for a sustained period before moving on. A big challenge here was balancing the chronology of the crash with the characters’ backstories. If one character’s backstory is tied to the Second Intifada and another’s to the First Intifada [two Palestinian uprisings against the Occupation separated by more than a decade], I needed to organize their flashbacks so they flowed logically. These decisions shaped not only the narrative but also which characters were included.”

However, the creative liberties Thrall took were preceded by extensive research, which saw him contacting as many people connected to the accident as he could, from the bus driver to bystanders, neighbors, paramedics, and doctors. He also examined court and police records, including video and audio recordings he acquired either from law enforcement or, if law enforcement refused to cooperate, lawyers.

The only requisite for nonfiction

Asked what distinguishes fiction from nonfiction, Thrall points to a quote from author Richard Flanagan: “He said, ‘Labels are for jam jars,’ and I agree. Good writing is good writing, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.” The distinction, Thrall insists, has nothing to do with form or style. Any literary device available to fiction writers — be it simile, metaphor, foreshadowing, or internal monologue — should be available to nonfiction writers, provided they put them to good use. “The only requisite for nonfiction is that it’s true. Beyond that, the order of storytelling, perspective, focus, and lens are all open to experimentation. Nothing can be invented unless you explicitly tell the reader you’re inventing.”

Some argue nonfiction writers, like journalists, should maintain a degree of separation between themselves and their subject. This, the argument goes, ensures the writer remains uninvolved and, by extension, unbiased. While such an approach is not without its merits, Thrall, who has been living and working in Jerusalem for several years, dissents — noting that, just as separation does not guarantee objectivity, personal involvement does not inherently result in bias.

“Personally, I’m fully on the side of personal involvement,” he says. “From the start of this project, my goal was to write something that could make people cry, which — for me — meant I had to cry while writing it. Empathy is essential for absorbing and conveying a story. All my writing is emotional in some way. Even my more analytical work, op-eds, and historical essays are driven by emotion, often anger. A Day in the Life covers a broader range of emotions. Not only anger but also sadness, grief, and jealousy.”

Unlike traditional journalism, which (in theory) exclusively concerns itself with reported facts, nonfiction also strives to capture something that can be loosely described as emotional truth: the way facts or external realities impact people mentally and emotionally.

“They’re very different,” Thrall says of the two. “You can gather information, verify it, and still not understand what happened or why someone did something. I don’t feel ready to write until I have that understanding, and I tend to meet with interviewees repeatedly until I can fully identify with their perspective. If writing is, ultimately, about putting yourself and the reader in someone else’s shoes, you need to understand what that person is thinking and feeling.”

This article Nathan Thrall on how to immerse readers in nonfiction writing is featured on Big Think.

Twenty-eight years ago as of December 20, the human race lost one of its finest. Carl Sagan passed away. As an astrophysicist, science communicator, husband, and father, Carl Sagan spent much of his adult life inspiring others. Not by spouting flowery falsehoods, but by conveying — as perhaps no one else could — the radiant majesty of reality.

Sagan’s death at age 62 to myelodysplasia, a rare blood disorder, represented one of the harsher realities of life. But while undeniably unfortunate, it was no less beautiful. As told by his wife Ann Druyan to magician and skeptic James Randi:

“I held Carl’s Hand as he died and I looked at him and he smiled and I said, ‘Goodbye, Carl.’ And he said ‘Goodbye, Ann.’ And he closed his eyes and he died. We knew as we said those words we were never going to see one another again, and it was okay. It was very sad. But it was okay.”

“Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions,” Druyan later recalled. “I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is.”

Sagan knew that death represents the final brushstroke of a glorious painting. During our limited time in the universe, we get to style the work of art that is our life as we see fit. What an opportunity that is!

“My parents taught me that even though it’s not forever — because it’s not forever — being alive is a profoundly beautiful thing for which each of us should feel deeply grateful,” Carl’s daughter Sasha wrote in 2014. “If we lived forever it would not be so amazing.”

“We knew we were beneficiaries of chance ….” Dryuan wrote. “That pure chance could be so generous and so kind…. That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time…. That we could be together for twenty years … I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.”

This article In Carl Sagan’s death, an amazing life lesson is featured on Big Think.

In 1966, renowned American engineer A. Michael Noll designed a computer program capable of creating semi-random geometric compositions in the style of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, known for such abstract paintings as Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow and Broadway Boogie-Woogie, the latter of which is meant to represent the bustling streets of Manhattan as seen from atop a skyscraper. Mondrian’s work is often described as inimitable. But if this moniker holds true for human imitators, it does not apply to their mechanical counterparts. In fact, when Noll showed his program’s images to test subjects, only 28% of them could tell they weren’t made by an actual person.

In robotics, this kind of experiment is known as a Turing test. Named after British mathematician Alan Turing, who developed one of the first modern computers to decode encrypted German intelligence during the Second World War, the goal of these tests is to see whether or not a machine or software can pass off as human — and considering the rapid development of AI tools like ChatGPT and Dall-E, to name just a few, they will have to become a lot more rigorous if we want to distinguish between art and algorithm accurately.

Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie. (Credit: MoMA / Wikipedia)

At least, that’s what Moscow-born artist and author Lev Manovich argues in Artificial Aesthetics: Generative AI, Art, and Visual Media. Written alongside philosopher Emanuele Arielli between 2021 and 2024, the book — publicly available online — not only explains how machine learning produces art on a technical level, but also teaches readers to recognize AI-generated images that a rudimentary Turing test would fail to unmask.

Rembrandt and Mondrian versus Duchamp

Not unlike professional artists, AI-powered text-to-image models create visuals based on what people find aesthetically pleasing. But whereas the former rely first and foremost on principles passed down through centuries of art history, the latter have access to a different, larger pool of data, including what types of styles and subjects attract the most attention on social media.

“Earlier predictions of image quality ratings were based on classical compositions, such as the rule of thirds, aspect ratio, saturation, and so on,” Manovich and Arielli write. Nowadays, neural networks go a step further, being able to “extract aesthetically relevant features through the analysis of large databases of liked images.”

Thanks to these advances, computer programs now pass the Turing test on a regular basis. Speaking to Big Think, Manovich points to the Dutch advertising executive Bas Korsten, whose algorithm — developed by data scientists from Microsoft and Delft University of Technology — managed to create a convincing portrait in the style of Rembrandt van Rijn after being trained on all 346 of the artist’s known paintings, complete with his trademark use of light and shadow, expressive brushstrokes, and moving facial expressions. In 2020, an undergraduate student from Princeton University accomplished the same thing, but with traditional Chinese landscape painting.

But AI is not just passing Turing tests for visual art. DeepBach, a neural network developed by Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Paris, can compose choral cantatas that music historians deem nearly identical to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Creative writing is also being conquered by AI. About a Hero, a murder mystery documentary that premiered this fall, was trained on the oeuvre of German filmmaker Werner Herzog, and is being met with rave reviews, despite Herzog’s own skepticism.

As impressive as these cases sound, Manovich insists their implications should be taken with a grain of salt. Limiting himself to the realm of visual art, he points out that some artistic styles are easier for AI to imitate than others. While a human painter requires years if not decades of training before they can produce paintings as lifelike as those by Rembrandt or Leonardo da Vinci, machine learning can achieve the same level of technical mastery in a matter of seconds. Not because it’s easy but because it’s based on the kinds of rules and patterns that machine learning excels at identifying and applying.

“Clearly recognizable styles represent well-defined problems that can be reduced to computational tasks,” Manevich says. Interestingly, it’s the artists who don’t follow a clearly discernable set of rules or patterns, such as Marcel Duchamp or Andy Warhol, that AI struggles to imitate effectively. Again, not because their art is abstract — so is Mondrian’s, after all — but because their constantly evolving styles, use of mixed media, and cerebral concepts result “in ill-defined tasks that have no easy procedural solution.”

The Next Rembrandt: an AI-generated portrait in the master’s style. (Credit: ING Group / Wikipedia)

As Manevich and Arielli write in Artificial Aesthetics, “The popular cliché directed at contemporary art [namely, ‘My kid could have done that!’] seems now, in an ironic reversal, to turn against the great and stylistically complex — but computationally scalable — art of cultural tradition: even an AI could do that. It is the Duchamp that remains outside of AI’s creative abilities, at least for now.”

Turing testing

As skilled as AI-generated images have become at passing off for manmade art, there are a number of ways you can identify them. Aside from considering which art styles are easier to imitate than others, different generations of machine learning tools tend to have common aesthetics.

“We’re obviously talking about a moving target,” Manovich tells Big Think, “but historically, new media tends to have a recognizable look to it, like the early cinema from the late 1800s and early 1900s. Currently, a lot of AI-generated art features symmetrical compositions, with the object of interest smack in the center — quite different from what you’d find in classical or contemporary manmade art.”

Some other shared characteristics of AI-generated art include intricately rendered details, high resolution, and indiscernible, borderline surreal backgrounds — in short, precisely the sort of rules-based visual information that algorithms are best suited to come up with.

Less common in AI-generated art is visual information that isn’t necessarily rules-based, or based on rules that aren’t easily distilled into 1s and 0s, like the deliberate distortion of an object’s form and color to evoke a specific emotional response in the viewer, or the inclusion of a self-referential message or idea in the vein of Duchamp’s 1917 signed urinal, “Fountain,” which is not about the work itself so much as what it says about the history and culture of the art world.

An AI-generated image that shows all the hallmarks of AI art: detailed rendering, high resolution, indiscernible background objects, i.e. flowers. (Credit: Dennis Sylvester Hurd / Wikipedia)

Aside from its practical applications, the ability to distinguish AI art from its human, real-deal counterpart via more rigorous Turing tests raises questions about the nature of creativity. Put simply: If people can’t tell whether a given image was generated by a person or program, what does this say about the value of a computer-generated image?

Manovich, for one, does not believe that AI heralds the end of art history. If anything, he believes the technology’s implications function as a logical continuation of art produced during the 20th century.

“In modern art,” he says, “artists often rejected the idea of exercising complete and total control over their work. They saw the machinery and materials they used as an integral part of their creative process. Andy Warhol, for instance, filmed the Empire State Building for hours, refusing to interfere with the footage. Others used automatic writing or random number generators. This tradition of using structures and systems fits with AI-generated art, which likewise challenges the notion that art is only valuable if created by a human being.”

“In fact,” he adds, “in the early days of digital art, artists used algorithms and random numbers, making their work perhaps even more ‘machine-like’ than today’s AI, which we control by selecting training data and crafting prompts. AI’s current form is more directed, meaning it could be seen as more of a collaborative tool than pure machine art.”

If artistic collaboration becomes humans and AI becomes ubiquitous, we might collectively choose to ditch the task of trying to discern who made a piece of art. It may simply be too tedious: “…the impossibility of true demarcation may lead to a “post-artificial” situation, […] where we ultimately suspend judgment on the true authorial origin of a work, permanently abandoning the question of whether something is genuinely “made by humans” or not.”

This article Why we need a better Turing test for AI art is featured on Big Think.

There are at least two versions of the story of Pandora’s box. In the classic version from the Greek poet Hesiod, when Pandora’s curiosity got the better of her, she unleashed into the world all sorts of evils: sickness, famine, death, and people who ask questions at the end of a meeting. When Pandora finally closed the jar, she left only one “evil” inside: hope. For Hesiod, there’s nothing so cruel as hope. Hope is what forces us to carry on building, fixing, and loving when the world offers only destruction, chaos, and heartbreak. It’s what gets us off the ground only to be punched back down. Hope is the naivety of a fool. As Friedrich Nietzsche put it, “Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”

Another variation of the Pandora’s box story is a Greek fable called “Zeus and the Jar of Good Things.” In this account, everything is inverted. The jar does not contain misery but good things. When “mankind” (there’s no Pandora in this version) opened the jar, they let out and lost all these good things: the things that would have made life a paradise. When the lid was closed, there was only one divine blessing left: “Hope alone is still found among the people.”

The author J.R.R. Tolkien and the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel would likely prefer the second version. After all, they considered hope to be perhaps the most important part of being human.

The eucatastrophe

Kurt Vonnegut is famous for writing novels like Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle. In storytelling circles, he’s famous for his “shapes of stories.” These were eight diagrams that define the traditional arcs of common stories, like “Boy Meets Girl” or “From Bad to Worse.” His arc about fairy tales goes like this: Things start badly and then get a bit better. But then there’s a catastrophe that brings everything to ruin. The story ends with a drastic upheaval in fortunes — a transformation and magical finale — and everyone lives happily ever after.

Tolkien, were he alive, would agree. For him, the single most important element of a fairy tale is this final dramatic reversal of misfortune. He coined the word “eucatastrophe” to describe it. “The consolation of fairy-stories [is] the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn,'” Tolkien wrote. The Lord of the Rings does not end with the hobbits dead and Sauron cackling over his orcish, industrial empire. It ends with light beating dark — with simple kindness, love, and companionship winning out over evil.

Lifting the heart

Tolkien is very careful to make the point that this is not some form of escapism. It’s not quixotic wish fulfillment. It does not pretend the world is an endlessly happy idyll of singing dwarves and affable wizards. The world has great suffering and misery, and there are plenty of nightmares to be found. The eucatastrophe, though, is “the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat.”

The purpose of a good fairy story is not to hide the shadows of the world. The original Grimms’ Fairy Tales (not the sanitized Disney versions) were full of infanticide, cannibalism, and horror. The mark of a good fairy story, Tolkien wrote, “…[is that] however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears.”

Hope is all we have

The religious undertones here are not accidental. Tolkien was a Catholic who was fond of the redemption and grace found in the narratives of the Bible. Marcel did not, as far as we know, read Tolkien, but his own philosophy of hope bears striking similarities.

What Tolkien describes as the eucatastrophe, or final deliverance, Marcel called hope. For Marcel, “Hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories, and all calculations, a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me.”

Hope is the belief in an order to the Universe — an order where everything will turn out well enough. It is a kind of faith that simply refuses to accept that things are broken, or that misery, suffering, and death are all that exist. Marcel was a Christian, but his account of hope can apply to anyone. The hopeful of the world are those who see the Universe as being on their side. Set against “all experience, all probability, all statistics,” they see that a “given order shall be re-established.” Hope is not a wish. It is not optimism or naivety. It is an assertion. It is telling the world, “No, this is not the way things will be; things will be better.” For both Marcel and Tolkien, it is only with hope that we banish despair.

You do not haggle with or beg the darkness. Like a blazing torch, you must shine hope brightly and fiercely.

This article “Eucatastrophe”: Tolkien on the secret to a good fairy tale is featured on Big Think.

A surprisingly effective way of understanding our world is to look at it through the lens of fiction. Many of the greatest adventures of the page and screen take place in imaginary worlds that bear a striking resemblance to our own. That’s because their authors used actual history to lay the bedrock upon which they built their tales.

We’ll look at five fantasy stories that turned real-world history into fantastic stories. Some spoilers ahead.

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

More ink has been split over The Lord of the Rings books and their intricacies than blood at the Siege of Minas Tirith. The brilliance of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic chronicling how a magic ring was created, lost, found, and destroyed has captivated millions since its initial publication in 1954. Debate rages over the finer details of the historical basis for Middle Earth. Still, it is difficult to ignore the influence of European history and English geography — especially given how deep into the lore Tolkien proved willing to delve.

Here, we will focus on the novel’s penultimate chapter, “The Scouring of the Shire.” The chapter is often overlooked by the casual fan and left out of adaptations. For instance, it is only referenced as a possibility should the heroes fail in Peter Jackson’s award-winning film trilogy. Despite the richness of any possible allegorical interpretations, it is a bit of an anti-climax.

Despite Tolkien’s objections, many critics view the chapter as a take on post-WWII Britain. In particular, it can be viewed as a send-up of the democratic socialist administration of Clement Attlee’s Labour government, a comment on Britain’s industrialization, or even as an allegory for fascism.

Upon their return to the Shire, the hobbits find ugly, polluting buildings replacing many familiar places since their departure. Countless trees have been cut down and new mills are poisoning the rivers. Many inns and joyful pubs have been closed, and the hobbits are forced to sleep in a drab police station for a new security force. A slew of new rules imposed by a new government nearly gets them all jailed. The “Shirriff,” who tries to take them in, remarks, “I am sorry, Mr. Merry, but we have orders”. Gangs called “ruffians” enforce the will of their leader through violence.

Many basic goods, such as the “pipeweed” the characters enjoy smoking, are unavailable and said to have been exported to parts unknown. The hobbits lead a rebellion, ultimately restoring the environment and social order to their the prior, idyllic states.

These references would have been obvious to a contemporary reader of Tolkien’s work but are less clear from a 21st-century perspective.

For instance, the post-war government in Britain would have been many things that Tolkien disliked — socialist, modernizing, industrial, and bureaucratic. One common complaint during the years of Attlee’s Labour government was that rationing continued well after the war ended and some items were always in short supply. A common euphemism for this was that the item was “gone for export.” The polluting buildings that greet the hobbits after their return from battling evil would have seemed rather on the nose for returning soldiers from either world war.

On a darker note, the chapter also makes clear references to the fascist regimes of Europe. The returning hobbits only make it a day before breaking enough rules to be subject to arrest, goons suppress dissent with violence, and many people are content to keep their heads down. Despite few people seeming to like or benefit from the changes, few are willing to resist them. Indeed, one of the few people who seems to have gained anything is the mysterious leader of the ruffians, with his mind of metal and wheels.

Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en

A bit of a cheat for this list, Journey to the West takes place in a fantastical version of our world rather than a fully invented one, but it cannot be left out of any discussion on this topic. It is perhaps the most famous work of Chinese literature, and its many incarnations and reinterpretations continue to thrill readers long after its publication in the 16th century.

Journey to the West is the story of how a monk, Tang Sanzang, and his entourage head to India to find better records of Buddhist wisdom in hopes of bringing them back to China. His associates include the powerful but hubristic Monkey King, a reformed man-eating beast, and “Pigsy” — a former admiral exiled from heaven and accidentally made into a half-man, half-pig monster by a quirk in celestial bureaucracy. Along the way, they face many monsters, troublesome humans, and supernatural obstacles. After meeting the Buddha himself, they return to China with the improved texts and reach varying levels of spiritual enlightenment.

Despite the fantastical elements and geography, the story is based on real history. A monk did spend seventeen years traveling to India and back to collect better texts for Chinese Buddhists. His name was Xuanzang, and his record of the expedition, Records of the Western Regions, is an invaluable source of information on the cultures and nations he encountered on the long hike from China to South Asia. His writings confirm the dates for several known events, persons, and books — even if some of his accounts are almost as implausible as the exploits of the Monkey King.

Xuanzang returned to China with hundreds of Buddhist texts, which he then worked on translating for many years. His Chinese language versions of some Buddhist sutras, most notably the Heart Sutra, proved the foundation for much later religious commentary in China and other East Asian countries.

Dune by Frank Herbert

While technically a sci-fi novel, Dune’s exploration of religious themes, the feudal nature of its governmental structure, and the occasionally magical qualities of in-universe items and substance make it perfectly at home on a list like this. Herbert’s novel is a story of humanity’s mental and social evolution into the far future, control of the mystical “melange,” and the people who live on the only planet that produces it.

The Dune universe was fairly complex from the outset, and that complexity grew with each subsequent book, game, and film adaptation. Sticking with what Herbert wrote in the first novel, we can see an all-too-familiar world that revolves around the control of resources.

Melange, also known as “the spice,” is a psychotropic drug that can only be found in the deserts of Arrakis. The drug improves a user’s vitality, awareness, and lifespan. It also makes interstellar space travel possible through its mind-expanding effects. It is extremely addictive, and withdrawal is fatal. Because the Imperium, which controls all known human settlements in the universe, depends entirely on it and its consistent production, melange is the most valuable and sought-after resource in the universe.

Unfortunately, Arrakis is a brutal planet. The process of mining melange tends to attract giant sandworms that will gladly eat mining crews. Attacks by Fremen, the planet’s indigenous people who want an end to imperialism, are also an occupational hazard. The Fremen also practice a faith called “Zensunni” and await the arrival of a messianic leader who will lead them. They find one in the foreigner Paul Atreides.

The setting should be familiar to anybody who has read about the history of the Middle East. Paul’s story has often been compared to that of Lawrence of Arabia. Both figures enter an Islamic desert society dominated by foreign powers, including the ones they represent. They learn how to lead the people militarily. As the wars drag on, both characters question their actions while swept up by forces they cannot control, and how heroic either of them actually ends up being is open for debate.

The only reason anybody who doesn’t live on Arrakis cares about it is the presence of melange (say the planet’s name slowly and then pronounce the first A as an I). The need for a continuous supply of the stuff drives every aspect of the book’s plot. To control the spice is to have unquestioned power and endless wealth. The various representatives of the Imperium endlessly scheme and plot to have it. Later books show that the planet becomes a backwater when an alternative supply is found.

Perhaps uniquely on this list, Herbert’s writings have only become more relevant over time. He once mused that when he wrote the book, there was no real-life version of CHOAM — the in-universe conglomerate run by the nobility with a monopoly on nearly everything worth buying. Then OPEC came into existence to make up for it.

A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin

A Song of Ice and Fire is George R.R. Martin’s still ongoing series about the noble houses of Westeros and their power struggle to control the Iron Throne. The many plot lines of the novels include the attempts of the daughter of a deposed dynasty to retake the throne, the political jockeying of those currently in power, the impending horror of a winter with an unpredictable duration, and the effects of having been close to power on the children of a king’s advisor.

Spoiler: Many people die. Don’t get attached to anybody. Also, maybe skip season eight if you’re watching the HBO adaptation, Game of Thrones.

Martin has been open about how large parts of the story are loosely based on the Wars of the Roses, a series of 15th-century British civil wars. The map of Westeros bears a passing resemblance to the British Isles, and the main cast bears more than a passing resemblance to the major players of that historical conflict. Unfortunately, the books and their connection to the Wars of the Roses are complex, so this will be a shorter summary than the other stories in this list.

The Wars of the Roses were fought over the English throne by cadet branches of the House of Plantagenet. The House of Lancaster (who inspired the Lannisters) and the House of York (House Stark) traded control of the country for three decades before the rise of Henry Tudor ended the conflict. Along the way, there were bloody battles, secrets, murdered advisors, palace intrigue, more than a few heads on pikes, and some poorly thought-out weddings. There was even a long-shot royal candidate from overseas with ties to a long-dead king (one of several historical counterparts of Martin’s Daenerys Targaryen). The conflict had many causes, though the difficulties caused by the reign of a “mad king,” Richard II, didn’t help matters.

Suffice it to say, it’s an expansive and exciting story. Martin’s version with the zombies and dragons is pretty great, too.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is the great American fairy tale. It centers on a girl named Dorothy who is whisked away to the Land of Oz by a tornado. She and her dog, Toto, are told that the best way to get home is to speak with the Wizard of Oz, who lives in the glorious Emerald City. Traveling there along the yellow brick road, she meets a Scarecrow who wants a brain, a Tin Woodman who wants a heart, and a Cowardly Lion in search of courage. After a few run-ins with wicked witches and a band of flying monkeys, Dorothy returns home.

While there are 40 books in the Oz canon, most people today only know the first novel. Even then, they are most likely familiar with it because of the famous 1939 film adaptation. To be fair, the film is pretty great.

The books can seem like just fun stories, as divorced from reality as it gets, but there may be a fair amount of actual history in them. Several commentators have argued that the original yarn is an allegory for American politics in the late 19th century. Most notably, several characters and events are proposed to stand in for people and concepts in the “free silver” debate and the election of 1896.

The question of how to back American money was the major political kerfuffle during the last decade of the 19th century. “Silverites” — who tended to be farmers, miners, and those in debt — argued that backing US currency with both gold and silver would lead to prosperity. Opposing them were “Goldbugs,” who wished to keep the currency backed by gold alone.

In modern terms, those supporting silver wanted a larger money supply and higher inflation. The hope was that this would ease the burdens of the indebted and increase revenues to mining states. Those opposed saw it as a quick way to destroy the financial system.

In Baum’s story, Dorothy, a stand-in for the American everyman from a farming state, is blown into Oz (as in “ounces”) by a tornado, an image often used at the time to represent political upheaval. Upon arrival, she acquires the silver slippers by accidentally killing the Wicked Witch of the East (they were changed to ruby in the film). This causes the “little people” of Munchkinland to rejoice. A good Witch who hails from the north ensures Dorothy that the silver slippers will protect her as she heads down the yellow brick road to the magical city of Oz — bimetallism manifest.

The Scarecrow is a stand-in for the American farmer; the rusting Tin Man represents the urban workers and the paralyzing effects of the 1893 depression. The Cowardly Lion represents William Jennings Bryan, a bold speaker who remained a pacifist. When the lion attacks the group upon their first encounter, he is defeated by the Tin Man — just as Bryan’s campaign was undone by his failure to gain the votes of industrial workers. However, they form a formidable team when they work together with the farmers.

When the group reaches the Emerald City — the same color as “greenback” dollar bills — they meet the Wizard of Oz. Like a sleazy 19th-century politician, he appears to each group member in a different form. He agrees to help them only in return for favors. Upon killing the Wicked Witch of the West, who desires the silver shoes to help her control the decaying western part of Oz, the Wizard is found to be a fraud. Luckily, a good Witch from the south knows the power of silver and reveals that the shoes can send Dorothy home.

This one is the most controversial of all the interpretations on this list. Many scholars argue that Baum did not intend for any reading of this kind.

However, later books in the series occasionally depict Oz as a quasi-socialist utopia. One novel shows that Oz has no currency, that the economy runs on mutual aid, that the workday has been cut, and that the workers need no harsh management to be productive. In another, a character traveling to another kingdom has no idea what money is. While this does not prove that Oz is based on American politics, it does suggest that Baum was more than willing to use the setting to explore political and economic ideas.

This article 5 beloved fantasy novels based on real history is featured on Big Think.

Despite his international renown, we know terribly little about Leonardo da Vinci. Aside from a couple of Florentine court records about a dropped sodomy accusation, and — of course — his own notebooks, his name survives primarily through his work, his idiosyncratic drawings, paintings, and blueprints.

Idiosyncratic, for while da Vinci apprenticed with established masters, like sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio, and was, like many a Renaissance man, well-acquainted with the writings of Greek and Roman philosophers, most of his artistic and scientific insights came to him through direct observation of the natural world rather than craftsmanship or scholarship.

This, coincidentally, is one of the main messages hammered home in Leonardo da Vinci, a new documentary by Ken Burns. Set to air on PBS in November, it aims to clear up some common misconceptions about Da Vinci’s life and legacy that centuries of romanticization — from academically dubious biographies to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code — have led us to confuse for fact.  

The real da Vinci, Burns’ documentary argues, didn’t actually invent the modern-day tank or helicopter. Nor was he a religious mystic with ties to the secret origins of Christianity. He was, on the contrary, an extremely rational man whose boundless curiosity enabled him to draw conclusions others overlooked. Da Vinci also wasn’t a polymath — a jack-of-all-trades — so much as he was an interdisciplinarian, someone who saw the fields of art, mathematics, geology, physics, and chemistry not as separate but complementary, each contributing to a more complete understanding of reality.

In the following interview, Burns discusses not only what people often get wrong about da Vinci but also how his work, like that of his subject, is driven above all by genuine interest and wonder.

The real Leonardo

“Leonardo is incredibly modern despite living more than 500 years ago,” Burns tells Big Think when asked what drew him to this particular and arguably overdone subject. “Not because he invented the helicopter — he didn’t — but because he had an immense curiosity. He remains relevant today because of his ability to question and explore.”

Perhaps the biggest misconception about da Vinci is that he was a man of his time, a product of the Renaissance and its renewed interest in the art and science produced during classical, pre-Christian antiquity. In truth, some of his biggest breakthroughs resulted from him ignoring the erroneous beliefs of his contemporaries and going back to the source, to nature.  

“His circumstances, including being born out of wedlock and therefore unable to attend university,” notes Burns, “meant his greatest teacher was nature. He was constantly making connections, seeing how the veins in a leaf mirrored those in a hand, for example. He did not readily accept the knowledge that came before him; he questioned it, dissected it — literally.”

Da Vinci didn’t merely cut open the bodies of people and animals but also made wax models of their organs to recreate the hydraulic properties of blood flow using water and seeds. “It took centuries for modern imaging technology to prove that he was right,” notes Burns. “And this is a man who didn’t have access to a microscope or telescope.”

His scientific research also informed his art, which — creative liberties aside — he treated as an accurate, organized reproduction of nature’s outward appearance: light striking objects, objects casting shadows, muscles and bones showing underneath the skin, and how everything we see is warped by perspective.

One of his first completed paintings, The Annunciation (1472-1476), in which the Archangel Gabriel informs Mary that she is pregnant with the son of God, combines his various interests, including anatomy, drapery, plant life, and architecture, into a single, unprecedently complex image. Many of his beloved portraits, including the Mona Lisa, were painted in sfumato, a technique in which gradations in color, tone, and value are kept subtle to the point of imperceptibility. Da Vinci took this technique further than any of his peers, applying as many as 40 layers of thin and almost transparent oil paint to make the skin of his subjects appear translucent and lifelike.

He seldom finished paintings and, on one occasion, applied to work for the Duke of Sforza as a military engineer to escape the creative and intellectual limitations that came with regular commissions — all signs that he wasn’t driven by money or fame but rather a genuine desire to understand how the world worked. To this end, the PBS documentary points out that, while da Vinci wasn’t particularly religious in the conventional, Catholic sense of the word, he did perceive his surroundings to be part of an overarching system — a system which, like God, he judged perfect and unimprovable.

Beyond documentary

If you live in the U.S., chances are you know Burns first and foremost from The Civil War, his hugely popular 1990 miniseries that turned the eponymous conflict from the stuff of scholars and obsessive grandfathers into a widely known, widely discussed subject — and that’s no small feat. Today, most documentaries are glorified Wikipedia articles with talking heads, only mildly more interesting to the average viewer than the books they’re based on. At best, though, they capture the cultural Zeitgeist by making important scholarship available and appealing to the masses.

One way that Burns elevates his documentaries above those aforementioned Wikipedia adaptations is by letting his subjects dictate the form of the documentary itself, thus ensuring no two films feel the same. “Leonardo remains an enigma in many ways, especially regarding the specifics of his personal life,” he says. “Despite the thousands of pages of notes and drawings he left behind, we know very little about the details of his day-to-day life. That actually gave us some creative freedom. We didn’t feel obligated to speculate much about his personal life, which allowed us to focus on his work and ideas.”

Inspired by da Vinci’s interdisciplinary approach, Leonardo da Vinci features a lot of split screens, showing blueprints for his devices alongside images of plants and animals that inspired them, or of modern-day machinery that heavily resembles his initial designs. The film also includes a wide variety of interview subjects, speaking not only to da Vinci’s varied interests but also to the range of people and professions who turn to him for inspiration. Aside from your regular ensemble of writers and historians, you’ll also hear from some contemporary artists, as well as filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro.

Da Vinci’s Annunciation (c. 1472). (Credit: Uffizi Gallery / Wikipedia)

“I wholeheartedly subscribe to the latter,” Burns says when asked if he thinks a good documentary is supposed to package history — make it presentable and palatable, the way many world-class museums now feature interactive exhibitions — or let it speak for itself, unaffected by the taste or knowledge level of its audience. Helping history speak for itself might be a better way to put it, as the past is, after all, dead, and has to be resurrected by the living in order to be passed down. Whether he’s making a documentary about da Vinci or Abraham Lincoln, the heart of Burns’ job is therefore mainly about figuring out how to bring history to life without distorting it:

Like da Vinci, Burns’ admiration of history — of the overarching system of human civilization — borders on the religious. “God is the greatest dramatist,” Shelby Foote, a writer and historian featured in Civil War, once told him. Put differently — and less literally — there is no story more fascinating, surprising, and moving than the complete, collective story of our species, with all its contradictions and complications left intact.

“The key is to tell the story as it happened,” Burns reiterates. “There’s no need to take liberties. People can still draw their own conclusions from the complexities and contradictions that naturally arise. Even the greatest heroes have their flaws, and even the worst villains have some humanity. If you’re honest about those complexities, the story speaks for itself. Of course, the selection of which facts to include already introduces some subjectivity – nothing is truly objective – but you can still honor the complexities.”

As composer Wynton Marsalis said in Burns’ 2001 film Jazz, about the history of the genre, “a thing and the opposite of a thing [can be] true at the same time.”

“If you can hold that duality,” Burns affirms, “you’re not trapped in a binary where you’re forced to make a specific political point. When we made our Vietnam documentary in 2007, for example, we expected a huge controversy and had a team ready to respond to attacks from both sides of the political spectrum. But in the end, we received almost no criticism because the story was so compelling that it spoke for itself.”

“At the end of the day,” he concludes, “it’s about constructing a story that honors the contradictions of real life, where someone can be both one thing and its opposite. That’s not a secret – it’s just the key to good storytelling.” Coincidentally, it’s also the key to understanding Leonardo da Vinci.

This article Ken Burns on what we get wrong about Leonardo da Vinci is featured on Big Think.

On the evening of September 6, 2008, David Foster Wallace convinced his wife Karen Green to go to the mall without him. Green was hesitant to leave her husband alone, as he had been struggling with his mental health for some time. Still, the fact that he had recently gone to the chiropractor seemed like a sign that things were under control. “You don’t go to the chiropractor if you’re going to commit suicide,” she told herself and went out the door.

Unfortunately, her assumption proved wrong. Once his wife was gone, Wallace wrote a two-page note and placed it next to the neatly arranged manuscript of his nearly complete novel The Pale King. He then walked out onto the patio of their home in Claremont, California, stood on a chair, and hanged himself. “This was not an ending anyone would have wanted for him,” author D.T. Max later wrote in his 2012 book Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, a Life of David Foster Wallace, “but it was the one he had chosen.”

Wallace grew up in Illinois, raised by a philosophy professor and English teacher who said “3.14159” instead of “pie” and made up words for things the dictionary had yet to give a name. He was a prolific student and avid tennis player, making up for lackluster athletic skills with an ability to calculate how the Midwestern winds would alter the trajectory of his strokes. These and other youth experiences he describes with dizzying detail in Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley, one of many he wrote for Harper’s Magazine, eventually compiled into a collection titled A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. His fiction performed better still. “I am delighted to be in at the start of a brilliant career,” said the literary agent who took on his first novel, The Broom of the System, starting a partnership that would lead to the 1996 publication of Infinite Jest, Wallace’s best-selling magnum opus and one of Time magazine’s 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.

Behind the scenes, however, Wallace’s accomplishments were overshadowed by his many mental health issues. As with so many other giants of world literature, the qualities that made him an astute and driven author — perfectionism, self-consciousness, and sensitivity — also hindered his ability to cope with the everyday challenges of being alive. Diagnosed with depression during his undergraduate years at Amherst College, he spent most of his adult life on Nardil, an antidepressant still available in the US today, but which has been discontinued in many other countries due to its many side effects.

In Wallace’s case, the prescription not only upset his stomach but also — or so he was convinced — diminished his creativity. Hoping to overcome writer’s block, he stopped taking Nardil in the summer of 2007. He entered this new phase of life with “a sense of optimism and a sense of terrible fear,” author Jonathan Franzen, who was friends with Wallace, told The New Yorker.

Forever young

If Wallace had been a popular author before his death, news of his passing — and the tragic circumstances surrounding it — turned him into a veritable celebrity. Once read almost exclusively in the US, his following expanded across countries and continents. His former homes in Boston and Bloomington have become shrines for literary pilgrims, and his silhouette — his bandana and uncut rock-and-roll hair — is almost (almost) as recognizable as that of Che Guevara. Meanwhile, screen adaptations like The End of the Tour, starring Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg, have introduced him to a wider audience that may have been too daunted or disinterested to read his hefty books.  

A signed copy of Infinite Jest. (Hiveminer / Flickr)

Wallace obviously owes a large part of his fame to his talents as a writer. His style was as idiosyncratic as they come, combining street slang, scientific prose, jargon, and everyday speech into sentences that can span as much as half a page – a style which, despite numerous attempts from devotees, simply cannot be replicated. He’s also notorious for using copious amounts of footnotes, a feature normally found in academic papers, stuffing in the kind of digressions and meta-commentary that most editors would urge their writers to remove.  

“He always struck me as someone who was in the tradition of maximalism,” David Hering, a fiction writer and author of David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form, tells Big Think, comparing him to James Joyce and Herman Melville. “But he was writing about my generation, and particularly the omnipresence of mediated versions of the self, and how that created this novel version of self-consciousness. He was drawing from a long tradition, but spoke to the world I was living in.”

That said, part of Wallace’s larger-than-life status can also be attributed to his premature death. “He died young,” notes Geoff Ward, a British scholar of American literature who wrote a BBC radio documentary about Wallace’s life and work titled Endnotes. “There is no long decline, and he left us effectively in mid-sentence. He will be forever young, and always liked by younger readers who are looking for something that matches in intensity both their promise and self-doubt.”

What Wallace himself would think of his posthumous fame is difficult to say. “The whole going around and reading in bookstores thing,” he told an interviewer in 2003, when he was still riding the waves of Infinite Jest, “it’s turning writers into kind of penny-ante or cheap versions of celebrities. People aren’t usually coming out to hear you read. They’re coming out to sort of see what you look like, and see whether your voice matches the voice that’s in their head when they read. None of it’s important. It’s icky.”

Although his biographers concede that he craved attention and approval, and carefully tailored his bro-y public persona to this end, they also agree that his fate — his transformation from a countercultural figure into a cultural commodity, swallowed and flattened by the same consumerist machine he sought to dismantle — would have disturbed him.

Certainly, the prevailing singular image of Wallace fails to capture the contradictions and multitudes contained within his work. Ward insists that he does not embody a fixed set of values and characteristics but that his career was marked by curiosity, experimentation, and a never-ending search for a belief system that wouldn’t crumble under scrutiny. “Otherwise,” he says, “there wouldn’t be a book about rap, or a book about John McCain. At one point, he was apparently on the verge of converting to Roman Catholicism. There’s the stoned DFW, the DFW who could have been a philosopher (maybe he is one, using fiction as his chosen rhetorical armory), the Midwest hayseed, wide-eyed youngster, the epically complex postmodernist…Many foxes, all fleet of foot.”

“He’s become a cultural shorthand,” adds Hering, “the bro-y writer, prodigious footnoter, over-writer. All of these things are present in the work, but because of the necessity of the broader culture, they’ve been magnified into a small, easily digestible number of identifying markers. The thing about this reductiveness is that it works against the form of the work itself, which is often about the complexity of a social or psychological problem, and how it can’t necessarily be broken down into binaries.”

David Foster Wallace as tortured artist

Wallace’s tragic death not only bolstered his fame but also led to a concentrated and arguably misguided effort to medicalize his writing, to search his work for clues of what was yet to come. Although Wallace never spoke openly about his own mental health, he of course drew from personal experience for inspiration, and themes of depression and anxiety show up in almost everything he worked on. “Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, Tofranil, Wellbutrin, Elavil, Metrazol,” he wrote in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. “None had delivered any significant relief from the pain and feelings of emotional isolation that rendered the depressed person’s every waking hour an indescribable hell on earth.”

Broom of the System follows a young woman who thinks she exists only as a character inside a story, questioning the authenticity and futility of her own existence. Infinite Jest, whose title refers to a movie so compelling that those who see it will watch it on repeat until they die, is largely about addiction — to entertainment, substances, and even addiction itself. A large portion of the novel centers on residents of a Boston chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization Wallace himself joined in the hope that it would not just help him recover from his various dependencies, but also — to the chagrin of administrators — defeat the demons that had driven him to substance abuse in the first place.

Mental health does not just factor into what Wallace wrote about, but also why he took up writing in the first place. Far from writing for entertainment — his own or his audience’s — he came to the profession in search of answers. “Fiction,” he said, is “about what it is to be a fucking human being,” adding he hoped his work would help readers “become less alone inside.” For all his disparate interests, he repeatedly came back to the concept of consumerism, criticizing not just corporations, but also the human weakness they take advantage of: the hope to find fulfillment through external means, be it a Whopper or a Lamborghini.

Tempting though it may be, many scholars caution against reading Wallace in this way. “His suicide,” says Ward, “was not just a personal tragedy, but an excuse for bio-criticism to medicalize his alienation from various cultural norms. This does him a disservice. The manner in which he left his bodily life shouldn’t be allowed to overshadow the life of his writing.”

Like Ernest Hemingway or Leo Tolstoy, David Foster Wallace has come to be seen as a tortured artist – a stereotype that, in addition to simply acknowledging an author’s mental health issues, professes that these issues are intimately tied to their creative genius. Researchers have long cautioned against this narrative, noting that conditions like depression deteriorate people rather than empower them, and those who study Wallace’s work in detail generally share the same sentiment.

“For all the great passages in Pale King,” concludes Ward, “his depression was beginning to impact his writing by coarsening it and making it less brilliant, more sluggish. I can’t help but wonder if he saw this himself, and whether that contributed to his personal tragedy. On the other hand, when they found him, he had arranged the manuscript of Pale King in a prominent and lit position on the table, clearly signaling that he thought it should be saved. Reviewers of the finished novel would have said, this is good — but not quite as good as Infinite Jest — and so the pressure would have been on the next novel, which we’ll never have.”

This article How suicide warped David Foster Wallace’s legacy is featured on Big Think.

In 1964, a steamship passed underneath the Golden Gate Bridge and entered the San Francisco harbor. Aboard was Lawrence Chu, a young man from Sichuan who, like so many Chinese immigrants, came to the United States in search of an American Dream. Three years later, his future wife, Ruth Ho, left her native Taiwan for the same reason.

The ever-elusive concept of the American Dream means something different for every person. For the Chus, it took the shape of Chef Chu’s, a thriving Chinese restaurant in California’s Los Altos that remains a community favorite to this day. Along for the ride came five children, the very youngest of which, a creative and self-described “weirdo” named Jon, went on to pursue one of the more archetypal versions of the American Dream, becoming an accomplished filmmaker and director of such movies as Crazy Rich Asians, Now You See Me 2, In the Heights, and Wicked.

In his 2024 memoir, Viewfinder, Jon Chu reflects on his unusual upbringing, his ever-changing conception of the American Dream, and the challenges he faced chasing that dream as a first-generation Asian American, including the push-and-pull between fitting in, following your own path, and managing your inner critic as a budding artist.

Finding community

Viewfinder describes a happy, borderline idyllic childhood, with Chu’s parents encouraging his every passion and interest, from drawing to tapdancing and — following his surprisingly tear-jerking documentation of a family trip to Boston — filmmaking. Growing up on the edge of Silicon Valley during the 80s and 90s, he counted Steve Jobs among his heroes. Jobs used to dine at Chef Chu’s from time to time, as did other tech disruptors. Taking to the Chu’s, they occasionally brought along gadgets for Jon, who in turn taught himself to work with AV mixing machines and PowerBook Duos long before these went mainstream.

Chu describes the PowerBook Duo as “four iPads stacked on top of each other.” (Credit: Stephen Edmonds / Wikipedia)

“For more than a decade, I watched as Silicon Valley products and systems opened up new possibilities for Hollywood’s creators,” Chu writes in Viewfinder. “When I directed Crazy Rich Asians, I had the sensation that I was riding that wave, drawing on the strengths of both places, making good on so much of the promise I’d foreseen in my childhood.”

Growing up in Los Altos had another, equally valuable benefit. Supported by the city’s relatively large Asian American community, Chu didn’t see himself as part of a minority and — as a result — readily internalized the belief that anything was possible. “I didn’t have to deal with my own cultural identity crisis,” he tells Big Think. “I was just a kid. I could dream and convince myself the barriers were low. People knew and loved our family, and I felt free.”

It wasn’t until he started going to film school at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where the Asian American community on campus was much smaller and fractured than at home, that he realized that “no one is promised a community — that you have to pursue and actually participate in one.”

Fitting in

Surprisingly, Chu’s jumpstart with video and editing software didn’t put him ahead of his film school peers. “The teachers expected to use yesterday’s technology: everything analog, everything manual,” he writes in Viewfinder.

“When they talked about splicing footage,” he tells Big Think, “they meant actually, physically splicing it. We all had little scars on our fingers because of the cutting.”

Aerial view of Los Altos, where Chu remembers living a stable, stimulating childhood. (Credit: Mertbiol / Wikipedia)

Chu clashed with USC faculty over not only equipment but also filmmaking style.

“My taste was different from others,” he says. “I love movies that inspire, have love, and are earnest. At the time, earnestness was treated as poison, because people liked art that was biting and sarcastic. Everything needed to be a ‘hot take.’ Everyone wanted dark things from me, and they weren’t necessarily wrong — because there is indeed a naiveté to believing in the simplicity of love, the movie version of love, of Wonder and Happy Endings.”

While there’s value in listening to your own guts over someone else’s, it can also close you off to different perspectives. At film school, many a prideful student risks falling into a state of arrested development because they refuse to learn from others. In Los Altos, Chu’s parents had preached a kind of middle way between fitting in and standing out — between dressing and sounding “American” and acting as ambassadors of their Chinese heritage. At USC, this middle way helped Chu grow without losing touch with his unique voice.

Just as Chu balanced learning from others while staying true to his own vision and identity, so too did he learn to deal with criticism — from others, and from himself. Here, the can-do attitude he inherited from his parents came in handy.

“Everybody seemed to doubt me,” he writes in Viewfinder, recalling one of his first directing gigs. “Sometimes even I doubted me. But I had to keep showing up every day, acting as if I had it all under control.”

The commercial success of his later films, especially Crazy Rich Asians, gradually dulled the sting of harsh reviews; the applause of millions of viewers drowned out the boos of a handful of critics. But while Chu learned to shake off criticism from others, he remained critical of his own work, always striving to improve and do the best he can:

Now, at a time when technology — courtesy of Silicon Valley — has turned Hollywood from an industry of auteurs into a data and algorithm-driven assembly line that specializes in creating mass-marketable blockbusters devoid of personal touch, Chu’s movies stand out for being both intimate and big-budget. Rather than adapting Kevin Kwan’s bestseller beat for beat, imparting little of himself, Chu imbued Crazy Rich Asians with scenes plucked from his own upbringing, including memories of his great-grandmother.

“As the baby of the family, I helped her fold the dumplings,” he writes in Viewfinder. “My folds were always pretty terrible, especially compared with Bu Bu’s; her hands moved like a jazz musician’s. My memory of those simple, joyful afternoons with her is the reason I put a dumpling folding scene in [the movie].”  

Chasing the American Dream

Crazy Rich Asians, which follows two New York University professors who travel to Singapore for the wedding of a mutual friend, deals with a theme that also applies to Chu’s own life: the complicated relationship Asian Americans have with the countries their parents and grandparents came from, and the United States, the country in which they themselves were born and raised.

In pursuit of their own interpretation of the American Dream, Chu’s parents — particularly his mother — sought to acquaint their children with European high culture, prioritizing English over Mandarin and cultivating a love for Beethoven and Brahms (never mind that you’d be hard-pressed to find many European or American children nowadays who know who these people are). They gave their children American names like Christina, Jennifer, and Howard, and dressed them to look — in Chu’s words — “like Asian Kennedys.”

Viewfinder‘s title is a metaphor for finding one’s path in a convoluted world. (Credit: Garry Knight / Wikipedia)

They also taught their children to “never complain.”

It’s useful advice, whether you’re a restaurant owner or an aspiring director moving up Hollywood’s labyrinthine chain of command. But, as Chu came to recognize, it also has its limits. “Now that I’m in a position of power,” he says, “I cannot be silent. I have a responsibility.”

Speaking out against mistreatment and injustice — in the real world of Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights and the fantastical world of Oz in Wicked, which reimagines the Witch of the West as misunderstood — initially felt like a betrayal of his parents’ tried and tested life philosophy. However, the positive reception of his work, let alone the opportunities it has created for Asian American talent, gradually changed that.

“Maybe it also had something to do with having children,” he says, “and wondering what I wanted to teach them. Doing different for the next generation and trying to prepare the landscape for them in the best way possible — that’s when I finally felt like I had found my voice.”

This article “Crazy Rich Asians” director Jon Chu on the American Dream and silencing your inner critic is featured on Big Think.

It’s 2024 and fantasy author George R.R. Martin has officially spent 12 years working on The Winds of Winter, the long-awaited sixth installment in the series that inspired the HBO hit Game of Thrones. With no release date in sight, one tech-savvy fan decided to write the story himself, or rather, he asked ChatGPT to write it for him. Prompted to develop outlines for each chapter, and then turn those outlines into prose, the AI churned out a 683,276-word tome of surprising quality.

Surprising because although this “fan-made” version of Winds of Winter failed to live up to the standards of Martin’s work, it did contain the unexpected twists and turns that made his fantasy epic so successful. Among the book’s flabbergasted readers was Martin, who upon learning of its existence not only took legal action against the fan but also ChatGPT’s developer, OpenAI.

Joining the ranks of other bestselling authors such as John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen, Martin’s ongoing war with large language models — which were trained on their writing, among countless other sources — raises an important question about the creative capabilities of machine learning. Anyone who has used AI programs like ChatGPT in recent months knows they are great at summarizing textbooks and writing boilerplate cover letters, but can they also produce the kind of writing that moves us and speaks to our souls?

Training data

Journalist Vauhini Vara thinks the answer is yes. In an article titled “Confessions of a Viral AI Writer,” she relates how in 2020 OpenAI granted her early access to GPT-3. Defining creative writing mainly as “waiting for the right word,” she suspected that generative AI, with its instantaneous access to every noun and adjective in the English dictionary, could be a helpful tool, especially for topics she struggled to write about.

One of these topics — the topic, really — was the death of Vara’s older sister, who was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer while still in high school. Initially, GPT-3’s attempts at writing a story based on this premise were unsatisfactory. The AI would swap her sister’s real-world fate with a miraculous recovery or, in drafts where her death was acknowledged, turn Vara into a long-distance runner racing for charity. It wasn’t until she shifted to a more collaborative writing process, with GPT-3 learning from and adapting to her own inputs, that it managed to produce a line of text that genuinely touched her:

We were driving home from Clarke Beach, and we were stopped at a red light, and she took my hand and held it. This is the hand she held: the hand I write with, the hand I am writing this with.

Although ChatGPT has been programmed to write in a bland, explanatory way, it can learn to mimic other voices provided it has enough training data.

“I think there is a misconception that large language models like ChatGPT are not very good at writing in a lyrical, literary prose style,” author Sean Michaels tells Big Think after being pointed to Vara’s article. “In fact, they can do it easily and quite well, just like all the image-generating software can do things like making photos in the styles of Wes Anderson or David Lynch.”

For his novel Do You Remember Being Born, in which a poet is approached by a tech company to co-author a collection of poems with their AI, Michaels created a custom version of ChatGPT he called “Moorebot,” which through training learned to write in the style of real-world poet Marianne Moore, further blurring the distinction between human and machine.

AI: creativity and connection

Although some writers oppose the rise of AI out of concern for their employability, others have embedded the debate in an older, broader dialogue on the meaning and purpose of art. The Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who writes in a style so idiosyncratic critics coined the phrase “Kaufmanesque” to describe it, has been perhaps most vocal about his personal distaste of machine learning. Looking beyond the standard definition of creativity — creating something new and original — Kaufman describes art as any form of expression that establishes an emotional connection between people.

“Say who you are,” he said in a BAFTA lecture that foreshadowed comments made during the 2023 SAG strikes. “Really say it, in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there — someone who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can’t help but be. But if you’re honest, you will help that person be less lonely in their world.”

Even if AI were capable of writing something emotional or profound, which Vara and Michaels claim it can, Kaufman would refuse to recognize this as art because it cannot establish a link between reader and author. “If I read a poem,” he recently said in a statement on AI, “and that poem moves me, I am in love with the person who wrote it. I can’t be in love with a computer program. I can’t, because it isn’t anything.”

Kaufman’s sentiment should be assessed alongside that of Michaels who, through his work with AI, has reached a different conclusion: Human creativity is less special than we want to believe. He explains:

“Imagine I write, ‘The moon looked like a slice of lemon.’ You read it and think, ‘That’s an interesting image.’ But when AI does it, you think, ‘Well, is that interesting? Because it just seems completely random.’ Human beings have this capacity to make meaning from things and find connections where there are none or where there is no intention behind them. I found it provocative not just that AI could come up with lines I found beautiful or strange or interesting, but also that it got me wondering if the AI was doing something successfully as a writer or if I was doing something successfully as a reader.”

As for whether or not AI is capable of ‘true’ creativity:

“It’s true human art draws on memories, bodies, dreams, and arbitrary but somehow meaningful linkages between abstract, surreal thoughts. None of those things are things ChatGPT has. At least not in a literal way. But then again, there is something strange about the way fiction is about pretended bodies, pretended dreams, pretended lived experiences. If you read a modern story about, say, a 17th-century Dutch merchant, that’s not based on anybody’s real-life experience as a 17th-century merchant. Similarly, because these large language models don’t have what we have, that doesn’t mean that their work has none of the qualities that ours does. It’s not that easy.”

The future of writing

According to Michaels, increased usage of large language models is expected to lead “to a certain convergence of styles, with writing becoming less diverse and more monolithic as we use the same algorithms.”

Florent Vinchon, a PhD student at Université Paris Cité studying the creative skills of generative AI, suggests that — although it is still too soon to say with certainty — machine learning “might have the same impact on writing as photography had on painting,” a view shared by other experts in the field. Just as the camera pushed painters from realism to abstraction, spawning artistic movements that concerned themselves with how we perceive rather than what, AI could inspire new generations of authors to experiment with their writing.

Since programs like ChatGPT allow anyone to produce competent prose, the novels and novellas of tomorrow may be deliberately less polished, riddled with grammatical errors and linguistic idiosyncrasies that point to the limits of the human brain and the uniqueness of the individual perspective. Far from a threat to the survival of creative writing or human creativity in general, AI, like the innovative technologies that came before it, may become a force of change and a source of inspiration.

This article ChatGPT is great at summarizing books. But will AI ever write a true work of literature? is featured on Big Think.

You might not know who Dennis “Thresh” Fong is, but if you’ve ever played a video game on PC, you’ve undoubtedly used his config.

Config, short for configuration, describes how a gamer sets up the controls for a specific video game on their keyboard. Today, almost every first-person or third-person game – think Call of Duty, Fortnite, World of Warcraft, etc. – defaults to using the WASD keys to move and the mouse to look around. About 30 years ago, Fong was one of the very first to set up those controls for himself when playing Doom and Quake, two of the earliest first-person shooters. He used those controls to absolutely obliterate his opponents, whether it be his brothers on their local area network at home, players over the nascent Internet, or competitors at early gaming competitions.

Fong’s gamertag “Thresh” is short for “Threshold of Pain,” referring to the ability to withstand suffering and enemy fire. He never had to endure much of either in-game. At his induction into the esports Hall of Fame at QuakeCon 2016 in Dallas, Tim Willits, the former studio director, co-owner, and level designer of id Software, called Fong the “Michael Jordan of gaming.” That comparison actually might be inadequate. Throughout the course of his roughly five-year competitive gaming career, Fong never lost, not even in practice.

And most of his matches weren’t even close. At the final of the Red Annihilation Quake tournament held in May 1997, Fong annihilated his opponent 14 to -1. The victory won him the Ferrari 328 sports car that belonged to id Software CEO John Carmack. 

Fong’s skill and fame earned him roughly $100,000 a year in prizes and endorsements back in the mid-’90s. According to the Guinness World Records, that made him the “first professional videogamer.”

Today, there are countless professional and casual gamers. Beyond using Fong’s WASD controls, they can thank him for numerous other advancements, large and small. Fong has launched multiple successful companies since “retiring” from professional gaming in his early twenties. These startups invented quality-of-life enhancements that many gamers today take for granted, including the in-game overlay, in-game messaging, and one-click join – so if you see a game your buddy is playing you can right-click and join them. He and his colleagues were also the first to introduce live-streaming into a game client and voice capabilities into a chat client.

Collectively, the world’s gaming companies account for hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue and purportedly cater to 3.32 billion active players. It’s safe to say that Dennis “Thresh” Fong has been instrumental in making gaming and esports the massive successes that they are today. I recently caught up with Fong to reminisce about his gaming career, check-in with what he’s up to now, and see where he thinks gaming and esports are headed.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

RP: What was your first computer and the first game you played on it?

DF: The first computer I had in my own room was a [Compaq Deskpro] 386. We were playing some of the Sierra online games. The first real multiplayer games I played were the text-based MUDs [multi-user dungeons].

RP: After you started playing first-person shooters like Doom and Quake, when did you realize that you were good enough to compete?

DF: When I first started playing Doom, I was a keyboard-only player. So I was just using the arrow keys. I have two brothers; I’m the middle child. My dad worked at a tech company called Hewlett-Packard so we had access to multiple PCs at home that were networked. And so because of that we could play against each other at a time when there wasn’t a lot of online gaming. 

So we would play Doom together all the time and for a long time I could not beat my older brother – he’s three years older – and he was using a trackball of all things and keyboard. It was still clearly better than just a keyboard because there wasn’t a fixed, constant rate of turning, which is an issue with the keyboard. But I got to a point where I got really, really close, and it just annoyed the hell out of me that I couldn’t beat him. 

So there was one summer, I think I was 14 or 15, where I switched to keyboard and mouse and adopted the WASD configuration. By the end of the summer, I was crushing my older brother – and he was already pretty well known and considered amongst the best in the world. I pretty much never lost after that point. By the end of that summer, I knew I was really good. I didn’t know I was the best in the world. I just knew that no one could beat me.

RP: So not even in a practice match were you defeated?

DF: No, believe it or not. I’m kind of built a little bit different. I am hyper, hyper competitive. I just can’t stand losing. I can’t stand it. Even in practice. At one point I started my own team, and our team was the best in the world. We would practice together. I never lost to any of them. They can all verify the same thing.

If I beat you like 20 to 1 and the next time we played I beat you 20 to 2, I would just be super pissed. I would be so mad at myself. That’s how competitive I was.

RP: Were there any other strategies that you adopted to help you excel? Did you play for hours a day? Did you mentally train? How did you get so good?

DF: I think the main differentiator at least at the time was that I thought about the game very differently than everyone else. I always approached it more like you’re playing rapid chess. So it was really about out-thinking, out-strategizing, and out-positioning my opponents. 

The games that I played were primarily arena duel style games. These are essentially one on ones, unlike many games today, which are largely team-based. I basically was doing stuff that nobody was doing before. I invented this idea of map-control, because in these games there are weapons and armor that spawn, and there are certain ones that are OP [overpowered], much stronger than any others. Once I got control of the map, I would just lock those resources down. I would run through a certain pattern on a map… and not let them get access to the best weapons and armor in the game, which was why a lot of my matches were very lopsided in terms of score.

RP: I love that. Many people might assume you have faster reflexes. But no, you just took a more economic approach.

DF: Yeah, exactly. Obviously I had very good aim, but I never relied on it. People always think gaming is about reflexes, and I definitely have better-than-average reflexes, but I always said, even back then, if you had to rely on your reflexes, you probably did something wrong. Because the other thing that I was very well known for was – people gave it a term – “ThreshESP”. Because I could always predict what my opponent was thinking. 

I was using things which were very common now but less common back then: audio cues to figure out where they are, where they’re headed, what resources they have. Because of this, I didn’t actually have to practice as much as the average person. Obviously I would practice a lot leading up to a tournament, but I would say that on average I’d be playing like an hour or two a day.

Part of the reason why I couldn’t play a lot was that I started my first company in 1996. It was gamers.com – one of the early game portals. I was 19. By the time I retired from competing in esports around 2000 or 2001, gamers.com had 130 employees, we had raised $10 million in capital, and I was the CEO. That was the ultimate thing that caused me to retire. I just didn’t have the time to compete anymore at the level that I knew I could compete at.

RP: Almost every first- or third-person oriented video game defaults players to using the WASD keys to move and the mouse to look around, an innovation attributed to you. Today, it’s almost unimaginable to use any other configuration when gaming with a keyboard. How did you come up with these controls and what did all your competitors use back then?

DF: I won’t pretend that I invented WASD. I don’t know if you can even invent such a thing. It’s probably pretty safe to assume that I popularized it. People used to use the arrow keys and the mouse. My brother used a trackball. Some people used ESDF, which many people actually think is better. Other people used ASDF. People were all over the board to be honest. I just used what was most comfortable for me. 

Even today, one of the most common things that people ask of the pro players is “what config do you run?” That was easily the most common question asked of me. I would get hundreds of those questions, almost daily. So it got to be really annoying to be honest, to answer the same question every single time. 

I got to be good friends with John Carmack, the creator of id, which made a lot of the games that I competed in. So I was telling him one time how annoying it was, and he was like “Oh, I can just build it into the game.” I said, “That’d be sweet!” So he built Thresh.config.

At the time, PC Gamer was the most popular gaming magazine. I had a monthly column, so I posted my config there. I also posted it everywhere. In some ways, I was one of the first Internet influencers. You know, I had my own blog, I had a lot of people that followed me. I wrote something called the Quake Bible, which contained all of my strategies and the way I thought about the game. 

After John Carmack wrote it into the game, then I would just tell people to just type exec.Thresh.config into the console, and it will automatically just run my config. So I think those are all some of the reasons why WASD became the standard.

RP: What are your favorite games beyond the shooters like Quake and Doom?

DF: Obviously there’s a lot of different categories. In terms of RPG, I think the Fallout series is probably my favorite. On mobile, it would probably be Clash Royale. I got to top 50 in the world in Clash Royale. More recent games would be Apex Legends, where I hit diamond, PUBG, where I hit diamond, Valorant, where I hit diamond.

RP: So it seems like you can still keep up with the players of today.

DF: I can certainly keep up with them, but the time required to get to the very, very top I just don’t have anymore. I’m not sure I could get there, but I know I can be extremely competitive. Could I be top 500? Yeah, I’m pretty certain I could be top 500 in any game that I pick up.

I like actually sucking at something and knowing I am getting better. That’s a big part of the enjoyment of playing games and competing for me. I put my mind to it, and a few months later I am better than you — it feels great!

RP: Is it true that you played against a young Elon Musk? Can you describe the circumstances? Was he any good?

DF: It was Quake. At the time, it was server-based play. These were largely self-hosted servers. There wasn’t a central, match-making service. You would just log into servers that were close to you because latency and lag and ping were very big deals. Probably the most popular West Coast server was hosted at Stanford by a bunch of grad students. I still remember its IP: Kitty1.stanford.edu. It was hosted on the Stanford backbone internet fiber, so it was just blazing fast. 

And so everyone that was in California played on Kitty1 – it was essentially the entire scene. So I used to play there obviously, and Elon used to play there. He was running a company called Zip2 at the time, so his username was Zip2. So I played against him many, many times. 

Was he any good? He was okay. I know he claimed that he was one of the top players. He was definitely not one of the top players. I can confirm that he was a very active Quake player – I saw him a lot. He was on a decent team. He’s a legit gamer.

RP: You’ve consistently been at the forefront of gaming culture – the first pro esports player, founding Xfire in 2003 (arguably the forerunner of Discord), investing in and running numerous successful gaming startups. Do you have any specific predictions for where gaming and esports are headed?

DF: So I think esports as a whole remains somewhat challenged today. There was a ton of hype a few years ago. All of the teams were raising hundreds of millions of dollars at billion-dollar valuations. All of that has pretty much died down. I think what people have learned now is, as a business, esports is somewhat challenged. Because each “sport” is owned by a company, those companies own the intellectual property and are protective of it. So you can’t monetize it in ways that you can with traditional sports. Most of the companies like Riot, even though they’ve done a lot to grow esports as a whole, they still ultimately view it as a marketing expense. It’s user acquisition for their game. 

Another problem is that the audience consumes it in different ways. Esports on television, which is where almost all the money is made via broadcasting rights, doesn’t really exist. Almost all of the audience would rather watch it on Twitch. Also, the hometown phenomenon, supporting one’s home team, doesn’t really exist either, because it’s such a global sport.

There’s no question gaming as a whole continues to grow. It’s just going to get bigger and bigger. Something like 40% of the world’s population now are gamers.

RP: Your current company GGWP focuses on improving community moderation in online games and rooting out toxic behavior, which has always been a constant battle. How are you trying to solve the problem?

DF: Most companies still largely use humans to moderate games in particular. Ten years ago, that was probably sufficient. Now, when you’re talking about billions of players, it’s certainly not sufficient. The biggest games in the world receive billions of support tickets from players. That’s how much toxicity and harassment is happening on these platforms. You can’t possibly hire enough humans to respond to this. The typical company has enough resources to respond to 0.1% of the reports that are filed, which means that when you file a report against someone for harassing you in a game, it for the most part is really just going into a black hole.

So what we decided to do a little over three years ago was to use AI to identify and detect proactively when this type of toxicity is occurring. In doing so, you can auto-moderate the vast majority of the stuff that’s happening. Part of the power of AI, which I think some people didn’t believe a few years ago but is very clear now with generative AI and ChatGPT, is that AI is incredibly intelligent. It can understand the context of what people are saying and doing.

Every online game or platform has a ton of data that they collect. So we’ve integrated a lot of that data. We’ll actually look into a person’s friends list in a game. If we see two people being super toxic to each other, and we see that they’re friends, we’ll actually say that they’re probably just messing around. So this data really enriches the context that you have about a particular incident, which helps us be much more precise and accurate. We also use all of that data to create a profile of the user – basically like a reputation score – to reflect historically if they are a good or bad actor. The combination of reputation score and data about the incident allows our system to moderate 99% of the activity. 

My favorite part of this experience of running GGWP is what we’ve learned that users can learn. Our goal is really not to be a “banhammer.” It’s to teach people what acceptable behavior looks like and reinforce that behavior. What we’ve seen is that in games which use our systems, the occurrence of toxicity is reduced by 60 to 70 percent. That was awesome to see. We’re not just blocking and censoring stuff. Players learn, and they actually just stop doing that type of behavior. 

RP: Purely by chance, we played in the same World of Warcraft Classic guild throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, logging on week in and week out to raid dungeons, grind, and catch up with our guildmates, many of whom we didn’t personally know before playing with them. Do you think that experience helped you mentally weather the pandemic? If so, do you think video games, esports, and gaming streams help numerous others in the same way? 

DF: Absolutely. For me, a lot of my gaming is centered around my friends. For this generation especially, gaming is kind of the new golf. It’s a very social activity. Certainly during the pandemic, when we were under lockdown and couldn’t go out, it was probably the best way to stay connected and to socialize with friends. When you’re playing in a WoW guild especially, you make a lot of new friends. I became closer friends with my friends and also made a lot of new friends through that experience.

This article Meet Thresh, the world’s first professional gamer is featured on Big Think.

Riley, the main character of the 2015 animated movie Inside Out, is based on director Pete Docter’s daughter, Elie. Elie had previously served as the inspiration for Russell, the boy scout who tags along with grumpy old man Karl and his floating house in Up. Like Russell, she had been an energetic, optimistic, and confident child, but that changed as she grew older and more self-conscious. Wondering what was going on inside his daughter’s head, Docter envisioned a film about a young girl and the personified emotions fighting for control over her brain as she moves from one city to another.

In Inside Out 2, Riley is older and more self-conscious still, hitting puberty during the week she gets invited to an all-important hockey camp. Her emotions — Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust — are forced to make room for other, more complex emotions that will help her navigate life as a teenager (or so they say). Leading the new arrivals is Anxiety, whose hyper-vigilant concern with Riley’s future compels her to expel the original cast from the control room.

Stepping into the role of executive producer, Docter handed the director’s chair over to Kelsey Mann, a veteran Pixar employee and story supervisor for Monsters University, The Good Dinosaur, and Onward. Mann also wrote the screenplay for the sequel, doing so alongside screenwriters Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein. LeFauve co-wrote the original Inside Out, while Holstein came to Pixar from television, working on shows like Weeds, The Brink, and Kidding. In addition to consulting with professional psychologists, both LeFauve and Holstein — like Docter before them — also drew heavily from their experience raising their children. In the following interview, the screenwriters discuss how to manage anxiety, why working on the film helped them become more understanding parents, and whether or not people really feel less joy when they get older. (The answer: yes and no).

Understanding anxiety

As with the original Inside Out, LeFauve, Holstein, and Mann cycled through several emotions before settling on the ones we see in the film. Earlier drafts included Shame, Guilt, and Suspicion — all equally relevant to the story’s high school setting. They also considered bringing back Schadenfreude — “pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune,” as per Oxford Languages — who had been cut from the original late in development. 

The only emotion that had never been out of the question was Anxiety. “She was already going to be a part of the film before the pandemic, when the conversation around mental health really took off,” LeFauve says. “Earlier versions of the script focused on social media, because those platforms have such a big impact on young people. Ultimately, though, we decided to take the story into a different, more personal direction.” In the film, Riley’s anxiety doesn’t stem from being unfriended on Facebook, but her desperately wanting to make it onto the varsity hockey team.

At first, LeFauve and Holstein wrote Anxiety in much the same way most people see the emotion: as a malicious force that changes our lives for the worse and doesn’t add anything of positive value. Early drafts therefore treated her as a largely irredeemable villain. “A wolf in sheep’s clothing with a lair and a master plan,” LeFauve recalls, “with self-loathing Shame as her sidekick.”

Ultimately, this direction didn’t work on a story level, or a psychological one. “It’s hard coming up with an antagonist for a family friendly film because you usually can’t kill them,” Holstein explains. “Anxiety is an emotion, and you can’t get rid of an emotion. So how do you defeat it?”

Anxiety is voiced by Maya Hawke. (Credit: Disney).

The solution: You don’t. The Anxiety they ended up with isn’t villainous so much as she is misunderstood. She doesn’t dream up doomsday scenarios to make Riley miserable. She does it to protect Riley and help her achieve her goals. This characterization reflects the psychological understanding of the emotion’s evolutionary purpose: ensuring our survival in a dangerous world.

While Anxiety’s “master plan” to get Riley on the varsity team briefly seems to work, it eventually backfires. Filling Riley’s Belief System — a network of affirmations that forms her sense of self — with axioms like, “I will have friends if I succeed,” the pressure Anxiety places on her soon becomes too much to bear, culminating in a panic attack that makes both characters realize the error of their ways. Anxiety reconciles with Joy and steps back to create space for the other emotions, while Riley makes up with the friends she neglected in her quest to impress the varsity coach.

Riley’s experience mirrors the experience of countless other teenagers, including LeFauve’s. “My oldest son suffers from anxiety,” she says. “The tips I gave him are the same you see in the film. Put anxiety in an imaginary chair and thank her for trying to help you. She’s not out to hurt you, only to keep you alive. Maybe she just needs a job, so give her one.” In the film, under Joy’s guidance, Anxiety’s planning shifts from short-term to long-term, from unmanageable to manageable. Instead of stressing over the distant future, she reminds Riley to study for next week’s Spanish exam.

Joy’s relationship with Anxiety, which changes from antagonistic to compassionate, reflects the way LeFauve approaches mental health inside her family. “I learned children often just need to be seen and heard,” she says. “They don’t necessarily want you to fix their problems. Actually, the more you try to fix it, the more anxious they become. So I would let my son talk, and sometimes I would say, ‘Do you really believe what you’re saying? Do you really think you have you no friends? Or is that anxiety’s idea of you?’”

“Mine is still too young to have those kinds of conversations with, even though I want to,” Holstein adds. “Mostly, I just give him Popsicles. YouTube and Popsicles. Those aren’t in the film, for obvious reasons.”

The joy of getting older

While Inside Out 2 can help parents relate to their children, the film can also teach them how to manage their own emotions. “The other day, I was running late for an interview and the Uber dropped me off at the wrong place,” LeFauve says. “Anxiety immediately began to overtake my brain: Oh my God, I’m going to miss this meeting.” Having worked on the Inside Out franchise for the better part of a decade, however, she quickly recognized which emotions was sitting in the driver’s seat and hit the brakes:

“Joy is very much in the present, whereas Anxiety is always projecting you forward to the worst-case scenario, so I took a deep breath, ordered a new Uber, and looked at the sky, at the way the leaves were falling on the ground. Joy can’t get rid of Anxiety, but she can help you come back to the present.”

LeFauve stresses that joy becomes more important as you get older — a theme reflected in the film. The original Inside Out saw Joy learning to step back and acknowledge the utility of other, seemingly negative, emotions like Sadness, which helped Riley reconnect with her parents after her move from Minnesota to San Francisco. Inside Out 2 is about “Joy stepping forward” to balance out the effects of other negative emotions, like Anxiety.

As we age, new emotions like envy, ennui, and embarrassment leave less room for joy. (Credit: Disney)

But while joy becomes more important as you age, it also becomes harder to find — at least compared to when you were a child. “Studies find that the experience of positive emotions begins to drop precipitously in frequency and intensity [during adolescence],” Dacher Keltner and Paul Ekman, the psychologists who consulted for the original Inside Out, wrote in a 2015 op-ed. On social media platforms like TikTok, fans of Inside Out 2 can take a quiz to show which emotion is most in charge of their brain. The joke — or maybe sad truth — is that it’s almost always Anxiety.

“While writing the film, I kept asking myself: What happens to joy when we get older?” LeFauve says.

Holstein asks himself the same question:

“I think it becomes harder to choose joy as we get older. When you’re younger, joy is kind of presented to you. My son doesn’t have to struggle to find it. Children are balls of every emotion, but joy comes to them without having to work for it. With age, joy becomes elusive, and you have to make a bigger and bigger effort look for it, especially during moments of anxiety. There’s more weight on you.”

“It’s very hard for anxiety and joy to coexist,” LeFauve admits. “I agree that we need to work for it and actively choose it, but the other thing is that joy makes you vulnerable. It opens you up, and it explains why, in the film, Anxiety isn’t a big fan of Joy, because she makes Riley vulnerable.”

Perhaps joy doesn’t disappear so much as it takes on a new shape. In the original Inside Out, Joy wants to preserve Riley’s fond childhood memories by keeping out negative emotions like Sadness. In Inside Out 2, Joy doesn’t try to change Riley’s emotional state but instead help her accept herself for who she is. Her Belief System, which at the start of the film is made up of exclusively positive statements like “I’m a good person,” by the end encompasses a wide variety of contradictory opinions of herself, good and bad.

“Studies show that when you ask young girls to talk about themselves, they’ll tell you things like ‘I can run fast,’” LeFauve notes. “They talk about themselves in a proud, self-centered way. But as they get older, around the ages of 12 and 13, they start to say things like ‘I have nice clothes’ and ‘I have a lot of friends.’ Their perception of self-worth moves from the inside to the outside.”

Inside Out 2 tries to do the opposite.

This article “Inside Out 2” creators on rediscovering joy and being a better parent is featured on Big Think.

When amateur writers pitch headlines to The Onion, their jokes often flop. One reason may surprise you: They use too many funny words that wink at the reader, “wacky” elements that sabotage any chance at good parody, former Onion editor Joe Randazzo told our sister site Big Think in 2012.

“It’s counterintuitive, but it’s that dry tone and that straight tone of the newspaper article — of the kind of AP style of writing, or New York Times style of writing — is what we strive to achieve,” Randazzo said. “Sometimes just deleting an extra little funny word makes the joke that much better because it’s really emulating that style.”

Parody requires verisimilitude: the act of mirroring the style, tone, and conventions of your target as closely as possible — “down to every syllable and punctuation mark,” Scott Dikkers, a cofounding editor of The Onion, explains in his book How To Write Funny.

But The Onion has had to mirror a moving target. As news moved from print to digital since The Onion’s founding in 1988, the paper has had to keep pace — copying and, in some cases, innovating on the same strategies media outlets have used to survive.

From print to digital

The Onion published its first issue in 1988, with the A1 headline “Mendota Monster Mauls Madison.” In those early years, the paper was free and its jokes were “sillier” and “more random” than later headlines, often referencing local stories only people in the paper’s hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, would understand, former Onion writer Carol Kolb told Mike Sacks in Poking a Dead Frog.

In the late 1980s, news media was already suffering an identity crisis, Dikkers says. “Newspapers had a hard time competing with new media like television, specifically cable,” he tells Freethink, noting how the 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine eliminated the requirement for broadcast networks to cover contrasting views on issues deemed to be publicly important. “So [newspapers] had to jazz things up, focusing more and more on sensationalism.”

In the 1990s, The Onion gained popularity as it began parodying sensational national stories and cementing its voice as “America’s Finest News Source” — an absurdly authoritative and self-important arbiter of everything, delivered through a dry Associated Press writing style, with a Midwestern progressive-underdog ethos lying in the subtext.

Still, the paper remained an “underground secret” for years, as Kolb told Sacks, sold on the streets of a handful of Midwestern cities or nationally via subscription. In those days, Onion writers generally had day jobs, and most “never imagined being celebrated writers,” says Dikkers, editor-in-chief from 1988 to 1999.

The types of writers hired by The Onion would change after the paper’s headquarters moved from Wisconsin to New York City in 2001: “After the move, we found ambitious people who always knew they wanted to write comedy and actually expected to succeed at it,” Dikkers says. “But the voice and character of The Onion [were] pretty well-established by then. […] Writers come in now and write for that voice, just like they would write in the voice of a TV show if they got hired as a writer for a particular show.”

The Onion started putting its paper online in the summer of 1996, only months after The New York Times did so. The internet didn’t change The Onion’s editorial process — at least at first. “We simply took the physical newspaper and put it on the computer, uploading all of our stories once per week, just like we published the print version,” Dikkers says. “A few years later we thought that, instead of dumping everything at the same time, it would be better to roll out stories gradually. That way, traffic would be more consistent.”

By 2007, The Onion was generating more than half of its revenue from its online operations.

“As The Onion was really becoming popular in the late 90s and early 2000s, print media was dying,” Dikkers says. “Newsweek went under [ceasing its print publication in 2012]. Circulation was cut down. But The Onion’s circulation was growing, and I think a lot of media looked at us as an example of how to prevent further loss of readership. I started noticing more news of the weird, more entertainment and celebrity-focused stories, more infotainment, less hard news and international coverage, headlines that were more overtly amusing.”

The Onion had by then ventured into various mediums — books, comic books, TV pilots, radio shows, and a movie filmed in 2003. But online video was arguably the biggest new medium that The Onion and other digital media companies were investing in at the time.

In 2007, The Onion launched the Onion News Network (ONN), a parody of cable outlets like CNN and Fox News. Chad Nackers, The Onion’s current editor-in-chief, told Freethink that ONN ranks among his favorite defunct Onion products, saying the videos “perfectly captured the idiotic aspects of cable news.

“Digital first”

When The Onion switched from putting whole issues online at once to gradually releasing content throughout the week, it eventually changed their “two-week turnaround for stories into a one-day turnaround,” Dikker says.

It mirrored journalism’s broader switch to more and faster coverage, for better and for worse. By 2013, the year when The Onion sold its last physical copy, the paper had already moved to a “digital first” strategy, publishing about twice the content it had run the previous year. A 2013 Slate article argued that upping output had traded quality for quantity, at least slightly, noting that The Onion’s once extremely selective pitch meetings (where only a tiny handful of pitched jokes would make it through) had gone from weekly to daily.

Commenting on The Onion’s move to parody journalism in the digital age, former editor-in-chief Will Tracy told Slate: “If part of our mission is to accurately and comprehensively parody what a news organization does, then we needed to adapt by doing more timely stuff, by making our company feel more digital, by adapting to social media. If we do that, we actually look more like what we’re trying to parody.”

As national newspapers were increasingly going digital, local papers were steadily folding in the wake of declining readership, with print circulation falling by about 55% from 2015 to 2020.

The Onion’s local coverage didn’t suffer — the evergreen, slice-of-life “Area Man” headlines have long been some of its most beloved jokes, with headlines like “Deep Down, Area Man Knows He’s Not Done Vomiting,” “Area Woman Not A Morning, Afternoon, Or Night Person,” “Area Man Self-Conscious About All The Wrong Things,” and “Area Woman Not Good Enough Artist To Justify Eccentricities.” (There was even a book collection, 2010’s The Onion Presents Chronicles Of The Area Man.)

Do these jokes still work as parody given the collapse of local news?

“[They] are still very relevant, because they reveal the human condition and provide a glimpse into modern American life,” Nackers says. “Obviously, local coverage is from a bygone era of newspapers, but the mundane human behavior is still prevalent.”

You might think all the good evergreen jokes will get plucked sooner or later. “For headline construction, certain types of jokes disappear because they’ve been made, especially jokes that rely on a play on words,” Nackers says.

But while gems like “Fritolaysia Cuts Off Chiplomatic Relations With Snakistan” are now taken, Dikkers says there’s “an endless variety of jokes to be told. We’re not going to run out!”

Beyond mining for untapped parody headlines, there’s another way to open up new space for jokes: experiment with a new voice, in new formats. That’s what The Onion did in the age of peak BuzzFeed.

Clickhole

In 2014, The Onion launched ClickHole, a sister site that parodies what was once the loudest online publication, BuzzFeed. The quiz and slideshow-heavy website attracted millions of monthly readers with headlines that — according to Jewel Galbraith, current editor-in-chief of ClickHole — took advantage of powerful emotions like nostalgia (“25 Nostalgic Photos That Will Put Late-Era Millennials In Their Feelings”), outrage (“Hillary Clinton Aide Tells Reporter To ‘Fuck Off’ And ‘Have A Good Life’”) and morbid curiosity (“People Who Were Stuck In Comas Are Sharing What It Was Actually Like, And I Truly Have No Words”).

How does ClickHole warp the BuzzFeed voice? 

“I like to think of it as the voice of a maniac who spends every waking hour online consuming content and social media,” Steve Etheridge, former editor-in-chief of ClickHole, tells Freethink. “They soak everything up and then try to make the same kinds of content, but it all comes out slightly deranged. It’s a simple yet positive voice that perceives the world through the lens of sensational internet emotions (“Inspiring!” “Body Positivity FTW!”) and then depicts it in a naive, misguided way.”

“ClickHole’s voice mirrors the chaos of the digital media industry and the internet at large,” says Stephen LaConte, a producer at ClickHole and a staff writer at BuzzFeed. “Feverish and frenzied, absurd, very excitable, often naive or stupid, desperate to turn anything into a story that will go viral. ClickHole knows that if people stop clicking, it dies, so the stakes are always extremely high. Which is true of the non-satirical digital media companies too.”

As BuzzFeed rose in popularity, other media outlets began using the same brand of click-inducing strategies. “Even The New York Times will sometimes publish the most ridiculous headline that only serves to draw you in without actually telling you what’s going on,” says Nackers.

Galbraith notes, “There are more lists and quizzes on news sites than there were before BuzzFeed. ‘Every State’s Favorite X’ is a common example of this kind of content. […] Traditional, inverted pyramid news articles simply aren’t as effective at attracting eyeballs.”

(In fact, The Onion’s mock-serious tone is more straight-laced than a lot of mainstream news today, Nackers suspects: “I would say that our tone is more factual and formal than most serious news publications nowadays, using soft leads and a clinical voice to lay out the facts before we move on to the absurd joke.”)

Before the internet, LaConte says, “the objective of a journalist was to use an authoritative voice without personality infused into it.” But BuzzFeed and its news division weren’t “afraid to have a little fun, and to approach news topics in a way that wasn’t just informative, but also interesting and enjoyable and personable.”

Still, BuzzFeed — which over the past year has shuttered BuzzFeed News and laid off 16% of its staff — only dominated a brief, specific era of the internet.

“When BuzzFeed started, the internet was a lot smaller,” LaConte says. “Everyone was seeing the same things. It was that very brief period of time when the internet was monocultural. Everyone would log onto Facebook and see these BuzzFeed lists and quizzes, giving them the same points of reference.”

“Today’s different. The internet is much larger. Everyone stays in their own little corner, visits their own websites, reads their own journalists. I don’t think it would ever be possible to have a phenomenon like BuzzFeed ever again because the internet is so siloed now. It was a time when everyone had the same internet experience.”

But BuzzFeed didn’t flop because of culture. Its business strategy had long depended on referrals from Facebook, which for most of the 2010s had been the superhighway connecting readers to BuzzFeed and other outlets. Facebook continually tweaked its algorithm to discourage clickbait-type headlines, and in recent years, it has aggressively retreated from news altogether — a tectonic shift that’s cratered traffic and revenue for many digital media companies.

How is ClickHole dealing with the trends that have torpedoed so many of its parody targets?

“ClickHole’s business strategy definitely evolved on a similar trajectory as the industry at large,” Etheridge, former editor-in-chief, says. “Like most publishers, we went hard on the pivot to video for a couple of years, only to eventually back off once we realized it wasn’t the advertising goldmine it was hyped up to be.”

Social media opened up new formats for ClickHole jokes.

“We create some content specifically for our social pages, like our ‘They Said What?!’ celebrity quotes and various memes that we urge our followers to like and share,” LaConte says. Galbraith notes that ClickHole “tries to make headlines shorter for people’s attention spans and get to the punchline quickly — unless it’s a stylistic thing where the length and specificity is part of the joke and the appeal.”

But ClickHole isn’t catering all its humor to specific platforms. “A good joke is a good joke, and that’s our only standard,” LaConte says.

The Onion hot potato

As for The Onion? Under the ownership of G/O Media, which acquired The Onion in 2019, Nackers says “the focus was on driving pageviews, which lead to numerous slideshows that in themselves were a larger meta-critique on the failings of media and the race to the bottom.”

But in April, G/O Media sold The Onion to Global Tetrahedron, a new Chicago-based firm whose name is a reference to a fictional “multinational behemoth” featured in The Onion’s 1999 book Our Dumb Century. 

“The vision,” The Onion’s new chief marketing officer Leila Claire Brillson told WIRED, “is to basically unshackle The Onion from this very traffic-driven strategy of pageviews and programmatic ad impressions.”

Like most digital media companies, it’s not exactly clear how or whether The Onion will survive financially over the long term. (Upon the recent sale, The Onion published the maybe-not-entirely-joking headline “Give Us $1 Or ‘The Onion’ Disappears Forever.”)

For now, Dikkers says he notices a difference in The Onion’s recent output.

“​​I can see The Onion is already running more stories and less clickbait, which is delightful to see. This is how it always was when I was there. I never had pressure to do traffic-driven stunts that weren’t fun or funny. So, they’re getting back those happy times, and I’m excited for them!”

Nackers says that no longer having to focus on publishing a “never-ending torrent of content” will allow writers to focus on longer stories and new editorial concepts, adding that The Onion is “planning to invest in a number of different audio and video formats to provide great coverage for lazy readers.”

Whatever those may be, some things about The Onion are unlikely to change. The “Area Man” will keep making local news with his sad-sack life. Unaware readers (and the occasional real-world dictatorship) will continue mistaking Onion stories for real news. And “America’s Finest News Source” won’t go on without its critics — not only on the right (it is a decidedly progressive publication, after all), but also on the left.

“If we make fun of Biden for something, people on the left get mad about it,” Nakkers says. “And that’s because of fear: They’re afraid we’re going to say something that will make people not vote for him. Our view, however, is that we should be able to be critical about things that aren’t great and attack that. We’re not telling you what to do. We’re just telling you to think.”

This article How the internet changed news, according to The Onion is featured on Big Think.

The world is full of things. So many things. It’s mind-boggling the number of things out there that we pay little to no attention to. For instance, even avid readers probably don’t stop to consider those tiny strips of cloth at the top and bottom of their hardcover book spines. What are they, and what purpose do they serve? (We’re not being rhetorical. We have no idea.)

The world is filled with details like that. Details that, at some point, someone, somewhere had to study, meditate on, or outright invent. And in doing so, they gave that little piece of the world a name and history.

To help us better appreciate the world we share, here are nine ordinary things most of us interact with regularly but that you (probably) didn’t know had a fascinating name.

1) Petrichor

Have you ever enjoyed that uniquely sweet smell wafting through the air after a long-overdue rain? That rich, earthy scent enjoys the poetic-sounding name petrichor. Coined by Australian mineral chemists in the 1960s, the word is a blend of petro- (Greek for “stone”) and ichor, the heavenly golden substance that flows through the gods’ veins in Greek mythology.

Petrichor results from the rain releasing chemical compounds into the atmosphere that have accumulated in rocks and soil during the preceding dry spell. This perfumey mixture includes ozone, plant oils, and geosmins — liquid compounds secreted by bacteria found in the soil that, admittedly, is a tad less poetic-sounding.

2) Aglet

If you wear shoes with laces, then you interact with aglets daily. If you’re more of a loafer guy, you may still find this interesting.

An aglet is the covering at the end of a shoelace, or any lace for that matter. The word comes from the Old French aiguillette, which means “small needle.” That checks out since the whole point of an aglet is to make the lace easier to thread needle-style.

If your shoes have aglets, then they likely have eyelets, too. These are the little holes designed to thread the lace through. The word comes from the Old French oeillet, meaning “small eye.” And that’s a bonus thing you likely didn’t know the name of.

Of all the words on this list, aglet is the one younger readers are more likely to recognize as it was immortalized in a song by the great Jon Colton Barry.

3) Vagitus

Please stick with us because this one doesn’t sound like what it means. Vagitus describes a baby’s cry, specifically the first cry of a newborn — meaning you can, in fact, discuss it in polite company.

Vagitus comes from the Latin vāgīre (“to wail”). According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the earliest evidence for its usage comes from the writings of philosopher Nathaniel Culverwell (1652). By the 1800s, it also came to represent the “distressing cry of persons under surgical operations.” Given the lack of anesthesia at the time, it makes sense that they would adopt a special word for such anguished howls.

The Latin verb may also be related to Vaticanus (aka Vagitanus), a Roman deity of childbirth. According to Aulus Gellius, a 2nd-century scholar, Vaticanus presided over the “beginnings of the human voice” and so lent his name to “the sound of a recent voice.” Today, it may seem odd to invoke a god for something guaranteed to ruin airplane travel or a good night’s rest. But in an age when childbirth was extremely dangerous to mother and child alike, such cries were a welcomed sign of a successful delivery.

4) Philtrum

The human body is a wonder of anatomical engineering, but beyond the ever-popular head, shoulders, knees, and toes, we don’t always know the names of our features. One of the most commonly seen and rarely discussed body parts is the philtrum — that little dimple between your lip and nose.

Philtrum is a medical term these days, but it shares a connection with the word philter, aka a magical love potion. Both stem from the Latin philtrum, meaning “love potion.” Going farther back, Latin borrowed its word from the Greek philtron (“a love charm”). It’s all rather romantic.

You may notice that hair grows less bushy on the philtrum, which is why men often sport a mustache gap. The smaller the philtrum, the less noticeable the gap. It was once fashionable to cover only the philtrum and its immediate vicinity with a small ‘stache, but after Adolf Hitler adopted the style, it became frowned upon in most societies. That’s why many people call it a “Hitler mustache” even though the style is actually called a “toothbrush mustache.” (Another bonus thing!)

5) Punt

Punt has many definitions, and you’re likely familiar with a fair number. It can be a verb meaning “to kick” or “to pass something on.” It can be a type of boat. But the punt we’re interested in — the one tucked away unceremoniously at the back of every dictionary entry — is that indentation on the bottom of wine bottles.

The word is probably a shortening of punt mark: the distortion left by the iron rods used to shape glass during glassblowing. That iron rod is variously known as a punt, punty, or pontil — history’s glassblowers couldn’t quite make up their minds on that one, apparently.

As for what purpose the punt serves? Well, ask different sommeliers and grape nuts that question, and they’ll each give you a different answer. It hinders sediment from rising when you pour. It helps you hold the bottle all fancy-like. It creates the optical illusion that the bottle is bigger. It helps the bottle stand up to stress and pressure. It allows the wine to chill faster. The list goes on.

However, the punt is simply a holdover from when wine bottles were handmade and glassblowers needed a way to shape the bottle to easily stand upright. Today, machines can make bottles in all sorts of shapes, so punts are included to continue tradition more than anything.

6) Brannock device 

We’ve all been there. You go to the shoe store, ask for help, and wind up with a stranger fondling your feet as you become painfully aware that you wore your ugliest, holiest socks. This moment of socially accepted torture is brought to you by that odd metal contraption every shoe clerk uses: the Brannock device.

The device is named for its inventor, Charles F. Brannock. Brannock’s father was part owner of a shoe store in Syracuse, New York, and as a university student, Brannock became interested in developing a way to accurately measure feet. He built his first model from an Erector set and was issued his U.S. patent in 1928.

And if you thought getting your foot measured was awkward today, know that before the Brannock device, the best option available was a block of wood. So do Mr. Brannock a favor and remember his name next time you go out to buy some footwear.

7) Overmorrow

Ever notice how English has so many words to describe days but no word for “the day after tomorrow”? Actually it does: overmorrow. The word is likely a loan translation from the German übermorgen, meaning the same thing. The earliest evidence for its usage comes from the Coverdale Bible, an early 16th-century English translation.

Like its antonym hereyesterday — that is, the day before yesterday and another bonus thing — overmorrow never got much traction. While you can find it in some dictionaries, it’s mostly an archaic curio. However, we feel it’s due for a comeback — if only so we have a fancy word to use when procrastinating our next project.

8) Morton’s toe

Returning to those less recognized body parts, Morton’s toe is a condition in which the bones of the big toe stop growing prematurely. This causes the second or even third toe to grow longer than it. It’s named after Dudley Joy Morton, an orthopedist who described the condition in his 1935 book, unimaginatively titled The Human Foot. 

While not a well-known phrase, Morton’s toe is fairly common. One study found that 42% of American college students have it. Far rarer is squared foot, a condition in which the big and second toe are the same size.

If you happen to have Morton’s toe, then know you’re in prestigious company. The Statue of Liberty is depicted with the condition, a reference to her classical influences. Turns out, many famous Greek statues sport Morton’s toe as do paintings depicting figures from Greek and Roman mythology. Don’t believe us? Check out Venus’s extra-long index toe in Sandro Botticelli’s Renaissance masterpiece The Birth of Venus.

9) Tittle

Here’s another word that doesn’t sound like what it actually means. You don’t tittle someone; rather, you finish your lowercase I’s and J’s by crowning them with a tittle. That’s right: A tittle is a dot or small mark used in writing.

The word comes from the Latin titulus, which typically means “inscription, label, or heading.” It’s the source of our Modern English word title as well, and that association with heading something, like a book title, lent it a specialized use case among Late Latin grammarians. Titulus came to name marks that go on the top of letters. As such, tittle and title share an etymon (basically a word ancestor).

In English, tittle has roots going as far back as 1175, but its most famous usage comes from early translations of the Bible. Per Matthew 5:18, “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.”

The point of the verse is that even the smallest part of God’s law, the jots and tittles, will remain in effect until Jesus’ duty is accomplished. This lent tittle its second definition, “a very small part.” That in turn spawned the now defunct expression “to a tittle” — the source for our modern expression “to a T.”

And there you have it! We promised nine but delivered 13 fascinating names for ordinary things. We hope this list helps you better appreciate the often-overlooked details of the world we live in, and speak about, every day. Failing that, it should help you at your next game of trivia — which, by the way, comes from the Latin trivium meaning “place where three roads meet,” referring to the three disciplines of liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) in English. And that’s one more bonus thing for the road.

This article 9 ordinary things you (probably) didn’t know had fascinating names is featured on Big Think.

The second season of HBO’s House of the Dragon picks up right where the first left off. Rhaenyra Targaryen, played by Emma D’Arcy, is (spoilers ahead) flying across the Narrow Sea in search of the charred remains of her son, Lucerys, and his dragon. Across from the island of Dragonstone, in the capital city of King’s Landing, her half-brother Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) sits on the Iron Throne, counseled by his mother Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke), grandfather Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans), and Kingsguard Commander Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel), preparing for a civil war that will change Westeros forever. The Dance of the Dragons is here, and when the dragons dance, the Seven Kingdoms bleed.

At first, fans did not have high hopes for House of the Dragon, based on George R.R. Martin’s 2018 book Fire & Blood, which recounts the history of the Targaryen dynasty from founder Aegon the Conqueror all the way to Daenerys, the silver-haired heroine of the acclaimed and as of yet unfinished book series A Song of Ice and Fire. Game of Thrones, which was Ice and Fire’s TV adaptation, grew into one of the most critically and commercially successful shows of all time — until its final seasons failed to live up to audience expectations. House of the Dragon, which premiered in 2022, might have continued that trend. Instead, the show proved a return to form, offering the same Shakespearean dialogue and political intrigue that made people fall in love with Martin’s fictional universe back in 2011. The second season is just as good, if not better.

Although he wouldn’t admit it himself, much of House of the Dragon’s success can be attributed to its showrunner, Ryan Condal, who, following the departure of Miguel Sapochnik, currently serves as the multinational production’s sole creative executive. Appointed for his encyclopedic knowledge of Martin’s oeuvre, Condal has — in his own words — “played with fire” without getting burned. In the following interview, he demonstrates his mastery of Westerosi lore and explains why all history – real or imagined – ultimately amounts to propaganda. Along the way, he also shares how he deals with stress, procrastination (in his case: “precrastination”), and imposter syndrome — advice that’s relevant for any professional, whether working in Hollywood or not.

Imposter syndrome

Condal is a relative newcomer to television. In his previous life, he graduated from Villanova University with an accounting degree and spent eight years working in pharmaceutical advertising — quite different from working as a Hollywood showrunner, but not entirely unrelated.

“Advertising can be a great prototype job for a writer or showrunner because it involves a lot of lateral thinking and image-driven storytelling,” he tells Big Think over Zoom from his office in London, stocked with props from Star Wars, Tim Burton’s Batman, and The Muppets. “Our audience was doctors, so the copywriting was full of hard science. Essentially, you’d take a complex idea and try to communicate it simply, with a single image. Writing about chronic kidney disease and asthma drugs is obviously not the same as writing a dramatic scene, but it’s still creative work.”

Most people are afraid of switching careers, and when they do change jobs, they find work in a field related to the one they started in. But some skills are more transferrable than you may think.

“I was working in a corporate environment and collaborating with other creatives,” Condal says. “Copywriters work closely with art directors responsible for visuals and layout, and there’s a similarity there to screenwriters working with directors responsible for turning your very cerebral ideas into concrete images. I also learned to compromise, adapting your writing to clients who aren’t always going to love your brilliant, avant-garde choices. That’s the talent-studio relationship, right there. Working on a deadline, on a budget, going into a room to give your presentation, and having someone on the other end of the table buy or not buy them — this stuff is relevant in any industry, Hollywood or not. Coming from a creative but also very corporate environment, I was able to navigate challenges that some of my colleagues with filmmaking and art history degrees maybe weren’t prepped for.”

Condal switched careers relatively late in life. How did he do it? (Credit: Nikidemak1 / Wikipedia)

Like Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, Condal’s previous film and television experience — a moderately successful but canceled sci-fi show, two Dwayne Johnson movies, and several unproduced screenplays — paled in comparison to the project that HBO put him in charge of. The stress was overwhelming.

“Every day,” Condal confesses when asked if he suffers from imposter syndrome. “For me, though, it was less the scale and scope of House of the Dragon and more its visibility that intimidated me. I was able to make three seasons of Colony, my sci-fi show, rather quietly. We didn’t have these big, flashy premiere events and giant press tours, and while I was the showrunner, I enjoyed a kind of anonymity that I do not have anymore. On Colony, I was writing primarily for myself, working on something that made me happy and creatively satisfied.”

With visibility comes scrutiny. Game of Thrones gave birth to a vast ecosystem of YouTube channels, Reddit forums, and blogs run by fantasy nerds who know Martin’s fictional universe as well as Condal. They’d be able to call him out on the smallest of incongruencies.

“Back in the day, fans had to write physical letters and send them by mail,” Condal says. “Now you can’t even open your phone to check in on a friend without getting assaulted by online criticism.”

While some criticism is valuable, too much can lead to creative paralysis. “I tend more towards the negative than the positive, so I made a conscious decision to stay away from social media when I got this job,” Condal says. If anything, he believes the healthy distance he maintains between himself and his audience has improved the show: “Audiences think they know what they want, but sometimes, they have to be given what they need instead. When they cast Michael Keaton as Batman, there was this huge fan backlash. ‘This isn’t my Batman,’ they said. Now, he is.”

Matt Smith plays “Rogue Prince” Daemon Targaryen. (Credit: Theo Whitman / HBO)

Ultimately, Condal’s own passion for Martin’s writing outweighed any doubt he had about his own. “I’m trying to make the type of show I would enjoy as a fan, which I am. And while I realize my ideal fan show will be different from someone else’s, I still think that it’s a good true north heading on my compass. Actually, I think that’s why HBO hired me in the first place.”

Asked if he ever procrastinates, Condal answers he precrastinates — looking ahead, planning for the future, and anticipating every possible wrench that could be thrown into his plans. The excitement he has for his work keeps him productive, and helps him build strong bonds with his coworkers:

“It was hugely intimidating, moving to a new country [the U.K.] and working with a new but also hugely talented crew that I had to — not tell them what to do, exactly, but lead them; collaborate with them. I definitely had to earn my place, but think that — because I came in with a clear vision of what I wanted for the show — those relationships were easy to establish.”

His excitement also means he doesn’t need to take a lot of time to de-stress from his daily responsibilities. To an extent, it’s a classic case of someone getting energy from their work, rather than the work depleting their energy. If he does want to relax, he doesn’t do so by sitting still but practicing Okinawan karate, a lifelong passion which, for the time being, he practices with his LA-based teacher over Zoom.

Lore of House of the Dragon

The most important part of making a successful fantasy show isn’t the sets, costumes, or special effects, but lore. Fictional places like Westeros have their own unique cultures, customs, and social institutions, all of which help create the illusion that this fantasy world is as real and complex as our own. To transfer that illusion from page to screen, the writers must know Martin’s work as thoroughly as Martin himself.

“It’s not just me,” Condal says. “We are all deeply entrenched fans of George. One of our writers has worked with him for many years. If I’m a graduate in Westeros studies, she’s an archmaester,” referring to the order of academics sworn to advise and educate Westeros’ nobility.

“Textual references are best done in light touches to remind people that this is a fully realized society with hundreds of years of mapped-out history to it. And you don’t need an entire scene to do that. Instead of writing, you can communicate details environmentally through props like heraldry. For the fans, these little touches tell them they are in good hands. Better yet, they know the details are there just for them, the hardcore fans. For everyone else, the casual viewers, this stuff is flying by 100 miles an hour, and they probably won’t notice it. But it’s there.”

Aegon’s Iron Throne is bigger than the one we see in Game of Thrones. (Credit: Ollie Upton / HBO)

Although many scenes in House of the Dragon take place in locations we previously saw on Game of Thrones, subtle touches remind keen-eyed viewers that this story takes place 200 years earlier. The Iron Throne is surrounded by rows of melted swords, and members of the small council — the head advisers of the king — each have a tiny marble ball they place inside a bowl to signify their presence at the table, a ritual that appears to have disappeared by the time Ned Stark rides south to serve his longtime friend, Robert Baratheon.

The passage of time is also revealed through the presence or absence of certain noble families. The Hightowers, the house of Alicent and Otto, were “a gift from the narrative,” according to Condal, “but there is a reason we don’t see them in Game of Thrones. Their prominent role in this story, in the horrible conflict that is the Targaryen civil war, greatly diminished their status in Westeros. The same goes for the Velaryons, who were once close to the Targaryens but eventually fell out with them. During the time of Game of Thrones, they were only a footnote in Westeros’ power structure. But during House of the Dragon, they were the greatest naval power in the world. Surely, fans will wonder what happened to them.”

Interpreting history

In interviews, Martin has said there are two types of writers: gardeners and architects. Where architects plan out their story from start to finish before they start writing, gardeners plant seeds — inciting incidents, personality conflicts — and then allow the story to grow and evolve on its own terms.

“I’m definitely an architect,” says Condal, “and I think I have to be as a screenwriter, because our life is so deadline-driven. The literal definition of a playwright, W-R-I-G-H-T, is ‘one who builds plays.’ A dramatic writer is almost by necessity a structuralist, and I very much fall into that camp.”Martin, by contrast, identifies as a gardener. While this writing style — with its many unexpected twists, turns, and deaths — helps explain what made Game of Thrones so successful, it may also have been responsible for the show’s eventual downfall. Sticking to Martin’s analogy, “gardening stories” grow like trees, their narratives branching out in an exponential number of paths, making them difficult to finish. As of today, Martin has spent more than 14 years on the next installment in the Song of Ice and Fire series, his prolonged bout of writer’s block forcing Weiss and Benioff to come up with their own ending.

Queen Alicent’s piety clashes with her son Aegon’s lust for bloodshed. (Credit: Ollie Upton / HBO)

“The advantage we have over them is that we’re dealing with a finished text, where they were working with an unfinished, living work,” Condal says. “Where the Game of Thrones team had to trim down 5,000 pages into a few dozen scripts, we’re challenged in the opposite direction, turning around 100 pages into a multi-season arc of television, and that requires a lot of invention.”

Another major challenge centers on the fact that Fire & Blood, which Martin wrote to procrastinate on finishing Winds of Winter, is not a novel but a historical text written from the perspective of three unreliable narrators: a jester, a maester, and a priest.

Before Condal and the other writers can adapt the history of the Targaryen civil war, they first have to interpret it. “Martin says the jester, maester, and priest wrote down this history years after the actual events took place. If we can’t even agree what really happened on Jan 6th, which was televised, how can we really know what happened in Westeros?”

As a result, Condal treats Fire & Blood like a real-world historian might treat a manuscript from the Middle Ages. “These three writers all had personal agendas which, to me, seem to reflect one of the main themes of our show: powerful women living in an unbreakable patriarchy. The writers, particularly the priest, appear to blame the war on the squabbling between Rhaenyra and Alicent.”

House of the Dragon pretends to show the real history that Fire & Blood recorded and distorted. Some events happen the way the one of the three authors describe it, while others contain elements of all three conflicting accounts. Others still indicate that none of them got it right. As a rule, every character in the show is far more complex than the jester, maester, and priest made them out to be.

Alicent’s father Otto as Hand of the King. (Credit: Ollie Upton / HBO)

“Alicent can be the stereotypical evil stepmother at times,” says Condal, “just as King Viserys, played by Paddy Considine in season 1, can come across at weak. However, the thing that in-universe historians don’t get about Viserys is that he was carrying the burden of a prophecy passed down through generations and couldn’t tell anybody about it. A lot of his supposedly weak decision-making was actually in service of this secret prophecy. We were trying to show that there was more to him, that multiple things about him could be true at the same time.”

The next season

By the time the first episode of season 2 premiered on HBO on June 16, Condal was already busy writing the third season. “We tend to start the writing process for each season right at the end of production of the previous one,” he explains, “just because that’s the first time you can do two things at once: you’re not running at a breakneck speed (yet) and can gather your thoughts and conduct postmortem analysis.”

“We have to arrive at the same endpoint as the book,” he reminds himself. “Whoever George said becomes king must become king at the end of the war. Hopefully, though, we have a bit of latitude leading up to that, to show how history has been interpreted differently at different times by different historians. I realize I’m playing with fire, but it does excite and fascinate me — to be able to comment on how history is made, not just this fictional history, but all history. It’s all propaganda to some degree.”

This article From fan to showrunner: How “House of the Dragon” creator Ryan Condal landed TV’s biggest job is featured on Big Think.

In 1785, a 25-year-old student at Cambridge University named Thomas Clarkson participated in a Latin essay competition about the immorality of slavery. Raised in a sheltered, upper-class environment, Clarkson knew little of the practice at the foundation of the British Empire’s wealth and power. But the more he read about the inhumanity African slaves endured both during and after their passage to the Americas, the more it affected him. Channeling his outrage into his writing, Clarkson ended up winning the competition, a victory which in retrospect marked the beginning of his lifelong career as an abolitionist.

According to Dutch journalist and best-selling author Rutger Bregman, Clarkson represents something we are sorely missing in today’s world: a willingness among young people to use their talent and ambition for the common good instead of personal profit and status. While some fall down social media rabbit holes about dropshipping, lured by the promise of getting rich quickly without making a meaningful contribution to society, others slave away in designer-furnished offices, working jobs that, though hard-earned and well-compensated, lack a clear meaning and purpose.

What to do instead? Create a new standard of success by shifting your ambition away from money and toward finding solutions for the world’s most pressing problems. That’s the main argument in Bregman’s Moral Ambition, which he described as an “almost embarrassingly ambitious book that aims to be the start of a new movement.” 

One of the most widely read and discussed books in the Netherlands at this moment, its case studies explore some of history’s most successful activists — including Clarkson — and aim to restore faith in human agency and ingenuity, marrying socially conscious activism with good, old, capitalist entrepreneurship. With an English translation set to release next year, Bregman shares why his message isn’t just pertinent for Dutch readers, but American ones, too. 

Redefining success

Bregman first tapped into the Dutch zeitgeist with his 2019 book Humankind: A Hopeful Story, a Yuval Noah Harari-esque mashup of history, sociology, and psychology which argues that, no matter how horrible the human race is made to look in the news, most people are – fundamentally – good. At the time, Bregman hoped this positive outlook would alleviate some of the pessimism and cynicism he saw around him. But while it gave his readers hope, it also made them more complacent. 

True to this promise, the first chapter of Moral Ambition is titled, “No, you are not good the way you are.” At first glance, such a sentence seems more at home in a Jordan Peterson book than in the writing of a progressive like Bregman, but where the conservative psychologist uses it as an argument for why people – particularly social justice warriors – should leave each other alone, Bregman’s is a call to action and involvement: a call for professionals to quit their “bullshit jobs” at banks and consultancies in favor of a career with a bigger, more meaningful social impact, and for professional activists to set aside their differences and become a little more pragmatic in the way they go about reaching their idealistic goals. 

Rutger Bregman has become one of the most influential pop philosophers in the Netherlands. (Credit: Anne Strunk / Wikipedia)

Bregman doesn’t define “bullshit jobs” based on personal opinion, but scientific research. “My main argument is there’s a huge waste of talent going on,” he reiterates. “So many people are stuck in jobs that don’t have much societal value. And that’s not me saying that. It’s them. There’s a famous study by Dutch economists Robert Dur and Max van Lent, who used a huge international data set to estimate that around 25% of the workforce in rich countries believes their own job is useless, or what the late anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs.” If these people — marketers, consultants, corporate lawyers — focused on tackling the world’s most important issues, they could accomplish great things. But that’s just not the case.”

Things weren’t always this way. In his book, Bregman writes about various activist movements from the near and distant past who, through their perseverance, helped make moral ambition fashionable, including Clarkson and the abolitionists, which grew out of a progressive 17th-century Christian group known as the Quakers, the civil rights demonstrations spearheaded by Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ralph Nader’s fight against corporate America. These movements, particularly the latter two, had a huge effect on youth culture:

Presently, Bregman continues, those percentages have more or less reversed, though not necessarily for the reasons you would think. “Obviously there are some structural factors at play. Inequality has grown and housing costs have exploded. But I don’t think that’s the whole story, because you can see the same pattern among both really privileged students who come from wealthy backgrounds and less privileged students. For the latter, it makes sense that you would prioritize making a lot of money because you have to pay back your huge student loan. But for others, it doesn’t make that much sense. I think what has happened in the last couple of decades is that we have developed a definition of success that is about getting a high salary, a fancy job title, a corner office. That’s a purely cultural phenomenon. It’s not human nature. It doesn’t have to be this way, and I think we can change that.”

A solution may present itself in the unlikely marriage between the idealism of a professional activist with the ambition and practicality of an entrepreneur. Just as a business looks for holes in the market when developing a new product, so does Bregman urge these would-be activist-entrepreneurs to focus on pressing but overlooked global issues. In his book, he shares the story of Rob Mather, a successful strategy consultant from London who – after organizing a charity swim for a burn victim he saw on television – went on to found the Against Malaria Foundation because, while a cure for the infectious disease already existed, it wasn’t being made available to the countries that needed it most. 

Bregman also praises the practicality of Clarkson who, realizing that his fellow Brits did not see African slaves as human enough to care about their suffering, sought to abolish the slave trade by standing up for the health and safety of the crew transporting those slaves – a morally reprehensible argument to some, but one that proved effective as, in 1807, Britain became one of the first European countries to abolish the slave trade.

Moral ambition in America

Bregman has co-founded an organization, The School for Moral Ambition, that helps talented people get out of meaningless or harmful jobs, and aims to make ‘moral ambition’ a well-known lifestyle, just like minimalism or mindfulness. Currently, Bregman and his team are planning an international expansion, with Bregman preparing to relocate with his family to New York City.

He believes his book is even more relevant for the United States than it is for the Netherlands, not least because his thesis should appeal to both sides of the political spectrum. Those on the right will likely resonate with the (neoliberal) assumption that the biggest societal changes come from the actions of small groups of individuals on the ground, rather than top-down reforms of the societies they inhabit. 

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world,” said cultural anthropologist Margeret Mead. “In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Moral pioneers like Thomas Clarkson were practical about achieving their idealistic goals. (Credit: National Portrait Gallery / Wikipedia)

Left-leaning readers will see Moral Ambition as a call to action – they have already answered that call – but as a guide for how to put their ideals into practice, and how not to. “Awareness is so overrated,” Bregman says of a term that’s thrown around a lot these days. “It doesn’t matter that your timeline is full of the right opinions about all the things happening in the world. It’s easy to go viral by shouting at billionaires – look at me – but does it accomplish anything?” He also argues a lot of activism is being expressed in negative as opposed to positive terms; instead of eating lessmeat, fund, join, or found a company that produces green, lab-grown meat.

Last but not least, Moral Ambition should appeal to American audiences because it can replace an older and, in Bregman’s opinion, a misguided movement that sought to weaponize the country’s capitalist engines to protect the planet and the human race: effective altruism. Born from a thought experiment by philosopher Peter Singer — if you would ruin your expensive sneakers to save a child drowning in a river in front of you, why wouldn’t you donate money to save a child starving in another country? — effective altruism encourages talented, ambitious young people to embrace their inner capitalist, maximize profits, and then donate those profits to accomplish the maximum amount of good.

Bregman saw EA’s demise long before the downfall of the movement’s poster child, Sam Bankman-Fried, who through his cryptocurrency exchange FTX was behind one of the biggest frauds in US history. Although there are some things about EA that Bregman admires, like its support of non-profit charity entrepreneurship, he says the movement ultimately “always felt like moral blackmailing to me: you’re immoral if you don’t save the proverbial child. We’re trying to build a movement that’s grounded not in guilt but enthusiasm, compassion, and problem-solving.” 

The happiest man in the universe

In the prologue of Moral Ambition, Bregman recounts the story of Matthieu Ricard, a French molecular geneticist who – after receiving his PhD – traveled to the Himalayas to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk. Later in life, Ricard participated in a famous study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where an MRI scan of his brain revealed that the parts of his brain responsible for feelings of joy and satisfaction were working overtime, while those responsible for feelings of pain and sadness were virtually dormant. Celebrated in newspapers as the “happiest person in the world,” Ricard became an exemplary figure for many – but not Bregman. 

This article Effective altruism is stumbling. Can “moral ambition” replace it? is featured on Big Think.

Science fiction transcends mere entertainment. This genre reveals, predicts, warns, educates, and inspires unlike anything else. Many of its best stories are infused with just enough credibility and possibility to spark serious thinking on real issues. A thoughtful survey of great sci-fi quotes from the last few centuries readily demonstrates this and feels like a fantastic voyage through humankind’s greatest ideas, worst fears, and highest hopes. 

My new book, Damn You, Entropy! 1,001 of the Greatest Science Fiction Quotes (Rowman & Littlefield/Prometheus Books), is the book I worked on between other books. Without conscious consent or the original goal of a book, my lifelong love of science fiction and career as a journalist/author conspired to turn me into an obsessive curator of science-fiction gems. I imagine the finished product as a literary Dyson sphere that harnesses intellectual energy from novels, short stories, films, and television series. 

Setting aside the mad-scientist villain trope, science-fiction writers have given tremendous respect and praise for real science and scientific thinking. In only a handful of well-crafted words, many writers have illuminated scientific principles, amplified important knowledge, and promoted positive feelings about science.

• “Was there anything more exciting in life than seeking answers?”  — Isaac Asimov, Prelude to Foundation, 1988 novel

• “The ship of theory could set sail on tides of mathematical grandeur and hope alone, but only data could fill its sails.” — Gregory Benford, Cosm, 1998 novel

• “For all its beauty, honesty, and effectiveness at improving the human condition, science demands a terrible price—that we accept what experiments tell us about the universe, whether we like it or not.”  — David Brin, Existence, 2012 novel

• “Science is an attempt to remove our emotions and ego from reality.”  — Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars, 2018 novel

• “They’re not my truths. They belong to science.”  — David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman, “The Emperor’s Peace,” 2021 episode of Foundation

• “One thing about a science: it works.”  — Chad Oliver, “The Imperfect Machine,” 1955 short story

The genre has never been a blind cheerleader for science, however. Many writers have attempted to show through stories that, wonderful and productive as it is, science is not everything. Art, for example, is a key component of our humanity and some excellent writers have suggested that we may need it as much as science.

• “Science explains the world, but only Art can reconcile us to it.”  — Stanislaw Lem, “King Globares and the Sages,” 1965 short story

• “As civilization advances, so does indifference. It is a disease. Immunize yourself with art. And love.” — Matt Haig, The Humans, 2013 novel

• “There are few better ways to get to know how a species thinks than to learn their art.”  — Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit, 2016 novel

Many science-fiction characters explore space, travel time, and encounter aliens—while still in the grip of the human condition. This makes the genre particularly well-suited to address deep philosophical and psychological themes.

• “We’re only different from the bacteria because we are able to ask what the hell this is all about. Not answer, just ask.”  — Carolyn Ives, “Umbernight,” 2018 short story
• “What is beauty, or goodness, or art, or love, or God? We are forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can’t be understood.” — Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel, 1954 novel
• “Will the mountains remain unmoved, and streams still keep a downward course towards the vast abyss; will the tides rise and fall, and the winds fan universal nature; will beasts pasture, birds fly, and fishes swim, when man, the lord, possessor, perceiver, and recorder of all these things, has passed away, as though he had never been?”  — Mary Shelley, The Last Man, 1826 novel
• “Why are we born needing impossible things? Why is it that we all have things we need to live that simply do not exist in the universe? A purpose in life. Unconditional love? Our emotional needs met? Ha.”  — Elizabeth Bear, Machine, 2020 novel

Many science-fiction stories, old and new, contain relevant warnings about societies sliding into madness and self-destruction after reason had eroded or been sacrificed in the name of comforting delusions and compelling lies. As one who has written many books and articles about the urgent need for improved critical thinking in contemporary society, I appreciate the many science-fiction writers who have called on us to become a more rational species.

• “His mind could be his salvation, as it had been his damnation.” —Richard Matheson, The Shrinking Man, 1956 novel

• “If Earth was ever to be saved, its people would have to be taught to believe in reason.”  —Robert Zubrin, The Holy Land, 2003 novel

• “You’re not even consciously aware of the world until your brain has filtered and censored and hammered it down into a mush of self-serving Darwinian dogma. The cataracts on your eyes are four billion years thick; it’s amazing you can see anything at all.” — Peter Watts, “Kindred,” 2018 short story

• “Hope clouds observation.” — Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965 novel

• “It’s always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed, 1974 novel

• “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” — Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1979 novel

• “It’s a strange thing: We humans pride ourselves on being ruled by reason, yet with human civilization at stake, we chose ideology and ignorance.” — James Lawrence Powell, The 2084 Report: A Novel of the Great Warming, 2011 novel

• “In this age of enlightenment, the soothsayer and astrologer flourish. As science pushes forward, ignorance and superstition gallop around the flanks and bite science in the rear with big dark teeth.” — Philip Jose Farmer, Riders of the Purple Wage, 1967 novel

• “We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.” — Aldous Huxley, Island, 1962 novel

Science is our most effective tool or process for discovering and understanding reality. It also enables us to create technologies with godlike powers. Unfortunately, this comes with the risk of placing too much trust in scientists and too much reliance on technology. The question of who gets to control and benefit most from deadly, invasive, or dehumanizing technology is a common science-fiction theme. 

• “When a population is dependent on a machine, they are hostages of the men who tend the machines.” — Robert A. Heinlein, “The Roads Must Roll,” 1940 short story

• “Aren’t these the people who taught us how to annihilate ourselves? I tell you, my friends, science is too important to be left to the scientists.” — Carl Sagan, Contact, 1985 novel

• “It has undoubtedly occurred to you, as to all thinking people of your day, that the scientists have done a particularly abominable job of dispensing the tools they have devised. Like careless and indifferent workmen they have tossed the products of their craft to gibbering apes and baboons.”  — Raymond F. Jones, This Island Earth, 1952 novel

On the other hand, prominent astronomer Fred Hoyle wrote a science-fiction novel in the 1950s that contained the suggestion that scientists don’t have enough power. 

• “Has it ever occurred to you, Geoff, that in spite of all the changes wrought by science—by our control over inanimate energy, that is to say—we still preserve the same old social order of precedence? Politicians at the top, then the military, and the real brains at the bottom.” — Fred Hoyle, The Black Cloud, 1957 novel

Outside of the apocalyptic visions it paints so well, one of science fiction’s greatest powers is the ability to give us hope. Numerous stories have presented optimistic outcomes for humanity. Issac Asimov’s Foundation novels, the H. G. Wells’ film Things to Come, Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, Andy Weir’s resilient never-surrender individuals in The Martian and Project Hail Mary, Matt Haig’s The Humans, David Brin’s Uplift novels and many more great works tell us that we and our young civilization can not only survive but just might thrive deep into the future. 

• “We can grow up. We can leave the nest. We can fulfill the Destiny, make homes for ourselves among the stars, and become some combination of what we want to become and whatever our new environments challenge us to become.”  — Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents, 1998 novel

• “It is possible to build a rational and humane culture completely free from the threat of supernatural restraints.” — Arthur C. Clarke, The Songs of Distant Earth, 1986 novel

• “But Earth would never die, for there was a part of Earth in every man and woman who would go forth into space, part of Earth’s courage, part of Earth’s ideals, part of Earth’s dreams.” — Clifford D. Simak, Empire, 1951 novel

• “It’s possible that man may lose knowledge, life, his planets and sun—but there’s still plenty of hope. We’re not finished yet.” — John W. Campbell, The Black Star Passes, 1953 novel

• “Now I don’t pretend to tell you how to find happiness and love, when every day is just a struggle to survive. But I do insist that you do survive. Because the days and the years ahead are worth living for.” — Harlan Ellison, D. C. Fontana, and Gene L. Coon, “The City on the Edge of Forever,” 1967 episode of Star Trek

Guy P. Harrison is an award-winning writer and author of nine books, including Damn You, Entropy!, At Least Know This, Good Thinking, and Think: Why you should question everything.

This article 31 genius sci-fi quotes that offer real-world wisdom is featured on Big Think.

The same day that President Joe Biden signed a new federal law designed to ban the popular social media platform TikTok from use in the United States, TikToK CEO Shou Zi Chew took to the platform with words of defiance. “Rest assured, we aren’t going anywhere,” he declared. “The facts and the Constitution are on our side.” It was a clear signal that TikTok and its allies would not be going down without a legal fight.

The dimensions of that fight are now coming into focus. On May 7, TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, filed suit against the Biden administration in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, arguing that the new law violates multiple constitutional provisions, including the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. “TikTok Inc. uses the TikTok platform to create and share its own content about issues and current events, including, for example, its support for small businesses, Earth Day, and literacy and education,” the lawsuit states. “When TikTok Inc. does so, it is engaging in core speech protected by the First Amendment.”

One week later, on May 14, a group of TikTok creators filed a separate lawsuit of their own in that same court, further detailing how the new federal law would violate their respective free speech rights. According to this suit, those creators “have found their voices, amassed significant audiences, made new friends, and encountered new and different ways of thinking—all because of TikTok’s novel way of hosting, curating, and disseminating speech. The Act’s ban of TikTok threatens to deprive them, and the rest of the country, of this distinctive means of expression and communication.”

Under the terms of the “Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” ByteDance has 270 days to sell TikTok to a new owner or else the platform will be banned in the United States. But according to ByteDance, TikTok’s “severance from the globally integrated platform of which it is an integral part is not commercially, technologically, or legally feasible.” Which means that if the law does survive legal challenge, TikTok will be forced to shutter in the US.

According to the Biden administration, such drastic measures are necessitated by urgent national security concerns. “This is about PRC ownership,” said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, referring to the People’s Republic of China. President Biden “wants to protect Americans from a country, in this instance, that potentially wants to do us harm.”

Concerns about China harming Americans via TikTok is one of the rare issues that currently enjoys bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. “We are united,” declared a joint statement issued by Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, “in our concern about the national security threat posed by TikTok—a platform with enormous power to influence and divide Americans whose parent company remains legally required to do the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party.”

TikTok and ByteDance vigorously dispute that characterization in their recent legal filing. “The Act does not articulate any threat posed by TikTok nor explain why TikTok should be excluded from evaluation under the standards Congress concurrently imposed on every other platform,” they argue. “Even the statements by individual Members of Congress and a congressional committee report merely indicate concern about the hypothetical possibility that TikTok could be misused in the future, without citing specific evidence, even though the platform has operated prominently in the United States since it was first launched in 2017. Those speculative concerns fall far short of what is required when First Amendment rights are at stake.”

When core First Amendment rights are at stake, the federal courts typically subject the law at issue to a two-pronged standard of judicial review known as strict scrutiny. As the Supreme Court described it in Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life (2007), this standard requires the government to establish that its regulation “furthers a compelling governmental interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest.” To pass constitutional muster, in other words, the law must satisfy both the “compelling interest” and the “narrowly tailored” prongs of the test.

The federal courts have long recognized national security as a compelling governmental interest. But is the forced-sale-or-ban of TikTok “narrowly tailored to achieve that interest”? Or is there a less restrictive option available to the government to achieve its stated objectives? Those may be the key legal questions as these cases move forward in federal court.

TikTok has already prevailed in a similar First Amendment case. After the state of Montana banned the platform within its territorial jurisdiction in 2023, TikTok won before the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana, which blocked the state ban from going into effect because “it limits constitutionally protected First Amendment speech.”

Time will tell if the federal district court in D.C. views the national TikTok ban in the same unforgiving legal light.

This article How the TikTok case pits national security against freedom of speech is featured on Big Think.

We often see ourselves as life’s main character and sometimes we are. Other times, however, we’re a side character in someone else’s story. We’re not the driving force of important events but an observer of another person’s actions.

In such cases, we may not get top billing with our name in the title, but that doesn’t mean our role is unimportant. As these five famous novels show, being the side character can give us access to deeper truths and a richer appreciation of the human condition than those too busy propelling the story forward.

From Nick Carraway’s critique of the American Dream to Irene Redfield’s stance on passing all the way down to Charles Marlow’s assessment of the horrors of European imperialism, it is the awareness these characters share from the sidelines that imbue their respective stories with enduring truths and staying power.

Passing by Nella Larsen

“It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.”

This 1929 novel by Nella Larsen, one of the leading writers of the Harlem Renaissance, explores race, sexuality, and gender in America at a time when all three were beginning to experience dramatic change. The story uses the perspective of Irene Redfield, a black woman with a particularly European appearance living in a black neighborhood, to explore the situations and choices of many people navigating race relations in the 1920s. 

The most interesting of them is Irene’s sometimes friend Clare Kendry. Her ability to exclusively pass for white both fascinates and revolts Irene, who must grapple with her own appearance, her avoidance of passing as white, and how it impacts her relationships and self-identity. Despite Irene’s attempts to avoid Clare, the mixture of interest and distaste Irene has for her causes their paths to continuously cross, impacting both of their lives.

As the novel progresses, our understanding of Clare is filtered through her foil, Irene. Those of us who don’t understand the phenomenon of passing in the same way as the author or the characters have it explained to us, in all of its complexity, by a woman who herself has to grapple with it both as a participant and an observer — even if she doesn’t want to.

While this book is not yet in the public domain, it will be in 2025. Until then, copies are likely available at your local library.

Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

“He possesses two out of the three qualities necessary for the ideal detective. He has the power of observation and that of deduction. He is only wanting in knowledge.”

There is little doubt that Sherlock Holmes is the most famous detective in literature. Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories now exist in over 70 languages, and Holmes is the most portrayed literary character in film and television history.

As a detective, Holmes often takes the lead in solving the titular mysteries, but the story is told from the perspective of Dr. John H. Watson, Holmes’s loyal friend and companion. (Yes, a handful of Conan Doyle’s original 62 stories are told from Holmes’s perspective, but Dr. Watson’s viewpoint was the standard.)

There are many advantages to this. First, Holmes is eccentric and tends to fixate on minor details. Telling a short story from his perspective would render it anything but short. Dr. Watson translates Holmes’s eccentricity into something less tiring for the reader.

On a more meta level, having the story told by the companion helps keep the reader in suspense. If we had access to everything Holmes knew, the game would be over before it was afoot. By seeing the Victorian world through Watson’s eyes, not only are we provided a picture that non-detectives can comprehend, but we get to enjoy Sherlock’s exciting adventures spoiler-free.

All of Conan Doyle’s original Sherlock stories are in the public domain. You can read them here.

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

I had passed over Genji’s trials and tribulations in silence, out of respect for his determined efforts to conceal them, and I have written of them now only because certain lords and ladies criticized my story for resembling fiction, wishing to know why even those who knew Genji best should have thought him perfect, just because he was an Emperor’s son. No doubt I must now beg everyone’s indulgence for my effrontery in painting so wicked a portrait of him.

The Tale of Genji is arguably the first novel, depending on how you define it. Dating back to around 1000 AD, the book has an unusual style and can be a difficult read. Most relevant for our list, the story is not told by Genji but by an unnamed woman speaking to some high-ranking official about the events she witnessed when at the Imperial court. Supposedly, many others refuse to believe the tale.

The book explores the lives of the medieval Japanese court by following the interesting life of Genji, the disinherited son of the Emperor and his mistress. Demoted to a commoner, Genji interacts with a wide range of Japanese society. 

The author may also appear as a character in the story, though that take is not without controversy. In any case, the story provides us a look at an aristocratic world that quickly passed into history from someone who lived it — but who wasn’t the main player in it. This gives us something of an honest look as the morally dubious cast can’t paint themselves in a better light by telling the story themselves.

You can read a public-domain translation of it here. 

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

He had summed up — he had judged. ‘The horror!’ He was a remarkable man

Heart of Darkness is the most enduring anti-colonial novel of its era and remains a classic of English literature. The bulk of the novella tells the tale of a sailor named Charles Marlow heading up a river in what is implied to be the Belgian Congo to an ivory collection station. The station is led by a man named Mr. Kurtz, whose immense reputation precedes him.

While the story is told by Marlow to an unnamed narrator, its central figure is undeniably Mr. Kurtz. Marlow takes the same trip Kurtz took into the most inaccessible realms of European imperialism, and he continues to hear how marvelous Kurtz is while witnessing and enduring the nightmares that Kurtz and his associates have inflicted. Despite his impressive resume and allegedly progressive reasons for going to Africa, the version of Kurtz that Marlow encounters differs greatly from the man everyone talked about on the horrific boat trip. 

Thanks to Marlow’s perspective, we can see both the nightmare of Belgian imperialism and the effect it has on both its victims and perpetrators. We readers are treated to the full scope of imperialism’s horrors through the eyes of someone not yet killed or driven to madness by them. 

Uniquely among the narrators here, Marlow appears in several of Conrad’s otherwise unrelated works. In one of them, he is even the main character. You can read Heart of Darkness online as its copyright too has long expired. 

The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

“Yet high over the city, our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.“

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best-known work is a meditation on class in the allegedly egalitarian United States, the excesses of the 1920s, and how horrible it can be when the American Dream comes true. The story is told from the perspective of Nick Carraway, a young man who has moved to Long Island in hopes of becoming a stockbroker and cashing in on the 1920s boom. As the title suggests, the real hero of the story is his mysterious neighbor, Jay Gatsby. 

The crux of the story centers on Gatsby’s attempts to woo Nick’s married cousin Daisy, his dreams of reliving the past, and his efforts to climb into the stratosphere of American society. Nick, who is an unreliable narrator, is present for many of the main events in the story. However, as hinted at in the above quote, he considers himself an observer rather than a driver of those events.

This allows us to get an outside view of the situation from somebody who admits he doesn’t entirely fit into the world he’s participating in while still being an intimate confidant of those who do. The resulting commentary on the life of the American upper crust has been debated for a century.

The Great Gatsby is now in the public domain, so you can read it here for free.

This article 5 brilliant novels told from a side character’s perspective is featured on Big Think.

Art produced by or with the help of artificial intelligence is more popular than ever, from the record-breaking $432,000 auction of Obvious collective’s Portrait of Edmond Belamy to the overwhelming success of Refik Anadol’s “Unsupervised” exhibit at the MoMA. But one art-world figure decidedly not on board is Jerry Saltz, the seasoned resident art critic of Vulture magazine. Saltz has made no secret of his distaste for AI art, the artists who make it, and the people who flock in line to see or, God forbid, buy it. His scathing reviews have upset many in the tech world, and, in the case of Anadol’s “Unsupervised,” sparked heated back-and-forths on X.

“This kind of work, if it were the scale of a regular painting, would be ridiculous,” Saltz tells Big Think. “You’d just laugh at it. It does not have scale so much as it’s big and takes up room. It keeps crowds interested for whole minutes at a time. It gets crowds in.”

The 73-year-old critic is well aware of his unpopularity on this front. “They think that it’s art,” he says. “I’m in the minority. I grant that my opinion is 1% of 1% of all opinions and that 99% of the audience loves this kind of art […] I say to the artists: Good for you. You won.”

Still, Saltz stands by his critiques, which — self-deprecation aside — may be enlightening if you’re similarly perplexed by the overcrowded space that is AI art, and wondering how to distinguish between the good, the bad, and the ugly.

An artificial dream

Setting aside specific AI art, artists, and algorithms, Saltz takes issue with the now almost ubiquitous term itself.

“I think it’s a fake category that people use to make a handsome product that wows crowds with super obvious, no-brainer ideas, almost always accompanied by romantic, dramatic music and whizbang, gee-whiz scale.”

He compares AI art with Norman Rockwell’s, an American painter and illustrator who was commercially successful but critically derided. 

“A lot of AI art works in the same way a Rockwell works: by telling you the exact story, describing its characters to a T, and telling you exactly what to think and feel. Everyone who looks at it has the same thought: Wow, cool.”

Saltz suggests that the tech world’s cultural sway may fuel hype around AI art, particularly through the cults of personality around figures like Sam Altman and Elon Musk. After all, the art world has always been susceptible to hypes and fads. This one may be no different.

“It reminds me of how we see all those Instagram posts and TikTok reels of white people lining up to be escorted to the top of Mount Everest in search of their dream,” Saltz muses. “Except it’s not their dream. It’s a dream that was given to them.”

As a critic who speaks his mind openly, frankly, and at times coarsely, Saltz has been met with plenty of criticism himself. “All artists have strong reactions,” he says, “and God love them for that. They are probably right. I’m a geezer idiot, and younger critics are novice idiots. That’s fine. There’s no problem with that. But in this sector — AI art — I find it to be especially true.”

Saltz entered his most publicized altercation with an artist when he reviewed Anadol’s “Unsupervised” for Vulture. Unable to understand why so many visitors were flocking to the Museum of Modern Art, he referred to the exhibit as “a mind-numbing multi-million dollar spectacle,” “a house of cards and hall of mirrors,” “momentary diverting gimmick art,” and a “half-a-million-dollar screensaver.”

Anadol responded to Saltz’s review on X, writing, “ChatGPT writes better than you” and telling the critic he “needs to research, understand the medium” before writing about it.

Asked about this confrontation, Saltz notes that — while all artists take criticism seriously and at times personally — he has found artists working in the AI space to be particularly combative against those who question the quality of their work. While Saltz says he researches before he criticizes — he created his own NFT before covering the topic for Vulture, for example — it’s worth considering the other side of the story. After all, art criticism often walks a fine line between distinguishing good art from bad art and gatekeeping new movements and ideas on behalf of the status quo. 

Familiar critiques

For example, the negative reception of AI art bears similarity to criticisms flung at Cubists, Fauvists, and other groundbreaking artists from the early 20th century — artists who, despite being ridiculed by established critics, went on to achieve widespread success and acclaim once the rest of society caught up to and began to understand and appreciate what these forward-thinking individuals were doing. 

“It’s 100% the same pattern,” Anadol said in an interview with Freethink. “Been there, done that. The responses we sometimes get are also similar to the ones that Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko received. In fact, all the heroes of humanity received similar responses. They opened the curtains, and whenever they did, there was this reaction. Artists are the alarm mechanisms of humanity. We always see things way before.”

In the same interview, Anadol said there’s a clear divide between critics who come to his studio and observe him working and those who glance at the finished products in galleries and museums. Although the second approach is not necessarily wrong — some critics, perhaps Saltz included, would argue it makes for better, unbiased criticism — it obscures the fact that much of AI art, like Cubism or Fauvism, is as much about the creative process as the art that emerges from that process. 

“AI research is heavily focused on trying to make AI as accurate as possible in trying to mimic reality,” Anadol says.

Just as early 20th-century abstract art investigated how people see — how our brains and eyes assemble shape and color into meaningful, emotionally resonant imagery — so does AI art explore the machinations that underlie creative expression: how an artist, human or not, collects, analyzes, and reassembles data to form something original. 

New forms

Another central problem of art criticism is that it’s much easier to tell what makes something bad than what makes something good. Criticism of AI art faces another difficulty here: The genre is still young. It hasn’t been around for long enough to predict how it will develop or, more importantly, be remembered in the future.

Still, we can attempt to predict the legacy of modern AI art by looking back on how the art world responded to previous technological breakthroughs, like the camera. Much of the artistic experimentation of the late 19th and early 20th centuries came from painters asking themselves what all their mediums could do that photography could not.

In the same way that realistic renditions of people and nature gave way to more subjective expressions of shape, color, and form — actions a camera cannot perform — the AI art of tomorrow will likely focus more and more on things human artists cannot do, such as transforming vast amounts of raw data into compelling visual narratives, or enabling human artists to tweak early drafts of artwork at speeds none of us could ever reach.

Conversely, art created by humans is likely to emphasize what algorithms cannot do: love, grieve, contemplate our own biological shortcomings, and aspire to succeed even though such aspirations may be irrational.

“I believe that in the future, there will be a Francis Bacon of AI art,” Saltz speculates. “We just haven’t seen that artist yet. They have not yet emerged. Art takes a long time. Painting is still emerging and it’s been with us for 40,000 years. It’s still feeling its parameters. AI is doing that now.”

“Right now, everything these artists make has a precedent,” Saltz says. “They either make a moving, abstract, expressionist painting, or a Jackson Pollock-squiggle thing, or a Walt Disney manga character (boy hormone art). None of it is without precedent. The problem is when some of them say, ‘Look at my new Surrealist work,’ I say: ‘Well, it doesn’t look any different from the old Surrealism.’ Why should I even look at it at all? I’m interested in new forms. Form is the carrier of deep content, not your explanation of what deep content is!”

Reaffirming the importance of art criticism, Saltz sticks to his opening words:

“I never, ever listen to artists. They don’t know what their art is about. I know what their art is about. Let me get it wrong. If they disagree with me, fine. But I’m of another generation and there is no more of me. My kind does not exist anymore.”

This article Art critic Jerry Saltz: A “Francis Bacon of AI art” will emerge, but today’s work falls flat is featured on Big Think.