Since the recent meeting between Anthropic executives and religious leaders, there has been much discussion about the relation between religion and AI. The ostensible purpose of the meeting was to make Claude more ethical. But hovering in the background was a deeper question: how will AI shape religion?

The best historical analogy is the printing press. By making the Bible available much more cheaply, print allowed ordinary Christians direct access to scripture, thereby cutting out the middle-men, which is to say, the priests of the Catholic Church. Hence the birth of Protestantism.

This story is broadly correct, but it leaves out what happened during the first seventy years of print, before Martin Luther complained about indulgences, before cheap Bibles became available in vernacular languages. The first seventy years were very different from what came after and this matters because that’s where we are with AI, at the beginning of a revolution whose consequences we can’t yet predict.

How An Invention was Made

It’s tempting to think of inventions as the work of a genius who single-handedly changes the world. But this is rarely how inventions are made. Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith by training, was not the first to think of using movable letters to compose pages that could be printed. He knew about the relatively simple technique of carving images into wood and using them like stamps to make copies, as was routinely done in making playing cards. This woodblock technique had come from the Far East via the Silk Road. Gutenberg’s invention was based on an idea transfer.

But ideas are one thing; putting them into practice is another. Gutenberg was the first to see the advantage of scaling up production. The first and perhaps most crucial step was not how to print, but how to make individual letters. The letters needed to be cast in an alloy that would be hard enough to withstand frequent usage. And they all had to be exactly the same size and length so that they could be assembled to form a uniform line.

Once a page was printed, the letters could be disassembled, but it was much more efficient to leave some pages intact so that errors could be easily corrected and the corrected page printed again. This meant that there needed to be enough letters to form several pages simultaneously, amounting to tens of thousands or perhaps as many as a hundred thousand individual letters. In response, Gutenberg invented a hand-casting device that allowed a single person to cast more than a thousand letters per day. Only mass-producing letters made it possible to mass-produce books.

Next, the pages needed to be inked. Normal inks were too liquid and needed to be thickened through a process of trial and error. The thickened ink was more difficult for the pages to absorb, so the pages needed to be carefully moistened beforehand. The challenge of ink led to Gutenberg’s second great contribution. Because parchment was thick, much thicker than what was used in East Asia, simply placing the page onto the letters was not enough; more pressure was needed. Here Gutenberg used something that was in ample supply in the region around Mainz: a wine press. It was the birth of the printing press.

Gutenberg Goes Looking for Customers

With the basic production process worked out, the big question was what Gutenberg should print. This first prototype should be in high demand and relatively small. To come up with a promising candidate, Gutenberg consulted his own reading habits. Along with all educated Europeans, Gutenberg had learned Latin, the common language of the educated classes. The rise of new universities, all based on instruction in Latin, had further increased the demand for this language. The most common Latin grammar book, which had dominated the market for hundreds of years, was named after its author, Donatus, and was most likely used by Gutenberg himself. This grammar became the first thing Gutenberg printed. It would remain one of the most often reprinted books in the coming decades, going through 260 editions by 1500.

While Gutenberg was working on the Latin grammar, news reached Mainz, in 1453, so shocking that at first it was hard to believe: The Turks had taken Constantinople, the eastern bastion of Christianity. With Constantinople fallen, it was only a question of what was next. Greece? The Balkans? Cyprus?

The Church called on all Christian kings and emperors to take back Constantinople, or at least to stop the advanceof the Turks. An army had to be organized, and soldiers were promised remission of their sins in return for the defense of Christendom. Such an army was expensive, but fortunately, the Church had developed a useful vehicle for raising funds. Those who could not themselves fight could pay the Church instead and still get remission of their sins. Donors would receive a sheet of parchment that detailed their name, the date, and the range of sins remitted; those rich enough were able to wipe out their sins entirely. All that was necessary was to take this sheet of parchment to their confessor, who would go through the ceremony of remission, after which they could emerge relieved of their burden. This was the birth ofindulgences, and to anyone with foresight it was clear that the Church was going to sell a great many indulgences very soon.

It didn’t take Gutenberg long to figure out this new business opportunity. Indulgences always used the same Latin formula. He could set a single page, with the name, date, and range of remission left blank to be filled in by hand. He lobbied for the commission and succeeded. The first indulgence he printed, on behalf of Pope Nicholas V, was for the defense of Cyprus. Others followed. Gutenberg knew that the Church would need hundreds, even thousands of indulgences, and he could print them with ease, as many as were needed and the market could absorb. In East Asia, print and paper had been combined to form paper money. Marco Polo had marveled at this almost magical invention whereby valueless paper could be made to stand in for gold. Europe didn’t have paper money yet, but the mass-produced indulgences Gutenberg was printing were nearly as good.

War indulgences were not the only business opportunity provided by the fall of Constantinople. In order to sell indulgences, the Church needed to whip up hatred of the Turks, and Gutenberg was happy to put his invention in theservice of this goal as well. He printed an anti-Turkish tract, written in the somewhat unusual form of a lunar calendar in which each month a different ruler, emperor, or the Pope himself was urged, in rhymed couplets, to join the fight. Indeed, most of Gutenberg’s texts were printed for the Church. As a patrician of Mainz, a city that was under the control of an archbishop, Gutenberg was in a perfect position to offer the products of his workshop to the Church.

The Work of Books

While Gutenberg was printing his Latin grammar, his indulgences, and his propaganda tracts, he was also pursuing another project. In contracts with his associates, he called it, enigmatically, “the work of books.” With this project, Gutenberg was hoping to apply his method to the most important book of all time, and the one with the largest market share: the Bible.

For Gutenberg, printing the Bible was an ambition on a whole new scale. So far, he had printed only single-page indulgences and small booklets such as the anti-Turkish calendar and the short Latin grammar. The Old and New Testament together would be thousands of pages. Based on the methods Gutenberg had used so far, it would take decadesto produce this book. He needed to scale up the process again, which he did by using several presses at once, which meant more letters needed to be cast, which in turn meant that the whole process needed to be made more efficient. Every step would have to be calibrated precisely so that as little time as possible was wasted. Gutenberg was turning his workshop into an early industrial production process, anticipating the assembly belt production system of Henry Ford in the early twentieth century.

Ordinary citizens, even relatively well-off ones, wouldn’t be able to afford such a large and expensive book; the market would be churches and monasteries. This meant that the Bible would need to be printed in a large format, folio-sized, as it was called when a large sheet of paper or parchment was folded once to produce two large pages, rather thanfolded twice, forming four pages (quarto), or three times, forming eight small pages (octavo). Only a folio volume would be large enough for a monk or priest to read on a lectern in a dimly lit church. And many more lines and columns could be crammed onto such a large page. Even with these savings, Gutenberg would have to print about thirteen hundred pages.

The challenge wasn’t just scale. With the Bible, Gutenberg was touching the most revered and sacred text of them all. He would have to demonstrate that his machines could produce something as neat, as precise, as accurate and as elegant, as those produced by the best-trained scribes, who were often monks who had dedicated their lives to this purpose. His scribe, Peter Schöffer, had created the model for new, more elegant letters. And Gutenberg planned to print in two colors, adding a ruby red, the way many calligraphers did when they copied the Bible in two different colors, to make the mechanical Bible look like a handwritten one.

But Gutenberg’s Bible didn’t just look as if it was written by hand. It looked much better, achieving a level of precision and symmetry undreamed of by even the most pious monk. Having started out with the hope that the printed Bible might approximate the look of handwritten ones, Gutenberg ended up exceeding his task, creating a new standard by which books would be judged. Print wasn’t just a way of mass-producing books; it completely changed the way books should look. A machine had triumphed over the human hand.

The new mechanical reality had many consequences. One concerned the writing surface. Even though parchment was prestigious, it was expensive. For a parchment Bible, the skins of well over a hundred calves were needed. Fortunately, paper had found its way to Northern Europe when a clever businessman in Nuremberg had set up the first paper mill north of the Alps, and thanks to the Arabs and their invention of paper made of rags, all that was needed to produce paper was a pile of discarded clothes. As Gutenberg realized the possibilities of the new mechanical Bible, he decided to increase the print run to about 180, with most versions printed on paper. Clearly, the mechanical mass production of books favored paper.

The Church Loves A Printed Bible

As Gutenberg and his partners were laboring on the Bible project, there was one question left hanging in the air: What would the Church say about these printed Bibles? Gutenberg had asked no one for permission. In the rigidly regulated medieval world, where much was controlled by guilds, Gutenberg had set up a secret society and gone intobusiness for himself. What he was proposing was surely shocking to the Church, for which copying scripture by hand was a holy duty performed by devoted monks. Cheap indulgences and pamphlets were one thing, but the Book of Books, printed on recycled rags? Had this entrepreneur and opportunist finally crossed a line, sullying the words of God with his furnaces, inks, and wine presses, replacing pious monks with mindless machines?

Gutenberg took precautions. The first was the choice of translation. In his Bible, of course, God was going to create the world in Latin. It was Saint Jerome’s Latin Bible, commonly called the Vulgate, that had become the Bible of European Christianity. The Vulgate was the traditional, authorized version favored by the Church, and Gutenberg wasn’t going to risk his capital outlays on a new and untested translation.

If Gutenberg was still worried about what the Church would say, he didn’t need to be. Presented with Gutenberg’s mechanically produced Bible, the Church admired it; it was more beautiful than what even the most devoted monks could produce. And despite their inhuman beauty, Gutenberg’s Bibles were cheap enough for parishes and monasteries to buy. Gutenberg’s high-stakes gamble to move print from the marketplace to the pulpit had paid off.

There was an additional reason why the Church readily accepted the new technology. Gutenberg’s method promised to reduce the countless errors that copyists introduced into the holy text. Faced with this sea of errors, the scholar Nicholas of Cusa had called for new, authoritative, and error-free missals, breviaries, and Bibles. But how could these new texts be kept from breeding errors when they would be copied by scribes in the future? Nicholas realized that the answer was Gutenberg’s invention. True, printers might introduce errors as well, but these errors could be corrected more easily. Each page could be carefully proofread, and if a letter was out of place, or upside down, as sometimes happened, it could be fixed and the page printed anew. Once the corrected page was set, all copies would be the same. It wasn’t quite foolproof. In England, a printer produced a Bible that encouraged its readers to commit adultery, having accidentally omitted the “not.” But overall, the errors introduced by human scribes would stop. Print was perfect forallowing the Church to exert control over its scripture. The Church and print were made for each other.

During the first seventy years of print, the Church became an early adopter because it thought that the new technology would simply produce better Bibles at lower cost. Gutenberg thought he had found the ideal corporate customer for his invention. Both the Church and Gutenberg were right in the short term but wrong in the long term because nether anticipated the ultimate effects of the new technology. Gutenberg, despite his precautions, could not keep his technology a trade secret for long, and soon printers set up shop all over Europe. The Church miscalculated even more badly. It didn’t realize that it was losing control over the source code of the faith. Soon, printers found that if they printed the Bible in languages actually spoken by believers, their market would increate enormously. By selling vernacular Bibles for cheap, they were changing religion without intending to do so.

Today, we’re likewise wondering about the effects of AI on our most important institutions, from religion to education. No matter what the producers of the new technology think and say they are doing, and what their early customers hope to get out of the technology, both are likely to be wrong about the long-term effects.

As Gutenberg learned, it’s difficult to invent a new technology, and offer it at scale, without going bankrupt, which he ultimately did. And the Church learned that it’s impossible to predict the effects of a technology that changes fundamental features of an entire culture.

[For more details about the print revolution, see The Written World, from which part of this post is adapted.]

The Epic of Gilgamesh, now available in a captivating new translation by the poet Simon Armitage, is the oldest work of world literature—the first version goes back some four thousand years—but it also resonates richly with our own moment.

The epic begins with a crisis: a wild creature has been interfering with the natural order of things. It has destroyed the traps and filled in the pits meant to capture wildlife. One hunter spots the creature: it has fur all over its body, a long mane on its head; it feeds on grass alongside gazelles and joins other animals at the watering hole. But the hunter realizes that this creature is actually some sort of human. How can this meddling creature be stopped?

The humans decide to try seduction. They send a woman to seduce the wildling, and she spends seven days with him. After that, the other animals no longer treat him as one of their own, which leaves him no choice but to throw in his lot with humans. He shaves off his beard. He starts wearing clothes and eating cooked foods. Above all, he moves from the wilderness into the city.

It is in the city that the wildling encounters the city’s ruler, Gilgamesh. At first, the two men fight, but they soon become friends. The wildling learns from Gilgamesh all the ways of city living, such as eating bread and drinking beer and adapts to this new lifestyle with the enthusiasm of a recent convert. There is something seductive and compelling about city living.

The city, which is called Uruk, is the true hero of this story. The epic begins with an elaborate description of its architecture, its overwhelming size, as well as the feats of engineering that made it all possible. This is how the opening reads in Armitage’s subtle verse, both fluent and formal as befits this grand epic:

He [Gilgamesh] constructed the fortified walls of Uruk,

and the Temple of Heaven, sacred enclosure.

Look, ramparts as straight as woolen thread

and battlements of matchless workmanship.

Ascend the stairs, built in ancient times.

to the Temple of Heaven, the house of Ishtar—

no king will make such magnificence again.

Walk around on the upper walls of Uruk,

Inspect the stronghold’s solid structure.

Aren’t its courses composed of kiln-baked bricks?

Were its footings not laid by the Seven Sages?

A thousand acres of dwelling and buildings

a thousand acres of garden and groves,

a thousand acres of quarries and clay pits

and the Temple of Heaven—five hundred acres.

Behold the extent of Uruk-the-Sheepfold!

Look! Behold! Inspect! The authors of the epic can’t get over the magnificence of this human-made environment, a true miracle of ingenuity. There is nothing like it in the world, and yet it is made by human hand, with human technology. They describe its tall walls and temples but they also explain how these marvels were created, namely with bricks made from clay that had been harvested right here, in clay pits, and hardened in kilns, right over there.

Uruk is arguably the first city in the world. It was made possible not only by bricklayers who built temples and city walls but also by other innovations, such as agriculture, which allowed farmers to feed 50,000 people packed densely together. Agriculture in turn was made possible by the patient cultivation of seeds but also by the building of canals and irrigation systems, which allowed humans to exercise increasing control over the natural world.

City living was made possible by these innovations, but it also led to other innovations, setting off a virtuous cycle of creative invention. The most consequential of these was writing. It was here, in Uruk, that the first full writing system emerged, the cuneiform script, which was written by pressing a stylus into moist clay (the same material from which the city was made). Cuneiform writing was first used as a method for recording economic transactions, made necessary by the increasing division of labor of urban living, but over time writing also led to the Epic of Gilgamesh. The hero of this epic, King Gilgamesh, is himself a scribe, the first literate ruler in history.

Fragments of the epic have been found all over the Near East, a sign that it was used as soft power to extend the influence of this city-state into the first territorial empire, a harbinger of things to come (for an essay on soft power, click here). Today, a great majority of humans live in cities, these cities are fed by intensive agriculture and are situated within larger territorial states made possible by accounting, writing, bureaucracies, and other uses of information processing.

The Epic of Gilgamesh resonates with our own cultural moment not because its authors had mystical powers of divination but because it sits right at a civilizational fork in the road, a fork that we, as a species, decided to take. The wildling’s story, it turns out, is our story, leading us from nomadism toward settlements, from hunting and gathering to intensive farming, from small, roaming groups to high-density city living, from nature to technology.

* * *

I was able to travel to Uruk a few years ago, and the first thing I encountered was a sign saying, in Arabic and English, “The first written words started here.” It could have added: and so did city living, civilization, and intensive agriculture. There’s nothing like a good origin story: they are prophecies in reverse, allowing us, in hindsight, to see how we got to where we are today.

I approached Uruk with great excitement. I had wanted to come here for decades, ever since I first read the epic. To get here, I had to overcome a number of obstacles. Uruk had been closed to the public for decades. I was able to visit only after I obtained permission from the ministry, thanks to the intercession of local intermediaries and an NGO. And I was lucky with the timing, thanks to a brief interval between the Iraqi civil war and the current war (I am writing these lines as US troops are abandoning its last remaining bases in Iraq).

As I approached, the epic’s grand, boastful description of the city, of its walls and temples, was on my mind. The first thing that drew my attention was the city’s highest point, the ruins of the great Temple of Heaven singled out in the opening lines of the epic. As we walked across the sand, I also kept looking down, worrying that somehow I was destroying ancient clay shards by stepping on them. (It didn’t help that I was accompanied by a soldier, there to ensure I didn’t take anything away with me, a capital crime.) Above all, I was overwhelmed by the size of it all, the thousand acres of quarries, gardens, and temples described in such glowing terms in the Epic.

I was surprised at how untouched the site seemed. I had expected elaborate excavations, and there were some, off to the side, but most of this space seemed abandoned. If Uruk was a civilizational fork in the road, a point of origin leading to our current global civilization, most of it still remains to be discovered.

As I was exploring the site further, I started to become more fully aware of how barren everything was, all parched surfaces, no tree in sight, and the life-giving Euphrates River some twenty miles away—we had crossed it on our way here—leaving Uruk looking like a pile of sand. What had happened here? How could the cradle of civilization have turned into a desert? I was beginning to wonder whether this place of origin was not only inaccessible and largely untouched—this could be explained by the war—but also hiding something from me.

Let’s Slay the Monster

I got an answer to these questions seven hundred miles to the north, in Mosul. Mosul had seen very heavy fighting in recent years, especially after it became the headquarters of ISIS. (For a substack on cultural rebuilding in Iraq, including Mosul, click here.) It was here in Mosul that I met a group of young climate activists who had just returned from a performance in the city’s marketplace calling attention to environmental degradation. I asked them about the Epic of Gilgamesh because it had been excavated right here in their city, in the 19^th century. (A library had burned down but the clay tablets on which the epic had been written had hardened in the fire—there are advantages to clay over paper.)

The group of climate activists was eager to talk about the Epic of Gilgamesh because, as they explained, it does much more than celebrate urban living. Strikingly, it also shows the costs, including environmental costs, of the urban revolution.

The Epic of Gilgamesh includes, as a story-within-the-story, the famous story of the flood, which would become world literature’s first meme, appearing, almost verbatim, in the Hebrew Bible, as well as in the Quran and many other texts. For the citizens of Uruk, the flood was an ancestral memory of the two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, flooding catastrophically, before the building of canals. But the story of the flood is also a warning. In the Bible, the flood is explained as divine retribution, a punishment for human sin. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, by contrast, humans aren’t punished for having violated God’s commands but because they have become too numerous and noisy, irritating the gods. With the flood, the gods are practicing population control.

While the relation between human actions and the flood remains relatively vague, the epic draws a much tighter connection between human activity and environmental change in its main plot. In a central episode, King Gilgamesh and the former wildling go on a quest to kill a monster. Once the monster is slain, the two adventurers reveal their true purpose: the monster they have killed is actually the guardian of a forest, and they have come to cut down the forest to bring back timber. The two friends aren’t here to save humans from savage monsters. They are on a logging expedition to expand the city of Uruk, which depends not only on clay but also on timber for roofs and doors. By the time the epic was written, city building had already led to widespread deforestation, requiring city builders such as Gilgamesh to go farther and farther afield in search of building materials. The desertification I had observed in Uruk was only the latest stage of a process described in the epic itself.

In the epic, the forest expedition has dire consequences. It inflates Gilgamesh’s ego so much that he rejects the advances of a goddess, which leads the gods to punish him by killing his friend, the former wildling. Gilgamesh is so stricken with grief that he becomes deranged and roams the earth, desperately seeking eternal life, almost becoming a wildling himself. Did the authors of the epic predict that the rise of urbanism would lead to climate devastation? Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that origins contain the seeds of later developments but reveal them only when the time is ripe.

The time of the Epic of Gilgamesh has finally arrived. We are hurrying down a path toward urbanization we collectively took thousands of years ago. And we’re also hurrying down a path that leads to climate change. The two are linked and somehow we need to unlink them. For this endeavor, the epic that recorded our collective decision can be a guide. The Epic of Gilgamesh doesn’t offer an alternative to the urban revolution, nor a way back to the fork in the road we took thousands of years ago, somewhere in Iraq. And for good reasons: there isn’t one. But it does offer a powerful warning about the costs of this path we’re on, and admonishes us to mitigate those costs as best we can.

The epic ends when Gilgamesh finally returns, much chastened, to his city and leaves us with another detailed description of its marvelous houses and temples, as if to remind us of everything we stand to lose. “We must tell this story differently,” one of the young climate activists from Mosul told me: “The monster is really the guardian of the forest and therefore the true hero.”

It’s back-to-school season, and many schools have finally accepted that AI won’t go away. This means that they need to figure out how to teach skills that students will be tempted to automate, including writing. As we all know by now, AI can produce smooth, argumentative prose, and this feels, to many instructors in the humanities and social sciences, like an existential threat. “Writing is thinking,” we tell our students, and must therefore never be outsourced. This is a strong claim and given what’s at stake, it’s important to get it right. Is it really true that all writing is thinking? And is the converse also true, that all thinking happens in writing?

Historically speaking thinking clearly precedes writing, which was invented only 5,000 years ago and spread extremely slowly, reaching only a small percentage of the human population until the last few centuries. What’s more, there are good reasons to believe that thinking precedes even spoken language, which is over 100,000 years old. Psychologists have studied how humans engage in forms of thinking without words, and educational theorists have used this research to identify different styles of learning, some distinctly non-verbal.

If not all thinking is writing, what about the first claim, that writing is thinking? This claim needs to be qualified as well. Here it’s helpful to distinguish between different types of writing. There is informational writing, whose purpose is to get pre-existing pieces of information across, as in an instruction manual; persuasive writing, which aims to change someone’s perspective, as in an op-ed; and exploratory writing, in which someone is slowly figuring out what to say. It’s primarily the latter that connects the process of drafting, testing arguments, and revising claims to the activity of thinking. [There are many other, creative forms of writing and thinking that are beyond the purview of this essay. Addition 09/12/2026]

Our evolving attitudes toward AI confirm this distinction. Many people feel that it’s OK to outsource the writing of an instruction manual for a dishwasher to a chatbot. AI might be getting better at writing op-eds, but many readers feel cheated when they learn an op-ed was written by AI, probably because they want to feel that there is a person at the other end of the writing process trying to persuade them to change their mind, not a machine. But it’s the third type, exploratory writing, that we’ll want to preserve because it’s here that writing and thinking are braided together most fully. This is the hard kernel of truth in the overstated equation that writing is thinking: certain forms of complex thought can only be worked out slowly, patiently, in the process of writing (the essay you’re reading is, I hope, an example).

As a literature professor, I’ve been teaching writing for decades. In the past, I would draw on my own hard-won experience of what worked for me, which includes imitating the writers I admired most, but also the advice I was given over the years by various mentors, including the devastatingly ruthless editing by my partner (I’m currently on my third draft).

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But then, about three years ago, a colleague, Bharat Anand, who ran Harvard’s online education program, prompted me to think about the teaching of writing in a new way. Mentioning a conversation he’d had with Sal Khan, the creator of the successful Khan Academy, he repeated Khan’s claim that writing was difficult to teach online because it couldn’t be easily scaled. I nodded in agreement. This was how I had been taught and how I had been teaching, namely in small workshops and other forms of intense 1:1 work.

Then Bharat turned to me and declared: “So I want you to solve this problem.”

Because I really respect Bharat (and generally do what I’m told), I got to work. With a team consisting of writing instructors, including the experienced writing instructor Jeffrey R. Wilson as well as instructional media designers and developers, we created a course aimed at teaching exploratory writing at scale. It ended up taking over three years.

We began by studying existing approaches to the pedagogy of writing, which introduced me to a new world. I was surprised to learn that even though writing is such a foundational skill, there was no generally accepted method of teaching it. Harvard has its own system, and many other universities have theirs. We took the best from each of these approaches and synthesized them into something that would work online.

The challenges of online education often surface more general pedagogical problems, and this was very much the case here. Writing is a messy bundle of activities. Just try to observe yourself while doing it: you have a general idea of what you want to say, perhaps working from an outline; you’ve just started to type your first sentence, while also thinking of your audience, trying to anticipate what they would know and what they would care about; you pay some intermittent attention to grammar, but your mind is simultaneously racing ahead, trying to decide how much to pack into the sentence you’re currently working on, and what to keep for the next one (but currently, you actually don’t yet know what the next sentence will be). And then, once you’ve finished a sentence, a paragraph, or a first draft and read it over, you discover all kinds of problems: it’s incoherent; it’s lacking crucial bits of information; it’s clunky or it fizzles out at the end, trailing off inconclusively until the last sentence feels so long that it’s past time to deliver a mercy killing with a belated full stop.

All good writing instructors try to disentangle this messy process by encouraging students to slow down, to make an outline, and to revise what they have written. When I survey my own students—even graduate students—they admit that they almost never do that and instead complete all of their writing assignment in single, manic all-nighters. (This obviously increases the temptation to use AI.)

For a scalable online course, the task of disentangling this messy writing process was all the more important because we needed to figure out how to teach each step online, through separate examples and exercises. To this end, we divided the course into four parts. First came Thinking, which teaches students how to make arguments, present evidence, and avoid logical fallacies. Second, Research, which tells them how to find and grapple with different types of sources. Third, Writing, which focuses on style, at the level of the sentence but also of the paragraph (AI is especially bad at paragraphs). The fourth part was Revision, the process of receiving feedback and incorporating it into a new version.

This division into four main parts and many smaller ones had several benefits. It forced students to slow down and tackle each step separately. It also supplied them with a vocabulary for the different elements of the writing process that they could name and therefore use to examine their own writing more analytically. Does the outline correspond to the sequence of arguments? Does the argument match the evidence? Are the examples in the right order? Does the conclusion advance on the initial hypothesis? A step-by-step process not only helps students approach writing more deliberately; it also helps them analyze what they—or others—have written. It teaches a craft and the craft cultivates judgment, the ability to discern what’s good and what’s slop, human-generated or otherwise.

The online format also forced us to think harder about the role of feedback. Human instructors give multi-layered feedback that often mixes suggestions about the topic with suggestions about structure, argumentation, and style. For our course, we needed to disentangle these different dimensions of feedback to figure out how to provide each at scale. Here, our step-by-step process came in especially handy. First, it allowed us to create a checklist of the most important features of any piece of writing, and second, to build a peer-review feature that allowed students to read each other’s work through that shared checklist.

Finally, we created AI tutors providing precise and targeted feedback. We didn’t rely on regular chatbots, but trained our AI tutors on the pedagogical principles of the course and deployed them at specific moments, when these tutors seemed particularly suited to giving feedback. We created a tutor to pose counterarguments, prompting students to fortify and nuance their claims. (This solved a problem common to in-person writing instruction as well, namely that students are reluctant to disagree). We also created a tutor that helped them think through alternative outlines for the essay, exploring what different structures would mean for their argument. And we built a tutor specialized in giving feedback on their first drafts, based on the same checklists we had provided for peer review.

Yes, I know, it sounds completely perverse to use AI in a course designed to preserve writing in the age of AI. But is it really? The current thinking about AI is marred by several of the logical fallacies we teach in the course. One is the false dilemma (subject of a recent Substack essay), which suggests that either we reject AI or it will take over our writing. The second is the slippery slope fallacy: if we use AI at any point in the writing process, we will end up using it for everything. Both fallacies are to be rejected without solid evidence to the contrary.

We put our approach to the test by having Harvard students work their way through the course. Their writing improved greatly. Several of them also gave us such useful feedback that we incorporated them into the course as guides. The result, I’m proud to say, is a new approach to exploratory writing taught online at scale.

* * *

How has the course fared in the wild? Our first batch of students has gone through successfully. But they have also reported that they miss the intimacy of human instruction. This is of course not surprising. The advantage of human instructors in small writing classes is that they know each student personally. And writing is more than just a technical skill. It’s an emotionally charged process that needs to be managed interpersonally.

I know this from my own experience. Every time I receive feedback on my writing, I go through an emotional roller coaster. Often it starts with incredulity: “What, my first draft is a mess? That can’t be the case! My structure was crystal clear! Each idea followed logically from the next! I had the whole thing planned out beautifully from the start!“ (Aside: please don’t overuse exclamation marks.). Then follows the second stage: acceptance. “Oh, all right, yes, I see it now, you’re right, the first draft is a mess.” This stage is usually accompanied by an interior monologue of despair: how can it be that even now, after thirty years of writing, I still can’t produce a decent first draft? Then, slowly, I pick myself up from whatever fetal position I have assumed and go back to work, accompanied by a (belated) feeling of gratitude for the brave person who has provided critical feedback. And then, if I’m lucky, the same process will be repeated only one or two more times rather than, say, three or four more times, but you can never tell in advance.

The emotional roller coaster is one reason why so many professional writers have their own first responders, friends, members of a writing group, literary agents, and editors, people they trust and with whom they can act out the emotional drama of writing. This makes me wonder whether, in addition to providing targeted AI feedback, we should create an emotional support agent helping students in the online course manage the emotions of writing.

Be that as it may, it’s clear that a scalable online course cannot and should not replace human writing instruction at a place like Harvard. The course is designed as outreach, for the many students who don’t have access to high-quality instruction by human writing teachers. (Also, not all human teachers are equally good and some students prefer self-paced courses.) I imagine the audience for this course to include high school students looking to improve their writing ahead of college, workers looking to upskill their ability to assess AI-generated output, as well as students for whom English is a second or third language.

While expository writing does exist in many countries, it plays a more prominent role in U.S. liberal arts colleges and so constitutes something that we may well want to make available to students from around the world. This was very much my own experience. No one ever taught me exploratory writing, either in high school or at university, in Europe; I learned it only once I came to the US. People say that teachers always create courses they wish they had taken when they were students. This was very much true of this course, for me.

(You can check out the first version of the course here. We’re working on others, including lower-cost, versions.)

My native Germany is in turmoil. On September 6 there will be an election in the state of Sachsen-Anhalt, and the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) might well emerge with an absolute majority of seats. This possibility has prompted widespread soul searching, a favorite German activity even under the best circumstances. Many point out that the economy has barely grown since COVID, as Germany’s economic model, dependent on cheap Russian gas and large Chinese markets, has run into geopolitical realities. Trump’s trade war hasn’t helped, either. But these factors aren’t enough to explain the rise of a party that includes confirmed right-wing extremists. Something is going on with Germany’s past.

For severals months now, the websites of many major German newspapers have featured sections in which readers can search whether members of their family were in the National Socialist Party. The result has been a slew of articles with titles such as “My Grandfather was a Nazi.” This phenomenon has no direct connection to the electoral debate around the the AfD, and yet it shows that eighty-one years after the fall of the Nazi regime, Germany is reckoning with its past yet again.

The story behind this recent wave has to do with archives and, to a lesser extent, with AI, though of the behind-the-scenes kind that gets much less attention. Under German law, Nazi Party membership cards are not available online (people have to make individual family inquiries to the Bundesarchiv and only qualified researchers have access to online search tools). But the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington owns microfilm copies of these cards. In late 2025, they began posting the digitized material, with the collection becoming broadly available by March 2026. The files were PDFs of enormous microfilm rolls, roughly three thousand pages each, and cumbersome to use. But once German newspapers discovered the collection, they went to work. Using AI, they extracted structured data and built search tools allowing users simply to type in a name (behind paywalls). For the first time, Germans have had an easy way of doing genealogical research into the Nazi past.

To be sure, Germany (or rather, West Germany) had long been involved in the project of reckoning with the Nazi era. This process, known by the compound noun Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), has been thorough and pervasive, especially since the late 1970s, through historical instruction in schools and through public monuments. In fact, the rise of the AfD can be understood, among other factors, as a backlash against Vergangenheitsbewältigung, a rebellion against the pervasive culture of remembrance. Ahead of next week’s vote, one might ask whether that culture has gone too far—or rather not far enough?

As the debate unleashed by the publication of the Nazi party membership files has shown, the older culture of reckoning with the past had been focused on capital-H History. But it is one thing to learn in school and through public monuments about the horrors of the Nazi regime. It’s quite another to find a Nazi lurking in your own family.

I’ve been watching this new, personal wave of reckoning with interest because I went through a similar process decades ago, in the old-fashioned way: through libraries and archives. While a student at Harvard, I spent a lot of time in Harvard’s Widener Library, one of the world’s largest. One day, bored with whatever I was supposed to be doing, I decided to test the library by checking whether it held any works written by my grandfather, a historian of names. To my gratification, I found several of his obscure, scholarly works. One of them was an article in a journal from 1934 called “Family Names as Racial Markers.” It turned out to be a vile Nazi rant in which my grandfather proposed, using the methods he had developed, to distinguish between German-sounding Jewish names and Jewish-sounding German names. This would allow the government, he wrote, to create a national registry of Jews.

The shocking discovery—no one in my family had ever mentioned a Nazi connection—sent me down an archival rabbit hole that ultimately led me to the Bavarian State Archive, where I knew my grandfather had worked after the war. The days I spent in this archive changed my view of my family—and of myself.

The Story of an Archivist

I wrote to the Bavarian State Archive asking whether it had information on its former employee Karl Puchner. A librarian informed me that of course they had an entire file on Professor Dr. Karl Puchner, correcting my omission of these titles, since he had been the archive’s director. Perhaps it should have been obvious to me. Of course, archivists keep records, even of themselves.

Next time I was in Munich, I went to the state archives. The building was a grand nineteenth-century structure, designed to inspire confidence and awe. In front of it stood a statue of a horse without a rider.

To access the records stored there, I went through elaborate vetting procedures, seemingly designed to intimidate. Eventually, after I had filled out several forms, obtained an ID, submitted a request, and waited, a low-level clerk of the type that seems to exist only in archives slowly approached, hunched over a wheeled cart. On it was a towering pile of papers: my grandfather’s file. It was much larger than I had expected at hundreds of pages long.

As I gingerly turned the pages over, careful not to break off edges of the brittle paper, the story of my grandfather’s professional life slowly emerged. The file contained plenty of bureaucratic information about his career, including documents concerning minor squabbles and complaints. In one, he and a colleague fought over the employee-owned vegetable garden. I enjoyed the deep dive into a past when archives owned vegetable gardens over which young archivists could squabble. I also enjoyed the odd way his superiors evaluated my grandfather. One official assessment singles out his “positive appearance” and notes that he “makes a good impression,” is a “hard worker,” “energetic,” and “seeks to improve himself.” This was not how I remembered him from much later in life, but a photo from the period shows a sleek, presentable young professional. His superiors also noted that his greatest talent, for an archivist, was as a writer. Karl Puchner, the son of a low-level business clerk, was poised for a good career.

The next batch of documents revealed another reason that Karl Puchner was favored by his superiors. It included a form, printed on cheap paper, on which my grandfather let it be known that he had joined the National Socialist Party. His membership number was 267,450 and the year, 1930.

Even though I had assumed, ever since my discovery in Widener Library, that he had been a party member, I was surprised to see how early he had joined, three years before Hitler came to power. Where had his political convictions come from? I found a copy of a request from Karl to deliver a lecture for a Nazi organization called Strength Through Joy in 1934. I continued to read about Karl Puchner’s career, skimming requests for reimbursements and minor promotions, until I came across information that gave me an even bigger shock: my grandfather had joined the storm troopers (SA). Members of the SA, colloquially known as Brown Shirts, were the party’s paramilitary force. My grandfather donned the brown uniform on January 9, 1933, a few weeks before Hitler was sworn in as chancellor. The SA had its own ranks, and my grandfather rose to Sturmmann (storm man), one rung above the simple Mann (man).

For his induction into the SA, my grandfather had to present the so-called expanded proof of ancestry, tracing his Aryan provenance back three generations, not the two generations required of the general population. For my grandfather, this was child’s play. Tracing histories of names and producing genealogies was his profession.

Karl Puchner’s political engagement served him well. On October 10, 1934, he received a temporary position at the archive and swore the following oath: “I swear that I will follow the Führer of the German Reich, Adolf Hitler, with loyalty and obedience, so help me God.” His superiors were pleased with Karl’s academic and political activities. One notes in an internal file: “Karl has belonged to the NSDAP since 1930 and has distinguished himself as a Nazi fighter. He was a member of the SA from 1933–1936. He is one of the great hopes of future leadership.”

When Hitler invaded Poland, my grandfather was drafted into the army. He was sent to the Western Front, wounded, and spent most of his time during the rest of the war as an archivist in the occupied Netherlands. It sounded like a nice, safe desk job. But what exactly did he do there? Was he helping round up people with suspicious names? He received a medal, the Kriegsverdienstkreuz, second class, a medal for someone not serving on the front. The medal was presented to Karl by Arthur Seyß-Inquart, a particularly rabid Nazi who sent 100,000 Jews to concentration camps and who, when the war was lost, threatened to destroy all levees to flood the Netherlands. He was among the few to be convicted at the Nuremberg trials and executed.

I lost sight of Karl’s whereabouts in the last months of the war. His military passbook ends in October 1944; after that, there’s no trace of him. The only information I could obtain was of a more personal nature: he returned to Munich with a Dutch girlfriend, leaving my grandmother with her children in the countryside.

The next sighting of Karl Puchner was in June 1945, a month after the German capitulation, when he reported for duty at his last place of work, the State Archive in the provincial town of Amberg. It was here that he was spotted by the Military Government of the U.S. Army. All the activities that had served him so well for the past fifteen years were now poison: the early party membership; the SA membership; his work as a party functionary. Karl was dismissed from the job and accused of being a willing collaborator.

I don’t know where he lived then, or how. Were he and his Dutch girlfriend shacked up in some half-bombed-out apartment in the ruins of the city? For a period, he was drafted into an improvised service to collect firewood, but he was dismissed because of his war wounds and instead started to work for the State Archive in Munich. He was now working for free, no doubt hoping to get in through the back door.

The next section of the file, which recorded his dealings with the U.S. authorities, made for fascinating reading. Karl’s first line of defense was typical: he was never a true believer. Karl claimed that he entered the party out of “youthful inexperience” and “naïve trust in the Führer, who disappointed me, like millions of other Germans.” For his SA membership, he blamed the former director of the archive, Dr. Riedner. “He demanded that I join the SA, and his demand was like a command,” Karl wrote. There was nothing he could do, he had to obey, much as he wished to avoid it. The best thing about this line of defense was that Dr. Riedner was unable to either substantiate or contradict this claim, because Dr. Riedner was dead.

What about his work for the party? Karl claimed that he had never worked for the Nazis, that he didn’t like the work, and also that he couldn’t have refused because refusal could have cost him his job, or worse. Finally, as proof of his inner opposition to the Nazi Party and the SA, he reminded his interrogators that he had sent his two sons, my father and my uncle, to a Catholic kindergarten and not to the Nazi kindergarten.

I am not sure how impressed his interrogators were by this act of resistance, but history came to his aid. By 1948, the Cold War had erupted and the priorities of the U.S. occupation had shifted from punishing those, like my grandfather, who were implicated in the Nazi regime to turning the western part of Germany into an ally against communism. On May 11, 1948, he was classified as nothing but a fellow traveler, fined six hundred marks, and let go.

In 1949, Karl Puchner returned to his old job, and in 1951 he became a civil servant, which meant job security and a nice pension, for life. The path was clear for him to rise through the ranks, and less than a decade later, he was director of the archive and enjoyed a teaching position at the university, one of the chief archivists in the land.

Karl Puchner didn’t dwell on the past. He didn’t talk about his fifteen years as a Nazi or his three years as a political suspect. In his obituaries, he was praised as a historian of names, as the director of the Bavarian State Archive, and as a university teacher.

As I contemplated his life emerging from the hundreds of pages in that stack of documents, I was struck by a paradox: Karl Puchner profited from postwar oblivion and silence, but all documents that demonstrate his Nazi past and his lies to the U.S. authorities were right here, in front of me. Karl Puchner must have been aware of his personnel file. It was, after all, in his own archive, the archive over which he presided and over which he had complete authority. It would have been easy for him to sneak in and eliminate the evidence of his early party membership and of the way he lied his way out of de-Nazification. But he didn’t do that. On the contrary, he tended his own file lovingly to the end.

For me, the most devastating document in my grandfather’s file is one that comes early on, from 1934, a note from a supervisor congratulating my grandfather on his marriage to my grandmother. It is written in a somewhat convoluted, pedantic manner, but also takes an odd flight of fancy, riffing on the work of archivists and the nature of the archive:

Dear Colleague: On the occasion of your marriage, I wish you and your bride great happiness from the bottom of my heart.

For an archivist, marriage is especially important because it is sealed with a document that constitutes the foundation of a building—an archive—that otherwise would only be of professional interest to him. This marriage certificate is soon joined by bills from landlords, tailors, and butchers, and then, God willing, by certificates of baptism, vaccinations, and school transcripts or, on the other hand, by promotion and transfer documents. Be warned that not everything that will be preserved in this archive will be pleasant, but I dearly hope that the greater part of this future archive of your life will speak not of pain and suffering, but of pleasure and happiness.

The note is prescient: my grandfather’s file, the archive of his life, really does capture much about him. Unfortunately, the good wishes of his supervisor that most of this archive tell a story of pleasure and happiness, not of pain and suffering, were not fulfilled.

The discoveries in Widener Library and the Bavarian State Archive ultimately prompted me to write up the story of Karl in a memoir called The Language of Thieves (on which the section above is based). The publication caused a rift in my family; some members are still not talking to me even now, several years later, while others have slowly made their peace with the new idea of the family’s past they have been forced to confront.

As I have watched other families go through a similar process in the past months, I know that for them, discovering their grandfather’s name in the files will be just the beginning. This discovery will lead to a longer and more complicated process of retelling the past and ultimately of themselves.

The radical wing of the AfD wants to put an end to this process. But for many families in Germany, that process has barely begun.

Most discussions of AI focus on the actions of a handful of companies. But there is another story of AI, one that takes place far from Silicon Valley and Hangzhou. It’s a story of creative experimentation at the grassroots level, of individuals and groups trying to use AI for projects ranging from healthcare to culture. It’s the latter that took me to Cambodia to observe one of these emerging uses of AI in action.

The person I came to see was Phloeun Prim, a cultural entrepreneur who’s made it his life’s work to help revive Cambodian culture in the aftermath of Pol Pot’s communist dictatorship (1975-1979). During that time, two million people were killed, a full quarter of Cambodia’s population. Even now, fifty-one years later, the devastation of this period can be felt everywhere. In Cambodia, as in other places that have suffered severe disruptions, people are now working to recover and preserve what was lost. (I also touched on this topic in a recent essay on Iraq.)

I met up with Phloeun in Siem Reap, the second-largest city in Cambodia, where he was born and where he continues to spend significant time. He took me to Artisans Angkor, one of the many enterprises he’s been involved with. It’s as far from AI as one can possibly be. Artisans Angkor is devoted to reviving Khmer arts and crafts, including silk weaving, wood and stone carving, silk painting, and ceramics. The site is composed of airy one-story buildings placed around an elegant courtyard. Inside the courtyard are artisanal workspaces as well as exhibition and sales areas. Everything looked stunning, arranged with incredible attention to detail. Artisans Angkor not only employs rural artisans, but also teaches their craft to others to preserve and revive Khmer culture.

In order to explore the cultural roots of the crafts practiced here, I didn’t have to go far. Siem Reap is located right next to Angkor Wat, the large temple complex built between 950 C.E. and 1220. Calling this archaeological site large is an understatement. The entire area once covered 390 square miles, roughly seven times the size of Manhattan. Inside this area are the ruins of around 70 major temple complexes and monuments as well as hundreds of smaller structures. It is one of the largest historical sites on earth, and to take it all in, it is best to look at it from space, as many astronauts have done.

During the days I spent exploring it, I only scratched the surface. Some sites, like the main temple, are visible from a distance because the forest around them has been cleared, but others are hidden in the jungle, where building structures and trees often form beautiful symbioses between nature and culture.

The older temples are shaped by Hinduism, with long friezes depicting scenes from the Ramayana, while later temples are influenced by Buddhism. Both are examples of what the historian William Dalrymple has called the Golden Road, the Indian sphere of influence across Asia. (I recommend his book very highly; it has a great chapter on Angkor Wat.)

It’s the same commitment to cultural preservation and revival that has brought Phloeun to AI. The result is an initiative, An AI of Our Own (AAOO), that seeks to create AI tools for cultural purposes (full disclosure: I have served as an occasional advisor for this initiative). What does that mean? It’s clear that Cambodia along with most smaller countries cannot compete with frontier models built in China and the US. This means that the rest of the world is operating with LLMs shaped by Chinese and American values. These values enter LLMs first through the vast textual corpora on which these models are trained and second through the tweaks and training the companies impose, based on a mixture of government mandates, consumer demands, and the individual decisions of corporate leaders.

The cultural values found in LLMs have been discussed mostly in terms of bias and censorship, echoing broader debates in American society about representation. Concern about bias is one of the reasons why so many people working in literature and culture in the US have been calling for resistance to AI (see a recent Substack on this topic). But the focus on bias is too narrow. Biases are just a small subset of cultural forces and values, many of them not in need of rectification. China’s DeepSeek, for example, is said to have Confucian values, which makes sense given the role of Confucianism in the Chinese textual corpus and society, while Anthropic’s models are said to be Socratic, focused on deep questioning, based on their training data. These tendencies aren’t biases in the negative sense. They are values on which entire cultures are founded. Having different LLMs with different values is a good thing.

There is one real problem with LLMs, though, and that problem has less to do with what is there, the distinctive cultural tendencies and values they exhibit, than what is not there. What’s not there is data in minor languages, languages with less of a written corpus, or languages whose written corpus has not been digitized. What’s not there are ephemeral cultural practices, including much of the performing arts. It is these two absences that Phloeun and his team seek to address.

Their approach is carefully targeted. Since they can’t build their own LLMs, they have decided to focus on downstream applications to fill these absences. One example is Voice of Our Own, a project that seeks to teach LLMs underrepresented languages, specifically Khmer (spoken in Cambodia) and Dagbani (spoken in Ghana), in order to give speakers of those languages better access to AI. To this end, Phloeun and his collaborators created an app that allows users to record and submit voice samples in those underrepresented languages that are then used to train LLMs. Apps such as these must be designed with care, with the particular needs of their target users in mind. For example, this meant allowing the recording to happen offline, since internet coverage in rural areas in Cambodia and Ghana is unreliable. Voice of Our Own is part of a larger initiative of the Mozilla Foundation, which has created a Common Voice Public API designed precisely for the purpose of incorporating less-recorded languages into LLMs, which will make these LLMs more useful and accessible.

Ephemeral Arts

Incorporating ephemeral practices is even more difficult, but fortunately these art forms are another one of Phloeun’s long-standing interests. In addition to his arts and crafts initiative, Artisans Angkor, he has served as the Executive Director of Cambodian Living Arts since 2009, a foundation devoted to the promotion of the performing arts.

Phloeun showed me the premises of Cambodian Living Arts (CLA) when I reconnected with him in Phnom Penh. While Siem Reap is laid back, Phnom Penh, the capital, is full of frantic energy, with cars, motorcycles, and pedestrians humming and honking with great energy. I first encountered Phom Penh at night, when it felt like the entire city had moved to the banks of the Mekong River.

The next day, I looked for CLA and located in a quiet street in a building that contained offices and rehearsal spaces, offering respite from the busy city.

Historically, the performing arts along with other ephemeral practices, from rituals and everyday behavior to live storytelling, have been difficult to record. We’ve had to rely on indirect accounts, such as travelers’ reports or the notes of anthropologists. More recently, it’s become possible to record audio, take photographs, and make videos, some of which have been digitized. TikTok, whatever else one may think of it, has managed to give dance a place in the digital sphere. But these digital traces capture only a small portion of embodied practices, which are important to all societies but crucial for those not dominated by writing. Should these cultural practices be fed to LLMs? Some critics want to keep them out of the digital world entirely, regarding them as an occasion to resist LLMs or at least limit their reach.

Phloeun and his collaborators chose a different path, namely to explore how such ephemeral practices could be recorded with the consent of practitioners and in ways that is in keeping with their values. The attempt is radically bottom-up and starts with visits and training sessions in small communities, which decide whether and how to record, tag, and present ephemeral practices. So far, An AI of Our Own has conducted experiments with communities in South Africa and Cambodia, exploring local knowledge of plants, silk weaving, and Buddhist Smot chanting. The goal is to establish a protocol for community-guided representation of ephemeral practices and knowledge.

AAOO is an underfunded, idealistic initiative by a loose network of committed actors across the globe (Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the US), but it is a powerful example of what a pragmatic use of AI looks like. Even though it may seem right now as if the AI future will be forever owned by a few companies, that may well change. Perhaps these companies may never recoup their astronomical investments and go bankrupt. And even if the race for the best frontier models continues to be dominated by them, many users may soon find radically cheaper open-weights models sufficient for their purposes. Perhaps good-enough AI models will soon become more like electricity: ubiquitous and cheap. What will matter is not what brand of electricity we use, but what we do with it, what kind of applications we can dream up and power with them.

In this scenario, the pragmatic attitude of An AI of Our Own will be the future of AI. What is needed in that case is not stalwart resistance against the evil forces of global capitalism, but a curious, exploratory mindset for a new set of tools. Yes, it’s important to know about the limits, flaws, and prejudices of LLMs, but with the goal of learning how to use them despite these drawbacks.

The most important ingredient for this exploratory attitude is purpose. Those with a clear and urgent purpose will know how to use LLMs, and purpose is what Phloeun and his collaborators have plenty of. I wish that we in the US would pause and learn from AAOO; I know that I have. AI is too important to be left to large companies. If we want to do something about this, we have to do it ourselves, with our own hands. Phloeun and his collaborators are showing us the way.

As we came streaming out of the IMAX theater, where I had managed to secure the last remaining seat, a 10-year-old boy asked: “What movie were you guys watching?” The answer didn’t ring a bell, but I recommended it to him very highly, as I do to you. In 2023, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, along with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, brought us out of our Covid seclusion, and now, three years later, Nolan is single-handedly breathing life into the cinema, with a movie shot for Imax. As of yesterday, roughly 60 million people have seen the movie, with no sign of its abating. Based on my own anecdotal impression, audiences come from an extremely wide spectrum. Filmmakers will be singing to their muses for the next three thousand years hoping for similar popular success.

I’ve been wracking my mind for comparisons. The 2010 Alice in Wonderland, which promised to revive 3D technology? The great Shakespeare adaptations of the 1990s, such as Kenneth Branagh’s 4-hour Hamlet or Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet? It’s possible that we have to go back all the way to Ben Hur (1959) or The Ten Commandments (1956). And who would have thought that this could be accomplished with a classic that is very long and very difficult to read, even in such excellent modern translations as that by Emily Wilson? (Full disclosure: that translation was originally commissioned for the Norton Anthology of World Literature, of which I am the general editor.) Indeed, translations of the Odyssey have been selling like hot cakes. Given the recent hand-wringing about the decline of reading, it’s possible that Nolan is saving not only cinema but also literature.

To be sure, not everyone has loved the adaptation, and I particularly recommend Wilson’s delicious takedown in the London Review of Books, which went viral and allegedly crashed the LRB website. But I came away feeling that Nolan does many things very well. His cinematography does a great job capturing what it feels like to be in a small boat in the open sea. Ithaca is shown as appropriately poor, a small windswept island, presided over by Penelope and her overwhelmed son, who are barely keeping the suitors at bay. Then there is the sheer pleasure of seeing a text I love dramatized. Ever since I first read the Odyssey (in a YA version), I’ve wondered what it must have felt like to be crammed inside the Trojan Horse as it is being probed by a spear and dragged up into the city (true, this is not in the original but it has been part of the story for over two thousand years). In Nolan’s adaptation, the horse is half-submerged in water, adding additional drama to the claustrophobia.

In general, I was surprised not how much was missing, but how much was retained, given that Nolan had to reduce a 13-hour epic to less than three hours. In any case, faithfulness is beside the point. The thing to ask of an adaptation is not how closely it hews to the original but how effectively it manages to speak to the present, which Nolan’s does eloquently. The Trojan War is explained not by the retrieval of Helen, always a weak peg on which to hang a major conflict, but as a battle over trade routes. Troy was located near the Dardanelles Strait, which was important to the expanding trade empire of the Greeks. The strait was still important eight-hundred years later when Alexander the Great launched his attack on Asia Minor, a copy of the Iliad in hand. His first stop in Asia was Troy. (Since then the ocean has retreated and is barely visible from the citadel. When I went there a decade ago, I was struck by how small Troy was. Homer’s epic had somehow made it seem much bigger in my mind. Nolan shrinks it back down to size.) Today, audiences can watch the movie while being bombarded with daily updates on the conflict over another strait, the Strait of Hormuz. Yes, we very much live in a world dominated by sea-born empires.

Nolan’s second adaptation concerns attitudes toward war. Homer is every bit as graphic in his depictions of violence as today’s action movies, with bits of brain dripping from spears. In fact, Homer renders the famous scene in which Odysseus takes a sharpened pole, made hot in a fire, and grinds out the Cyclops’ single eye in significantly more detail than what Nolan shows us. What has changed is not a fascination with witnessing violence, but our moral framework for understanding it. While Homer’s heroes are out for everlasting glory, today’s soldiers coming home from war need psychiatric treatment.

Nolan frames the entire story as a case of PTSD. He retains from the original the fact that many of the most famous episodes (the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Circe, the giant cannibals, the oxen of the sun god Apollo, the Cyclops, and the trip to the underworld) are narrated by Odysseus as a story-within-the-story. But Nolan cunningly transfers the scene of narration to Calypso’s island. What matters more than the location of the narrative is how it proceeds. In Homer’s original, Odysseus is a deft storyteller who is entertaining the audience with tales of his heroic deeds. In Nolan’s film we have a shell-shocked Odysseus who has been living on the island for seven years, remembering nothing. Slowly, through the encouragements of the nymph and by micro-dosing on lotus leaves, he remembers the painful episodes from his past. Commentators have pointed out that in turning the victor of Troy into someone troubled by his past deeds, Nolan is repeating the plot of Oppenheimer, but the closer model is the Jason Bourne trilogy, where Matt Damon plays a former CIA operative who suffers from amnesia and is slowly piecing together the atrocities he committed in the past.

As is fitting for a returning soldier with PTSD, Odysseus remains damaged, traumatized by the violent sacking of Troy and the loss of his companions, even after he makes it home. In fact, he is so troubled that he cannot stay in Ithaca. The idea that Odysseus might remain in Ithaca after twenty years of war and travel was developed by the 19^th century British poet Alfred Tennyson, but while Tennyson’s Odysseus leaves his home once more to explore new worlds, like a British empire builder, Nolan’s Odysseus packs his wife on a boat and sails into exile to atone for his sins.

Nolan is adapting Homer to the present, but in doing so he also throws overlooked aspects of Homer into relief. While Homer did not have a concept of PTSD and his soldiers unapologetically battle for glory, it’s not impossible to think of Odysseus’ troubled journey home as a sign that something went wrong in the war. It wasn’t just Odysseus who had a troubled homecoming; all Greek heroes did, so much so that it became a genre, the nostoi (returns), captured in epics and dramas such as the Oresteia, which tells us how Agamemnon was killed by his wife and she, in turn, by her son. Nolan skillfully uses these stories and adds to them: while we see Helen reunited with Menelaus, Nolan has her face scarred to suggest that no one returned from Troy intact.

Nolan’s is not the first adaptation to diagnose Odysseus with PTSD. Kate Hamill’s The Odyssey, which premiered at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge in 2025, does the same. Both adaptations show how deeply conflicted we are about wars. Despite Pete Hegseth’s recent attempt to promote a warrior spirit, returning soldiers tend to experience a troubled homecoming in America.

Nolan is speaking to our current moment in a second way as well, by showing what happens when a rules-based order is abrogated and destroyed. That order is xenia (guest-friendship), which requires that travelers be sheltered and fed. In Homer, xenia plays a central role, especially when it is being violated. This happens when Odysseus enters the cave of the Cyclops, while the owner is absent, and starts to behave as if he owned the place, for example by tasting the cheese--“not bad,” he declares. Another violation happens in Ithaca, committed by the suitors, who are trying to force Penelope to marry one of them. While they have a legitimate interest in seeing the throne filled, they are overstepping the bounds of xenia by eating and drinking their way through the palace’s meagre provisions.

Nolan retains these instances of xenia but expands the concept significantly. In fact, he almost flips the situation in Ithaca on its head by suggesting that when Odysseus finally kills the suitors to reclaim Penelope and the throne, it is he who is violating xenia by killing his guests. This somewhat far-fetched interpretation gives Nolan an additional reason—besides lingering PTSD—for Odysseus to leave Ithaca after his return. Staying would bring the wrath of Zeus, guarantor of xenia, on Ithaca, which is also why Odysseus keeps Telemachus from participating in the carnage. Telemachus must come out of the story unscathed so that he can take the throne. With this unorthodox interpretation of xenia, Nolan adds a tragic dimension to the final scene, in the proper Greek manner: Odysseus must kill the suitors to regain his home, but the very act of doing so forces him to abandon the home he has just regained.

Nolan’s boldest expansion of xenia is to declare that even the Trojan Horse, Odysseus’s most celebrated invention, constitutes a breach, on the theory that the Greeks pretend the horse is a gift that is to be taken into the city. In terms of the Greek conception of xenia, this is nonsense. The Trojan Horse is a ruse within a war and therefore does not fall under a law that is meant to protect travelers. But while this interpretation is not historically accurate, it allows Nolan to do something important: xenia becomes something like the Geneva Convention or the Genocide Convention, a universal world order based on laws. And this means that the destruction of Troy by means to the Trojan Horse is in violation of this rules-based order. Nolan brilliantly seeds this throughout the movie with rumors of sea-based raiders who are threatening the status quo. By the end, Odysseus reveals that these pirates are the Greeks.

* * *

Nolan’s is an American Odyssey in another way as well, without quite realizing it. Even before the movie came out, it was decried as “woke” due to a number of black and brown actors playing Greek characters, including Helen. On the whole, I found the casting (and acting) well done, perhaps because it seemed representative of the wider Mediterranean world within which Homer’s epic is set. At the same time, this wider world is strangely absent. With the exception of the Cyclops, whose face looks like it was sewn together from spare body parts by Dr. Frankenstein, we barely see a non-Greek face. In the flashbacks from the Trojan war, the Trojans are heavily masked, as are the cannibalistic Laestrygonians. The faces of the Sirens are too far to see. Only Circe has a face. Nolan has cut all the other non-Greek peoples, above all Phaeacians, who rescue Odysseus and send him on his way (in an exemplary act of xenia). This means that the movie confines racial diversity to the Greeks while remaining uninterested in the wider world.

What Nolan delivers, then, tells us as much about our current moment as about Homer. His story sings of an America that wants to secure trade routes but is simultaneously undermining the rules-based order on which trade is based; an America that sends soldiers abroad but does not know what to do with them when they come home; an America that celebrates racial diversity within but shows little interest in the diversity of the wider world.

It is fitting that Nolan’s Odysseus chooses, at the end of the movie, not only to go into exile, but to do so by sailing west. Putatively, he does so to make amends for his sins. But I like to think that he’s sailing to America. Thanks to Nolan, he’ll feel right at home.

When I started watching soccer in the early 1970s, the World Cup was a spectacle of nation states competing against each other with players born and bred in distinctive national traditions. In 1974, the first World Cup I remember, West Germany won against the Netherland 2-1, with a squad composed exclusively of players who were employed in the Bundesliga. The Dutch squad was similar, with only two players playing for neighboring Belgium and one, Johan Cruyff, for FC Barcelona. The latter was seen as a rare anomaly. Four years later, Argentina took the title by beating the Netherlands 3-1 in extra time with an entirely domestic squad except for one player, employed by Valencia CF.

That year, Franz Beckenbauer, who had led his team to its World Cup win four years earlier, was absent from the West German squad because he had made the highly unusual decision to move to New York to play for Cosmos. Beckenbauer was in his early 30s, so still in his prime, but the move to New York had placed him somehow beyond the pale. The only expected and acceptable reason to move abroad, at least among self-respecting soccer nations, was as a kind of early retirement, when a player could no longer play competitively at home. And when players in their prime did move internationally, their movements were determined by cultural and linguistic affinities, as when players moved from the Netherlands to Belgium or from Latin America to Spain.

During the 80s, the number of players employed abroad crept up, though very unevenly. Most larger soccer nations, such as Brazil, Argentina, Italy, England, Spain and West Germany continued to field teams composed almost exclusively of domestic players, while smaller nations, including Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark, had more players based abroad. This meant that teams played different national styles. Italy played defensively, with rapid counterattacks. Argentina was possession-oriented and increasingly organized. England excelled at direct passing and crosses. West Germany used the attacking libero position pioneered by Beckenbauer, comparable perhaps to the quarterback in American football.

The reasons for this national organization were partly regulatory. Soccer was a highly protected market with foreign-player quotas. But it was also a cultural matter, with foreign travel more difficult and costly. This state of affairs continued into the early 90s. I remember when one of my favorite players, the diminutive Pierre Littbarski (5’6’’) moved to Japan in 1991, thus putting himself, as Beckenbauer had before him, somehow outside the game. Even though he had just won the 1990 World Cup in a 1-0 final against Argentina, moving to Japan meant he was soon phased out of the national team.

Then came the 1990s, the end of the Cold War, and deregulation. 1990 was the last Cold War World Cup, with the Berlin Wall having come down just nine months earlier. West Germany won that title three months before its reunification with East Germany, fielding, for the last time, a team composed entirely of West German players. Immediately upon reunification, leading East German players were integrated into the national squad. Spirits were high, not to say cocky, and many predicted that the combined forces of east and west would make German soccer invincible. What happened was the opposite. German soccer declined and had to be reconstituted in the late 90s and 2000s. Germany wouldn’t win again until 2014.

By then, the face of soccer had changed completely. In December of 1995, the European Court of Justice ruled in favor of Belgium player Jean-Marc Bosman’s claim that foreign-player quotas were illegal and that out-of-contract players should be able to move to another EU club without a transfer fee. The decision became a catalyst for globalizing soccer. I vaguely remember, sometime in the 90s, watching a German offensive player chatting on the field with his defending counterpart and realizing that they played for the same club. Their allegiance, I thought, must be divided since it was probably more important for them to remain on good terms with their colleagues than to play for their national team. It was a glimpse into the future of soccer as a truly global game. It wasn’t just that the number of players employed by foreign clubs increased; the types of foreign assignments changed as well in that the movements of international players were no longer shaped by cultural and linguistic affinities, with English now serving as the lingua franca.

The other driver of change was also based on deregulation: the liberalization of television. When I was growing up, the World Cup was one of the few occasions when you could actually watch games on television; most other matches were not televised. You could follow soccer on the radio or watch weekly summaries, otherwise you had to go and watch a game in person. The liberalization of television in Europe, which happened unevenly from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, meant a sudden influx of money, fueling the transfer game we know today.

If one story of globalization was the international transfer of players, the other was immigration. Immigration shaped soccer at the World Cup level with a delayed effect, typically taking at least one generation to make itself felt on the field. European nations with former colonies such as England, France and Belgium had more immigrant players and had them earlier. Others, like Germany, remained largely white well into the late 1990s. It took until 2009 for a Turkish-German player, Mesut Özil, to make the national team--a third-generation Turkish German. While the pan-European transfer market created internationalization on a European level, immigration enabled an influx of players from outside Europe.

Soccer in America

What about America? I moved to the US in 1993 and drove cross-country with my brother during the 1994 World Cup, watching games in Motel 6 rooms located in stunning landscapes and strange small towns. I had been to the US for extended periods before, but I think of this World Cup-themed drive as the time when I really got to know America.

It was an America in which soccer played a minor role. US commentators didn’t know the game well and struggled to explain it to US audiences. Ever since, I have been rooting for soccer to make it big here. But soccer has been a difficult sell. In part this was because sport was and is a crowded field, but there have also been other problems with soccer in America. The longer I have lived here, the more I have come to see soccer through American eyes. The spectacle of rolling around the field pretending that you’ve been mortally wounded now seems embarrassing, rather than savvy, to me, and I’ve come to appreciate the near absence of these theatrics in women’s soccer. When soccer players pass the ball back and forth just to pass the time, I yearn for the forward movement of American football.

But the root of the problem is the low scoring nature of soccer, which has all kinds of consequences. Above all, it makes the outcome of a given game much more dependent on that one bad decision, that one mistake, from which it is near-impossible to recover. It also makes the outcome of the game much more dependent on the referee, since a penalty kick or a red card can have an outsized impact on the result. (The attempt to solve this with VAR, the video assistant referee, has been a disaster because it has not altered the basic nature of the game. It only resulted in more delays and the frustration of delayed or misguided jubilation.)

The most profound effect of low scoring, as others have observed, is that it requires players to face their own frailty and their exposure to external factors (such as referee calls) beyond their control. In other words, soccer is a tragic game. America, at least in its self-conception, does not accept this tragic view of life and believes in taking fate into your own hands. When Donald Trump lobbied FIFA to have an unfair red card for Bolagun rescinded, he wasn’t just being Donald Trump; he was also channeling an American objection to soccer’s tragic view of the world.

The State of the World, 2026

What does the 2026 World Cup say about the state of the world? Even though there may be signs that we’re living through an era of de-globalization, this World Cup tells the opposite story, one of ever-accelerating globalization. The number of players employed by foreign clubs stands at an all-time high of 72%. As for migration, about 24% of players were foreign-born, also an all-time high. Of Curaçao’s 26 players, 25 were foreign born. For Bosnia & Herzegovina, 15 out of 26. (On the other end of the spectrum, Brazil, Colombia, South Africa and Austria had no foreign-born players.) An even larger number of players were children or grandchildren of migrants. Famously, Folarin Balogun was able to play for the US only thanks to birthright citizenship, when his heavily-pregnant mother was barred, by the airline, from flying back to London, thus forced to give birth on US soil. It’s a reminder that changes to citizenship laws, especially in countries traditionally less open to immigrants, have further contributed to the globalization of national soccer teams.

The 2026 World Cup delivered a snapshot of global culture in another way as well: the relation of the US to the rest of the world in an era dominated by Donald Trump’s America First policies. One drama was regional, given that the World Cup was hosted not only by the US but also by Mexico and Canada, making it the first NAFTA World Cup. What made this especially poignant was that Trump suggested, while the World Cup was going on, he might not renew the revised NAFTA treaty (technically renamed USMCA), which he himself had renegotiated during his first term. But if soccer has anything to tell about the state of NAFTA, it’s that the treaty is in better shape than it may look, given that the NAFTA signatories pulled off this event without a hitch.

How about the rest of the world? Many visitors were surprised by the spontaneous welcome they received in the US. The most well-publicized scenes of fraternization happened in Boston, where Scottish fans decked out in kilts and bagpipes were enthusiastically adopted by Bostonians, who even took them to a baseball game at Fenway Park, to show them what a real American sport looks like. There were other, equally touching stories, such as Algerian fans being welcomed back to their base in Lawrence, Kansas, with an elaborate show of fireworks.

From a perspective of soft power, the world cup couldn’t have come at a better time for the US (see an earlier essay on soft power here). I’ve been struck, when traveling through Europe, by the widespread perception that the US has become something close to a failed (or rogue) state. The World Cup, happily coinciding with the 250^th anniversary of the founding of the United States, was an occasion to show that such perceptions are exaggerated.

As was the case with every World Cup since the 1994 American games, this one has again increased the status of soccer in the US. Does this mean Americans are ready to embrace this global game with its tragic view of life? Only time will tell.

As a literary scholar, I’ve long been intrigued by the founding of the United States. As everyone knows, the founding occurred when thirteen North American colonies declared their independence from the British Empire, but we have forgotten how unusual this was. Ordinarily, nations are founded by wars, conquests, or mass migrations, and in the case of the United States, all of these played a role as well. But there was something else: a particular kind of text through which independence was declared. A text may seem like a fragile foundation on which to build a nation, but it has turned out to be remarkably durable. Other nations watched this new mechanism and some followed suit. The authors of the Declaration had created a new way of founding a nation.

There’s a lesson in this history about the power of texts. To hone in on this power, the events on and around the 4^th of July need to be understood from a literary perspective, including the media environment that made them possible. There was one person involved in the founding who was at the center of this media landscape: Benjamin Franklin.

* * *

On August 2, 1776, the members of the Second Continental Congress gathered to sign the Declaration of Independence. The young Thomas Jefferson had drafted the text on a custom-made lap desk and sent it to the Congress, where it was put to table, which meant that it had been laid on a table where each member could read it and offer amendments and changes. After Congress had agreed and voted on the revised document, it was ceremoniously read aloud by Colonel John Nixon on July 8. Several weeks later, the Congress hired Timothy Matlack, a former beer brewer who also excelled at the elegant English round hand, with its open, flowing script. Using a quill pen, Matlack wrote out the entire Declaration on a single sheet of parchment, leaving the bottom fifth free for the required signatures.

One by one, the members of the Congress stepped forward to sign. Benjamin Franklin waited for his turn, after half the signatures had already been applied, approached, and signed the document with a graceful hand, styling himself “Benj. Franklin.” Most signatories simply wrote their name, but Franklin took the liberty of adding an elaborate flourish under the length of his signature, drawing a long figure 8, then a smaller circle across it and finishing off with another figure 8. Perhaps he felt that he had saved room for this extravagance by abbreviating his first name.

Despite his wig and his stockings, Franklin was one of the great pioneers of modern information technology. As his quill scratched across the parchment bearing the Declaration of Independence, he must have realized just how antiquated it was, even in 1776, to sign a document written by a scribe, as if hailing from the dawn of writing, and on parchment, a writing surface made from animal skins invented at Pergamum two thousand years before. To be sure, in the age of print, handwriting and parchment had become something special, reserved for important documents (in a similar fashion, the U.S. Constitution would be written by a scribe on four sheets of parchment.) But Franklin knew that the Declaration of Independence relied on newer technology, more in keeping with its revolutionary aims.

As soon as the Declaration had been voted into effect on July 4, a full month before the beautifully handwritten parchment copy was made and signed, the ratified text had been sent to a printer, John Dunlap, who had produced some two hundred broadside copies overnight. The copies were immediately dispatched on horseback to the other twelve colonies via postal roads. On July 6, a newspaper, The Pennsylvania Evening Post, carried the Declaration on its front page; on July 10, Mary Katherine Goddard did the same with The Maryland Journal; and many other newspapers followed. It was in the form of printed newspapers and broadsides that the United States first declared its independence from England.

Among the framers of the Declaration, Franklin was in the best position to appreciate the role of print that day. At the court of France, Marie Antoinette would disparage him as lacking in aristocratic refinement because he had been a printer’s foreman. Though unkind, Marie Antoinette was not wrong. Franklin had learned the trade as a quasi-indentured apprentice to his brother, who introduced him to every step in the printing process, including the making of inks and the different types of paper, letters, and layout. Franklin would spend his career expanding and perfecting the infrastructure of print, from securing paper supply and maintaining the postal roads over which printed matter was distributed across the thirteen colonies to newspaper and broadside publishing networks. A media entrepreneur, Franklin did more than anyone else to create the world that would bring the Declaration of Independence into being.

The first newspaper in the colonies had been produced in Boston in 1690, mostly reflecting the views of the ruling class. But Franklin’s brother had challenged the status quo by starting his own newspaper, whose success set him on a collision course with the authorities. When he landed in jail, he continued to publish the paper in Benjamin Franklin’s name, showing the younger brother just how powerful a newspaper could be. The experiment also demonstrated that there was an untapped market for newspapers. Towns didn’t need just one newspaper, as had been thought; there was room for several. And with competing newspapers would come controversy, the testing of ideas, and polemical exchange from which the best ideas would emerge victorious.

While newspapers were the most important novelty in the world of print, broadsides were significant as well. Shorter, cheaper, and even easier to distribute than newspapers, single-page broadsides consisted of one large, folio-sized page that could be posted on a wall or door. Alternatively, a page could be printed on both sides and folded once or twice, yielding four and sixteen pages respectively. Combining three such twice-folded pages produced a sizable pamphlet of forty-eight pages that could be stitched together with needle and thread. As long as the stack of pages didn’t need to be laboriously bound, as long as a needle could still pierce the pages and thread them together, which was possible up to about one hundred pages, the result could be made cheaply.

Franklin’s Paper Trail

Franklin realized that it wasn’t enough to have a print shop; he also needed to control the necessary raw materials, above all paper. After failing to buy out the paper supplier from his Philadelphia rivals, he helped papermakers set up their own business and shared profits. Paper was still made from rags, and Franklin himself collected them and sent them to the paper mills that were part of his sphere of influence before buying back the finished paper. Eventually his supply network expanded all the way to the South, including a paper mill at Williamstown, which, like the many Dutch mills that produced the paper exported to the colonies, was driven by a windmill. Franklin was essentially creating a vertically integrated industry, controlling the process from the rags that were turned into paper to the printing and distribution of his newspapers and broadsides.

Printing in the colonies was highly localized, in part because of the difficulties of transportation, but Franklin recognized that having a network of printers would be a great advantage. In addition to his vertical integration, he needed a horizontal one. Just as he himself had been apprenticed to his brother, so Franklin now placed his own children and nephews as apprentices in other print shops or bound them to him through marriage. Franklin would lend money and types and help with contacts, demanding in return one-third of the profits. He sent a nephew to establish a print shop in Rhode Island, and a former associate all the way to Antigua. All told, he helped set up two dozen printers, from New England to the Caribbean. The official printer of the Declaration of Independence, John Dunlap, was part of Franklin’s network as well. Franklin had helped John Dunlap’s father, William, to establish himself as a printer, and approved of William’s marriage to Franklin’s wife’s niece, Deborah Croker. William Dunlap was so grateful to his patron that he named one of his sons Benjamin Franklin. Eventually William gave his business to John, who became the official printer of the Declaration of Independence.

While Franklin was working on both vertical integration and horizontal print networks, he also realized the importance of government roads, called postal roads because they enabled the distribution of mail in the colonies, which placed them under the control of the postmaster. The position didn’t offer much by way of a salary, but it came with the privilege of sending items free of charge and deciding who else could do so, a significant privilege for a printer. As soon as Franklin had established himself as a printer, he had started a lobbying campaign to become postmaster, and he succeeded nine years later, when he was named postmaster of Philadelphia. Not content with this accomplishment, he brought nearby post offices under his control as well and did not rest until he became the postmaster general for all the colonies, in 1753. In 1775 he switched his allegiance from the British crown to become the first postmaster general appointed by the Second Continental Congress. (The position of postmaster general today comes with the second-highest salary in the federal government, right after the president.)

The job of postmaster came not only with privileges but also with responsibilities, chiefly among them the postal roads. Franklin made significant improvements, cutting down the time it would take for mail to get from Philadelphia to New York (faster than it does today: a round trip in 24 hours).

The Boston Paper Party

Together, newspapers and pamphlets helped create the explosive mixture that would lead to the Declaration of Independence. All that was needed was a match. According to conventional wisdom, the match was the Boston Tea Party. The British had imposed taxes on the colonists even though the colonists had no representation in Parliament. In protest, freedom-minded Bostonians, disguised as Indians, threw newly taxed tea into Boston Harbor.

The story is true, but incomplete. The first tax imposed on the colonists that triggered widespread resentment was the so-called Stamp Act, which imposed a tax not on tea but on paper and printed matter. The Act hit at the center of the rapidly expanding colonial network of paper mills and printers, postal roads, and newspaper distributors. It was not the smartest way for the British to raise revenue because the colonial publishing industry fought back with all its newfound might. Newspapers ran front page stories about the injustice of the Stamp Act; some added black funereal frames, and one paper printed a gravestone across the front page. Printers boycotted, protested, decried, and openly defied the tax by using paper that had not been stamped. When paper exports to the colonies dropped 90 percent, the British Parliament relented and repealed the Stamp Act.

In ending the hated Stamp Act, Parliament did the right thing for the wrong reason. Thinking that the problem had been the structure of the tax (an external rather than an internal tax, a distinction suggested by Franklin himself), Parliament came up with the Townshend Acts, which still taxed paper, in addition to tea. Angry printers destroyed stamped paper publicly, in a kind of dress rehearsal for the Boston Tea Party, which could just as easily have been named the Boston Paper Party. The importation of paper almost ceased after 1765, when the First Colonial Congress imposed a systematic boycott on all imports from Britain, laying the foundation for the Second Colonial Congress to declare independence. (The paper Jefferson used for drafting the Declaration of Independence, however, was imported from a Dutch mill, probably via a British wholesaler.)

While Jefferson could take pride in having authored the Declaration of Independence, Franklin could take pride in the fact that he had created the print infrastructure that had made it possible. He also contributed the document’s most important phrase. Jefferson had opened the document with the sentence “We hold these truths to be sacred”; Franklin replaced “sacred” with “self-evident,” using a term favored by natural philosophers. Marie Antoinette, no doubt, would have found it strange that it was a printer who added a crucial word to the most important document of the Enlightenment. But then again, she didn’t know that the technology that would lead to her death was not the guillotine but the printing press.

* * *

Given the widespread anxieties caused by our own media revolution, from TikTok to AI, it may be good to remember how an earlier media revolution inadvertently enabled the founding of a nation. What effects, intended or unintended, will AI have on American democracy in the future? How will one media revolution change or amplify the effects of another? There’s no better time to ponder all this than today. Happy 4^th of July.

(This essay is partially adapted from my book The Written World, where I write about this episode at greater length.)

Dear Subscribers,

This week’s essay, which looks at AI from an arts and humanities perspective, is published in cooperation with Aeon Magazine, so I’m asking you to click over to read it on their site further below.

Since the essay was published there two days ago, it has garnered lots of reactions, many quite vehement (if you enjoy blood sports, click here). I’m tempted to say that these reactions confirm the essay’s diagnosis of AI resistance, but one type of reaction took me by surprise: several people who hated my argument attacked it by claiming that it was written by AI. I’ve come to believe that this mode of attack is actually quite interesting, namely a new species of the ad hominem fallacy: discrediting an argument by attacking who (or what) wrote it. Let’s call it the ad machinam fallacy. I think we’ll see a lot more of it in the coming years. You've heard it here first.

Actually, I now realize that I myself have been guilty of the ad machinam fallacy by occasionally calling out an essay or post I felt was written by AI. I should’ve focused on the merits of the arguments instead. So, I am hereby starting a campaign against the ad machinam fallacy. (This doesn’t mean we can’t reject AI slop, only that the ad machinam attack is not good argumentative practice.)

And now, please enjoy the essay, which was written, I swear, with loving attention to detail by yours truly (but that doesn’t mean my conclusions are correct):

Since artificial intelligence went mainstream a few years ago, it has done double duty as a political personality test: tell me what you think about AI, and I’ll tell you who you are. Those worried about climate change focus on energy consumption. Those who denounce late capitalism see it as the ultimate example of corporate monopoly. Those concerned about racism have warned about AI biases. Those studying the effects of colonialism see it as yet another form of exploitation. And those tending toward doom have seen ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok as the four riders of the apocalypse.

People in the arts and culture have felt particularly threatened by AI because the technology seems to be coming for the things they cherish the most: the creative use of images, words, and ideas. The latter two, words and ideas, have been in the centre of the storm because generative AI is based on language and because ideas are closely associated with the words in which they are expressed. In response, writers have largely opted for resistance, defending the genuine creativity of humans against the machines. My social media feeds have been flooded with AI-slop gleefully produced and circulated by colleagues hoping to prove that AI can’t be creative. Let’s call this the Creative Resistance.

Please continue reading this essay by clicking over to the Aeon site.

The more I teach logic in college writing classes, the more I see its failures out in the world. Take the tendency of labeling people snowflakes, soy boys, or groomers to question the integrity of their position. That’s a clear case of ad hominem, challenging the person making an argument rather than the argument itself. Or the rejection of compromise positions, such as background checks, out of fear that a small concession will inevitably lead to much more extreme outcomes, such as the outlawing of guns. This is the slippery slope fallacy, the fear that a single step in the wrong direction will lead to catastrophe. Or arguments against positions no one is actually arguing for. This is the straw man fallacy, caricaturing an opponent’s arguments in order to render them less strong.

A major problem in American political life is polarization. We have moved farther apart on key political issues such as immigration, abortion, tax policy or climate change. Many causes have been offered to explain this phenomenon: the geographic clustering of like-minded people, which reduces contact with people who think differently; the decline of civic associations, which further reduces opportunities to leave demographic bubbles; and social media algorithms that favor engagement, which ensures that posts inducing rage get preferred billing.

Logic points to an additional cause. We are living in a world shaped by the fallacy of the false dilemma. That is, complex realities are being reduced to two, and only two, positions.

But isn’t the logical diagnosis of polarization merely a way of describing the problem rather than identifying its root cause? If, for example, the true culprit is geographic sorting, vanishing civic organizations, or social media, won’t the solutions come from rectifying those causes? I suspect that this distinction between cause and symptom may be—you guessed it—a false dilemma. Political polarization is a complex phenomenon, of which faulty logic is one.

Describing polarization in terms of logic has several merits. First, it allows us to distill the problem more precisely. It enables us to see, for instance, that polarization dovetails with the two-party system, which forces us on election day to reduce complex reality into a binary choice. To be sure, the two-party system has existed for almost the entirety of US history (although it plays no role in the Constitution). But as long as each party functioned as a big tent containing multiple positions and as long as political culture allowed for cross-party initiatives, the two-party system worked reasonably well, leading to occasional realignments and even new parties. But when those practices disappear, the two-party system embeds a false dilemma into the structure of political life.

The false dilemma also allows us to understand another phenomenon: the linking of disparate political causes. Many people who are pro-religion are also against immigration, just as many who worry about the environment also are against AI. Many people who support Palestine also support gay rights, while many who are opposed to abortion are in favor of guns. But there is no obvious reason why these views should be linked. Yet increasingly, all these different political issues are lined up much more neatly than one would expect.

Progressives developed a term, intersectionality, to justify this phenomenon. Originally the term simply meant that different forms of disadvantage can be compounded, but over time it called for the linking of a whole array of social justice causes. But intersectionality is by no means limited to the left and can be found across the political spectrum. Either you buy this bundle of linked positions or that bundle; there is no other choice. From the point of view of logic, linking is the false dilemma squared. When disparate topics are linked within an already polarized world, it means that false dilemma thinking dominates not only each individual issue but all of them at once.

Logic is helpful in another way as well. Focusing on the other causes of polarization requires us to envision complex, collective solutions, such as changing housing policies, starting new civic organizations, keeping teenagers away from social media or founding new political parties. Each of these tasks seems daunting enough that this way of thinking about polarization can lead to despair. Focusing on logical fallacies, by contrast, reveals opportunities for immediate action. That’s because logical systems offer a training program for fighting against false dilemmas, a mental gym in which people can exercise the muscles they need to resist polarization. That’s what they were designed to do.

Logical Training from Around the World

The concept of the false dilemma is as old as logic itself, which means it’s been around for nearly 2500 years. At roughly the same time in history, systems of logical thought independently emerged in several regions of the world. They were developed specifically as a way to manage clashes in religions and worldviews. Logic emerged from conflict.

One of these logical systems was developed in ancient Greece, at a time when public life in Athens was divided between two groups: philosophers and sophists. In response, Aristotle developed a technique that would allow philosophers to debate their opponents more effectively. He noticed that many sophists offered their interlocutors false, artificial choices. Aristotle therefore sought to inoculate his followers against this practice by teaching them to pay attention to the very act of classification, to the ways we divide the world into categories. Such divisions can’t simply be posited; they must be challenged and grounded in reason. (The fact that we now use the term “sophist” pejoratively shows that Aristotle succeeded.)

In order to teach young people the tools of logic, he set up a school, called the Lyceum. In it he trained students to resist false dilemmas by showing, in many spheres of life, the importance of intermediary positions. Because his pedagogy involved arguing while taking long walks, his followers were called Peripatetics.

Another tradition of logic started in north India, when a prince, Siddhartha Gautama, began to challenge Hindu priests in public debates. From these challenges, Buddhism would emerge (starting in the 5^th century BCE). Over time, Buddhists developed rules of logic aimed at avoiding common mistakes in reasoning. Some Buddhist philosophers, including Nagarjuna (c. 150-250 CE), developed a “four corner” logic. Instead of reducing logic to a binary, X and not-X, he added two more positions: both X and not-X; and neither X nor not-X. In this way, reasoning was restructured to prevent false dilemmas from becoming entrenched.

Like Aristotle, Buddhists understood the power of training. They developed monasteries, most prominently in Tibet, that specifically trained young monks in the art of debate. Instead of arguing while walking, as the Peripatetics did, Buddhist monks met every afternoon in the debating courtyard to practice their art.

In response to the Buddhist challenge, Hindu Brahmins responded with a logic system of their own. The result was the Nyaya Sutra, a treatise on logic and debate, likely from the second century BCE. It tried to establish common ground for constructive debates among different traditions, with particular attention to sources and evidence. It recommends that debaters quote from scripture rather than hearsay and to rely on experts only if they have no reason to lie. But the Nyaya tradition also worries about false dilemmas, which occur when you treat a position and its opposite as exhaustive even when, as is the case so often, there are many more possible positions one might take.

All three of these logical systems were widely adopted. Buddhist traditions of logic traveled from India to Tibet and onto China, Korea, and Japan. The Sanskrit Nyaya tradition spread around the Indian subcontinent and into Indochina. Both may also have exerted some influence westward, to the Middle East and even Greece, although that vector of influence is harder to prove. Aristotle’s logic, for its part, went east. Forgotten in Europe, it would become enormously influential in medieval Baghdad, contributing to the flourishing of an Islamic debate tradition. Only in the 12^th and 13^th centuries would many parts of Aristotle’s logic return to Europe, establishing a debate tradition in European universities—and then to America. Until the late 18^th century, graduates of Harvard University had to defend their thesis in public, as part of commencement exercises. The language of debate was, naturally, Latin. (Those who watched Harvard’s commencement exercise last week might have noticed the Latin Address, sole remnant of this grand tradition.)

Much has changed since then, of course. Students aren’t expected to know Latin anymore, logic is now treated as a subspecialty of philosophy, and debate has become an extracurricular. But the tradition of logical debate is a tradition worth reviving. I’m not suggesting we sequester students in Tibetan monasteries and require them to learn four-corner logic. But I do believe that logic, that art developed in times of conflict, is a helpful tool for managing the conflicts of our own day.

While other causes of polarization, such as housing policy, social media, and the two-party system, seem impossible to change, logic is something each of us can practice in everyday life. We may be forced to make binary choices on election day, but on all other days of the year we can resist the false dilemmas that surround us. When confronted with a false dilemma, we can train ourselves to think of Aristotle and his campaign to question the wisdom of a given binary, or ponder the ways in which neither position is necessarily true, as Buddhist four-corner logic suggests. Or, when confronted with evidence such as a statistic or graph, we can wonder about its source and validity, as the Nyaya Sutra demands.

Given how deeply false dilemmas have shaped our thinking, it’s probably best to start our personal training programs with smaller, less consequential matters. Is it better to read a physical book or an e-book? Well, that depends on many factors, and sometimes an audiobook is the solution. Should schools teach facts or critical thinking? Well, you actually need to know some facts to engage in critical thinking. Only in a second step can we hope to carry the work of de-linking to the hot-button issues of our day, picking apart different strands and weaving them into new patterns.

Logic can’t solve all the problems that beset our world, including those that cause polarization. But it can train us to identify and resist false dilemmas when we encounter them, as we invariably will.

Editor’s Note (June 7, 2026): This essay has been updated to clarify the discussion of ad hominem arguments. The phrase “to question the integrity of their position” was added to make clear that the fallacy lies not in the use of labels themselves, but in using such labels as a substitute for engaging with an argument.

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Harvard has been in the news this week! The faculty voted to combat grade inflation by limiting the number of As assigned in each course. Harvard was the first university to take steps in addressing this rampant problem. Others will likely follow. The discussion of grade inflation raises larger questions about higher education, what students need to learn and which cognitive skills they should develop.

As it happens, I live with the person behind this initiative, Amanda Claybaugh, Dean of Undergraduate Education for Harvard College. I’m devoting this week’s newsletter to a behind-the-scenes interview with her.

- Grades had been creeping up for decades, but no one wanted to tackle it. It was almost like an embarrassing secret that people talked about in private. What made you decide the let the cat out of the bag?

It’s a good question! Grading was certainly not on my to-do list when I became Dean of Undergraduate Education. I was focused on more important things. I wanted to make sure our students were getting the full benefit of a liberal arts education, encountering an array of disciplines even as they focus on a single one. I wanted to make sure they were getting the full benefit of an education in a research university, learning about the cutting-edge work being done by faculty and also doing research of their own. And most of all, I wanted to help them see the connections between what they were learning in our classrooms and the things they want to do out in the world—and the people they want to become.

All faculty want these things for our students. But every time we took a step forward, we would stumble on the problem of grading. Faculty would redesign their courses to make them more meaningful, only to watch students choose less demanding courses instead; students would shy away from the courses that truly interested them, feeling compelled to take the courses that guaranteed an A. And so, I realized that we had to change our culture of grading before we could do anything else.

- As with monetary inflation, grade inflation is a difficult problem to tackle. Before proposing solutions, you needed to understand what had caused it. What were your conclusions?

Inflation’s a good metaphor, because it prompts us to think about what grades can buy. For students, As buy honors and prizes and admissions to medical school; for faculty, they buy higher course evaluations and larger course enrollments. As a result, there’s always been a strong incentive for students to push for—and faculty to award—more As than are deserved. Even though doing so inflates the currency dangerously.

This is a timeless dynamic, but it was intensified over the past 15 years or so by some new trends. First, new approaches to teaching. Some faculty replaced high-stakes exams with more frequent, lower-stakes assessments; some replaced exams and papers with creative assignments and group work; still others shifted to grading schemes that focused on assessing mastery of course material rather than differentiating student performance. In many cases, these changes improved the quality of our teaching, but they also increased the number of As we were giving out. Second, a new concern for the well-being of students. In recent years, faculty have been attentive to the fact that some of our students arrive at Harvard better prepared than others, that some of them have disabilities, that many struggle with mental health issues and stress. Concern for these students has made Harvard a more welcoming place, but it has also made faculty more reluctant to give a full range of grades. And of course, these trends weren’t limited to higher education. Similar things were happening in high schools, which meant that more and more of our students were arriving having never earned anything but As, and this made it even harder for faculty to grade rigorously.

Almost everyone saw the problem, but no one could solve it on their own. Faculty who grade harder than their peers risk lower evaluations and enrollments, just as students who choose challenging classes risk their ability to earn honors. (This year, a second A- was enough to disqualify a student from graduating summa cum laude). This is a classic collective action problem; it can only be solved by forced coordination. Recognizing this, the faculty committee I asked to address the grading issue arrived at the idea of a cap.

- Since you decided to call attention to the problem through your report on grading and education last fall, there has been a vigorous debate on campus and in the national press. What were the most common objections and how did you respond to them?

There was a lot of worry about student stress. I share the concern, but I think we should focus on helping students learn how to manage their stress, rather than trying to relieve them of it by giving out too many As. Because while it’s stressful to be, for instance, a pre-med, it’s also stressful to be a medical student or to practice as a doctor, holding life and death in your hands. And the same is true for the other career paths our students tend to pursue. Our students are stressed not because of anything we’re doing to them, but because they are very ambitious people who want to do great things in the world. And they can! But part of that is learning how to manage stress.

There was also a lot of worry about competition. Many students reported that they found their classmates to be collaborative and supportive, and they worried that a grading cap would change this. I can understand this concern, but I have more confidence in our students than that. After all, our athletes compete with one another for starting positions, but still play together as a team; our actors compete with one another for the best roles, then still work together to put on the show; and the same can be true in our classrooms as well.

Finally, there was a widespread sense that Harvard students deserve all those As. Some people cite the difficulty of getting into Harvard (with its 3% acceptance rate) and ask why we’re surprised when they earn a lot of As. But while it’s true that all our students are talented at something, it’s not true that they’re all equally talented at every discipline; we should still see more of a distribution of grades. Other people argue that professors should articulate standards and then give As to all the students who meet them—and that ideally all students would be able to do so. But we want to set a bar that not everyone can meet, and that’s because we want our students to do more than regurgitate what we’ve taught them. We want them to push themselves and surprise us with what they’re able to do, with their ability to ask new questions, discern new connections, make new discoveries. We don’t want to put a ceiling on their intellectual aspirations, but that’s just what the too-easy A can do.

- What surprised you the most in the debate about the proposal?

The variety of people’s responses. I’m an English professor, and I presumed that my fellow humanists would be leery of a grade cap while scientists would be in favor. But the reality was much less predictable. There was strong support for a cap among the faculty in the quantitative social sciences (economics, political science, psychology), but beyond that it was impossible to generalize by discipline. The only other pattern was that faculty who’d been educated abroad also tended to support the cap, which makes sense because grades in the United States are much more generous than elsewhere.

- Grade inflation has contributed to the erosion of trust in higher education—like monetary inflation, it devalues what it touches. How do you see this initiative shifting the political debate about higher education?

To be clear, I don’t think grading is the most important issue facing higher education, but I do think that reforming our grading will begin to restore trust. At the risk of sounding high-falutin, I’ll say that I believe universities have a crucial role to play in society. We serve as the arbiters of knowledge: we pursue the truth, we distinguish open questions from settled ones, and we strive to do so independent of power or profit or popularity. But when people see us give out As too easily—when they see us failing to distinguish the extraordinary from the excellent from the merely good—they have reason to doubt our judgments about knowledge as well.

Universities have another crucial role to play: we educate young adults and prepare them to lead. Schools like Harvard are fortunate enough to be richly endowed for this work. We hold a disproportionate share of the world’s educational resources (faculty and labs and libraries and the like), and we are able to attract a disproportionate share of the world’s most talented students. I don’t think people resent that we have those things so much as they expect us to steward them responsibly. But when some students start saying that they don’t really have to go to class, that it’s their extracurriculars that really matter, that they’re here mostly to network. . . well, it doesn’t sound like we are stewarding our resources responsibly. Put another way, every year we end up rejecting around 60,000 talented applicants; we have to make sure that the students we do admit make good use of what we have to offer.

Finally, there’s been a lot of talk in recent years about whether universities are capable of governing themselves. I think this vote shows that we are. Our faculty acknowledged a seemingly intractable problem, they grappled with it seriously, and they came together to solve it.

- Now that Harvard has gone public with the problem and implemented a solution, other universities are sure to follow. Based on your experience, what is your advice for colleagues at other institutions?

Ours is a Harvard-specific solution to a Harvard-specific problem. My understanding is that grade inflation is a problem across higher education, but I presume that the contours of the problem vary and so will the right solutions. The only thing I’d recommend is the value of research. Our proposal was designed by a committee of faculty who drew not only on their long experience as teachers but also on their expertise in their various fields. We had economists thinking about incentive structures, psychologists thinking about measurement, and a computer scientist who gathered the data set of all Harvard College grades in the 21^st century and modeled the outcomes of all proposed changes. The result was a proposal as rigorous as we’d expect faculty research to be, and that rigor ended up persuading their colleagues.

- You’ve said that tackling grade inflation is not an end in itself but the basis on which to address larger challenges facing higher education, especially with respect to AI. What are your plans?

Grading is such a straightforward problem compared to AI, which may well alter not only the way we produce knowledge, but also the way faculty teach and students learn. I’m going to spend the summer talking with colleagues, many of whom are already using AI in really interesting and creative ways, and we’ll see what kind of plans we come up with. Maybe you can interview me again when we know more!

Dean Claybaugh, thank you for this interview.

Among the (admittedly lesser) casualties of the war with Iran has been the Artemis II mission, whose recent trip to the moon was largely drowned out by the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz. Those news stories that did make it through rightly pointed out that this was the first trip to the moon since Apollo 17, in 1972. Much less attention was paid to the question of why we should send humans into space at all. Why not just send robots?

The best arguments in favor of human space travel emerged not during the historic Apollo 11 mission with its giant leap for mankind, but during Apollo 8, the first time that humans left terrestrial orbit and circled the moon, much as Artemis II did last month. One such argument was Earthrise, the photograph of the blue planet rising over the horizon of the barren moon, which has rightly become an icon of a globalized world, the fragility of our ecosystem, and the loneliness of our shared home. It was an entirely unexpected picture taken on the spur of the moment by one of the astronauts, William Anders.

All three astronauts brought back something even more unexpected: unusual experiences expressed in striking words. The astronauts on Apollo 8 rose to the historic occasion of their mission by capturing their unique experiences through what might be called the first space poetry. I wrote about this in the opening section of my book The Written World and want to share it here to remind everyone why it was important to send thinking, feeling, and speaking humans into space—as opposed to just dogs and apes, as had been the case before.

The unusual words astronauts found in December 1968—and ever since—to communicate what it feels like to be in space have another significance for us today, in the age of AI: these words demonstrate better than anything I can think of why it matters whether something was written by a human and rooted in actual experience—in this case, a truly novel experience for all of humankind.

With this in mind let me tell you what happened that December of 1968:

“Apollo 8. You are Go for TLI. Over.”

“We understand we are Go for TLI.”

By late 1968, terrestrial orbit had been going on for over a decade. Apollo 8 was the latest mission and had just spent two hours and twenty-seven minutes circling the earth without a major incident. But Frank Borman, James A. Lovell and William A. Anders were on edge. Their ship was about to attempt a new maneuver, TLI, trans-lunar injection. At any moment, they would speed up to 24,207 mph, faster than anyone had ever traveled before. But speed wasn’t what had them worried. They were pointing away from earth, ready to shoot straight into space. They were going toward the moon.

The mission of Apollo 8 was simple. They wouldn’t land on the moon; they didn’t even have a landing vehicle on board. They were to see what it was like, identify an appropriate landing site for a future Apollo mission, and bring back documentary photos and film material that experts could sift through.

Trans-lunar injection proceeded as planned, and Apollo 8 was heading into space. The farther they got, the better they could see what no one had ever seen before, the earth. Borman interrupted procedures to call out the landmasses that were rotating below him: Florida; the Cape; Africa. He could see them all at once. He was the first human ever to see the earth as a single globe.

As the earth was receding, getting smaller and smaller, the moon started to grow, but the astronauts had trouble seeing it because the windows kept fogging up, and it was almost impossible to position the capsule so that the camera could capture the moon. The picture quality wasn’t good. Ground control realized that they needed the astronauts to rely on a simpler technology: the spoken word. “We would like you, if possible, to go into as much of a detailed description as you poets can.”

Becoming poets was a task for which their training hadn’t prepared them and to which they brought no particular skills. They had made it through the ruthless selection process of NASA because they were the best fighter pilots and knew something about rocket science. Anders had gone to the Naval Academy and then joined the Air Force, where he had served as an all-weather interceptor at Air Defense Command. But now he needed to come up with the right words. He singled out the “lunar sunrises and sunsets.” “These, in particular, bring out the stark nature of the terrain,” he said, “and the long shadows really bring out the relief that is here and hard to see in this very bright surface that we are going over right now.” Anders was painting a stark picture of bright light hitting hard surfaces making precise shadows—perhaps his job as all-weather interceptor helped. He was becoming a poet in the great American tradition of imagism, perfectly suited to a stark and brilliant thing like the moon.

Lovell had also gone to the Naval Academy, after which he had joined the Navy; like the others, he had spent most of his life on air bases. In space, he showed a predilection for another school of poetry: the sublime. “The vast loneliness up here of the moon is awe-inspiring,” he ventured. Philosophers had reflected on the awe that nature could inspire; waterfalls, storms, anything grand, too grand to be neatly captured and framed, would serve. But they could not have imagined what it would be like to be out there, in space. It was the ultimate sublime, the awe-inspiring experience of vastness that was certain to dwarf them, crush them, make them feel small. Just as these philosophers had predicted, this experience made Lovell relish the safety of home. “It makes you realize just what you have back there on earth. The earth from here is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space.” Dr. Wernher von Braun, the Nazi who had become an American and who had built the rocket for Apollo 8, must have understood; he liked to say that a “rocket scientist is an engineer who loves poetry.”

Finally, there was Borman, their commanding officer. Borman had graduated from the United States Military Academy, entered the Air Force and become a fighter pilot. On board Apollo 8, he waxed eloquent: “It’s a vast, lonely, forbidding-type existence, or expanse of nothing.” Lonely, forbidding, existence, nothing: it sounded like Borman had been hanging out on the Left Bank of Paris, reading Jean-Paul Sartre.

By the time the three astronauts had become poets, they had arrived at their final destination: they were circling the moon. With every rotation, Apollo 8 disappeared behind the moon, where no one had ever been before, and they lost radio contact with earth each time. There was much nail biting in Houston, the Texas headquarters of ground control, during their first fifty-minute absence. “Apollo 8, Houston. Over.” “Apollo 8, Houston. Over.” Mission control kept calling, sending radio waves into space, but with no response. One, two, three, four, five, six times. The seconds, the minutes passed. Then, on the seventh try, they got an answer: “Go ahead, Houston. This is Apollo 8. Burn complete.” Ground control was audibly relieved and exclaimed: “Good to hear your voice.”

Over the next fifteen hours, the astronauts kept disappearing and reappearing, changing their position, maneuvering the capsule, trying to get some sleep, before they prepared to make their return to earth. Returning would require them to fire up the rocket on the dark side of the moon, without radio contact, in order to escape from the pull of the moon and gain enough momentum to make it back home. They had only one shot at it; if they failed they would be orbiting the moon for the rest of their lives.

Before that maneuver, they wanted to send a special message to earth. Borman had written it down on a fireproof piece of paper beforehand and had even made them rehearse. Not everyone seemed equally into the idea. Before the broadcast, Anders said, casually: “May I see that blurb – that . . . thing?” “The what, Bill?” Borman asked, somewhat passive-aggressively. This was not how he wanted them to be talking about their upcoming performance. “The thing we’re supposed to read?” Anders replied, more carefully. Borman let it go. All that mattered now was the reading itself.

They returned from the dark side of the moon and announced to Houston, “for all the people back on earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.” And then they read that message, even though they had fallen behind schedule and still faced the perilous final burn and return voyage to earth. Anders, the space imagist, began:

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth; and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said: ‘Let there be light’ and there was light. And God saw the light, and that it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness.

Despite their rehearsal, there was confusion about who was going next. Lovell thought that it was Borman and didn’t want to take the slip of paper. “You got it, Frank.” But Borman wanted to be last. “No, it’s your . . .” Lovell finally understood. He took the piece of paper, entirely weightless, and read:

And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters. And let it divide the waters from the waters.’ And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament and the waters which were above the firmament, and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Now it was Borman’s turn, but he had his hands full. “Can you hold this camera?” he asked Anders. But Lovell was closer and took it so that Borman could grab the piece of paper:

And God said, ‘let the waters under the heaven be gathered together into one place and let the dry land appear,’ and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.”

Back on earth, the audience was spellbound, all 500 million of them. It was the most-watched live transmission in the history of the world.

There had been doubts about the wisdom of sending men to the moon. Scientifically, an unmanned space probe would have been good enough. Or NASA could have used a chimp, which they had already done on previous missions. The first American in space had been Ham, a chimp from Cameroon, captured and sold to the United States Air Force. Between the Russians and the Americans, a whole zoo had been sent up there, as if on some Noah’s Ark: chimps; dogs; turtles.

But while the human Apollo crew didn’t contribute much to science, it did contribute to literature. Ham the chimp from Cameroon would not have shared his impressions about space. He would not have tried his hand at poetry. He would not have had a message upon reappearing from the far side of the moon. He would not have thought of reading the creation myth that expressed something of the experience of having left the orbit of the earth, having shot straight out into space and having been captured by the gravitational field of the moon. Seeing earth rise from afar was the perfect position for reading the most influential creation myth dreamt up by humans.

I am glad that as of spring 2026 we’re back in the neighborhood of the moon. The astronauts aboard Artemis II brought back new impressions and new images, including Earthset, a photo of earth setting into the horizon of the cratered moon, the perfect companion piece to Anders’s Earthrise.

In the right circumstances, with the right experiences, we can all become photographers, poets, and artists. It’s what we’re made to do.

Two years ago, at the tender age of 55, I took my first coding class and have been coding up a storm since then, admittedly with the constant assistance from helpful AI agents. I began by creating chatbots that allow users to speak to various philosophical and literary figures. Since then, I’ve been vibe coding an app that puts these philosophers in conversation with each other, fulfilling my lifelong dream of watching the greatest minds exchange arguments and ideas. My favorite is Socrates against the Buddha; they have their differences, to be sure, but they also seem to agree on some things. The Greek philosopher Lucian, by the way, had a similar idea and called it Dialogues of the Dead, which he placed in the underworld. At first I thought I was doing the same, but then a student pointed out that really it’s more like creating a Jurassic Park for philosophers. It’s time we brought the greatest minds in history back to life. God knows, we could use them.

Vibe coding has allowed me to speak to my favorite philosophers, but it has also introduced me to a mode of thinking that has been pretty alien to me: thinking like an engineer. At first, I assumed that creating an app was like writing a book, and in some sense it is. Both are concrete manifestations of ideas that need to be refined through a lot of trial and error. Just as with books, it’s crucial to get the right sequence of ideas and of interactions into the user interface of an app, and the underlying code with all its dependencies needs to be all in the right order. This is not so different from organizing sentences, paragraphs, and chapters in order to take readers from A to Z.

But the method is different. Words are more malleable. While there can be bugs in arguments, words let you fudge things to some extent. This is very much in contrast to code, which is more unforgiving: a single wrong turn can have cascading effects. This is why in coding so much time is spent repairing and debugging, fixing things. By the way, thank you very much, Claude Code.

As I was embarking on this second career as a vibe coder, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance popped into my mind. I had never actually read it, in part because I thought (wrongly, it turned out) that it contained a lot of New Age mumbo jumbo. But now that I was engaged in code maintenance, I finally cracked open the book’s spine, or rather, swiped my finger across my tablet.

It soon felt like the book had been waiting for me. I suspect that most passionate readers have had an experience like that. To be sure, we get a lot of other things out of reading, such as learning about the experiences of others, about places and manners, ideas and points of view we didn’t know before. But the main thing we chase is that rare moment when reading a book feels intensely personal, when someone’s voice is murmuring in our head and we begin to think, with surprise and gratitude, this was written for me.

On the face of it, there is little in the book that has anything to do with my own life. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is the story of a father who is taking his 12-year-old son, from whom he is estranged, on a motorcycle trip from Minneapolis through Montana to California. Along the way, he talks about what we would now call mindfulness: being attentive to the landscape that they drive through, the physical hardship of spending all day on a motorcycle and of camping in the wild, the state of mind that can come when you’re hiking up a mountain and you stop thinking about the goal and just take go one step at a time.

During his ride with his son through the American West, Pirsig grapples with his troubled past. He’d been a graduate student in philosophy, hoping to create a grand synthesis between Plato and Aristotle; but as he has also worked as a writing instructor, he is inwardly arguing against Socrates’ attacks on rhetoric. We also gather that Pirsig has suffered a breakdown, has gone through electroshock treatment, and now retains only fragmentary access to his former self, which he refers to as Phaedrus, one of Socrates’ opponents.

It’s in this situation that Pirsig develops the practice of motorcycle maintenance. The protagonist always fusses with his engine, listening to every change in sound, worrying about what it means, keeping every piece of the machine in tip-top shape. If you ride a motorcycle, you need to learn the art of motorcycle maintenance, diagnosing problems, catching them before they become more severe. Pirsig is as skeptical as anyone of relying too much on technology, which for him, writing in the early 1970s, meant TV and cheap manufactured goods. But that doesn’t prevent him from extolling the engineering mindset required to become a mindful user of tools. That’s the Zen of motorcycle maintenance.

While reading the book, I kept wondering what Pirsig would think of vibe coding. Probably he would see in my reliance on Claude Code a violation of his own Thoreau-inspired ideal of self-reliance. Certainly, without AI, I would fall flat on my face, coding-wise, and my projects would sputter and quickly grind to a halt. And yet, I have found his book to be something like a spiritual guide to coding. Vibe coding doesn’t just mean outsourcing coding to an AI agent. Because good AI agents are providing a running commentary on what they are doing, and why they are doing it, vibe coding is like an introduction to the engineering mindset for the uninitiated. As a lifelong writer and humanist, I had always been vaguely dismissive of the mechanical world and am now, in late middle age, slowly learning to appreciate mechanical maintenance as a mindset of great subtlety.

My favorite scene in the book is when Pirsig watches a welder at work:

When I show it [the broken chain guard] to him [the welder] he nods and slowly goes over and sets the regulators for his gas torch. Then he looks at the tip and selects another one. Absolutely no hurry. He picks up a steel filler rod and I wonder if he’s actually going to try to weld that thin metal. Sheet metal I don’t weld. I braze it with a brass rod. When I try to weld it I punch holes in it and then have to patch them up with huge blobs of filler rod. “Aren’t you going to braze it?” I ask.

“No,” he says. Talkative fellow.

He sparks the torch, and sets a tiny little blue flame and then, it’s hard to describe, actually dances the torch and the rod in separate little rhythms over the thin sheet metal, the whole spot a uniform luminous orange-yellow, dropping the torch and filler rod down at the exact right moment and then removing them. No holes. You can hardly see the weld. “That’s beautiful,” I say.

“One dollar,” he says, without smiling.

The welding scene stuck in my mind because it made me think that perhaps vibe coding would be fine with Pirsig after all, since he did have to rely on the welder. Total autonomy is impossible; what matters is the attitude of mindfulness toward engineering.

Pirsig learns a thing or two from the welder, but the two pieces he himself welds together are right in the book’s title: Zen and technology. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, Westerners seeking enlightenment in the East tended to be luddites hoping to escape the trappings of the modern world. Pirsig does the opposite. Instead of pitting ancient Zen against modern technology, he combines the two in ways that strike me as prophetic.

Varanasi

It so happens that I finished Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in Varanasi (Banares), where Pirsig went to study for a while. Fittingly, he didn’t go to the many traditional ashrams that line the Ganges River and instead studied at Banaras Hindu University (BHU), an institution founded in the early twentieth century with the explicit purpose of combining traditional Sanskrit learning and Ayurvedic medicine with modern science and technology. When I asked colleagues at BHU whether they were aware of the impact their institution had on Pirsig and his unlikely bestseller, the name didn’t ring a bell. For them, he was just one more Westerner coming through to learn something from them and then disappear.

It was sheer coincidence that I happened to be Banares while thinking about Pirsig—and I did a bit of vibe coding right here as well, in his honor. Inspired by Pirsig’s study of Zen Buddhism, I also spent a day at nearby Sarnath, the place where the Buddha first preached to a small group of followers. During the entire visit, I kept thinking about Pirsig’s desperate, moving book. It struck me that it captures what I want to cultivate through In Practice: putting philosophy—here Socrates and the Buddha—to use in real life, bringing insights from cultural history to bear on the world we live in today.

As we cruise through life, we repair our lives with the tools at hand, welding what we need on the road or getting others to weld them for us. This is what culture is meant to be: a collection of tools for life that we can use along the way. Figuring out what we need requires a particular form of attentiveness that might be called life maintenance.

Throughout the current war with Iran and Donald Trump’s threats to destroy “a whole civilization,” I kept thinking about neighboring Iraq. It is a country that has come closer than most—during its bloody war with Iran, Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, the US invasion, and subsequent civil war—to being destroyed.

I had gone to Iraq in the fall of 2022, eager to visit archaeological sites connected to early Mesopotamian civilization, in whose wake most humans live today. But something else happened during my visit that touched me even more: observing how a civilization decimated by war was slowly rebuilding itself.

Baghdad

In Baghdad, the first stop of my itinerary, the traces of the city’s bloody history were still visible. In the Green Zone, once the center of US presence, cars and signs were still riddled with bullet holes. Other places bore traces of earlier conflicts and changing political realities. A monument to the fallen in the war against Iran still existed, but was now cordoned off and all but abandoned; it no longer fit the new reality of close ties with Iran. A gigantic mosque begun by Saddam Hussein stood there, empty and incomplete, another remnant from recent history with no clear purpose now.

Apart from the bullet holes in the Green Zone, it is hard to tell that Americans were ever here. All that is left after the twenty years of military and cultural presence are some troops stationed at Ain Al Asad Air Base, which has come under fire during the current war with Iran, and, holed up in one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces outside Baghdad, a campus of the American University of Iraq.

The influence of Iran, on the other hand, is everywhere. Baghdad is effectively controlled by different militias that have divided the city among them, some with close ties to Iran. Entering these sectors often involves lengthy negotiations at improvised roadblocks. But Iran’s main influence is religious. My visit coincided with Arbaeen, the largest festival in Shia Islam, which marks the end of the forty-day mourning period commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. During this period, twenty million pilgrims walk to Karbala, about seventy miles south of Baghdad. Among them, several million come from Iran. When I landed, Baghdad airport was filled with these pilgrims, all dressed in black and carrying flags. Most arrive by bus, however, and the newspapers were full of reports of enraged visitors having trouble crossing the border, a sign, perhaps, that Iranian influence is incomplete.

Baghdad was transformed by the pilgrims. Much of the city seemed eerily empty, except for the areas around the great Shia mosques. The highways leading from Baghdad to Karbala were closed to cars and filled by the pilgrims, a giant organism on the move day and night. The road sides were lined with tents put up by volunteers offering shelter and food.

While the religious festival is a sign of realignment with Iran, Iraq is also seeking to re-connect to its own Arabic past. Take, as an example, Al-Mutanabbi Street. Named after a 9^th-century Arabic poet, it had recently been rebuilt to foster literary culture. Book sellers had set up stalls outside, while larger, more formal bookstores had opened up as well and were hosting literary readings. People told me that thanks to improved security, the street was now open all evening. A strange assortment of books in English and Arabic lay side by side, prominently among them the works of William Shakespeare as well as autobiographies by Michelle Obama and Adolf Hitler.

Not far from here was another structure that had been recently rebuilt and was, like Al-Mutanabbi Street, overlooking the Tigris: Bayt al-Hikmah, or House of Wisdom. Its origins go back to the 9^th century, when it was the place where Indian mathematics, Persian stories, and Greek philosophy were translated and assimilated into Arabic thought (and ultimately transmitted to Europe). Today, the rebuilt institute works as an academy of arts and sciences. A representative whom I met told me that part of its remit was a program in translation, in honor of the original House of Wisdom. It’s an attempt to reconnect Baghdad to a time when it was a center of learning.

Towering above all these efforts was Baghdad’s tallest building, a new tower for the National Bank of Iraq designed by the Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid. In part because of a fear of snipers, Baghdad has strict limits on how tall buildings are allowed to be. But for this building, which is reshaping the skyline of the city, those limits have been suspended. I couldn’t help but see it as a sign of confidence, or perhaps an attempt on the part of a still fragile government to project strength.

While Al-Mutanabbi Street, the House of Wisdom, and the bank tower were government-funded projects, other efforts in cultural rebuilding were private. A gallery, helpfully called The Gallery, exhibited contemporary art, most of it created by artists living in Iraq, as the owner told me, as opposed to Iraqis living in exile. The artworks, primarily paintings and installations, were of the highest quality and could hold their own against most of what I have seen in New York’s Chelsea district. They were informed by a kind of international contemporary style, but also in conversation with Baghdad’s past.

Not all efforts at rebuilding have been equally successful. The Iraqi National Museum is famous for its holdings from Mesopotamian civilization, including stunning sculptures and some of the earliest examples of writing, objects that had originally drawn me here. During the first chaotic days of the US occupation, the museum had been badly raided, with untold artifacts stolen and sold on the black market. With great effort, the museum had managed to recover many of these artifacts, as its director proudly told me. I found it extremely moving to see them all back together again.

But it was also a bittersweet experience. Understandably, the museum was now heavily guarded, including by tanks. It was also, sadly, empty of visitors, at least the day I visited. I felt as if the past had been pieced together again, but that no one knew what to do with it.

Erbil

Erbil, the capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in the north, was a different world. More stable and secure, Erbil is where all the international NGOs and commercial companies who want to do business in Iraq have set up their headquarters. The result is a housing boom that has produced a new city virtually overnight at a pace I would expect to see only in China. If cultural rebuilding in Baghdad takes place in the shadow of Iran, in Erbil it takes place in the shadow of international capital.

An old citadel had been carefully restored and turned into a cultural center. It hosts different arts festivals on a tight rotation, including a recent film festival that has garnered significant international interest, especially from France and Germany. Different artists have set up shop here as well. The main bazar, which reminded me vaguely of Istanbul’s Grand Bazar, was doing brisk business.

Despite the boom, people here worry, and with good reasons. The political arrangements that give the Kurdish region some degree of autonomy is always fragile and depends on international support. Turkey has set up a security area not too far from here, part of its long-standing battle with its own Kurdish minority. Relations with the Kurdish minority across the border with Iran are complicated. For the time being—a phrase people here use a lot—for the time being, rebuilding is taking place at a dizzying speed, as if to make sure as much as possible gets done before things come to a stop again.

Mosul

Just a few hours by car is the city of Mosul. It is here that I encountered the most moving efforts in cultural rebuilding.

Much more so than in Baghdad, the wounds of war were visible everywhere. Because Mosul is close to the border with Syria, the city had fallen within the ISIS sphere of influence; eventually, ISIS had occupied the city and set up its headquarters here. Most of the destruction happened at the end of ISIS rule, when a drawn-out urban battle involving the Iraqi Army as well as a US-led coalition of forces reconquered the city house by house, street by street. Even now, many houses and bridges were still riddled with bullet holes.

These wounds of war made the signs of rebuilding stand out all the more. UNESCO had begun financing a rebuilding effort in the old town, which included private buildings and mosques. The restored buildings, some newly painted in white, stood out as if to advertise that something new was happening here after decades of destruction.

The most moving effort of rebuilding involved ordinary Iraqis. A group of young professionals had managed to obtain use of a villa on the banks of the Euphrates River and had turned it, through great collective effort and enthusiasm, into what they called a Culture House. It contains small historical exhibits, an intriguing example of a 3D animation of some of Mosul’s destroyed buildings, and a meeting hall for lectures and discussions. People were flocking to it, eager to take the rebuilding of culture into their own hands. “We can’t wait any longer,” one of the organizers told me. “We need to rebuild our culture now.”

For most of history, the Galápagos Archipelago, located some 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, was ignored by humans. The first of our species to set foot on these islands were sailors aboard a Spanish vessel blown off course in 1535. They found that only a few islands had fresh water and none offered much in the way of food except for giant tortoises. For the next several hundred years, fresh water and tortoise soup remained the only attractions for the occasional ships that stopped for provisions. From time to time, British pirates would anchor and set up improvised settlements, forming the islands’ indigenous population, and whalers would pass through on the hunt for sperm whales, then a major source of fuel before the age of oil. When, in 1832, Ecuador annexed the islands, no one batted an eye. Nor did anyone particularly care when the United States briefly established a naval base during WWII. The islands simply weren’t important enough to matter.

And yet, the Galápagos Islands have come to ignite the imagination, a travel destination that draws visitors by suggesting it is special, that it matters for the world. Part of the attraction is that this archipelago is so remote, isolated in the vast Pacific Ocean, but that is not all. Galápagos is a place charged with meaning and significance—a place that matters.

The person who set this transformation in motion was the young Charles Darwin, who encountered Galápagos in September of 1835 aboard the Beagle. He was not impressed:

Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance. A broken field of black basaltic lava, thrown into the most rugged waves, and crossed by great fissures, is everywhere covered by stunted, sun-burnt brushwood, which shows little signs of life. The dry and parched surface, being heated by the noon-day sun, gave to the air a close and sultry feeling, like that from a stove: we fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly. Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, chapter XVII.

Having expected a tropical paradise situated on the equator, Darwin found a harsh world made of sharp volcanic rock and inhabited by relatively few species. Entire classes, such as mammals, were missing except for sea lions, which had effectively decided to become fish again.

Once Darwin had gotten over his disappointment, he realized that the islands’ very poverty was actually an advantage. It allowed him to focus on the few species that actually existed and observe them more closely. They all resembled species from the mainland, suggesting that they had migrated there at some point rather than being created in situ, as the prevailing theory had it. And once those species had migrated to Galápagos, they must have been forced to adapt to much harsher conditions. After Darwin returned home and brooded over what he had encountered, he realized that Galápagos was like a laboratory of evolution, which helped him work out his theory of natural selection.

This, too, might have been the end of the story, with Galápagos becoming a minor curiosity in the annals of science, like the site of Kepler’s telescope or Freud’s consulting rooms in Vienna—fun facts for historians and pilgrimage sites for occasional enthusiasts, nothing more.

How then did the Galápagos Islands become more than a random stop on Darwin’s itinerary? It’s a process that began with what might be called a migration of meaning by which the islands shifted from being the place where Darwin happened to figure out his theory of evolution to becoming a place considered crucial for evolution itself. Visitors could come here to observe evolution at work by looking at the islands’ species through Darwin’s eyes.

There is no strict logical reason for this. Evolution can, in principle, be observed everywhere equally. Darwin himself would likely have developed his theory of natural selection even if he had never set foot on Galápagos, just as Alfred Russel Wallace arrived at similar conclusions by studying a completely different archipelago, in Malaysia. But this migration of meaning suggests that something special is going on here, as if not only Darwin, but evolution itself, neededthe Galápagos Islands and that coming here, you can somehow observe not just the origin of Darwin’s theory but the origin of evolution itself.

This process happened over time, as Darwin’s theory of evolution became more broadly accepted and more firmly attached to these islands. Another crucial step in this process occurred when, in 1959, the Ecuadorian government turned the islands into a national park. Many islands were declared off limits to humans entirely and habitats for endangered species were restored. Galápagos began to brand itself as an exemplar of eco-tourism, the place where a new relationship between humans and nature was being established.

During my recent visit, we were advised not to touch anything, including the animals, in order to minimize human intervention. However, it became clear very quickly that this idea of untouched nature was highly artificial. Invasive species such as rats and cats are everywhere being trapped and exterminated. Cactuses are planted so that the islands’ iguanas (Conolophus subcristatus) will eat them rather than saplings of trees or, heaven forbid, the eggs of the blue-footed booby (Sula nebouxii), one of the main tourist attractions. And this is nothing compared to what is being done to the giant tortoises (Chelonoidis niger), whose eggs are dug out and put in incubators, where they are kept at a temperature that ensures that they will yield at least 70% females, to maximize reproduction. Galápagos is a giant experiment in creating not nature but a Darwinian theme park of natural selection. In this it resembles nothing so much as Jurassic Park, whose location on an imaginary island in the Pacific was surely inspired by Galápagos as well.

As a place where natural selection can be observed as if in a laboratory, Galápagos also became a project screen for all the ways in which Darwin’s theory is used and abused. Visitors intrigued by sexual selection can admire the red balloons produced by the male Frigatebirds (Fregata magnificens) hoping to attract female mates, or the mating dance of the blue-footed boobies as they show off their ridiculously colored feet to each other, completely oblivious of the groups of humans that are standing right next to them. If, on the contrary, they are more interested in the cruelty of nature and the survival of the meanest, Galápagos offers everything from several species of sharks to aquatic and terrestrial lizards that look at you with pitiless eyes and who would devour you in an instant if only they were as big as dinosaurs.

It isn’t just animals that can be observed in a state of natural selection; homo sapiens sapiens can be as well. This happened as far back as the 1930s, when several Europeans, uprooted by the Great Depression, landed on Galápagos and became, without realizing it, one more test case of evolution. First a German couple landed on Floreana Island, where the Ecuadorian government allowed them to settle, to eke out a living. Soon another family arrived, and finally an eccentric baroness made a grand entrance, flanked by her two lovers. The press became fascinated with the doings of these inhabitants: could Galápagos become a place where humans would figure out how to live in a new way? Alas, the answer was no. The three groups started to fight, one of them was killed, and only one family, the Wittmers, remained, winning this particular Galapagan struggle for survival. On the plus side, the story became the material for a recent Netflix series, Eden (2024), starring Jude Law and Vanessa Kirby.

The person who caught on to these different layers of meaning was the American writer Kurt Vonnegut. Best known for his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, with its grueling depiction of the bombing of Dresden during WWII, which he had witnessed as a prisoner of war, Vonnegut wrote his novel Galápagos with a similarly dark view of humans. Only here, he wanted to depict our destructive capacity on the larger canvas of human evolution, which drew him, inevitably, to Galápagos. The novel takes place against the background of a global economic depression, which is followed by a pandemic that renders women infertile, spelling a sudden end to the human race.

There is one exception, the Galápagos Islands, where a tourist boat becomes a new Noah’s ark, and evolution starts anew. But evolution needs to solve the problems of human destructive capacity, which Vonnegut blames on our giant brains. Over the next million years, natural selection wields its magic as the surviving humans slowly adapt to fishing, which they do by shrinking their brains down to a more hydrodynamic form. Their opposable thumbs, which along with brain power had brought so much mischief into the world, are turned into flippers. This way, humans can now compete with sea lions, fellow mammals optimized for diving and catching fish. The rest of the time, humans are just hanging out on lava rocks, doing no one any harm.

Strikingly, Vonnegut’s evolutionary fantasy includes AI. By 1985, humans have invented a hand-held device that offers immense knowledge in a patronizing tone of smug knowingness. Medical advice is freely given and often ignored. The device also offers resonant quotes from world literature that are utterly predictable and banal. One character gives up on her beloved hobby of arranging flowers when she realizes that AI can do it much better at the push of a button. It’s all part of the giant brain problem, which evolution, or rather Vonnegut, solves by sending the last surviving AI device into the ocean. Galápagos is where humans, that most invasive of species, have come to die.

I don’t quite share Vonnegut’s dark view of humanity, nor his dismissal of AI, however prescient he may have been about some of its effects. But Vonnegut caught on to the fact that Galápagos has become a focal point, a place where we hope to see the history of the world, from volcanic eruptions to evolution, as in a laboratory and where we need to figure out a new path into the future.

In this, it reminded me of the remote mountain monastery I had visited last summer in Bhutan called The Tiger’s Nest (which I wrote about in an earlier post). During that visit, I had met the writer Kinley Dorji, who describes in his book Within the Realm of Happiness how the monastery came to be seen as a nye, using a Bhutanese term that combines the idea of nerve centers in the human body, as used in acupuncture, with that of a sacred site. Even though the Galápagos Islands are not a religious site and are located far from Bhutan, a landlocked mountain kingdom halfway around the world, I have come to think of them as another nye of the world, a nerve center where the past and the future of humanity converge into a single point.

Not too long ago, I found myself standing at the top of a ridge that jutted out into the ocean. To my left was the Persian Gulf, to my right the Gulf of Oman, and straight ahead, about fifty miles as the drone flies, was Hormuz.

The ridge belongs to Oman, even though it is not contiguous with the rest of the kingdom, whose bulk is located farther down the Arabian Peninsula. Because of its strategic location, it has long been inaccessible to tourists. Military installations monitored the comings and goings of ships through the Strait.

This state of affairs started to change in the 2000s, when the area cautiously opened up to tourism. A new road was built and a hotel opened. Visitors from the United Arab Emirates, especially nearby Sharjah and Dubai, could visit and spend the night. This is what I did with a friend, Paulo Horta, who lives in Abu Dhabi. We drove up through Sharjah and, after sorting out some visa problems (entirely my fault), took the winding road along the coast to the small town of Khasab, which boasts the largest natural harbor in the area.

The ridge is breathtakingly beautiful with steep, inaccessible mountains, some over 6,000 feet high. People call it the Norway of Arabia. Unlike the fjords of Norway, the ridge looks across at Iran, cut off but also connected by trade. The harbor is busiest very early in the morning, when countless small motorized boats return from the other side, part of a robust smuggling operation that has existed here forever but that has taken on particular urgency since 2006, when different forms of sanctions were imposed on Iran. When the smuggling was done for the day, we were able to rent a boat and spent the day cruising the fjords. Friendly dolphins were following us and we even managed to scramble up one of the peaks.

On a map, the ridge looks like the point of a needle, which is fitting since I think of it as an instrument that registers the state of global trade. While I was standing there all seemed calm, but I could feel the needle quivering ever so slightly. The breathtaking beauty and the friendly dolphins couldn’t quite hide the tensions that were being registered subliminally.

A Seismograph of Geopolitics

Control of the Strait of Hormuz has always been a balance between keeping things flowing and interrupting that flow. History shows that it’s not that easy to shut the Strait down entirely. Even now, during the current war with Iran, the odd oil tanker is making it through, and I suspect that some of the small smuggling boats might still be active as well. The needle is a seismograph of geopolitics.

It’s a seismograph with a history. There were reminders of this history all along the coast, ruins of villages and even forts nestled at the foot of these steep mountains, accessible only by boat, blending in perfectly with the earthen tones of the landscape. Most prominent is a fort the Portuguese built in the 17^th century, and Hormuz, on the other side, has remnants of Portuguese settlements as well. They are part of a pattern I have been noticing in recent years. Seemingly whenever I have found myself at strategic locations throughout the globe, I’ve stumbled across f Portuguese forts, from San Domingo, near Taipei, to Goa, in India. There are others I haven’t visited, including A Famosa, which controls the Strait of Malacca, the busiest spice route in the world, and Massawa, which controls the mouth of the Red Sea.

[Video by Martin Puchner, Musandam Peninsula]

The Portuguese recognized the Strait of Hormuz as a chokepoint of geopolitics and trade. It’s a chokepoint much like the Khyber Pass, the gateway between Central Asia and India, or the Thermopylae, the narrow coastal pass between Greece and Persia, all places where empires clash over and over again. Discussions of European empires and their aftermaths have been focused largely on England and France, with their thirst for occupying large swaths of land. But before them came the Portuguese, who had a very different strategy. Instead of occupying land, they focused on controlling access, which is why they focused on the chokepoints of global trade—places like Hormuz.

A Poet of Global Trade

The Portuguese identified these global chokepoints by interviewing returning sailors, traders, soldiers, and spies and then turned all this information into a new geopolitical view of the world. There was another profession crucial for this endeavor: poets. Or rather, there was one poet, Luis de Camoes (c. 1524-80), the first writer to realize that the map of the world was being redrawn. Camoes was in a good position to do so because he started out as a soldier and adventurer, living for sixteen years between the new imperial outposts in Goa, Malacca, Macao, and Mozambique. His work, an epic called The Portuguese (Os Lusíadas), would capture the imagination of the burgeoning Portuguese trading empire.

Camoes’s models were classical, above all the Odyssey with its famous sea-faring hero, but unlike previous writers, Camoes wasn’t overawed by Homer. On the contrary, he was struck by how provincial the Greek epic was: Odysseus puttered around the eastern Mediterranean, while he had rounded the Cape of Good Hope, crossed the Arabian Sea to Goa, and ventured as far east as Macao. Yes, Homer had created the great blueprint for how to write about wars and sea voyages, but Portuguese sailors had far outdone their Greek predecessors. Camoes decided it was time for Portuguese poets to do the same.

Camoes proceeded to write a new kind of epic, one that showed the Portuguese going “where no man has gone before,” which would become the famous slogan of Star Trek. Camoes’s Captain Kirk was Vasco da Gama, the first Portuguese to round the Cape of Good Hope. Camoes’s epic follows him all the way up the Eastern coast of Africa and finally, after many travails, across the Arabian Sea to Goa, India.

Of course it wasn’t true that no man had gone to Goa before. Lots of people had, including Arab sailors. Even Camoes had to admit that it was an Arab navigator who helped the hapless da Gama find his way across the Arabian Sea. Once the Portuguese arrived in India, they had another surprise waiting for them. The locals laughed at the poor quality of the wares the Portuguese had brought to trade, especially textiles. The only thing that was impressive about the Portuguese was the size of their ships and the firepower of their cannons. Over time they managed to control trading outposts and eventually figured out what the Goans were actually willing to buy.

There was one problem: the Arab navigators who had hitherto dominated naval trade didn’t want to give up control. The Portuguese were therefore drawn into a long-term war of attrition for dominance of the Arabian Sea. The war was in full force when Camoes, following in da Gama’s wake some seventy years later, may have found himself in these waters. By this time, the Portuguese had learned to focus their cannons on a few well-chosen chokepoints, above all the entrances to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, the two key access routes for the Arabian Sea trade.

Camoes describes those chokepoints toward the end of his epic poem, when he captures how Portuguese sailors would make their way out of the Red Sea and around the Arabian Peninsula and into the Strait of Hormuz to make battle with Arab ships and armies:

Look at Dhofar, renowned because it sends
Its fragrant incense to the altars of the church;
And notice this: just on the other side
Of Ras al-Hadd and all its barren shores,
Begins the kingdom of Hormuz, which then extends
Along the coasts that will one day be famous
When the galleys of the Turk and all his fleet
Must face the naked sword of Castelbranco.

Look at Cape Asaboro, which is now called
Musandam by the navigators;
Through here enters the gulf that has a chokehold
On the abundant lands of Persia and Arabia.
And here is Bahrain, whose waters are adorned
With precious pearls that imitate
The color of the dawn; and see as well
The Tigris and Euphrates find their way into the salty sea. (Translation is mine)

It’s a bit of a cheap trick on the part of Camoes to be “predicting” what he knows full well will happen, namely that the Portuguese, under Castelbranco, will fight “the Turk,” by which he means Muslim forces, for supremacy. It is likely that Camoes himself participated in some of the battles at the Strait of Hormuz, which would explain the precision with which he captures this terrain and its importance for trade, the incense of Dhofar (in Oman), the pearls of Bahrain, the brackish delta where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet the gulf, and above all the Strait of Hormuz, which holds those two immensely rich lands, Arabia and Persia, in its grip. His “Asaboro” is Qushm Island, which was bombed last week, and his “Musandam” is where I scrambled up a mountain to have a look across the Strait.

What matters more than the question of how much time Camoes spent in the Strait of Hormuz is that he turned the experience into the first global epic. He and his manuscript were almost lost to the world when his boat was shipwrecked by a typhoon (a word the Portuguese adopted from the Chinese ta feng) in the South China Sea. But with luck and grit and the help of locals who rescued him in the Mekong Delta he eventually made it back home.

What his epic, which is largely forgotten outside the Portuguese-speaking world, ushered in was a vision of a multipolar world order focused on the control of trade routes and their contested chokepoints. The forts the Portuguese built in these locations are largely in ruins. But the world they created, and which Camoes was the first to describe, is the world we are living in today.

During a recent trip to Rome, I walked past the column of Marcus Aurelius, the famous Roman emperor (161-180). Some key things were missing. The column, built by his son, had originally featured statues of Marcus Aurelius and his wife, Faustina, at the very top, but now only the statue of Faustina remained. Also absent was Marcus Aurelius’s most lasting accomplishment. The column was covered with reliefs depicting Marcus Aurelius leading armies in Eastern Europe, where he won his most dramatic victories, but there were no depictions of him writing.

And yet, it is as a writer and philosopher that Marcus Aurelius is remembered today. In particular, as the author of Meditations, which record his attempts to discipline his mind and cultivate moral clarity amid the pressures of life in Rome. To be sure, the work’s influence has gone up and down, but in recent years the movement has been pointing upwards again. During the first Covid spring of 2020, sales of the Penguin Random House edition of Meditations spiked 28% , which came on the heels of a steep increase from approximately 16,000 in 2012 to 100,000 in 2019.

Marcus Aurelius is not alone. The past fifteen years have been good for the Stoics. The Stoic Reddit community has grown from a few hundred subscribers in 2012 to more than 600,000 in 2024, and Google Trends data shows a 600% rise in search interest over the past five years. Where is this interest coming from?

It’s not coming from exciting new research into Marcus Aurelius, nor a sudden increase in college students taking philosophy classes. The popularity of the Stoics is yet another example of a humanities-related trend taking place outside academia.

One driver of this popularity is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), whose founders, Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis, cited the Stoics as a key influence. Even though Stoic philosophy presented a complicated cosmology, including a belief in a rational cosmos, what makes it so useful for therapeutic practice is its focus on daily habits and routines designed to change one’s inner attitudes, to accept adversity calmly and focus only on what one can control. Since CBT has become the dominant therapeutic orientation among both researchers and practitioners, who use it in individual therapy, for community service, and in hospitals, it has brought the Stoics along as well.

Thanks to CBT, references to specific Stoic techniques can be found in broader wellness and mental health contexts as well. Many therapists advise patients to envision the adverse outcomes they fears most. The Stoics called this premeditatio malorum, imagining—or pre-meditating on—bad things. Other exercises include reflective pauses and attention to one’s underlying values during a crisis. The very act of writing down daily observations, also known as journaling, is another Stoic practice that is being recommended by mental health professionals today. Many of these techniques are part of the Daily Stoic movement initiated by Ryan Holiday and promoted in his book The Daily Stoic (2016). And yes, there are also several Stoa-inspired mindfulness apps. (Full disclosure: I have been working on philosophical chatbots, one of them based on Marcus Aurelius. More about this project in a future post.)

What is it about these ancient philosophers that has enabled them to speak to our current moment?

The two most prominent Stoics couldn’t have been more different. Epictetus was born into slavery and later gained his freedom. Throughout this volatile life, he found that true freedom was a matter of controlling his inner reactions rather than letting himself be controlled by external events. He spent the rest of his life promoting a practice of regulating his emotions and detaching them from events outside his own control.

One might expect this kind of attitude to be appealing primarily to the powerless, but that is clearly not the case, given that the other great Stoic was Marcus Aurelius. Even though he was arguably the most powerful person in the world when he ruled the Roman Empire from 161-180 AD, and therefore should have felt that he could control his surroundings better than anyone, he came to the same conclusion. Like Epictetus, he developed a practice of detaching himself from the external world. Perhaps his position as Emperor actually helped him see just how unstable that world really was. Be that as it may, his Meditations are a classic of Stoic practice, which is why they became such an instant hit during COVID.

It’s not a bad sign for a philosophical school to count both former slaves and former emperors among its members, a compelling argument that there is wisdom for everyone to be found. (Other important Stoics include Zeno, from whom no work has survived, and Seneca, the Roman statesman and dramatist, whose philosophical letters rival Marcus Aurelius as surviving classics of Stoic practice.)

Even though the Stoics believed in a well-ordered cosmos, their philosophy turns out to be especially useful for our chaotic world. No one seeks out the Stoics when things are good. The Stoics are there for us when we’re in trouble both collectively and individually, when we need help, when we are riven by desires for things we cannot have and by passions we can’t control. So successful have the Stoics been that in popular parlance, being a Stoic and taking things philosophically are synonymous. When it comes to practicing philosophy, for most people the Stoics are everything.

In the worlds of therapy, life coaching, and mental health, the only tradition that is giving the Stoics a run for their money is Buddhism. More than one commentator over the years has noticed similarities, which have led to speculations about influence: perhaps Alexander the Great brought back Buddhist ideas from India? It is also certain that Ashoka (c. 304--232 BCE), the Mauryan king responsible for turning Buddhism into a significant political force, sent emissaries to Greece with the purpose of spreading Buddhism. We don’t know what happened to them and whether they succeeded. But we do know that Ashoka’s efforts at promoting Buddhism took the form of edicts written on rocks and pillars, some looking not so dissimilar from the Marcus Aurelius Column.

While the story of Buddhism’s eastward expansion to Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan is well known and well documented, its westward path is much less studied, in part because it is much less documented. But in cultural history, documented direct influence is not everything. Even more intriguing is the idea that Stoics and Buddhists came up with similar ideas at roughly the same time, perhaps because they both felt that older systems of meaning-making were inadequate for their world. They agreed that a new focus on training mental behaviors was needed, one that could be used by anyone. If so, this dual invention is proving as useful today as it was two thousand years ago.

How to Be a Stoic without Realizing It

The recent rise of Stoicism was on my mind when I read Georgi Gospodinov’s most recent book, Death and the Gardener (Norton, 2025). I’ve been a fan of this Bulgarian writer ever since I met him seven years ago during a fellowship at the New York Public Library. At that time, only one of his exquisite works had been translated into English: The Physics of Sorrow. Despite the melancholic title, it is a witty novel, full of surprising observations, down to the structure of each sentence. As soon as you think you know where a given thought is going, there’s a turn and you find yourself looking at it in a different way.

Gospodinov received wider recognition with his subsequent novel, Time Shelter (2020), which many saw as eerily predicting the Russian invasion of Ukraine and which won the International Booker Prize in 2023. And now, with Death and the Gardener, he’s out with his first post-Booker Prize book.

Death and the Gardener turns out to be about the Stoics, but with a characteristic Gospodinovian twist. It promises to take you headlong into misery in that it’s a novel about the death of the narrator’s father. The narrator, fearing that readers will shy away from depictions of pure grief, goes out of his way to reassure them that there will also be relief, mostly in the form of funny stories, stories about his father as well as stories told by his father and now retold by his son. In this way, the narrator uses storytelling to alleviate intense, unrelenting misery. The stories make life—or rather, death—bearable.

If the narrator’s go-to palliative is storytelling, the other is Stoic philosophy. Twice, this philosophy is mentioned explicitly at strategically important turns. The first comes at the moment of maximum grief, after the narrator has held his father’s hand as he passed from life to death.

But my father died quietly and without raging, more in line with the Stoics, without being afraid of death, without begging for mercy, just as Zeno taught.

Though he never read Seneca, my father could have uttered his same words; I can even hear his voice: I shall die, you say; you mean to say, ‘I shall cease to run the risk of sickness; I shall cease to run the risk of imprisonment; I shall cease to run the risk of death.’

Much later, after we have heard more stories, including about the father’s upbringing, his clashes with collectivized Soviet agriculture and, after ’91, with capitalist markets, we return to the Stoics once again:

My father, of course, did not know the consolations of philosophy, nor did he rack his brains over how to learn to accept death; he did not page through Zenon and Seneca, nor did he get up and lie down with Marcus Aurelius, yet this did not prevent him from being a stoic, a naive Naturphilosoph, believing in virtue and nature.

My father, the Stoic: this is Gospodinov’s ultimate panegyric. It made me wonder whether the true Stoic is one who has arrived at this practice without any help, without the benefit of reading the great Stoic classics.

I have often been struck by the fact that Stoic recommendations, and therapeutic ones more generally, always sound so easy. What’s hard is putting them into practice. Ultimately, the only person who can do that is us, individually. If we want to be Stoics, we will have to do it on our own, one day at a time.

If you want to know what is going on in the world of culture, the best place to be is the Jaipur Literature Festival, which takes place every January in the capital of Rajasthan, India. Begun nineteen years ago on the margins of a crafts fair by Namita Gokhale, William Dalrymple, and Sanjoy Roy, it has become a celebration of literature and ideas that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, and tens of millions online. For a week, authors can feel like rock stars, drawing huge crowds on open-air stages. But it is not just scale that makes this festival different from any other. Something unusual happens here every January, a heady mixing of people and ideas that makes culture feel vibrant and alive. What’s the secret of this festival’s success? The answer matters since JLF, as it is widely known, has much to teach those of us who work in culture and the arts.

There are some obvious answers, and some less obvious ones. One is celebrities, which doesn’t just mean famous authors and Nobel Prize winners, though there are plenty of those, but also Bollywood stars and influencers. Another ingredient is radical openness. With basic tickets entirely free, Jaipur attracts the greatest imaginable variety of visitors, many of whom drive in on scooters or hitch rides from far away. Hundreds of young literature enthusiasts volunteer as helpers; they both manage the crowd and are part of it.

Most astonishing to me has always been the fact that some portion of visitors do not, or even cannot, read literature. What draws them to a literature festival? The fact that JLF turns literature into an event. Literature here is performed, enacted before our very eyes, as ideas are debated and come alive. The organizers have a knack for finding the right people and matching them up in intriguing ways. The author of a book on mushrooms meets an Indian politician; a publisher of an important imprint talks to the inventor of the Internet. There’s always a fair amount of improvisation. Once, I was asked to fill in on a panel about the blue economy with just enough time to google what the blue economy was. (It’s the water-based equivalent of the green economy.) Over time, I’ve learned to go with the flow, so to speak, and trust that the organizers know what they’re doing. It’s all part of the JLF vibe.

Then there’s the music. Every day begins and ends with a musical performance. A Carnatic violin player might entrance audiences using an originally Italian instrument that migrated to India in the 18^th century, only to be incorporated into several Indian performance traditions. The morning performances are among my favorite moments because it feels like I’m being tuned for the rest of the day, put in a more receptive mood. (The most important Indian treatise on music, the Natyashastra, focuses on nine rasas, or modes, that evoke different emotions. Somehow, I suspect that this theory of music is being put into practice at the festival.) The evening performances are grander. Over the years, I have discovered some of my favorite bands, including Afro Celtic Sound System, itself a JLF-like combination of African and Celtic traditions.

Finally, there are the food and tea stalls; the booths for buying jewelry, bags, and clothing; and, of course, an enormous bookstore, or rather, book tent, which contains books and more books, books neatly arranged on shelves, books in enormous piles on tables, books in boxes and books just fresh from being signed by their authors. JLF is a marketplace—as well as a marketplace of ideas.

For people like me, who worry that people aren’t reading anymore, coming to Jaipur is the perfect antidote to cultural despair. That so many people of so many kinds go out of their way to participate in cultural events demonstrates an enormous yearning for culture. But the success of JLF also throws into relief how seldom this yearning is satisfied by our existing cultural institutions, from museums, libraries, and universities to other literary festivals. Compared to JLF, they feel exclusive, expensive, old, heavy-handed in all kinds of ways, and siloed.

The unlikely success of JLF has not gone unnoticed. My colleague Tarun Khanna, who teaches at the Harvard Business School, wrote a Harvard Case Study on JLF. When the first iteration of the case study was published in 2011, the question was how the festival, which had grown rapidly beyond its modest origins, would develop in the future. The answer today is: it has gone global. In recent years, JLF has spawned satellite festivals across the world, including the US, with locations in North Carolina, Seattle, Boulder, Houston, and New York City.

In keeping with my recent post on South Korea and Bhutan, one might wonder whether JLF’s increasingly global reach should be described as part of India’s soft power. JLF is unmistakably an Indian institution and it has been bringing Indian culture to many places around the globe. To this end, it has strategically connected with diasporic South Asian communities across the US, as well as with other local writers and institutions, from museums to libraries. Let us hope that part of the JLF magic will rub off on these US institutions.

But unlike recent success stories in soft power such as South Korea or Bhutan, JLF isn’t the product of a government-funded infrastructure that was fostered over decades, as was the case with South Korea, or a national campaign spearheaded by a head of state, as was the case in Bhutan. JLF is the unlikely story of a single festival becoming so successful that it has inspired other smaller festivals across India and is now projecting its influence abroad. In this way, JLF is bundling the enormous cultural richness of South Asia, its history as well as its current crop of writers, artists, opinionators, publishers, and entrepreneurs, and is showcasing this richness around the world.

Cultural Diplomacy on the Island of Ireland

JLF isn’t just a case study in how a single cultural institution can emerge out of nowhere and become a cultural player. It’s also a case study in how such an institution can use its newly gained power for other purposes, above all, cultural diplomacy.

As part of its global reach, JLF has been hosting a festival in Belfast, Northern Ireland, for several years, creating a rare occasion for writers from both sides of this divided country to come together. The Belfast edition of JLF has been a quiet but effective act at cultural diplomacy.

But now JLF is going considerably further. A few weeks ago, during the most recent iteration of the festival in Jaipur, the organizers announced that they would be hosting the first “all-island edition” of the Irish festival this coming May. This is more than just a change in name. The “Island of Ireland JLF” will begin in Belfast and then move on to Armagh and Dundalk before ending in Dublin, thus crisscrossing the entire island. This kind of movable feast would be a great experience for pretty much any place, but it is especially significant in Ireland, where deep divisions have made cultural collaboration almost impossible.

The importance of this type of cultural diplomacy is difficult to underestimate, and it is instructive to think about how JLF pulled it off. Some other cultural institution, of which there are so many in Europe and the United Kingdom, could have tried to launch an initiative of this sort, but none did (or succeeded). It took an outsider with a global brand to initiate this kind of cultural mediation, in addition to willing local partners, which include the government of the Republic of Ireland and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

India and Ireland, of course, aren’t strangers. They have long-standing ties, many of them established by their respective relations to the British Empire. So perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it took an outsider who wasn’t quite an outsider, an institution, like JLF, that had ties to Ireland but was not directly entangled in the current conflict, to effect meaningful change.

I don’t think cultural diplomacy was something the festival’s founders envisioned as their goal when they began the festival nineteen years ago. But it is something they have grown into and are now embracing as a role that is theirs to play. In keeping with this new mission of the festival, I noticed an especially large number of diplomats and politicians this year—I ran into an average three ambassadors per day—who are clearly attracted by the power of culture to be found here.

When I asked co-founder Namita Gokhale about the reasons for JLF’s unlikely success, she said: “Somehow we seem to get things right: JLF has a kind of grace.” I love this formulation, and would only add that this grace has been extremely well earned.

P.S.

I realize that I am reporting on a literature festival without talking about actual books. I will make up for this unforgivable omission in a future post. Stay tuned.

What happened at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, and in the year leading up to it, was a historic bet against “soft power.” As Joseph Nye, who coined the term, explained, soft power allows countries to get desired outcomes not through military or economic coercion but through attraction, by inducing foreign powers and populations to act voluntarily in accordance with one’s goals.

For Nye, the unrivalled champion of soft power was the United States. Writing in 1990 in Foreign Policy, he wanted to explain how the United States had won the Cold War. There had been plenty of hard power involved, from Reagan’s Pershing II Missiles to economic coercion, such as broad trade embargoes against the USSR, Eastern Europe and the Republic of China as well as blocking access to capital markets. But hard power alone didn’t explain the decisive victory over the Soviet Union. What made the difference was the decades-long deployment of cultural resources. While the Soviet Union had invested in propaganda, the United States had done something smarter: instead of churning out overt propaganda for the American way of life, it had promoted, sometimes through covert CIA funding, a large variety of cultural products, from abstract expressionism to little magazines, that highlighted the freedoms available to Americans. The unruly energy of American culture was not something a ministry of propaganda could ever have come up with. It was an organic result of political, economic, and cultural freedoms that characterized America. Almost everyone, including Soviet nomenklatura and Parisian Maoists, wanted a part of it, whether they admitted it or not.

Today, US soft power is in rapid decline. During my recent travels across Asia and Europe, I met not a single person who wanted to send their kids to US colleges anymore; most were afraid even to visit. Nye, who died in May 2025, lived long enough to witness his world champion of soft power voluntarily giving up on it. Shortly before his death, I had a chance to talk with him about the changing landscape of soft power. That conversation helped me see that soft power was now being wielded much more effectively by other countries. My subsequent travels have confirmed that view. For this post, I want to single out two of them: South Korea and Bhutan.

K-Everything

Perhaps it’s not surprising that South Korea would emulate the Cold War model of US soft power since it is the last country on earth still locked into a Cold War struggle. When I recently went to the Demilitarized Zone between South and North Korea, I felt like I was entering a time warp that took me back to Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. For many decades, South Korea has faced a highly militarized opponent who is all about hard power. South Korea, by contrast, decided to supplement its military and economic might with strategic investments in culture.

The problem with soft power, as Nye pointed out, is that it is difficult to produce and even more difficult to deploy. Culture takes decades to develop; it requires a creative industry that must be organically grown but also left to its own devices. The harder a government is trying to steer it, the more likely it will become crude propaganda, and therefore misfire.

Beginning in the 1980s, South Korea did the right thing: it started to lay the foundation, through strategic public/private partnerships, for a culture industry focused on popular music and dance. Rather than mandating that this industry express some essence of Korean culture—the equivalent of Moscow’s Cold War Bolshoi Ballet—the Korean culture industry went on a mission of cultural appropriation, amalgamating American pop culture and Korean song traditions with new takes on costume and video. Then YouTube came along and PSY’s deadpan “Gangnam Style” took the world by storm, the first music video to hit one billion downloads in 2012. Suddenly, K-pop was a thing. It had taken twenty-five years to get there.

There is no sign of it stopping anytime soon. During a recent month in Seoul, I noticed that everything was branded K: Netflix series; shoes; perfume; food. Even rice grown in the Demilitarized Zone was becoming a branded export product.

The campaign that resulted in Han Kang receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024 has been attributed to the power of K-branding, even though that novel has little in common with the products typically associated with K-pop. At a recent book festival in Shanghai, I was able to observe Korean popular culture, including literature, exerting its influence in China firsthand. With the US largely absent, I realized that South Korea had taken over as the most significant foreign cultural power.

Korean K-branding conforms well to Nye’s theory. Soft power needs time and room to grow. Countries must foster it over decades and refrain from steering it too much in one direction or another. They must create an ecosystem and then trust that ecosystem to work on its own.

Gross Happiness Index

During the height of the cold war, another soft power was taking shape in the tiny mountain kingdom of Bhutan. Small and landlocked, Bhutan is also wedged between China and India, the world’s two most populous countries. Its military or economic powers are negligible by almost any standard, and it has therefore tended to view the outside world with suspicion. In 1972, when King Jugme Singye Wangchuck was crowned at the age of 16, Bhutan had only recently established formal ties to the rest of the world.

A new actor on the world stage, how would this isolated, small, and largely rural Himalayan kingdom conduct itself? More specifically, what would it do about its paltry GDP? That’s a question that the king was asked during a stopover in Rome, on his way back from the UN. His off-the-cuff answer was that GDP was not everything. What really mattered was Gross National Happiness and Bhutan had plenty of it.

The spontaneous quip quickly turned into a deliberate campaign. Bhutanese thinkers elaborated it into a philosophy based on Buddhism, turning the remoteness of this kingdom with its breathtaking natural beauty into its greatest asset.

In 1999, the Center for Bhutan Studies was founded with the express goal of turning the philosophy of happiness into a measurable system: the Gross National Happiness Index. (In 2012, the Center was renamed Center for Bhutan Studies and Gross National Happiness.) In 2011, Bhutan introduced resolution 65/309 to the UN, entitled “Happiness: towards a holistic approach to development.” The following year the UN published the first World Happiness Report.

During my travels in Bhutan in the summer of 2025, happiness was everywhere as a distinct Bhutanese thing. It was invoked in speeches and press materials, but also in private conversations about the country’s traditions and nature. When I returned from Bhutan, I was frequently asked about happiness, so the branding had clearly worked. From an off-the-cuff response, it had turned into a soft-power slogan. (In case this is relevant, my own subjective experience was that there were plenty of wonderful people in Bhutan, but whether they were, on average, happier than other people, I couldn’t tell.) What K-pop is for South Korea, Gross National Happiness (GNH) is for Bhutan.

This successful campaign of cultural influence is just getting started. Currently, under the leadership of King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, the 5^th king of Bhutan, the country is developing Gelephu Mindfulness City, a special economic zone near the border with India that will showcase the distinct Bhutanese brand of happiness, combining sustainability with a “modern Buddhist Lifestyle Destination.” By drawing international seekers of happiness into this special zone, Bhutan also continues its cautious approach to tourism. With travel to many parts of the country deliberately restricted, Bhutan will use Gelephu Mindfulness City as a gateway without being overrun by tourists.

* * *

Before his death, Nye had begun to ask under what circumstances a country can lose the soft power it has so carefully fostered over many decades. Here is an initial answer: it’s not enough to have a culture industry, which the US continues to do. In order for soft power to work, a country’s hard power needs to leave room for soft power to exert its force. This was the case with the US during the Cold War, just as it has been the case with South Korea. (In the case of Bhutan, there is no military or economic power to interfere with its soft power.) The current US policy proves that a clumsy use of hard power can simply choke off a country’s soft power.

A second question remains unanswered: can a country that has lost, or deliberately thrown away, its soft power ever get it back? Perhaps we’ll get an answer in the coming years or decades.