Welcome to Big Think Books, your direct line to the books and ideas that shape our world. I’m Kevin Dickinson, and here are some great reads to check out this month.

From my formative library

Next month is September, which kicks off the busiest time of the year in publishing. From after Labor Day to Thanksgiving(ish), publishers will release a wellspring of new titles in the hopes of gaining enough attention and good word-of-mouth to land them on bestseller lists and in readers’ Christmas stockings.

That leaves summer in a dead zone. Sure, plenty of interesting and worthwhile books come out in July and August. They are just fewer and farther between, which makes collecting enough recommendations for a newsletter like this a bit challenging. So, this month, I decided to take a breath, lean into the lull, and try something different. Instead of recommending new titles, I want to share with you a small collection of books that changed my life.

To be clear, I’m not saying these are my favorite books of all time. That gimmicky phrase has always irked me, especially because no one really means of all time. At best, such collections are a snapshot of what the person values in books at that moment; more likely, it’s an invocation creators recite so the algorithm will bless their content. (Fair enough; I’m not above playing the hits for the search engine.)

But there are numerous reasons to treasure a book, and preferences can (and should) vary depending on whether we’re considering stories to read with your child, alongside friends for a shared laugh, or by yourself to quietly revel in the sentiment. Books, and the experiences they elicit, are too diverse to fit neatly under such a simple rubric as “the best.”

The list is also far from comprehensive. Looking down, I wonder how I fumbled my way to these six while excluding the likes of Wells, Dick, Borges, Butler, Salinger, Steinbeck, Shakespeare, Le Guin, Le Carré, and — my god, not one Vonnegut? Madness!

These are simply six books that entered my life at precisely the right moment to light something up in me and help me see myself, the world, or the art of literature differently. It’s one of the things I love about books: They don’t have to be the best to be the best book for you.

Keep reading,
Kevin

1. James and the Giant Peach

by Roald Dahl

Or any of Dahl’s other invariably charming children’s novels. My third-grade teacher, Ms. Ladd, introduced me to the author, and I read through as many of his books as I could find at the school library that year. What I loved about Dahl wasn’t just his stories but the way he told them. He had a gift for imbuing sentences with kinetic energy and choosing words with tactile precision — showing me how the right words don’t only inform the reader about what’s happening but transport them by evoking their senses.

Obviously, my 8-year-old self didn’t have that epiphany. I found the books fun. But returning to Dahl as an adult while I read to my son before bedtime, I was better equipped to understand what my younger self intuitively appreciated all those years earlier.

2. The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories

by Ernest Hemingway

For most of my childhood, I gravitated toward speculative fiction. Stories like Goosebumps, The Hobbit, and Ender’s Game were mainstays on my bookshelf. That began to change my freshman year of high school, when I was introduced to classics that felt like more than homework — among them Hemingway’s fantastic collection, specifically “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”

The short story touches on themes of despair, empathy, suicide, and growing older in a lithe five pages. Reading it as a teenager, it whetted my appetite for literature that was more than fun adventures I took vicariously through a hero’s story. Not that I no longer enjoyed a fun power fantasy (still do), but I wanted something more — that exchange of minds and the all-too-fleeting experience of another life that made my own richer when I returned.

From Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma to Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, Shortform helps you explore key ideas, make connections, and discover what belongs on your reading list next.

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3. A Canticle for Leibowitz

by Walter M. Miller Jr.

I was supposed to read Walden my junior year of high school, but my teacher, Mr. Murphey, was retiring and refused to spend another year teaching such a “self-indulgent book.” God bless him for that. Don’t get me wrong: I respect Walden, but I revere A Canticle for Leibowitz.

The book follows the monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz across the future centuries — from a post-thermonuclear world (think medieval Mad Max) to a sci-fi Renaissance. Along the way, it touches on a kaleidoscope of themes perfect for my teenage brain: morality, ethics, power, epistemology, and what it means to believe in a world cursed with evil and a silent god. I’ve reread it many times since, and it has become the book that reminds me you’re never finished with the ones that mean something to you.

4. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

by Mary Shelley

I didn’t get around to reading Frankenstein until college, and I’m glad I didn’t because I wouldn’t have been prepared for Shelley’s stunning debut until then. If I’d encountered it any earlier, I would have bounced right off.

To my eyes, Shelley created the genre of science fiction with this achievement, and it showed me how a great book can serve as a kind of conversational cafe for authors across your reading life. Her exploration of ideas like love, acceptance, and the perils of knowledge unbound to morality felt like a continuation of discussions I already had with Miller, Bradbury, and Vonnegut and would have again with authors I had yet to discover (such as Dick, Le Guin, and Herbert). Recognizing that was a pleasure and made me feel accepted as part of a timeless group of friends.

5. Wuthering Heights

by Emily Brontë

In graduate school, I had the opportunity to TA a class in Romantic literature, and Brontë’s gothic classic was one of the books on the syllabus. I had all my notes prepped on the Byronic hero, nature and the sublime, emotion and reason, and how the novel both trades in and deconstructs these tropes.

I soon learned that a book like Wuthering Heights inspires, let’s say, passionate responses from twenty-something students. It was one of the more potent reminders in my life that the book you read — and prep amazing notes for — won’t necessarily be the same book others read. And it made for a great class.

To borrow from Oscar Wilde: “Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.” Despite being published in 1847, Wuthering Heights remains all three.

6. Invisible Cities

by Italo Calvino

I am currently rereading Calvino’s masterful postmodern novel, and it is for me today what James and the Giant Peach was for my 8-year-old self: a lovely expression of the inherent beauty and joy that can be found in language. Calvino’s surrealist cities make even less rational sense than Dahl’s, and if you read them with an eye to verisimilitude, they feel low-key nightmarish. But Calvino’s colorful prose and lyrical descriptions make everything feel dreamy. Just by the cadence of his sentences alone, it’s an utter joy to read.

(Hat tip to the book’s translator, William Weaver. I don’t speak Italian, so I can’t judge his translation, but to my ears, he did a brilliant job!)

Kevin Dickinson is the books editor at Big Think. He holds a master’s in English and writing, and in addition to Big Think, his work has appeared in RealClearScience, Pop Matters, the Writer Magazine, and the Washington Post.

by

In ninth grade, Ms. Hayes, my enthusiastic, whip-smart English teacher with expectations to match, handed out an unassuming packet a few pages long: “ The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. We read the short story aloud, one student picking up where the last left off, all of us relieved by the simple language and unconvoluted plot. Normally, she handed out a sonnet or free-verse poem that most of us couldn’t understand, let alone analyze its deeper meaning.

The story began innocuously: Residents of a small agricultural town gather in a public square for the annual “lottery” draw. Children play and collect stones while the adults make small talk, bored and eager to get it over with and “get back to work.” The story’s structure matches their indifference, moving with a calm nonchalance.

That composure begins to fracture when Tessie Hutchinson draws the marked slip. She clutches it, trying to keep anyone from seeing the consequential black dot in its center, until her husband pries it from her hands. The crowd turns on her with startling speed. Neighbors and friends begin to take stones from the pile, and the purpose of the lottery suddenly becomes clear: a ritual in which the townspeople sacrifice the person who draws the marked slip to ensure a good harvest. At that moment of awareness, and as quickly and matter-of-factly as it began, the story ends.

None of us saw it coming, and that was the first time I experienced the strange power of a short story.

The “unity of effect”

“The Lottery” is as famous for its reception as it is for its story. When it ran in The New Yorker in 1948, it provoked an intense backlash. The magazine, and Jackson herself, received hundreds of letters, many from outraged readers canceling their subscriptions.

The story’s theme is uncomfortable, disturbing even. By depicting a seemingly civil town, only to reveal its citizens participating in such a barbaric ritual, Jackson examines how tradition can be used to justify cruelty and how social pressure can lead us to accept and commit acts we would otherwise condemn.

Still, I’d guess it wasn’t the plot so much as the delivery that unsettled so many people. Jackson goes for the kill with a practiced deftness. Readers receive the final blow as both startling and inevitable. The ending doesn’t offer them an outlet for their outrage — or the recognition of the uncomfortable truth beneath it all — except, evidently, The New Yorker mailbox.

Since then, I’ve read many short stories: Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Alice Munro’s “Runaway,” Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog,” Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies,” Junot Diaz’s “This Is How You Lose Her,” and, more recently, Lauren Groff’s “Brawler” and Camille Bordas’s “One Sun Only.” Each one is about wildly different people in different places, from a spy’s impossible choice in a labyrinth of time to a marriage unraveling in rural Canada. But they share qualities beyond their length, characteristics I’ve come to admire and find equally, if not more, necessary than those of the novel.

It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what the power, the je ne sais quoi, of the short story is. Most writers reach for analogy. Lorrie Moore described the short story as “the noise in the night […] life itself, surprising and not entirely invited.” Alexander Chee says it’s “the one-night stand of the soul,” while Rahul Mehta describes it as “a secret whispered quickly, and in the dark.”

Edgar Allan Poe came closest to a concrete description that bridges form with effect: A short story, he wrote, is something that “can be read in one sitting,” a quality that allows it to “deliver a sense of the fullest satisfaction.” This brevity, Poe argued, lets a short story achieve what he famously called “the unity of effect,” an uninterrupted emotional experience.

The short end of the stick

The short story’s own history is full of reversals, revivals, and arguments about its worth. In the early- to mid-20th century, short stories were a staple of mainstream reading. They ran regularly in magazines like The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Atlantic, which paid generously and turned writers like J.D. Salinger into household names. While these publications continue to publish short fiction today, and while many writers regard and revere the form, it has become something of a literary underdog. Short story collections are acquired by publishers far less often than novels, they rarely crack bestseller lists, and they compete for a fraction of the major prizes. Even among those who admire the form, there’s a persistent sense that the short story is a kind of apprenticeship for the novel.

This neglect is a little strange because the short story might be one of the forms best suited to our busy lifestyles. You can absorb one over coffee or on a commute, in a way a novel rarely allows. And in a culture already organized around snappy, complete units of attention, the short story arguably satisfies the same appetite for a quick hit — without the superficiality many associate with TikTok videos. That’s not to say short stories are easy; quite the opposite. They demand sustained attention in exchange for real reward. But the reward arrives within a stretch of time many of us can spare.

It seems we have decided that length is a proxy for impact and quality and that a short story can’t offer what a novel does. A quick look at Goodreads, an online forum where readers discuss books, turns up frequent complaints that short stories lack character development or plot or that they leave readers hanging without a proper resolution.

That is true; however, these are only flaws if you judge the short story as though it were a mini-novel, straining toward novel-scale ambitions. In reality, it’s an entirely different form, one that deserves judgment in its own right.

Turn to a novel if you want the chance to escape into another life, grow slowly attached to characters and worlds, and perhaps even enjoy a neat-and-tidy resolution. Short fiction won’t provide this, and it shouldn’t be expected to. Instead, the short story writer must be precise and committed, wielding the pen like a scalpel and using the page not to take a broad look but to cut deeply and precisely to reveal places the novel — for all its sweeping breadth — cannot.

Reasons why short stories aren’t just “mini-novels”

Short stories deal with different territory

Whereas a novel can accumulate information about a character, even build whole worlds and complex plots, a short story has no such luxury. Its narrower focus lets it open to questions and experiences that are fundamentally unresolvable. Characters in short stories tend to confront the kinds of experience that defy explanation and do not become clearer with more context — the paradoxes in our behavior or feelings of ineffable joy, focus, or loss. Such brief, urgent moments are arguably the best and worst parts of living and are better reflected by a style that matches their precision and intensity.

In the first two paragraphs of “The Lottery,” Jackson tells us just enough: We’re in a small farming town at the height of summer, and the tight-knit community is gathering for some mandatory ritual. We get the names of a few townspeople, but not the name of the town, its location, the origins of the lottery, or any of the characters’ backstories. A novel-length version of the same premise would almost certainly explain the lottery’s origins and history, offer side stories about characters, and contextualize the townspeople’s complicity. A useful exercise, but a wildly different impact.

Short stories often resists a tidy ending

Even before reading a short story, the reader knows, owing to the literal length, that there is more to the world than can be told. The structure itself primes us to read differently, to immediately question what the author shows and pay as much attention to what the author omits. In a powerful short story, the ending loops back to the beginning, and the resolution is not so much closure but a new perspective, an understanding, of everything that came before. The author and scholar Charles May* describes this resolution as “aesthetic.” By giving us only the necessary context, a short story arrives at its truth by embodying the experience rather than explaining it away. It allows the reader to interpret its impact for themselves and draw a personal conclusion rather than a universal one.

We don’t know what happens after the first few people lob their stones. We don’t know whether the lottery will ever be abolished, whether the town will change, or whether anyone will question what they have just done. Jackson doesn’t give us those answers because they aren’t the point. The story ends not when its central problem is solved, but when its existence has become impossible to ignore.

Short stories force a precise, unique writing style

Junot Díaz wrote that the short story is “unforgiving as fuck,” and that to work, it requires “unnerving levels of exactitude.” The prose must be spare and precise, razor-sharp and multi-faceted, and able to perform more than one job at once — advancing the plot, revealing a character, establishing a rhythm, creating an image, or setting up something that will matter pages later.

Many of the names in “The Lottery” read as plain, but carry darker undertones once you look at them closely. Mr. Summers, who cheerfully runs the lottery, has a name at odds with the event he sets in motion. Mr. Graves, the postmaster who helps administer the lottery, carries his function in his name. Nothing is there by accident. At the same time, omission and implications move the story along — what Jackson doesn’t tell us about the lottery’s origins, its rules, and its purpose is as important as what she does.

The result is a mix of poetry’s compressed, lyrical quality and prose’s descriptive complexity. It’s incredibly difficult to master, but when it does, the writing becomes an aesthetic experience. “[S]entence by sentence, scene by scene, page after page, from first touch to last, you almost forget to breathe,” Díaz writes.

Short stories reflect our discontinuous reality

We like to imagine that our lives play out with the typical beginning-middle-end structure of a novel, building toward some kind of meaning or conclusion. But some of us may relate more to Alice Munro, often regarded as one of the best short fiction writers, who described her own life as a series of “disconnected realities” — a realization that pushed her toward short stories, even as she set out to write a novel.

Our lives are sometimes narrated by a version of ourselves we hardly recognize now, set in a place so distant to us we question whether it was ever real. Short fiction may be more faithful to the discontinuous way experience plays out.

As essential as a dream

In Heart of Darkness, the protagonist, Charles Marlow, grows frustrated as he tries to tell stories about his travels in the Congo, realizing there is a vast gulf between narrating a series of events and capturing the actual experience.

“Do you see the story? Do you see anything?” he pleads. “It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream.”

A dream. That may be the best description of the form, something that opens up into a world undeniably real and fantastical all at once, something fashioned, as Lorrie Moore puts it, “from a frame of mind that is both familiar and strange, recognizable and startling as a pinch.”

Much like a dream, it illuminates from a new angle, teases awareness, and then, just as quickly, lets you go. And, for some reason we don’t understand, we need them.

* Author’s Note: A hat tip to Charlie May’s excellent “Why the short story is essential and seldom read,” to which this essay is most indebted to.

by Scotty Hendricks

Some readers will accept everything the narrator says to be true in the context of the story. This may be the case in novels where the narrator is an omniscient being floating high above the action. But when a story is told from the first-person perspective, it can be a mistake to think the narrator is describing reality in a fair and accurate way — as if they lack the biases, blind spots, and not-always-respectable motivations that the other characters possess.

Here, we look at five books where you’d do well to take the narrator’s tale with a grain of salt. Several of these works are controversial. This is partly due to the ill-advised tendency to assume that the authors endorse everything their narrators say. The opposite is usually true. Also, be careful if you want to avoid spoilers, though simply being on this list is a bit of a spoiler in itself.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

“What’s it going to be then, eh?”

A dystopian black comedy disowned by its author and made into a film by Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange is narrated by a 15-year-old lover of classical music, “milk-plus,” and “ultraviolence” named Alex. The events of the novel — which explores themes of free will, maturity, and moral responsibility — are told from his perspective.

This narrative choice is part of what has made the book so infamous. Alex enjoys his crimes, is incredibly smug, and sometimes portrays himself as a victim. In one disturbing scene involving a sexual assault — a scene that was actually toned down for the film — it is initially difficult to tell what is going on because Alex buries the extent of his heinous crimes under slang and a nonchalant attitude.

If his viewpoint is taken as prescriptive, the novel can appear to glorify violence and destructive tendencies, but this wasn’t the author’s intention, of course. It’s easier to pick up on that fact when you read the book’s (often-cut) final chapter. In it, Alex matures and forgoes his life of violence. But even without it, the book is a scary yet fascinating dive into a worldview of violence, drugs, and Beethoven through the eyes of someone who fully embodies it.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (1962)

“This is what I know. The ward is a factory for the Combine. It’s for fixing up mistakes made in the neighborhoods and in the schools and in the churches, the hospital is.”

Another book with an arguably more famous film adaptation, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the story of what happens in an Oregon mental hospital ward when a nonconformist criminal feigns madness in hopes of escaping the chain gang. He quickly upends the ward’s routine and earns the ire of one of the great villains of American literature: the tyrannical Nurse Ratched. The story explores themes of conformity, mental health, and how societal pressure can be as incontrovertible as law.

Unlike the film version, though, the novel is told from the perspective of one of the hospital’s residents, Chief Bromden. This version of the Chief is explicitly suffering from schizophrenia and depression, and his narration varies between descriptions of events grounded in facts and obvious hallucinations. The former details the abuses inflicted on the mentally ill and Native Americans. The latter includes the hospital staff “curing” Santa Claus, visions of oozing slime, and the ward’s walls opening up to reveal a vast slaughterhouse.

By the novel’s end, it is easy to wonder what happened and what did not happen. It is only clear that something happened. More frightening is the fact that many of the abuses noted in the book actually took place; Kesey based them on his experiences in the MK-ULTRA experiments.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel (2001)

“If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn’t love hard to believe?”

Unlike many works featuring an unreliable narrator, this one begins by noting that what follows is fiction (mostly). The story begins as Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel leaves India for a new life in Canada with his family. Their ship goes down in a storm, and Pi is trapped in a lifeboat alongside several animals, one being a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Along the way, they meet an army of meerkats, cannibalistic plants, and a zebra with a broken leg.

The story centers on Pi’s hopes to escape this situation and how the events affect his worldview, leading to a deep examination of the relativity of truth, religion, and life’s absurdity.

Looking back on the story’s events, several characters question not only what really happened, but discuss what that even means. No matter what “really” happened in that lifeboat, the result is an excellent read.

One Thousand and One Nights

“Quoth the bird, ‘I tell thee but what I saw and heard.’”

One Thousand and One Nights, commonly referred to as The Arabian Nights, is a collection of short stories from the Golden Age of Islam. While many editions of the work exist, they all share the common element of being framed as a series of stories told by Scheherazade, a clever young woman and able storyteller. She tells these tales to her husband, King Shahryar, who plans to have her executed but stays his orders so he can hear the endings of her 1,000 tales. After nearly three years of excellent stories, he lets her live as his queen.

Several of these stories feature early explorations of the unreliable narrator trope. “The Seven Viziers,” for instance, contains several short tales exploring the very idea of unreliable narration and the possibility that a storyteller could be misinformed. It provides the quote at the beginning of this section. “The Three Apples” is an early detective story where the characters do not have all the information. And “The Hunchback’s Tale” is a courtroom comedy in which a dozen people on trial for murder try to explain how an unfortunate fellow met his end.

These fun stories provide a look at how this curious tool in the writer’s kit has aged across the centuries. Speaking of age, because One Thousand and One Nights is so old, free-to-read versions are easily available.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

“The following decision I make with all the legal impact and support of a signed testament: I wish this memoir to be published only when Lolita is no longer alive.”

Lolita is told from the perspective of Humbert Humbert, a self-pitying abuser recounting the events of his life. The story is most famous, and infamous, for its depiction of Humbert’s sexual fixation on his landlady’s daughter, Dolores, whom he calls Lolita.

Humbert Humbert, which is the narrator’s nom de plume, describes his life as he awaits his trial. At many points, it is clear that he is not giving the reader the full story and is actively trying to make himself seem like less of a monster than he is — maybe even sympathetic to a jury. Several scenes in the novel approach surrealism. In others, Humbert admits how wonderfully convenient certain plot points are. The frequent references to literature and literary history — Humbert’s first love being named similarly to Poe’s Annabel Lee — also imply that his descriptions are less than factual.

As you might have guessed, a novel focusing on a pedophile has proven extremely controversial over the past 70 years. The fact that he is an unreliable narrator often escapes people, especially those who saw the movie, also directed by Kubrick.

The choice to tell the story from the point of view of the repulsive Humbert, who tries to portray himself as debonair, doesn’t help, but it does offer a powerful metaphor: We never hear the victim’s voice without the filter of her abuser. It might even be said we never see or hear from Dolores herself, but only the version of the girl in Humbert’s mind: Lolita.

This article was originally published on Big Think in June 2023.

by Thomas Moynihan

Secession is carved into America’s essence. From the Declaration of Independence to the Confederacy, exit provides a kind of primal scene and an unfinished vector. Indeed, the idea of “opting out” has since spilled far beyond taxation and governance into domains the Founding Fathers would likely have found surprising and uniquely challenging.

Not only do we find recurrent dreams of leaving Earth behind, but we also find aspirations to unbind intelligence from the human organism itself. A jailbreak, therefore, not just from the penuries of being planet-locked but also from the paltry limitations that human gray matter imposes on raw intelligence — a supposed liberation of ingenuity and invention from all biological substrates and gravity itself.

If such visions were ever restricted to science fiction, they absolutely are no longer. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has blogged sanguinely about how we simians may prove to be the “biological bootloader for digital intelligence,” destined thereafter to “fade into an evolutionary tree branch.” Elsewhere, he has spoken of rearranging solar systems as a mere milestone on the way to soaking up all matter and energy in the reachable Universe.

The impulse to separate oneself from the limitations others accept — though focused on differing frontiers in different eras — forms a consistent trajectory in American culture. What follows is an exploration of this trajectory by way of two past prophecies, both of which feel more timely than ever.

There comes a point when intensifying the drive to liberate oneself from others tips into the drive to liberate the universe from people entirely.

One was written during America’s Gilded Age and depicted a picture of U.S. expansionism fueled by aggressive geoengineering. It is a future wherein corporations reign supreme; one company even has the goal, as agreed by its “bondholders and stockholders,” to “straighten the axis of the Earth.”

The other is a satire penned in the wake of Y2K. At the time, silicon had only just started melting everything solid into bytes, but the direction of travel was already undeniable. Narrating the aftermath of an AI singularity, it imagines what happens to humanity’s final remnants as they experience a supernova-like explosion of machine intelligence.

There are many “opt-outs” imagined throughout these two visions of the future — from opting out of traditions to opting out of terrestrial life — but, fundamentally, these all come down to the drive to opt out of our obligations to other people. As we shall see, there comes a point when intensifying the drive to liberate oneself from others tips into the drive to liberate the universe from people entirely. In one vision, technology is seen as a mere means for humans to escape limits imposed by other humans; in the other, technology becomes so powerful that — mutating into an end in itself — it decides humanity as a whole is a burden that demands dismantling.

In the early hours of April 15, 1912, John Jacob Astor IV lit his final cigarette. Not long afterward, he perished in icy water. Astor had been the wealthiest individual aboard the RMS Titanic. After the ill-fated ocean liner hit the iceberg and the damage became apparent, he made sure his pregnant wife was safely loaded onto a lifeboat. He was refused a place beside her, though; women and children were given priority.

A Manhattan real estate titan, Astor was more than just the Titanic’s richest passenger — he was one of the wealthiest individuals in the world. In the early 1800s, his great-grandfather had become America’s first multimillionaire by prudently buying land on the outskirts of a rapidly expanding New York City. Astor inherited the fortune and portfolio that had accumulated since then. That wealth, however, meant nothing when Astor, along with his pet dog and approximately 1,500 other souls, went down with the Titanic. He was last seen smoking on deck.

What’s ironic is that Astor believed — to an almost fanatical degree — that with private investment and inventiveness, near-invincibility could be achieved. He thought people like him could opt out of the natural order. He had presented this philosophy 18 years beforehand in his swashbuckling science fiction novel A Journey in Other Worlds.

Reading often like a manifesto, sometimes like an engineering manual, the book is set in 2000 A.D. and depicts a United States that has become the globe’s unrivaled superpower, swelling (via “enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine”) to encompass the entire Western hemisphere. Given this unipolar dominance, the planet has become “dull” and “too small,” such that enterprising Americans have now set out to find new worlds to conquer — namely, Jupiter and Saturn (more on that later).

A Journey in Other Worlds surveys the geopolitical state of the world in 2000 — and finds that the U.S. has expanded as “no other nation ever has before.”

Astor’s book opens with a prefatory appeal to the vanquishing of the humanities by the sciences — an opting out of tradition and history itself. Astor proudly pronounces that poring over classics and “past achievements” produces nothing new. Science alone provides the Archimedean lever to alter planetary orbits. This gives a good taste of what’s to come.

A Journey in Other Worlds thereafter surveys the geopolitical state of the world in 2000 A.D. Canadians, we are told, concluded that “their future would be far grander and glorious in union with the United States.” Something more paternalistic unfolded in Central and South America, with its various countries “tiring” of being unable to govern themselves (in Astor’s patronizing portrayal) and so yielding to be ruled by their northern “big brother.” Astor blithely notes that Americans with property south of the border agitated for this, knowing “their possessions would double in value” following the annexation.

Meanwhile, Europe has stagnated under socialism. The invention of weapons of mass destruction, capable of jeopardizing the existence of humankind itself, has enforced peace. Here, Astor presciently anticipates what would later be called the doctrine of mutually assured annihilation, which, he reports, averted the long-expected “Great War” between European powers. Nevertheless, “high taxes” and government overreach have prevented Europe’s “moneyed men” from investing in colonization, and Old World influence crumbled.

Contrarily, a combination of “low taxes” and Protestant confidence in “manifest destiny” allowed the U.S. to expand as “no other nation ever has before.” The country became a technological utopia. Energy is derived from windmills and other hydraulic, solar, and geothermal sources; pestiferous species have been exterminated thanks to engineered pathogens; and, as Astor makes sure to note, “the physique, especially of women, is wonderfully improved.” Instead of taking medicine, people cure their maladies simply by dieting. Longevity has increased handsomely. In an uncanny anticipation of Elon Musk’s proposed hyperloop, Astor even envisions “magnetic” railways with shuttles “sealed” in a frictionless vacuum within a “toughened glass tube.”

Turning the Sahara into farmland pales in comparison to the scope of the CEO protagonists’ other plans: moving the weight of Earth’s oceans and editing the planet’s orbit.

It is a world of Gilded Age boosterism, a playground where rich individuals bolster their agency by opting out of traditions and taxes, sidestepping the inertia imposed by precedent and other people. The invention of private airplanes has replaced the “manly sport of yachting,” allowing magnates to flit across continents like “child’s play.”

And, reflecting the prejudices of the time, Astor makes it clear that those exerting agency are, exclusively, people who look like him. He callously depicts a future wherein other races simply die out in response to advances by “the more progressive Anglo-Saxons.” He rationalizes this as “survival of the fittest.” It has happened throughout South America, Astor gleefully claims, and even more dramatically in Africa, which he chillingly describes as the “erstwhile ‘Dark Continent.’” Its deserts and jungles have been geoengineered into pleasant gardens and suburbs, Astor reports.

But turning the Sahara into farmland pales in comparison to the scope of the protagonists’ other plans. Seceding entirely from nature’s status quo ante, Astor salivates over a vision of a world where global climate itself is decided by CEOs. The narrative begins with a speech addressing shareholders of the “Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company” (T.A.S.). Using colossal pumps, bulkheads, and reservoirs, they plan to move the weight of Earth’s oceans, seasonally shifting the planet’s ballast, eradicating its orbital “wabbling.”

Given that seasonal extremes are caused by the unevenness of Earth’s orbital axis, the plan is designed to enforce “eternal spring” across the world. This would, apparently, melt the ice caps, making the polar regions arable paradises, thus providing untold sustenance for growing populations. Casually, the T.A.S.’s president conveys his ancillary design to “blow up the Aleutian Isles,” allowing the Gulf Stream to shuttle warm water into the Arctic, accelerating the process. He jocularly notes that polar bears will be made homeless. Later in the book, readers are treated to proposals to use colossal bombs to rupture Earth’s crust, which Astor assures will drain entire oceans and happily raise new continents.

Not content merely with altering Earth’s surface and axial inclination, plans are afoot to edit the planet’s orbit, too, making it more elliptical. This is so that it will pass closer to Jupiter, allowing for shorter trips from Earth to the fifth planet and making it easier to colonize.

The trajectory Astor championed was one of capitalism’s continual exit from all prior limits, with “inferior” portions of humanity being left behind by this thrust.

Having set axial straightening in motion, the T.A.S.’s president joins a wealthy socialite on humanity’s first mission to Jupiter. Naturally, it is entirely privately financed. (Said socialite is advised to apply for federal funding, but he vehemently refuses. He doesn’t want to share glory with the state.) The resulting jaunt to Jupiter is justified because Earth’s “possibilities are exhausted” — now that there’s perpetual springtime, peace, and abundance, those who want to prevail in the “struggle for existence” must seek opportunity elsewhere.

Equipped with hypodermic syringes filled with rattlesnake venom (to inoculate against Jovian microbes), our protagonists alight on Jupiter, which Astor imagines as a lush, terrestrial planet currently undergoing something identical to Earth’s Carboniferous period. He imagines it populated with dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts — a common belief in his time.

Upon assessing Jupiter’s verdant “rolling plains,” the T.A.S. president’s “materialistic mouth” begins to “water.” His first words: “How I should like to mine those hills for copper, or drain the swamps to the south!” Marveling at all the coal, petroleum, silver, and lead to be extracted from the planet, the explorers compare exiting the Earth to the “Divine promise” — and “manifest destiny” — of the “return of man to the garden of Eden.”

The initial reaction of another party member upon encountering a thriving alien ecosystem on Jupiter is to ready his “explosive magazine rifles.” They express eagerness to shoot and slaughter Jovian game. Indeed, certain that evolution everywhere inevitably produces intelligent “beings” like humans, the explorers happily comment that Jupiter’s colonization by Earthlings will “arrest” this evolution. All that “man” needs to do, Astor explains, is pursue “the same destructive methods that he has pursued” with other species back on Earth.

Again, Astor isn’t coy concerning who he envisages these colonists to be. The “blessing” of Jupiter, he jubilates, is that it will provide “unlimited outlet” for the “congested communities of Europe and America.” He even explicitly urges that the secession from Earth does not begin until there has been due time to “absorb or run out all inferior races” back home on Earth, lest humankind “make the mistake of extending the Tower of Babel.”

It’s important to note that there’s nothing inherently imperialist about expanding life beyond Earth, especially when it comes to exploring otherwise uninhabited worlds. Indeed, around the same time Astor published his book, the Russian futurologist Nikolai Fyodorov was pleading that space not become an amusement park for “millionaires and billionaires,” nor its exploration be reduced to infecting other planets with Earth’s “commercial” cupidity. Astor’s blithe entangling of these themes merely reflects his prejudices and towering privilege. It’s tragic that people still conflate these matters.

Nevertheless, later writers would continue to extrapolate the trajectory Astor championed: one of capitalism’s continual exit from all prior limits. Where Astor murderously envisaged “inferior” portions of humanity being left behind by this thrust — to ultimately fade into the twilight — later writers imagined a similar fate for the entire species. The underlying logic of perpetual secession remained the same. The difference was that the prophesied advent of artificial intelligence made biological brains themselves impediments to further accumulation, acceleration, and intensification of capital — and therefore something to be sloughed off.

Where Astor penned his Journey during the fin de siècle, British author Charles Stross published Accelerando in 2005, after the fin de millénaire. Like Astor, Stross envisions a future in which corporations rule supreme and the Solar System has been settled. However, in Stross’s novel, humans are not driving these developments. Just as marginalized peoples were blotted from Astor’s future, the biological species itself is marginalized and ultimately displaced in Stross’s.

But while Stross does extend the logical ramifications Astor championed, his prophesied future serves as a warning rather than a roadmap.

Incipient smarter-than-human AI accelerates economic productivity beyond human comprehension. Technological progress itself moves toward not needing a human driver.

Described by reviewers as “volatile” and “visionary,” Accelerando deliriously shuttles through epochs before, during, and after the technological singularity — a hypothetical inflection point at which intelligence secedes from biological substrates to synthetic ones and undergoes explosive amplification. The event splits evolutionary history in two by making self-improving machines — not blindly evolved humans — the most intelligent beings on Earth. Stross documents the final generations of humanity as they witness everything solid melt into nano-dust.

Get 25% off for a limited time with the code: LitMap25

Indeed, rather than providing the stage for capitalism’s apotheosis, as Astor imagined, the U.S. is portrayed as a “crumbling bureaucracy” in Accelerando. The economy that was previously seen as providing the vanguard of escape velocity from social burdens has itself been outpaced and become outdated. AI has allowed markets themselves to become self-aware and sovereign, such that — in its runaway secession from all inertial influences — capital itself opts out of even the erstwhile “Land of Opportunity.” Markets may once have served as a means to the furthering of human ends, but now they can finally become ends entirely in themselves.

The book opens in the early 21st century. Aside from references to “sentient corporations” and “self-aware financial instruments,” life remains recognizably human-centric. Fast forward a few decades, however, and things start getting strange. Incipient smarter-than-human AI accelerates economic productivity beyond human comprehension. Humans are now “being dragged behind the out-of-control engine of history,” insignificant in a world fast becoming unknowable. Technological progress itself moves toward not needing a human driver.

For the time being, however, there are still “tinned primates in orbit around Jupiter.” The gas giant is where the Solar System’s rearrangement begins with relatively modest mining projects. Surrounded by a “reef of specialized nanomachinery and debris,” the planet is the victim of a “cosmic land grab unmatched since the days of the wild west.” (Astor would be proud.) But soon, Jovian “dumb matter” is being converted directly by machines into “smart matter” or “computronium.” The planet itself is being transformed into one vast synthetic brain.

Fast forward a few more decades, and the final smatterings of Homo sapiens teeter on extinction.

Where Astor imagined Jovian colonization as unfolding in a manner identical to westward expansion in the U.S., Stross depicts an extractive process — extending down to the nanomolecular scale — that rearranges the gas giant’s entire bulk. This is no swashbuckling jaunt to Jupiter; it is more like endocytosis. Nevertheless, both proceed according to the same logic of prospecting and profit.

Some “tinned primates” remain in the loop, here and there, but they are rapidly becoming an irrelevance. As tendrils of “smart matter” spread and begin rearranging other planets, too, the Solar System itself begins to “wake up.” It begins thinking and trading “furiously” at untold googolplexes of cogitations per second. It is turning into one vast, circumstellar CPU.

Out in the asteroid belt, digital sentient beings “sing of alienation and obsolescence, of intelligence too slow [to] support the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world.” On Earth — now overheating due to runaway economic hyperactivity and ravaged by biosphere-devouring nanobot outbreaks — there are “still humans dwelling down in the hot depths, but it’s getting hard to recognize them.”

Fast forward a few more decades, and the final smatterings of Homo sapiens teeter on extinction. Inscrutable superintelligences have taken over, wasting no time in entirely dismantling the planets with “molecular machinery.” Their mass is turned into “hazy shells” of “nanocomputers” circling the Sun, metabolizing its output directly into pure thought and unbridled economy.

The Earth is kept, for a time, for sentimental reasons. Eventually, however, it is also unceremoniously converted into “computronium.” This heralds the final extinction of biological humanity. We witness the “death throes of dumb matter,” as the Solar System reorganizes itself into one titanic “Matrioshka brain.” Stross writes:

From outside the Accelerated civilization, it isn’t really possible to know what’s going on inside. … Inside that swarm, minds a trillion or more times as complex as humanity think thoughts as far beyond human imagination as a microprocessor is beyond a nematode worm.

History and progress have, by now, seceded entirely from all simian substrates. Accelerando closes with a haunting vision of the Universe itself being reorganized by “galaxy-sized intelligences” that are conducting experiments to “hack” the fundamental constraints of spacetime and thermodynamics. For the most developed minds, even the laws of nature are now optional. Intelligence headlong secedes from all of them.

These distant blooms of superintellect provide the inscrutable, foreboding backdrop against which the final smatterings of recognizably human-derived entities eke out a backwater existence in the “waste heat” of distant singularities. Refugees of the intelligence explosion, they live “furtively in the darkness between these islands of brilliance.

The same ultimate and final equality still applies to all of us. There’s no escape from death — for now, at least.

Given his Protestant convictions and fervent belief in an anthropoid deity, Astor might have found Stross’s latter-day vision of the future troubling at first. On further reflection, however, he might notice its consistency with his principles.

Where Astor, living at the height of the Gilded Age, would have believed that capitalism and markets exclusively provide a means to further human ends, Stross depicts them overleaping these bounds: autocatalyzing into ends-in-themselves to the degree their primate inventors (that is, us) become entirely expendable — a logic that was already inherent in Astor’s own will to secede from all burdens imposed by social and natural limits.

Again, Stross wrote his book as a pitch-black satire, though it’s clear not everyone will read it that way. Some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in the world today look positively on outcomes similar to those depicted in Accelerando. Google cofounder Larry Page, for example, has infamously professed that he sees nothing undesirable in humanity’s replacement with digital minds. It’s just the next, inevitable step in “cosmic evolution,” he decrees.

I’m enough of a chauvinist to feel perturbed by the prospect of Homo sapiens being marginalized out of existence. I’m also open-minded enough to acknowledge that chauvinism is typically, though perhaps not always, misguided. I hope, desperately, that a more collaborative outcome is possible. It’d be a boring Universe if biological humans, with all our smallness and crookedness, were some unsurpassable pinnacle, but that doesn’t necessarily mean humanism is a limitation intelligence must opt out of in order to intensify itself into strange new forms. Good things can be made from the crooked timber humankind was hewn from.

Regardless, as poor Astor succumbed to the icy waves back in the early hours of April 15, 1912, he proved that even the most privileged individuals couldn’t entirely opt out of the natural order. The same ultimate and final equality — that of mortality — still applies to all of us alive today. There’s no escape from death — for now, at least.

This article is part of Big Think’s Summer 2026 special issue, The Opt-Out Nation.

Welcome to Big Think Books, your direct line to the books and ideas that shape our world. I’m Kevin Dickinson, and here are some great reads to check out this month.

Putting books on the map

A few years back, my love of a book hit reality head-on. I was visiting Monterey, California, with my family to see its world-famous aquarium. Afterward, we decided to explore Cannery Row, and I was surprised to find it remarkably unsurprising. We window-browsed tchotchke shops, had lunch at a themed brew pub, and turned down a barrel’s worth of old saltwater taffy samples.

It was like every other water-adjacent main street. But Cannery Row was supposed to be different. It was, after all, the setting of Steinbeck’s lovable little 1945 novel.

Honestly, what did I expect: a place frozen in the early 1900s, where bordellos advertised next to immigrant grocers while factories breathed a halitosis of fish slaughter over everything? Still, I wanted something that reminded me of the street I’d traveled in my imagination. I did manage to locate a nod to that place, but only by stopping to read every plaque along the way* — much to my family’s annoyance.

In his latest Strange Maps essay, my colleague Frank Jacobs noted that academics call this phenomenon “imaginative geography” or “toponymic capture.” Basically, Steinbeck’s vision of the California town came to dominate its identity for me. In some ways, it overwrote the town’s “prior identity in the public imagination,” too. Consider: The street officially became Cannery Row in 1958. Before that, it was called Ocean View Avenue, same as every other water-adjacent main street. (Ironic, I know.)

“[T]he English nature writer Robert Macfarlane develops the idea that a sufficiently powerful text doesn’t just describe a landscape, but alters the mind that subsequently encounters it,” Frank writes. “[Y]ou see the Suffolk coast through W.G. Sebald, the Mississippi through Mark Twain, the South (as a particularly ‘Gothic’ place) through Faulkner.”

Through stories, we shape a place’s identity while also examining it, a process equal parts creation and discovery.

Frank’s essay was inspired by Big Think’s new map of the United States’ literary landmarks. It’s a massive poster that charts the settings of more than 400 books alongside travelogues for those more restless tales. I even found a surprising story or two from the places that helped shape my own sense of self.

The map is available at Pop Chart, and you can use the code LitMap25 to get 25% off for a limited time. Big Think members get a special 40% discount.

And as always, I have some book recommendations, too. They are all nonfiction, so you won’t find them on Big Think’s map, but they can help you see the world a little differently, as well.

Keep reading,
Kevin

*Pro tip: Always read the plaque.

1. Not Built in a Day: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire

by Emma Southon

Western culture is obsessed with the Roman Empire. Its art and architecture, politics and rulers, the glories of Rome maintain a unique place in world history and our collective imagination. But those glories were dependent on slave labor, and while history doesn’t often ignore this fact, it does have a habit of relegating it to a few sentences on demographics.

In her new book, Southon reveals the history hidden in those statistics. She writes about how Rome propagated its slave trade through war and how enslaved peoples underpinned every aspect of society, from the harvest to building the Colosseum. It also examines slave revolts and the complex realities of life for those freed from bondage.

Though conversational in tone, the book handles its subject with care and is worth picking up for anyone interested in a deeper understanding of Rome.

2. Power Surge: Conglomerate Hollywood and the Studio System’s Last Hurrah

by Thomas Schatz

They don’t make movies like they used to. Pardon the cranky old-man moment, but I really do feel fortunate to have come of age in the ‘90s and early 2000s. It was a time when blockbusters such as Jurassic Park and Terminator 2 were pushing technological boundaries, while indie darlings like Pulp Fiction were taking visual storytelling to cool new places.

So, I was drawn to Schatz’s latest, which tells the story of how this era came to be. Deeply researched, it reveals the meetings, big egos, and backroom deals that created an era of movie magic Hollywood continues to mine for nostalgia bucks: the second, and potentially last, golden age of studio cinema.

3. Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate

by Roopika Risam

We’re so awash in data that the very concept has become as transparent as the air we breathe. Every day, I manage umpteen spreadsheets, read statistics in the news that account for millions of people, and pay little attention to the trillion bytes of my hard drive (to say nothing of the gazillions more swimming in the clouds).

Risam wants to make data solid again by showing that it was a “turning point in how humans learned to organize and imagine the world.” She traces how data evolved, from tallies scratched into bone to the clay tablets that allowed early civilizations to function, all the way to today’s nation-state data frenzy. An important through-line in this book is that data is as much a tool for control as it is for counting.

Truthfully, I don’t always agree with Risam’s takeaways, and her style can be stale in its straightforwardness. But this numerical tour is wonderfully unique and raises questions modern readers should give proper thought and consideration.

4. Big Time Off: The Transformative Power of Sabbaticals and How to Take One

by DJ DiDonna

If you’re an American, chances are you need a vacation. We seldom use all of our vacation days in a year, and some of us take no days off at all. If we do, we feel guilty setting foot out of the office and log on to work anyway. (Just gotta check something.)

DiDonna has a modest suggestion: People shouldn’t just take more time off; they should take an extended vacation, one potentially months long. Unlike vacations, DiDonna argues, sabbaticals have the potential to improve our relationships, make us more self-actualized, and give us a proper rest for once.

A word of warning: If you are looking for a how-to book, then your mileage will vary. I do think DiDonna underestimates how difficult it can be to pause work for so long when you live in my tax bracket. But if you’re looking for a book that pushes against the myth that productivity alone will save you — and amen to that! — then give this one a try.

5. The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness

by Cal Flyn

“Wilderness is a negative definition, an absence, a lack of human disturbance,” Flyn writes in the introduction to her new book. Yet, she adds, such a pristine landscape doesn’t really exist. Even by drawing borders for national parks and other natural sanctuaries, humans put their stamp on the wilderness.

Flyn investigates some of the world’s “most invigorating” wilds alongside how cultures have conceived of the boundaries between what is wild and what is civilized. It’s a fascinating exploration that also looks to what we have sought in these special places: epiphany, entertainment, a sense of purity, and even some long-lost Edenic past.

Kevin Dickinson is the books editor at Big Think. He holds a master’s in English and writing, and in addition to Big Think, his work has appeared in RealClearScience, Pop Matters, the Writer Magazine, and the Washington Post.

And if you’d like a copy, it’s not too late. Become a member by August 1, and we’ll send a print copy in the mail. Thank you for reading with us!

by Henry Eliot

“I would prefer not to.”

Those words, printed in white capital letters on a black T-shirt, are worn by a man surrounded by crates full of books in Zuccotti Park, downtown Manhattan. It is late October 2011, and the man doesn’t know it yet, but in three weeks’ time, the books in his crates will be seized by the NYPD and destroyed.

The slogan on the man’s T-shirt comes from Herman Melville’s 1853 short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” The words are spoken by Bartleby, a lawyer’s copyist, who has become, in the words of The New Republic, the “patron saint of civil disobedience.”

In Melville’s fable, Bartleby works diligently for a New York lawyer until one day, for no discernible reason, he stops and instead responds to his employer’s every request with the phrase: “I would prefer not to.” Bartleby remains at his desk, and the lawyer’s every attempt to get him to work proves unsuccessful. Eventually, the lawyer tells Bartleby to pack up and leave the office. “I would prefer not to,” is the reply.

We never learn why Bartleby behaves as he does or, in fact, anything about his past. Melville deliberately avoids clues, and this is perhaps why the story continues to resonate so widely, from The Economist, which has a “Bartleby” column about the mundanity of working life, to the Australian children’s cartoon Bluey, which features a poker-faced “Bartlebee” doll in a Christmas episode. The mystery of Bartleby is unsettling: He’s a blank page. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze argued that his very choice of words — “I would prefer not to” — creates an ambiguous “zone of indetermination” that dissolves normal linguistic binaries and seems to threaten the social conventions on which we rely.

Literature is full of characters who opt out of prevailing worldviews. The interesting question is how far we, as readers, condone their opting out.

The man wearing the Bartleby T-shirt is Zach, one of the librarians who created the People’s Library at the heart of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protest. The protest was a response to the global financial crisis of 2008 and a perceived lack of culpability or contrition amongst banks and corporations. Under the banner “We are the 99%,” protesters staged a 59-day sit-in at Zuccotti Park, highlighting inequality and championing social justice.

At the center of the occupation was the People’s Library, which grew out of donations until it numbered more than 5,000 books. The library adopted Melville’s story — the subtitle of which is “A Story of Wall-Street” — staging readings and printing T-shirts. I’m looking at a photograph of Zach from an old People’s Library blog post, which explains:

“Bartleby” is an imperfect analogy for Occupy Wall Street, but it nevertheless resonates because it is about how a refusal can open up new ways of seeing. Bartleby’s refusal — and his occupation of the Chancery office — punctures the “doctrine of assumptions” that naturalized the power relations governing the employer’s world.

Bartleby’s occupation of a Wall Street office in the story has a direct connection to Occupy Wall Street, but the mystery of his behavior makes him a fickle figurehead. Literature is full of other characters who opt out of prevailing worldviews for more tangible reasons. The interesting question is how far we, as readers, condone their “opting out.”

If we find the status quo dystopian, then opting out is clearly the morally commendable choice. When Winston Smith writes “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” over and over again in his secret diary, we cheer because we know those words represent the first steps of a journey that will place him in opposition to the hideous, authoritarian, joyless world of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). We thrill when the fireman Guy Montag pockets an illicit book in Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and when Offred meets Ofglen in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), we yearn for her to join the Mayday resistance and oppose the Republic of Gilead.

The case is also clear when the prevailing worldview is rife with prejudice or bigotry. The Awakening (1899) by Kate Chopin, for example, dramatizes Edna Pontellier’s gradual rejection of 19th-century marital and maternal expectations in favor of a life marked by artistic and romantic freedom. The same is true of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston, in which Janie Crawford overcomes similar frustrations and the added impediment of racial prejudice.

But the moral status of opting out becomes less obvious in the apparently bucolic genre of “back to nature” stories, in which a character swaps a conventional lifestyle for a simpler way of living. In Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees (1957), the young Cosimo climbs a tree in the baronial garden after arguing with his father about eating snail soup. Cosimo swears he will never come down for the rest of his life and stays true to his promise. He lives in the garden’s trees and the local woods, idling, reading, and pursuing amorous adventures until he is an old man. Similarly, in Joan Barfoot’s Gaining Ground (1980), Abra, driven to desperation, abandons her loving husband and children to live alone on a smallholding in rural Ontario, growing vegetables and forgetting about her family.

Behind both of these stories lies Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), the textbook for this mode of opting out: Its ethos extols this kind of experimental self-dependence, environmental awareness, and spiritual discovery. Indeed, if The New Republic hadn’t already canonized Bartleby, Thoreau would have a decent claim to being the “patron saint of civil disobedience.” After all, the first product of his sojourn at Walden Pond was the 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience,” in which he argues that the “only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”

As readers, we can empathize with the reasons for opting out while simultaneously regretting the circumstances that make it an attractive option.

Much as I admire Thoreau, I detect something naggingly selfish in Walden, as I do at the end of Voltaire’s Candide (1759), when Candide gives up engaging with the world and settles down to tend his cottage garden instead. We understand, of course, that trauma and the frustrations of modern life can motivate a retreat to nature, but abstaining from society still feels, on some level, like capitulation. Voltaire would argue that that is his point: It’s impossible to remain optimistic and engaged in the face of the world’s misery.

My point is that, as readers, we can empathize with the reasons for opting out while simultaneously regretting the circumstances that make it an attractive option.

And of course, there are examples of opting out that lead to obviously negative results. Characters such as Ilya Ilyich Oblomov in Ivan Goncharov’s eponymous novel (1859) or Jean des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours (1884) have opted out of society through an apathetic, aristocratic sense of ennui. Both have become so self-involved that they can barely leave their rooms or even their beds. At one point, des Esseintes encrusts the shell of his pet tortoise with exotic jewels until it is crushed to death under its own weight. Goncharov and Huysmans treat their characters with affectionate humor, but they are hardly role models for fulfilling life choices.

Even more destructive are characters such as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, who retreats to his subterranean lodgings to stew in frustration and write his diatribe against society, or Charles Dickens’s Miss Havisham, who stops all the clocks in her mansion and sits in her crumbling bridal dress amidst a rotting wedding breakfast while plotting the downfall of the male sex. Perhaps the most disturbing example of all is Meursault in Albert Camus’s L’Étranger (1942), who steps so far out of the range of normal human emotions that he feels nothing at his mother’s funeral or when he shoots a man dead on an Algerian beach. At the end of the novel, convicted of murder, Meursault embraces the “tender indifference of the world.”

Bartleby’s motivations are opaque. He can be read as a valiant opponent of capitalism, but he may equally be a victim of depression.

Literature demonstrates that the moral legitimacy of opting out depends on the circumstances in which one finds oneself, and moreover, that people can be skillful at spinning narratives to legitimize their behavior. We need to tune our analytical abilities and reach our own conclusions as to how far opting out is a valid option.

The same is true of politics. We need to use our skills as readers when we consume news feeds. We need to listen to politicians as if they were unreliable narrators; we need to look for ulterior meanings and notice rhetorical techniques. When President Trump withdraws the U.S. from the World Health Organization or Bernie Sanders criticizes the North American Free Trade Agreement, our duty is to analyze their narratives and decide whether their positions are legitimate.

This is why Zach was wearing a Bartleby T-shirt in 2011. But, again, Bartleby’s motivations are opaque. Of all the literary examples we’ve discussed, his decision to opt out can be interpreted most diversely: He can be read as a valiant opponent of capitalism, but he may equally be a victim of depression, or he may be displaying a catastrophically harmful and selfish protectionism.

In the story, Bartleby is eventually dragged to “the Tombs” — the Hall of Justice — where he starves quietly to death because he prefers not to eat. On November 15, 2011, Zuccotti Park was cleared. The protesters were evicted, and the 5,554 books in the People’s Library were seized by the NYPD, loaded into garbage trucks, and destroyed.

Fifteen years later, we can speculate as to whether politicians and corporations are any more engaged with society. Are they seeking to improve the world? Are they looking out for the 99%? Or perhaps, like Bartleby, they would prefer not to.

This article is part of Big Think’s newest special issue, The Opt-Out Nation.

by Scotty Hendricks

Literature explores the breadth of human experiences, even those behaviors and thoughts we find abhorrent. Characters who are cruel, malicious, and heartless are typically the villains of the story. They stand in opposition to a protagonist who, while perhaps flawed, is heroic, selfless, and kind — qualities we value and admire. When it comes to spending time with one character type or the other, it’s obvious which one readers prefer.

But sometimes, storytellers want to center their tale on the type of person we wouldn’t want to pass on the street, much less inhabit their point of view. These characters may even be the protagonists of their story in spite of — or because of — their distasteful personalities.

The down low on the low-down

Before diving in, it’s worth clarifying what psychopathy actually is. While words like psycho and psychopath get thrown around a lot, they are often used as insults, a quick-fire way to label someone unstable or weird. Even the more clinical psychopathy can be overly stigmatizing, which is one reason the term hasn’t been included in professional diagnostic manuals since 1980. Mental health professionals today prefer to categorize related diagnoses, such as “antisocial personality disorder,” more on behavior than personality traits. But while some argue that psychopathy is a useless diagnosis, it remains one of the most discussed personality disorders.

It is also fiendishly difficult to assess because its dimensions exist along a broad spectrum. The most widely used diagnostic tool, the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), looks at 20 personality traits. These include grandiosity, pathological lying, superficial charm, criminal versatility, and other nasty attributes. To complete the checklist, a doctoral-level clinician must conduct a face-to-face interview that can last for up to two hours.

Thankfully, as readers of fiction, we don’t need a 20-point checklist to make a rough determination as to whether a fictional character is psychopathic. A simpler model breaks the disorder down into three specific traits. Those being:

• Disinhibition (impulsivity, high risk tolerance, and a reckless disregard for safety).

• Boldness (extreme self-confidence and egocentrism paired with a need to be socially dominant).

• Meanness (a lack of empathy, exploitative tendencies, and no remorse for harming others).

More subjectively, though perhaps more illustratively, Robert Hare, the psychologist who developed the PCL-R, described psychopaths as:

“[…] social predators who charm, manipulate, and ruthlessly plow their way through life, leaving a broad trail of broken hearts, shattered expectations, and empty wallets. Completely lacking in conscience and in feelings for others, they selfishly take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without the slightest sense of guilt or regret.”

With these dimensions in mind, let’s turn to some of literature’s greatest psychopaths*. Spoilers ahead.

Richard III in Richard III (Late 16th century)

[W]hen thy warlike father, like a child, / Told the sad story of my father’s death, / And twenty times made pause to sob and weep, / That all the standers-by had wet their cheeks / Like trees bedash’d with rain: in that sad time / My manly eyes did scorn a humble tear

William Shakespeare’s characters wrestle with madness, psychological crises, and all manner of unhealthy obsessions, so it’s no surprise that at least one among their ranks would be a psychopath. His oeuvre has a few standout candidates actually — Iago from Othello comes to mind — but Richard III is the handily best of the Bard’s worst.

Richard III is a Machiavellian schemer with eyes on the throne. He plots to marry Lady Anne despite being responsible for the death of her husband, the heir apparent, Edward of Westminster. He lets his brother, the Duke of Clarence, be arrested for treason and later orders his assassination. He kidnaps two princes and has them killed. After marrying Lady Anne, he has her poisoned so he can pursue a different woman. The list of ill deeds goes on.

The death and misery Richard III engineers win him the throne, but his reign is short-lived. The play ends at the Battle of Bosworth Field, where Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, slays Richard and claims the throne as Henry VII.

After reading or watching the play, it’s not difficult to spot Richard III’s psychopathic traits. He can’t relate to others and lacks empathy. In one speech, he seems pleased by how much pain he caused another person. He is a pathological liar, using his charm and eloquence to fool almost everyone. He also seems more than a little reckless. In his famous opening soliloquy, he announces he is “determined to prove a villain” because he’s bored. While he does have his moments of guilt, these don’t slow him down much.

It’s worth noting that while the play is often categorized as a history, covering the end of the War of the Roses, Shakespeare takes more than a few artistic liberties in his villainous portrayal of Richard III. The monarch was no saint, but there is no actual evidence that he orchestrated the deaths of King Henry VI, Lady Anne, or the two princes. Shakespeare’s exaggerations likely stemmed from his writing during the reign of Elizabeth I, whose grandfather was none other than Henry VII.

Amy Dunne in Gone Girl (2012)

‘My gosh, Nick, why are you so wonderful to me?’ He was supposed to say: You deserve it. I love you. But he said, ‘Because I feel sorry for you.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because every morning you have to wake up and be you.”

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is a mystery-thriller about the disappearance of Amy Dunne, the quintessential beautiful blonde housewife. During the investigation, suspicion begins to fall on her husband, Nick, when it is discovered he is in extreme debt and increased Amy’s life insurance shortly before she vanished.

The novel shifts between Nick and Amy’s perspectives to reveal two deeply troubled people caught in a bad relationship. Structurally, this means the duo plays double duty: at times, they serve as the protagonist while also being each other’s antagonist. But Amy is hands-down the more psychotic of the two.

You see, Amy wasn’t murdered. After learning that Nick was having an affair, she staged her disappearance as revenge and fabricated clues that would frame Nick for her death. She jacked up his credit card debt, suggested the life insurance policy change, and forged diary entries that characterized Nick as a violent and abusive husband. She even plants her own blood as evidence and, at one point, plans to drown herself to ensure Nick receives the death penalty.

As the story progresses, it is revealed that Amy has a history of blackmailing people while playing the victim. She has no qualms over harming others, even killing her old boyfriend, Desi. And while we can’t say she is impulsive — she really takes her time planning her revenge on Nick — she certainly lacks empathy, is egocentric, and has a high-risk tolerance.

Part of the novel’s appeal lies in how it explores the psychopaths’ use of charm to exploit others. Amy is well aware of how the public at large views women like her (the so-called “missing white woman syndrome”). The media show no interest in investigating the truth, only confirming people’s biases and preconceived notions for ratings. But the person they are fawning over is the one manipulating them to her own ends.

Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby (1925)

I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic takes us to the jazzy, gin-fueled decadence of the mid-1920s. Well-known for exploring the emptiness of wealth, class struggles in the United States, and the darker side of the American dream, the story features an abundance of objectionable characters, and the eponymous Gatsby is one of them. He may not check all of the PCL-R’s 20 points, but he definitely sports more than a few psychopathic traits.

While Nick Caraway, the novel’s narrator, is infatuated with him, Gatsby is up there with Richard III in his gift for lying. The man lies constantly. Even when Nick points out some of his more glaring contradictions, he responds with more lies. Gatsby’s motivations are complex, but basically, all the lying comes down to either a desire to control how others see him or to hide the mysterious source of his wealth — later revealed to be bootlegging (with hints suggesting his involvement in more unsavory dealings).

His obsession with Daisy Buchanan, Nick’s second cousin and wife to the odious millionaire Tom, is in part due to her being the first woman he couldn’t immediately charm. After returning from the war, he proceeds to stalk her and convince her to abandon her family. He is the kind of man who will go to any lengths to get what he wants — even if it means dehumanizing and hurting others.

That said, Gatsby does appear to form reasonably deep emotional connections; is capable of non-impulsive behavior; and is willing to take the fall for Daisy’s hit-and-run rather than flee to avoid prosecution. He may not be as strong a candidate for psychopathy as the others on this list, but that just goes to show that in literature, as in real life, people are complicated.

John Wayne Cleaver in I Am Not a Serial Killer (2009)

“If you met me on the street you’d never guess how much I wanted to kill you.”

Our next entry, written by Dan Wells, is a real genre-bender. It’s part horror, part thriller, and part coming-of-age novel, but the part we’re interested in is the character study of John Wayne Cleaver. The titular “not a serial killer,” John was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder when he was 15. As we mentioned earlier, the disorder is not identical to psychopathy — though it does share some overlapping behaviors, such as deceitfulness, a lack of empathy, and a disregard for others’ safety.

Unlike other fictional characters with these traits, John doesn’t ignore or lean into his aptitude for cruelty. Thanks to his fascination with serial killers, John recognizes the traits he shares with history’s gruesome men and sets strict rules to regulate his impulse toward violence. He doesn’t allow himself to become obsessed with a specific person, he attends therapy sessions, and he maintains a friendship — even if his care for them is a mere facade.

However, John’s “normal” life is disrupted when a serial killer moves into his small town, and the teen decides to use his morbid knowledge to track the criminal down — an investigation aided by the fact that he lives above the town mortuary, which is owned and operated by his mother. He eventually learns that his neighbor, Mr. Crowley, is the killer. More specifically, Crowley is a demon who needs to harvest the body parts of others to replace his own deteriorating body. Did we mention that this one gets weird?

But what makes I Am Not a Serial Killer an interesting inclusion for a list like this is the characters. Crowley is a sympathetic villain, and so is John despite, what we know about his thoughts and feelings for others. By the end, John uses the experience to try to grow and make genuine connections with the people in his life, which is not how these psychopathic stories typically end.

Ostap Bender in The Twelve Chairs (1928)

“Oh-ho! If you’ve gone ahead and opened a personal account for me, then the least you could do is tally it right. Start up a debit column, start up a credit column. Don’t forget to enter the sixty thousand rubles you owe me in the debits, and the rest can go in the credits. The balance is in my favor: 59,992 rubles.”

Speaking of endings, let’s end this list on a lighter note. The Twelve Chairs is a hilarious Soviet-era novel by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov. It satirizes the USSR’s New Economic Policy and Russian life in general while telling the story of a hunt for one dozen matching chairs.

During the Russian Revolution, Kisa Vorobyaninov’s mother-in-law hid the family’s gems in a chair from her dining-room set to keep them safe from the Bolsheviks, but the Communists wound up confiscating all of her personal property anyway. On her deathbed, she tells Kisa about the treasure hidden in one of the 12 identical chairs, and Kisa sets out to retrieve the family’s lost wealth. The con man Ostap Bender joins Kisa in his search, and the two travel the USSR, having all sorts of humorous misadventures and team-ups along the way.

None of the novel’s characters are upright citizens, but Ostap may be the worst of a bad bunch. Highly manipulative, he more or less forces Kisa into working with him. He is also focused on the short term, frequently turning to scams or brute force to keep people motivated. A successful criminal, he has no problem lying, parting marks from their money, and abandoning those he no longer needs. While he does have some empathy for those he works with, it isn’t enough to improve his behavior.

If anything, the reader’s knowledge that he does have some sense of right and wrong might even make him seem worse. And Ostap’s unwillingness to curb his poor behavior proves his undoing. He is ultimately murdered by an alienated Kisa shortly before they discover the final chair.

In fact, few of our psychopathic protagonists meet desirable fates. Three of the five are killed, and Amy Dunne remains stuck in a loveless marriage. Only John, who actively works against his darker impulses, enjoys what we may consider a happy, if traumatic, ending. This suggests that one reason writers choose to center their stories on characters with such distasteful personalities is to serve as a warning: those who live in meanness, boldness, and disinhibition do harm not only to their victims but also to themselves.

* Editor’s Note: Yes, Patrick Bateman from Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) obviously meets the criteria, and no, we didn’t include him. That one just felt a little too easy.

by Jasna Hodžić

After unpacking my bag in the bedroom I’d call home for the next month, part two of my European spring trip, I went downstairs. My friend and travel companion sat at the kitchen table, eyes on her phone. Without looking up, she held out a paperback.

“Here,” she said, glancing up as I took the book. “I bought this at the airport. I think you’ll love it.”

I examined the cover. It carried a minimalist hand-drawn portrait, the subject unmistakably a hare in profile, with long, spindly ears, a dusky coat, and a single hazel eye. The title, Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton, was set against its slender snout. I opened it, skimmed a paragraph, thrummed the pages, took in the font and generous spacing, then flipped it over to read the back.

I thanked her, but kept my real reaction to myself. Though it seemed like something I’d enjoy, I probably wouldn’t get around to it. Thanks to the Libby app, I already had half a dozen e-books waiting for me. I considered myself something of a Libby maestra, constantly orchestrating its features to perpetually remain near the front of the line for at least one title. I set Raising Hare on my nightstand and went to explore.

That night in bed, I put my phone down and did the once unthinkable: abandoned a good e-book midway through. The hare’s beady eye beckoned. I started Raising Hare and returned to it every night until I finished.

I’m an avid reader, but I hadn’t read a print book for several years, and the act struck me as strangely significant. It reminded me of my morning journaling habit, which at times seemed slow and unnecessary but was oddly satisfying. A quick search through the literature turned up plenty of evidence that reading print has proven benefits: Readers focus better, understand more, and remember more details.

But I suspect these benefits aren’t why people keep returning to physical books, especially for pleasure. I wasn’t drawn to Raising Hare by some out-of-this-world cognitive experience I wanted to repeat. I didn’t sense I’d absorbed Dalton’s book more thoroughly than any e-book I’ve read.

Afterward, I found myself crouched in front of the rental’s bookshelf, hunting for another title. Nothing there could compete with what was waiting on my phone. I was dying to read Tana French’s new novel, The Keeper (2026), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) had been on my list forever. Still, I kept pulling books, unsure what exactly I was looking for.

The science of the “somethings”

“Most people understand that there is something they do when reading in print that they don’t do when reading digitally,” Naomi Baron told me. Baron is the professor emerita of linguistics at American University and the author of Reader Bot: What Happens When AI Reads and Why It Matters (2026). Her name kept turning up in the research on reading I’d come across, so I asked her for help to get to the bottom of my print renaissance.

I lobbed some of my “somethings” her way: something about the way the book felt in my hands, something about the way my friend had given it to me, something about the way the book boasted one singular, obvious purpose — to be read.

I grew slightly embarrassed as I explained my profound discovery that books are nice to hold. But I knew I wasn’t alone. Print has made something of a comeback, supposedly in response to demand, with some publishers even marketing it as a superior alternative. An ad for a climbing guidebook put it bluntly: “A genuine, real-paper, no-BS-print guidebook. Gift it to a friend in need.” A clear jab at guidebook apps, which are often cheaper and can be more convenient — when they work properly.

“Despite the rise of digitization, humans don’t want to give up tangible items,” Baron said. “Moleskine started selling out because people wanted to write with a pen. Vinyl records are back. Print didn’t fall off a cliff.” Baron points to this broad pattern as evidence that these objects hold a value that’s hard to pin down and can’t be digitized away.

I switched to e-books because they made it much easier — and cheaper — to read while traveling. Then it just became a habit, even when I stayed put. But back home after my vacation, I wondered whether how I read deserved as much attention and thought as what I read.

A book in the hands

The distinction between a book and an e-book is semantically obvious — the latter is a modification of the former, with a clumsy E slapped in front to signal the difference. A book is just that: a physical item you hold and interact with. It is also a self-contained entity. Raising Hare weighs a certain amount, feels a certain way, and has a minimalist cover. No other book is quite like it; it is nothing more and nothing less than Raising Hare.

Obviously, your phone or e-reader is tangible, too. You can hold it, flip it around, and throw it against the wall if you’re feeling overwhelmed (not that I am condoning such action). But it’s also strangely insubstantial. A swipe is more artificial than flipping a page. It looks and feels like every other device on the market. They are less singular objects than portals, panes of fingerprint-smeared glass revealing a million different functions.

“There’s something about the physicality of a book that matters,” Baron said. “When we survey readers across countries and ask what they like most about print, many say it’s the feel of the paper, the weight of the book in their hand. Print feels like ‘real reading.’ It’s a description we hear again and again, across many languages.”

There’s also a benefit that’s easy to overlook in today’s digital age. Because a book is a self-contained object, it lends itself to experiences that go beyond its intended purpose. As with other tangible things — a toaster, a vinyl record, a car — if you want to find a book, you seek it out in designated places: a library, a bookstore, a friend’s bookshelf.

“What do you gain by being able to browse and handle physical books that you don’t get when you’re browsing some poorly designed algorithm on Amazon?” Baron asked. “You discover things you wouldn’t ordinarily come upon — books that turn out to be deeply relevant to you or something about a person from the notes they left in the margins. Those are the things we miss out on when we don’t have physical books.”

And when you’re done with the book, the choice of what to do next — keep it, lend it, sell it — is yours. That choice becomes, in a way, a reflection of who you are.

“In surveys with younger readers, I’ve heard from kids who read the Harry Potter books digitally, then saved up their allowance so they could buy the print books and put them on the shelf to show their friends,” Baron said.

I pictured my own Harry Potter collection, still lined up on the middle shelf of my old bedroom, starting with the thin maroon spine of The Sorcerer’s Stone, each book growing wider until the dark, menacing green of Deathly Hallows. Most of the plot details are long gone, but I do remember my uncle buying me the last book as a surprise. I stayed up all night reading it, eagerly checking the mail each morning for my admission letter from Hogwarts. Harry Potter represents some of the best parts of childhood — imagination, curiosity, magic.

Other books on my shelf tell stories that have nothing to do with the one on the page. My copy of Memoirs of Hadrian — a book my parents bonded over early in their relationship and one I struggled through in high school — still has my teenage handwriting in the margins. My copy of Merle’s Door isn’t a memory I’m holding onto so much as one I let go of — someone gave it to me, and I later gave it to someone else, the two of us bonding over a shared love of dogs.

“When people hold onto books or collect libraries, I interpret that behavior to mean, ‘These books are part of who I am now,’” explained Baron. Fair enough. But what about the decade I’d spent reading with literally nothing to show for it?

E-books at your convenience

Most of what I’ve loved reading over the last ten years, I’ve read on a screen — Sally Rooney’s collected works come to mind. I relate to some of her characters, and I love her razor-sharp writing style. I’ve reread her books multiple times, and they — along with plenty of others I’ve read digitally — inform how I approach my own life. It felt like a juvenile question, but I couldn’t help it: Would these books hit even harder had I read them in print?

Baron’s answer is maybe, but also it’s complicated. “In surveys, when we ask, ‘What do you like most about reading in print,’ people tend to describe becoming emotionally involved with the characters or feeling transported,” she said. “When we ask the same question about digital books, people point to convenience or cost. That doesn’t mean people aren’t engaged when they read digitally, but I take the consistency in responses as an indicator that, for whatever reason, people are more absorbed in the story when they read print.”

That gap may come down to the different reading patterns most people fall into. “When we read a book digitally, we read it faster,” she said. “We don’t go back and re-read an earlier passage. We don’t stop to look something up.” People know they’re reading faster, she added, and mostly assume speed is a good thing. “When I survey people and ask, ‘What do you like least about reading in print,’ many say, ‘It’s too slow,’ or — my personal favorite — ‘I have to concentrate too much when I’m reading in print.’“

Her analysis tracked with how I read things I used to read in print. For instance, when I read the news online, I am always tempted to click away once I’ve gotten the gist. The promise of something else is somehow more appealing than the thing in front of me. But it didn’t describe how I read books for pleasure, even e-books. I go back and reread lines, sometimes entire books. I keep folders of highlighted quotes — one for passages that hit me emotionally, another I call “inspo” for sentences I admire as a writer.

Still, the statistics suggest I was probably reading Raising Hare more slowly without trying, and the story may have had more time to simmer as a result. I don’t know if that’s true, but as Baron pointed out, we’re not reliable narrators of our own reading habits. And that’s kind of the point: If we can’t feel the difference, that’s precisely why the pattern is worth knowing. It hands us back a choice we didn’t know we were making in a practice we’ve performed for most of our lives.

Baron’s practical rule of thumb: “If you know you want to ponder a book, I suggest reading in print. If it’s going to be what I call a ‘one-off’ read, the medium won’t make much of a difference.”

On the surface, the benefits of digital reading — convenience and cost — sound utilitarian, stripped of the higher purpose a physical book seems to offer.

Still, let’s not poo-poo convenience or cost. For all the emotional transportation a print book can give, plenty of people want to literally travel to new places, and lugging around a ton of books isn’t exactly conducive to that lifestyle. Thanks to e-books, I’ve been exposed to hundreds of new authors, ideas, and ways of writing — all while pursuing other priorities in my life and without spending a dime.

Baron points to other reasons someone might prefer reading digitally: “For millennials and onward — who [tend to] value experiences, not possessions — the notion that I’d rather pay for a scuba diving trip off Okinawa than for some Japanese souvenir. Some children tell me they’re afraid of damaging a print book or that it costs too much to buy or ship books when they’re moving. People reading in a new language prefer digital books because they can easily look up words they don’t know.”

When choosing between print and digital, Baron’s question is simpler than any of that: “What is your goal in reading? What are you trying to get out of this? If you want to absorb a novel, print might be better. If you’re trying to get through a textbook, or you’re traveling a lot, or there are certain features that appeal to your situation, digital might be better.”

“The goal isn’t to sell people on ‘reading’ in the abstract,” she added. “It’s figuring out how to keep both formats open, and use each one where it actually delivers the most value.”

Passing it on

A few days after returning from my trip, I was sitting in another friend’s yard in Salt Lake City, drinking a late-morning coffee and watching the birds and squirrels flit around her garden. The night before, I’d finally clicked “borrow” on The Keeper and was a few chapters in. As I opened Libby to keep reading, I heard the screen door shut behind me, and Rosie came out to join me.

In the middle of our conversation, Oso, her yappy, lovable dog, perked up from where he’d been lying at our feet and took off after something. “He loves those rabbits,” Rosie said, already resigned to the futility of trying to stop him.

I put my coffee down. “That reminds me; I have something for you,” I said and walked to my car to grab Raising Hare. I handed it over, and her face lit up as she turned it over in her hands, flipped it over, and skimmed through it. Somewhere in the garden, Oso gave up on the rabbit and trotted back.

by Tim Brinkhof

Ahead of publishing her new book, Mind Drama, science journalist Donna Jackson Nakazawa sent a copy to someone working on a similar topic. The person betrayed her trust by later attempting to publish several key findings under their own name. Although the situation was eventually resolved, Jackson Nakazawa’s mind kept replaying the upsetting incident. Falling prey to a “lifelong tendency to get sucked into a vortex of obsessive thought,” she found herself “trapped in [her] own head, and it was a bad neighborhood to be in.”

Jackson Nakazawa is hardly alone in this regard. In a 2010 study, Harvard psychologists found that people spend as much as 46.9% of their waking hours thinking about things other than what is happening to them in the present moment, and this “mind-wandering” is a strong predictor of unhappiness. Other studies indicate that the percentage has continued to grow, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s a problem because ruminating about what has been or could be isn’t just bad for our mental health. It’s bad for our physical health, too.

“Each time your mind relives a stressful scenario,” Jackson Nakazawa explains, “your body relives it, too.”

When we relive stressful situations from the past — or imagine stressful situations in the future — we activate our acute stress response. As part of this response, our bodies produce cortisol, a hormone that helps regulate arousal and reduces inflammation. While some inflammation is perfectly healthy, chronic inflammation has been linked with memory loss, as well as an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and some types of cancer. And the more cortisol our bodies produce, the less our cells respond to it, leading to an overabundance that can limit the hormone’s anti-inflammatory effect.

Of course, not ruminating is easier said than done. Many people ruminate without realizing it, while those who do often may not seek help because of fear or shame. But even if you are aware of the problem — and willing to address it — the road can still be long and arduous.

Jackson Nakazawa would like to say she can “slam the brakes on [her] escalating mind drama.” But despite everything she knew as a science journalist and the “meditation and yoga [she’d] stacked into [her] days for decades,” she couldn’t. Fortunately, she discovered several science-based techniques to help.

Ruminating on rumination

To draw the curtains on your inner monologue, you first have to understand what rumination is and where it comes from. Talking to Big Think over Zoom, Jackson Nakazawa called it a kind of “survival response gone wrong” — an evolutionary adaptation that remains as potent as ever despite not being as useful as it once was.

As she writes in Mind Drama: “The human nervous system evolved long before conscious, logical thought, so it maneuvers within a significant margin of error when it comes to assessing how much danger you face.” In prehistoric times, ruminating on danger kept our ancestors alive. Today, when genuine life-threatening encounters are few and far between, it tends to prevent us from living well.

Rumination arises from a network of brain regions collectively called the default mode network (DMN). “It’s actually three areas,” Jackson Nakazawa explains: one in the front of the head, one on both sides, and another on the back. “For a long time, we thought this network was a big nothingburger — an idling station, like when your car idles in the driveway.” Thanks to fMRI technology, we now know that the DMN is responsible for daydreaming, recalling memories, imagining future scenarios, and reflecting on social scenarios.

Put differently, Jackson Nakazawa writes, it’s the “seat of your sense of self […] your brain’s storyteller, where you spin stories about who you are, how you got there, what’s happened to you in your life — and who you can become.”

Through the mental MIST

When people seek professional help for their mental health, they’re often introduced to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Dubbed the gold standard of psychotherapy — or, in Jackson Nakazawa’s words, the “first line” — CBT can be loosely described as trying to improve your well-being by interrogating your thoughts and changing your behavior. It’s effective for many problems, from OCD to eating disorders.

However, according to a 2024 systematic review, CBT doesn’t always work for rumination. Instead, the review’s authors found preliminary evidence that rumination-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (RFCBT) — a form of CBT that focuses on changing the process of thinking rather than the content of individual thoughts — was more effective at treating depressive symptoms, especially in people who tend to ruminate.

For her part, Jackson Nakazawa recommends the MIST approach. This approach works by addressing three distinct experiences generated by the DMN: Mental imagery, Intense emotions, and Bodily sensations. (The T, if you’re curious, stands for “tie it all together.”)

There are two steps to MIST. The first is describing. By putting the images, feelings, and sensations generated by your DMN into words, you’re able to step outside the aforementioned vortex and see the things you’re ruminating about more clearly. Asked about the science behind this process, Jackson Nakazawa points to the research of UCLA neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman, who found that simply describing an emotion causes the amygdala — your brain’s threat detector — to relax.

MIST takes this a step further: By doing the same for the physical sensations we feel and the mental images we conjure, we are better able to stop our ruminations in their tracks.

“The language you come up with for your own experiences,” the author tells Big Think, “is the language your brain will pay the most attention to.”

The second step of MIST is to listen. When we ruminate, it’s tempting to try to ignore or suppress intrusive thoughts. However, Jackson Nakazawa argues we should do the opposite. Because while rumination “feels like an immersion into our suffering, it’s actually a means of avoidance.” As the philosopher Bertrand Russell said, “Every kind of fear grows worse by not being looked at.”

When we ruminate, we don’t face our problems so much as we run away from them. But if “properly heard,” Jackson Nakazawa writes, “our ruminations are an invitation to tend to the fearful, anxious, grieving, angry, unheard parts of ourselves.”

Ultimately, she tells Big Think, “we all ruminate about the same thing, and get stuck in storylines that share a common denominator: Do I feel I matter to the people who matter most to me? The stories we’re getting caught in are stories which tell us that in some way we are not feeling that sense of matter that we long to feel.”

And once you’re able to listen, you can formulate a plan to address what’s wrong.

Don’t feed your mind drama

Mind Drama explores many other techniques to deal with rumination, as well as the science behind them. Cyclic sighing, for example, “signals the respiratory system it’s okay to calm down,” while self-distancing, or talking to yourself as you would to another person, has been found to help people “regulate their emotions when reflecting on negative experiences,” as one study notes.

Other techniques, like journaling, daydreaming, and MIST itself, aim at treating rumination by stimulating creativity. That’s because creativity and rumination are associated with increased activity in the DMN. The difference, Jackson Kanazawa explains, lies in how this network operates:

“When we are thought spiraling, the DMN is firing on a closed circuit. It’s not interacting with the rest of the brain, kind of like a shut-down airport. But when we are being creative, the network goes from being the villain to the hero: Instead of a closed circuit, it’s interfacing.”

This helps explain why rumination loops in on itself. When we ruminate, we look for an answer to our problems, “but the answer never comes because we’re locked out of the areas of the brain responsible for problem solving.”

“The default mode network,” she summarizes, “gives rise to [those] horrible lost hours of negative overthinking and to the best ideas we have ever had. It’s like the word itself. In the dictionary, rumination means both recursive, unrelenting thought spiraling, and to muse, to ponder, and ideate. The difference? We exit the storyline emotionally. We stop the mind drama.”

And by stopping the drama, the rest of the brain opens back up.

Like any thoughtful book on therapy or mental health, Jackson Kanazawa’s concludes with a number of caveats. Getting better is a matter of practice and dedication, and techniques that work for one person may not work for someone else. But while therapy isn’t a quick fix — Jackson Kanazawa speaks of healing rather than curing — there are many reasons to be hopeful, not least our constantly improving understanding of the brain itself.

“Early in my career,” she reflects, “we were told the brain is only neuroplastic until the age of 5, then until 18, 25, and 28. Now, we’re seeing the birth of new neurons in the hippocampus throughout life. Your ruminations are nothing more than neural grooves through your default mode network that were laid down early in life, and that’s reversible.”

Welcome to Big Think Books, your direct line to the books and ideas that shape our world. I’m Kevin Dickinson, and here are some great reads to check out this month.

Summertime, and the readin’ is easy

Summer is the best time for reading. Longer days, evening breezes, cool drinks, everything about the season feels handcrafted to help you chill with a good book. But for many readers, myself included, I would wager the summer’s connection with books has less to do with the climate and more to do with sneaky parental conditioning.

When I was a kid, every summer kicked off with a reading challenge. If I could read five books in two months, the library would gift me a coupon for a personal pizza, with not one but two toppings. I didn’t even have to share with my little brother because he could read his own books. At the summer’s end, my family would head to the pizzeria and make a small celebration of our achievement.

As a bonus, I (mostly) chose the books, which meant a curriculum that leaned hard into fantasy and the original Star Wars extended universe.

I realize now that the challenge was designed to curb the dreaded “summer slide,” the too-cutesy name for the very real learning losses students suffer during the long break. Basically, sneaky homework. But it never scanned that way. It was just a fun and rewarding thing to do, and it created an almost Pavlovian association between the season and reading.

Today, I’m a father myself, and I’ve kept up the tradition, not only for my son but also myself. While the importance of children reading in the summer, and in general, is well documented, those benefits don’t go away once we grow up. They evolve. Research shows reading correlates with lower stress, improved mental strength, increased empathy, and — unless you have to find out what happens in the next chapter — better sleep.

That said, we should be careful not to treat reading like a summertime diet, something we do for a quick-hit health fix. Far better to make it a continuous and genuinely enjoyable part of our lives. And since we’re all adults now, we can make it as fun, challenging, and rewarding as we want. Maybe that means joining a book club for some social interaction. Maybe it means making room for the books we want to read and not just the ones we feel we have to. It could be as simple as treating yourself to more than two toppings on your frozen yogurt (my treat of choice these days).

Whatever the case, as always, I have a handful of new books below to share with you, and you can click the link below to enjoy a preview of each over at Big Think. Till next time!

Keep reading,
Kevin

1. The Shortest History of Soccer: From Ancient Kicking Games to the World’s Most Popular Sport

by Brian D. Bunk

I’m an American, so I doubt you’ll be surprised to hear that I know next-to-nothing about soccer. But with the World Cup coming stateside and my local Seattle playing host, I thought it was finally time I brushed up on the world’s favorite sport.

Enter Bunk’s latest, a book that is exactly what its cover promises. In a brisk 200 pages, the author takes you from the 12th-century “mob matches” played on British fields to the era of FIFA and, naturally, FIFA controversies. Did it transform me into a scarf-donning supporter? No, but it did deepen my appreciation of the beautiful game and its rich history.

2. Socially Wired: How Culture Shapes Our Brains

by Matthew W. Schelke

Many self-help books link behavior to a specific part of the brain. Fear hijacks your amygdala, the default mode network is responsible for your fretful ruminating and so on. While not necessarily wrong, it can oversimplify the relationship between our brains and, well, us.

Schelke, a general neurologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, wants to deepen that understanding. He argues that we can’t look at the brain in isolation; we need to consider how our social and cultural environments shape the brain and, in turn, who we are and how we interact with the world.

While Schelke’s concepts can be a bit heady (hey-oh!), he wisely grounds them in stories of his patients, who bring some much-appreciated humanity to the abstractions.

3. Emancipation War: The Fall of Slavery and the Coming of the Thirteenth Amendment

by Damon Root

History can often feel inevitable. In telling the story of the U.S. Civil War, for instance, the 13th Amendment can seem like one of those foregone conclusions. All the North had to do was win the war.

Root’s new book shows this was hardly the case. Bookended by two very different public addresses from Lincoln — one proslavery and the other anti-slavery — it traces the social, political, and legal struggles that had to be overcome to abolish the institution from the country. Erudite but never snobbish, Root’s account acknowledges the nuances of history and is worth your attention.

4. Empire of Ink: The Printers, Rogues, and Radicals Who Invented the American Newspaper

by Alex Wright

Many have lamented the death of traditional news in the era of social media and online influencers. But what we view as “traditional” is a far cry from what American newspapers were in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Back then, editors may duel at dawn with pistols, fabricate wild stories about civilizations on the moon, and steal content liberally from others to fill their own pages. Wright’s new book examines this under-explored history and suggests that, in some important ways, our era of influencers may be more a “historical reversion” than a loss of tradition.

For a deeper dive, you can read my review of the book here.

5. Prioritize Play: Express Your Creativity, Boost Your Confidence, and Foster Deeper Connection

by Rachael Renae

Like a dollar-store psychiatrist, I’m guilty of offering the advice, “Maybe you need a creative outlet.”

While Renae agrees that humans are naturally creative and that play is important for our well-being, she would counter that we don’t require “traditionally artistic pursuits” to reap the mental rewards. We just need to find ways to connect to ourselves through play and seek recreation in unexpected places.

This book was also featured in Big Think’s The Power of Play special issue, which explores how games and creativity shape our identities and cultures. It is available online for free, so check it out.

6. Been There, Done That: How Our History Shows What We Can Overcome

by Greg Jackson

The world is on fire. Things have never been worse in the United States. Back in my day, yada, yada, yada.

In his new book, Jackson takes aim at these all-too-common refrains, arguing that today’s crises, while real and worthy of concern, are hardly unprecedented. Disinformation, flame wars, and hyperpartisanship all have their historical analogs, and the American Republic has persisted.

With effortless wit and a conversational style, Jackson shares stories of “dreadful, dastardly deeds” to show readers that the past was no golden era and that modern society is worth the effort of surmounting the challenges we face.

Kevin Dickinson is the books editor at Big Think. He holds a master’s in English and writing, and in addition to Big Think, his work has appeared in RealClearScience, Pop Matters, the Writer Magazine, and the Washington Post.

by

Early in my career, I landed a job at a local newspaper. It was a small-town daily with one editor and three reporters, and I only took the position because I was fresh out of college, and it paid 25 cents more an hour than my gig at the take-and-bake pizzeria. Looking back, I’m not nostalgic for the crushing grind or the strangely personalized abuse the paper’s readers could hurl over a simple spelling error. But if you caught me in a sentimental mood, I would admit that the experience ingrained in me an appreciation for good journalism and a love of the printed word.

So, in some ways, reading Empire of Ink felt like tracing my professional roots.

Alex Wright’s delightful history chronicles the evolution of the American newspaper, from its colonial origins to the turn of the 20th century. During this roughly one-and-a-quarter-century stretch, the country’s news landscape was a far cry from today’s middle-class profession. Our button-up permutation — with its standards, press passes, and structured prose — was organized by corporations and magnates who transformed the country’s legion of indie papers into a model of “scaled capitalist industry.” Media McDonaldization, basically.

Before that, news in the U.S. was more of an “artisanal literary product” — albeit one crafted by charlatans and pistol-toting firebrands as often as by skilled craftsmen.

These figures, the “rogues and radicals” of the book’s subtitle, anchor Empire of Ink. Wright opens each chapter with the story of someone who influenced, or was influenced by, the technological shifts and cultural changes under discussion. Several of history’s favorite guest stars make appearances: Benjamin Franklin and Horace Greeley, to name two. Mark Twain earns top billing for his frequent appearances, building a career, earning his reputation, and wasting a fortune in his lifelong devotion to the printing press.

But Wright’s gift lies in his ability to uncover the stories of this history’s less-appreciated but no less noteworthy players. There’s John B. Russwurm and Reverend Samuel Cornish, the founders of the first Black-owned and edited U.S. newspaper, which became a “galvanizing force in the early antislavery movement.” Benjamin Day, the unscrupulous founder of The Sun, who proved fake news could be big business with the infamous “moon hoax,” in which the paper reported on the discovery of lush forests, strange fauna, and “four-foot-tall ‘man-bats’” populating the lunar surface. And George P. Joslyn, who showed that advertising dollars could support newspapers financially when he began hocking hack cure-alls in their pages — such as Dr. Samuel Collins’ Great Indian Pain-Killing Remedy, a wondrous medicine for the ages.

Then there are the dueling editors of the mid-19th century. Unbound by today’s “rules of literary decorum,” they made a habit of setting their poisoned pens against public figures and rival newsmen, viciously defaming their victims and attacking their credibility in the eyes of the community, like some one-man Twitter mob. To defend their honor, the offended would in turn challenge the editor to a pistol duel at dawn or just burst into the newsroom to beat the snot out of them. (A custom, I’m happy to say, had been long extinct by the time I took up my desk in the newsroom.)

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In one telling anecdote, The Vicksburg Sentinel “cycled through no fewer than eight editors” between 1837 and 1860, five of whom met violent ends. The paper’s founder, Dr. James Hagan, ignited this tradition with his talent for freewheeling slander — trading gentlemanly insults like “base dog,” “cowardly scoundrel,” and “ignorant and dastardly booby.” Easily offended himself, Hagan was not above throwing down the gauntlet, and his abrasiveness eventually caught up with him: He was shot at point-blank range while wrestling one of his adversaries in the dirt.

“Hot-blooded editors often exercised two of their constitutional freedoms at once: the right to free speech and the right to bear arms,” Wright says.

Admirable or incorrigible, these figures are seldom the prime movers themselves, but the doors through which Wright enters pivotal moments in this history — moments spurred by the myriad technological advances and social changes of the 19th century.

Things open in the late 18th century, when editors and their young apprentices, known demeaningly as “printer’s devils,” still toiled over handpress printers and set type laboriously by hand. Their main line of business was printing and distributing proclamations from the Crown, though intrepid editors also dabbled in popular fare to keep the coffers full: gossip, poetry, recipes, ghost stories, true crime, riddles, philosophical essays, and even the occasional piece of news.

After the Revolution, developments such as nationwide mail delivery, federal subsidies, and relaxed copyright laws created a “vast, decentralized information network” that enabled papers to circulate widely among the public. However, the demanding work kept operations small, so editors played the role of content curators as much as creators. They borrowed popular stories and essays liberally from other papers, remixing them or just cutting them out with scissors to reproduce wholesale.

This essentially made news editors the influencers of their day, a comparison not lost on Wright:

“Seen through a contemporary lens, this vast analog exchange network anticipates many of the features we now associate with digital media: virality, reposting, moderation, and algorithmic remixing. In the endless stream of memes, viral videos, and reposted content that makes up our modern-day social feeds, we can see distant successors of precisely the kinds of content that used to circulate widely via the exchange networks [...].”

From these early days on, Wright explores a succession of technologies that helped make print faster, cheaper, and more efficient while circulating newspapers to an impressively literate public eager for more. These include the invention of paper pulp, steam-powered presses, and the Fourdrinier machine, alongside ancillary technologies like railroads and the telegraph.

The hinge moment comes with the Civil War. Small, portable presses — weighing only a couple hundred pounds — were developed, originally allowing soldiers to print camp newspapers before moving out West with settlers after the war. Railroads brought reporters to battlefields for on-site reporting, and telegraph dispatches allowed them to send up-to-the-moment news back home. A fact I did not know before reading: the Associated Press came into its own during this period, and its reliance on the telegraph led to the “clipped, economical, and deliberately anodyne” tone we associate with “hard news” today.

“[T]hese developments helped accelerate the transformation of the press from a hodgepodge of small-town partisan papers into an increasingly nationalized press chronicling the war in real time — and laying the groundwork for the professionalized industrialized mass media of the postwar era,” Wright writes, and the back half of the book follows that evolution.

Confident and written in a sure hand, Empire of Ink is every bit the crowd-pleaser a pop history should be. The only lurch comes in its final chapter, when Wright looks to the future of news in the age of search engines, social media, and influencer-created content. Here, he questions whether new media isn’t so much replacing “traditional” news as it is a kind of homecoming:

“We may not be witnessing the end of the news business after all but rather a historical reversion to form: a transition from a centralized, industrial-era model dominated by commercial for-profit publishers and salaried middle-class journalists to a more distributed and recombinant media ecology — an echo, however distorted, of the chaotic and pluralistic press culture of the nineteenth century.”

It’s a provocative idea, and Wright handles it with humility, warning that comparing today’s trends with their historical cognates, while “tempting,” can be inexact. He is also aware that this change has put the economic viability of journalism and its role as the fourth estate at risk.

Unfortunately, Wright’s prescriptions for addressing these changes are hazy. Rather than “foolishly” try to save legacy newspapers, he argues, we need to “fortify the information commons to ensure the health of the broader media environment.” And we do that by creating a framework of part-human, part-AI hybrid editors that will shape “the public sphere from the infinite scroll of digital content.”

Maybe? Like so many pop-history codas drawing lessons from the past, Empire of Ink tries to tie together too many tenuous ideas in its final pages, and I’m left unconvinced that we’re witnessing the return to a more democratized press culture and not simply shifting the locus of editorial power to a gaggle of technopreneurs unrestrained by the standards of accuracy, self-correction, and (mostly) impartial reporting.

Or perhaps that’s just my sentimentality for the newsroom flaring up again. As I said, it’s a minor lurch — one unfortunately placed right at the end — and I don’t read histories like Empire of Ink in search of solutions to our modern problems. I read them to better understand some facet of our shared past and maybe some solace in knowing that we aren’t alone in facing such challenges.

On that point, Wright agrees: “As we enter a still-uncharted digital future, we might take some comfort in knowing that we are not the first generation to wrestle with such a rapidly changing unstable media landscape.”

Kevin Dickinson is the books editor at Big Think. He holds a master’s in English and writing, and in addition to Big Think, his work has appeared in RealClearScience, Pop Matters, the Writer Magazine, and the Washington Post.

I’m also pleased to announce that Big Think’s latest print issue is heading to the presses. In it, we explore the joys and perils of opting out of the status quo. Want to receive your copy? Become a Big Think member by June 21, 2026 to get it and much more. Thanks for reading with us!

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by Tim Brinkhof

For more than a century now, writers have attempted to put into words what it was like to serve in the trenches of the First World War: the chaos, the horror, the futility. Ernest Hemingway famously said that “the only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry,” which conveyed metaphorically what could not yet be put into prose.

After the war, his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) and other classics such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy (1924–28) set the standard for both literature and later film. These works stripped away the nationalist romance and confronted head-on the physical and psychological toil the war took on those who fought it. More recently, Sam Mendes’ film 1917 (2019) made headlines for representing one soldier’s journey through No Man’s Land in what, thanks to clever editing, appears to be a single, uninterrupted take.

Daniel Kraus’s Angel Down (2025) takes a similar approach, accomplishing through prose what 1917 does through visuals. Instead of an uninterrupted take, the story is told over the course of one uninterrupted sentence. It’s a stunning example of stream of consciousness, a writing style which allows the reader to lose themselves inside a character’s mind.

Joining Big Think for an interview, Kraus — also known for developing the story of The Shape of Water alongside director Guillermo del Toro — explains how he wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel without getting lost himself.

Thinking, fast and not slow

Angel Down takes place during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, when American forces carved a bloody path through German defenses in northern France. Private Cyril Bagger narrowly escapes an artillery shell while digging graves. When the dust settles, all is quiet save for an agonizing, ceaseless scream originating from somewhere beyond the trenches. Vainglorious Major General Lyon Reis hears it, too, and sends Bagger and his four other disposable subordinates on a quest to find and silence the mysterious screamer. To their surprise, this screamer is not a shell-shocked soldier but an angel shot out of heaven (hence the novel’s title). And it can grant any wish on Earth.

Kraus locked down the premise of Angel Down before he settled on its style. At first, he wrote the story the same way he had written his other novels. That is, with punctuation.

“I began experimenting with the prose because I felt the story deserved some kind of uniqueness that regular sentences weren’t giving it,” he tells Big Think. “I gave some thought to my overarching theme — the circularity of war, the wheel that never stops turning — and I thought that perhaps I could mirror it by writing a sentence that loops back on itself and never ends.”

The novel’s stream-of-consciousness style informs the personality and voice of its protagonist. Bagger isn’t a patriot. He’s a career con artist and repeated draft dodger who can’t wait to “get back to fleecing fools along the Mississippi.” He also has a complicated relationship with his dead father, a preacher, and a secret soft spot for the orphan Arno, to whom he reads pulp novels like Treasure Island and Son of Tarzan. Bagger is attentive, opinionated, and good with words but has an emotional range: His inner monologue can be crass and condescending, but also contemplative, sardonic, and sentimental — sometimes all at once.

“I do think there are fast thinkers and slow thinkers,” Kraus says of his protagonist’s thought processes. “Bagger is a fast thinker, lending himself to the speed of the prose.” And the speed can be dizzying. Take the following passage. At this point in the story, the characters are playing rock-paper-scissors to decide who has to risk their lives looking for the screamer, and the others are ignorant that Bagger has a foolproof method for reading hands and faces:

“… it’s really the same game, rock crushes kaiser, paper covers tsar, the scissors of the Entente snips Europe into new configurations, — and Popkin comes at Bagger like a hellbeast, purple-ringed eyes, nostrils pink and crusted, face a flaky agglomeration of red clay, brown blood, black mud, and orange tobacco, everything shellacked with sweat, the lummox breathing like a fish, a furor that makes it easy for Bagger to see the future, one, human nature is to replace a losing weapon, two, but Popkin will overthink it to the extent he can think at all, three, — and Popkin’s scissors is dispatched by Bagger’s rock …”

Or this one, when, moments later, Bagger realizes he has to play against Arno:

“… and here’s the scammer’s tightrope, to really scam someone you need to get to know them, but the worst thing you can do is to get to know someone too well, Bagger watches [soldiers] make the mistake every day, an offered cigarette, a smile of acceptance after some expulsion of fear or bodily fluid, the trading of photographs, this sweetheart for that, friendship is what Army leaders count on, that a buddy’s struggle becomes your struggle, and for them you’ll gladly die, — and it’s propaganda, the same pablum peddled by every cop who’s ever dragged Bagger off a riverboat by his collar, don’t you care about your fellow man, Mr. Bagger, not really sir, what has this so-called fellow man ever done for me…”

The process of writing in stream-of-consciousness style differs from writing in ordinary, punctuated prose. In Kraus’ case, removing periods from his toolkit forced him to rely on the natural rhythm of Bagger’s internal monologue to guide him and his readers through the text. Establishing this rhythm was easier said than done; at the start of each writing session, Kraus says he had to read back several pages just to get into the groove. But once he locked in, the story seemed to chart its own course.

As he explained in an interview with the Chicago Review of Books: “It feels like you’re on the rails of something that you can’t control.”

What is meant by reality?

It’s likely not a coincidence that stream of consciousness developed as a narrative technique shortly after World War I. Though its modernist champions like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, author of the quintessential stream-of-consciousness novel Ulysses (1922), did not fight in the war themselves, they were nonetheless influenced by its destruction. Gone were the prewar beliefs in a cosmic order and the grand narratives that revealed the preconditioned meaning of existence. Literary writing would be not unlike the mind of the shell-shocked soldier: fragmented, hypervigilant, attuned to, and at times disoriented by, the uncertainty and arbitrariness that characterize modern life.

Reality is thick and deep, too thick and too deep, and at the same time too fluid to be cut with any convenient carving-knife. The novelist who would be close to reality must confine himself to this knowledge first hand.

Mary Sinclair

Generally speaking, modernist writers began placing less emphasis on plot and grew more interested in emotion and psychology: in how people experienced and made sense of the world, rather than the world itself. Along came other, adjacent interests: the vulnerability of the body, the nonlinearity of time, the fallibility of memories, and the deeper meaning of fantasy and dreams. Where authors of previous centuries had set off with certain assumptions about human nature, society, or the universe itself, those writing after the Great War were certain of nothing but their uncertainty.

“Reality,” May Sinclair, the novelist who is thought to have coined the term stream of consciousness, once wrote, “[is] too fluid to be cut with any convenient carving knife.” Instead of outer reality, writing shifted towards exploring inner reality.

Angel Down is believable and immersive largely because its style reflects its subject. Both war and stream of consciousness can be described as overwhelming, disorienting, suffocating, and unrelenting.

“I wanted to skid a lot with my writing,” Kraus says, “to slide right up to the edge of crashing because it mirrored how my characters were skirting around death.”

Bagger’s monologue — breathless and haphazard, as though he wrote everything down while under enemy fire, convinced there would be no time for revision — is little different from the angel’s scream, which he fears “won’t ever end, just like the war won’t ever end.”

by Scotty Hendricks

Have you ever wondered how life could possibly be meaningful in this absurd and seemingly arbitrary world? If so, you’re not alone. The question of whether life has purpose has been debated since at least Ancient Greece, and some of the greatest minds in philosophy and literature have grappled with it and its implications.

On one side of that debate is nihilism, a group of philosophies that center on rejecting the foundational ideas of other philosophies. Its most famous manifestation is existential nihilism, which holds that life is meaningless and lacks intrinsic value.

This particular form of nihilism will be our focus here, but it’s worth noting that others are out there. For instance, moral nihilism rejects the idea that acts can be objectively right or wrong, a stance the philosopher J.L. Mackie argued for in 1977. Meanwhile, epistemic nihilism holds that knowledge is impossible. Plato claimed the pre-Socratic thinker Protagoras held this point of view.

Exploring nihilism can be distressing. It often requires us to face the possibility that what we hold dear rests on nothing tangible. However, a number of classic texts manage to do so in a way that both grapples with the gravity and philosophical depths of the problem while remaining accessible.

These five books explore existential nihilism, both practically and philosophically, and where a person confronting it might go.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None by Friedrich Nietzsche (1883–85)

They meet an invalid, or an old man, or a corpse — and immediately they say: “Life is refuted!” But they are only refuted, and their eye, which seeth only one aspect of existence.

If you only know one of Nietzsche’s works, this is probably it. Nietzsche himself considered it his magnum opus, and while technically a novel, the thin plot does little more than serve as a framing device through which the author can sermonize on his often provocative philosophy.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra follows the titular philosopher as he grapples with a variety of philosophical issues. Even though he shares a name with a historical prophet, Nietzsche’s character espouses diametrically opposed viewpoints to those of his ancient namesake. He instead considers the wide variety of problems that arise following the “death of god” and the collapse of traditional value systems. Among these is the problem of nihilism and the perception that life is miserable and pointless.

It’s a stance that Nietzsche refused to let go unchallenged even as he must agree that there is no objective reality to base truth on. As Zarathustra states, if the meaning and values God provided are dead and gone, new meaning and values will have to come from somewhere. Why not from us? In a meaningless world, one must create meaning.

One of Zarathustra’s solutions is to create value without reference to discredited metaphysical systems, something that the Übermensch would be capable of at some future time. (Yes, the novel is also the original home of Nietzsche’s famed concept.) However, Zarathustra fully admits this is difficult and may never come to pass.

Other points Nietzsche explores are how to understand facts in a world without an objective viewpoint, the theory of “eternal recurrence,” and his rejection of those who reject life itself.

Partly written as a send-up of the allegorical novel and meandering style of many a mystic or religious figure (including the original Zarathustra), the text is difficult to understand and open to a wide variety of interpretations. Several of those interpretations have proven controversial from the get-go, and debates on whether Nietzsche’s philosophy was monstrous were underway before the Nazis got their hands on it. Because of this, the novel’s reception has continued to fluctuate.

Nietzsche’s next two books, Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality were both attempts to express similar ideas in a more analytic style.

The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)

And I felt ready to live it all again too. As if the blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.

Another potential answer to nihilism lies in absurdism, a school of thought closely associated with the existentialist fellow-traveler Camus. The philosopher suggests that upon confronting the void of meaning in the world, one should revolt against it. Rather than creating meaning, you should consider its absence and cry out “So what?” And this cry is the inspiration for The Stranger.

The novella follows a French colonist in Algeria named Meursault, a man who is extremely indifferent to reality. The tale begins with him noting his mother died yesterday or “perhaps the day before.” He finds little to enjoy in life and comes across as listless as he describes the world around him in samey beige tones. He accidentally kills an Algerian man for reasons he is uncertain of and is eventually sentenced to death for it.

It is only shortly before his death that he fully comes to embrace the fact that life can be pointless and supremely valuable. The indifference that characterized him throughout the novel is finally shaken — even if a touch delayed. While most people would find their impending death a total downer, Meursault rebels and embraces life as a good absurdist should. It may seem paradoxical to embrace life because it will end soon, but for Camus, that’s the point.

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1864)

To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.

Many great philosophies — and serious critiques of those philosophies — can be found in novels, and our next entry is by every existentialist’s favorite Russian author. Throughout his career, Dostoevsky explored a number of the philosophies that were emerging in Russia during the 19th century, particularly those with intellectual foundations that concerned him.

You see, unlike his philosophical fans, Dostoevsky was a conservative, hyper-religious, and nationalistic thinker. He viewed the irrationality latent in all people as an active hindrance to building a utopia, and Notes from Underground focuses on what he saw as one such irrationality: nihilism.

In the book, an unnamed, reclusive main character — often simply called the “Underground Man” — offers a series of philosophical musings on society and the human condition before providing a biographical account of how he came to be in his present condition. A “hyper-conscious” person, he is uncannily insightful about modernity and humanity, yet unable to connect with others.

The Underground Man is something of a caricature of a nihilist. Despite his obvious intelligence, he is miserable, insufferable, and self-sabotaging because Dostoevsky thought this was the natural endpoint of that mode of thought. This point is often overlooked alongside the fact that the Underground Man is an unreliable narrator of his own life. He isn’t always wrong, but Dostoevsky warns that his final conclusion and general attitude are something we should all be wary of.

The Castle by Franz Kafka (1926)

K. was often in danger of considering his situation hopeful.

If there’s one author who can make a reader feel like life is a meaningless void, it’s Kafka. His final novel, The Castle, explores themes similar to those in his other works while offering a distinctive look at nihilism. It also has a dark, surreal edge not as prominent in his other works.

The text begins with “K,” a land surveyor, responding to a summons calling him to a distant village. The village is governed by an unseen bureaucracy housed in a nearby castle, whose decrees and activities the citizens praise as both flawless and mysterious.

Informed that he was summoned to the strange village by mistake, K attempts to penetrate the bureaucracy to speak with the person who signed his summons. Despite the supreme difficulties and being able to leave at any time, K continues to try to find meaning in his summons.

While interpretations of the book vary, it can be read as a broad analysis of nihilism. K is dropped into a strange world governed by unknowable powers by accident. He then struggles against meaningless decrees and actions that are immediately rationalized by others and remains convinced that everything will be worth it if he can only find the reason why he’s there.

Like most of Kafka’s writings, The Castle was published after his death and against his wishes. Kafka was reportedly unsure what to do with the story and never finished it, leaving the problems he raises throughout unresolved. The novel famously — and perhaps fittingly — ends mid-sentence.

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (1929)

We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.

Our last book goes in a different direction. It isn’t a philosophical novel or an authorial filibuster by a proto-existentialist. All Quiet on the Western Front is a masterpiece by Remarque, a WWI vet who turned his experiences into the quintessential war story. While our previous books may ask where nihilism comes from or what to do with it philosophically, All Quiet drops readers into the nihilistic horrors of war and a world that has sent its youth off to die.

The novel follows Paul Bäumer, a high school student who enlists in the Imperial German Army alongside his classmates. Their collective excitement for the adventure soon turns into trauma and despair as nameless battles are fought for inches of mud piled up with bodies. The young men who once found so much meaning and value in nationalism and duty soon find themselves left suffering in a meaningless void that is never filled. Value is swept away by machine-gun fire and left to rot in shell holes. Platoons of soldiers drop dead on days when the army declares nothing interesting to have happened.

Several of the other books on this list try to offer alternatives to nihilism or ways to find meaning. This one doesn’t. It can’t. The cast, most of whom die, quickly realize that not only were the values they had before the war impossible to hold in the face of the carnage, but that nothing else seems to hold up well either.

Welcome to Big Think Books, your direct line to the books and ideas that shape our world. I’m Kevin Dickinson, and here are some great reads to check out this month.

List it. List it good!

This month, The Guardian released its list of the 100 Best Novels Ever Published in English, and I can’t stop thinking about it. I somehow find the exercise fun and also a complete waste of time. And I don’t think anyone involved was aiming for either.

To compile the list, the British daily polled more than 170 authors, critics, and academics and asked them to rank their 10 favorite novels. A quick tally of the results, and you have the definitive list of the objectively best novels ever written in English.

Except, of course, not really. Literature isn’t science, and the editors make no claims that their list is. They aim to battle Netflix and our “dwindling attention spans” by helping the adults who “say they never read” rediscover the pleasure in books, though they admit, many of the recommendations aren’t “for the literary faint-hearted.” But the cynic in me sees another purpose: to ignite emotions and generate posts and shares across our click-based economy from creators desperate for quick-hit content. (So … touché.)

That’s not my issue, nor do I disagree much with the list. With one exception*, I would enthusiastically recommend every book on it that I have read, and word on campus is that the many I haven’t are brilliant too. I also respect the writers and experts whose opinions were polled.

My gripe is that the list provides little sense of why these books offer such valuable experiences. Each entry I sampled — no, I didn’t read all 100 — followed the same formula: a short history, a smattering of themes, and some re-heated version of the phrase, “It changed literature forever.” That’s it. There’s little understanding of why those polled cherish these books. Was it the lyrical prose, timeless social commentary, or honest exploration of our kaleidoscopic internal lives? I don’t know.

Instead of treating each novel as a unique expression, idiosyncratic to its author, the list flattens these works through a popularity filter — a high school vibe not helped by the top spots going to the canon’s usual cool kids and a clique-ish headline wondering “Who’s in, who’s out [...].”

That said, the editors chose to share each respondent’s individual list, and here’s a gossipy tea I am happy to sip. I was thrilled to learn that R.F. Kuang seemed the only respondent who loved The Name of the Rose as much as I do, but puzzled that nobody gave Kurt Vonnegut or John Steinbeck much love. Few provided the reasons for their selections, sadly, but if you are familiar with a particular author, it’s fun to see what novels they hold dear.

The diversity between these lists is also a lovely reminder that the pursuit and celebration of great literature can be as much a personal expression as the novels themselves.

Speaking of book lists, you’ll find this month’s recommendations below. Are these the best May had to offer? I have no way of knowing; I didn’t perform a single tally. I simply found each one fun, interesting, or insightful in its own way — and I will provide my reasons, along with a sample of the book for you to enjoy.

Keep reading,
Kevin

*The exception, if you’re curious, is Ulysses (#3). Whenever anyone tells me how amazing an experience it was, I always detect that telltale shimmer of Stockholm syndrome in their dilated pupils.

1. In a Good Place: How the Spaces Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive

by Leidy Klotz

I’ve always kept my home environment a certain way: clutter is minimal, my furniture is organized for easy flow, and my decor is both calming and inspiring. But if you asked me if there was some philosophy underlying these choices, my answer would be a blank stare. I’ve never put much thought into it. It just felt right.

Lucky for me, sometimes a book comes along that neatly encapsulates a vague feeling in a coherent thought, and Klotz’s book is one such for me. In it, Klotz explains how our spaces secretly display our values, help (or hinder) our ability to connect with others, and dictate how we move through the world. His practical advice is also thoughtful — sometimes amounting to how simply moving your desk can give you a greater sense of freedom.

2. The Unfragile Mind: A Physician’s Call for Restoring Hope and Humanity to Mental Health Care

by Gavin Francis

We’ve made great strides in supporting mental health since I was a kid. But with the massive uptick in disorders and prescriptions in recent years, is it possible we’ve shifted from overlooking to overdiagnosing?

Francis fears we have. His latest book argues that our current diagnostic frameworks are too broad and imply a degree of certainty we can’t justify given the nuances of any one person’s mental world. Drawing on his experiences as a general practitioner, he argues for a more comprehensive, curious, and individualized approach to mental health.

Thoughtfully written with a sense of profound care for the subject and its subtleties, the book is a humble request for us to take a breath and reassess what we know, what we don’t know, and how we can help those silently suffering in ways that are more holistic than a simple diagnostic label.

3. Cold-Blooded Murder: Reptiles and Amphibians on the Brink of Extinction

by Craig Stanford

In another life, I received a degree in zoology or wildlife biology because I find animals eternally fascinating. Thankfully, books like these allow me to indulge in that alternative timeline at my leisure.

Stanford’s love of “herps” is catching. He dedicates each of the book’s six sections to an order (or suborder) of reptiles and amphibians. These look at the ethology and natural history of various species, often tied together with anecdotes of Stanford’s personal encounters with them. Equal parts fun and erudite, the book is also a call to protect these fascinating creatures that are going extinct more rapidly than other animal groups.

4. The Creature’s Guide to Caring: How Animal Parents Teach Us That Humans Were Born to Care

by Elizabeth Preston

See above, only Preston expands her view from one class to parenting across the animal kingdom. Her book looks at the diverse range of parenting strategies among our fellow species — some humorous, others unsettling, and others weirdly relatable — to reveal lessons about parenting, human-style.

I love the individual vignettes of animal life, but my favorite part is the book’s ultimate message: Through her gentle tone and conversational style, Preston reminds us that “parenting is hard” isn’t so much a platitude as it is a natural law.

5. What Science Says About Astrology

by Carlos Orsi

You can answer the implicit question in this book’s title with three words: Astrology is bunkum. Done. Why then do I recommend you take the time to read an entire book on the subject? Because astrology is a perfect vehicle for learning how science approaches knowledge gathering and truth-finding.

Orsi isn’t a mean-spirited debunker. He appreciates astrology’s place in history as one of our first attempts to understand the natural world. But by breaking down why this “prototype” doesn’t measure up, he also shows readers how the methods of science do help us learn about the world by curbing magical thinking and weeding out biases. The result is a book that does far more than its short length would suggest and does it well.

6. Private Power and Democracy’s Decline: How to Make Capitalism Support Democracy

by Mordecai Kurz

Democracy has been having a rough go of it lately, especially in the U.S. One may suppose these challenges stem from tribalism and the culture wars, but Kurz, the Joan M. Kenney Professor of Economics, emeritus at Stanford University, suggests a different answer: technology and the U.S.’s free-market policy.

Over the last four decades, Kurz contends, these forces have created an economic and social reality that has benefited a select few at the cost of a working-class majority, leading to a coalition blending populist reactionaries with America’s more unsavory philosophies. While the writing style leans toward the academic, without being overly dry, Kurz does an excellent job of taking readers through the history and research underpinning his argument. Well worth consideration.

Kevin Dickinson is the books editor at Big Think. He holds a master’s in English and writing, and in addition to Big Think, his work has appeared in RealClearScience, Pop Matters, the Writer Magazine, and the Washington Post.

by Tim Brinkhof

Many of world literature’s most unlikable protagonists start unlikeable and end unlikeable. From the very beginning of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is clear that the titular Gray is a narcissist who’ll do anything to inflate his already monstrous ego. The same goes for Humbert Humbert from Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita, a pedophile with a silver tongue who conjures up excuses for his inexcusable actions.

But these characters form only the tip of the iceberg. A different yet equally interesting species of unlikable protagonist is the protagonist who starts off sympathetic but becomes more and more unsympathetic as the story develops. Though they appear similar, this type of character is not to be confused with other archetypes such as the tragic hero or antihero. The former (Oedipus, Hamlet) are good people who make bad decisions due to fate or circumstance, while antiheroes (Jack Sparrow, Batman) are morally ambiguous individuals who, in spite of their flaws, possess notable heroic qualities.

Each of these archetypes serves a distinct narrative purpose. Tragic heroes demonstrate that even the best of us can be brought low by unavoidable destiny. Antiheroes teach us, in the simplest of terms, that not all heroes wear capes. Protagonists who seem likable and then turn out unlikeable — let’s call them turncloaks for the sake of ease — can illuminate the dark side of seemingly positive qualities and characteristics. Because turncloaks deceptively win our support in the early chapters, we tend to follow them down whatever dark and twisted path they end up taking, even when we’d rather not. Below are five examples of such paths.

The Underground Man from Notes from Underground

The Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky had a knack for taking his characters on journeys that change them beyond recognition. The arrogant Rodion Raskolnikov we meet at the start of Crime and Punishment, for instance, is nothing like the repentant soul we find in the final passages. However, few Dostoevskian turncloaks are as compelling as the Underground Man, the protagonist of his 1864 novella Notes from Underground.

Written as a response to the utopian fiction that consumed Russia’s intelligentsia at the time, Notes from Underground is a mirror that reflects the ugliest, most pitiful aspects of humanity back at us. The Underground Man is a man torn apart by contradictions. He is incredibly proud, yet deeply insecure. He loathes his colleagues but also longs for their respect and acceptance. He is simultaneously convinced of his own worthlessness and angry with the world for failing to recognize his unlimited potential. He is quite possibly the most relatable character ever written.

At first, this relatability makes the otherwise insufferable Underground Man come across as comical, even endearing. It’s hard to read through sections where he overanalyzes his relations with a coworker, turning the tiniest interactions into an existential crisis, and not recognize a part of yourself in him. The same goes for a scene where he attends a party he both does and doesn’t want to be at. Sitting in a corner, sipping a drink, he alternates between judging others for not including them in their conversation and berating himself for wanting to be included in the first place. But as Notes from Underground progresses, his behavior turns from funny to pathetic to downright despicable. Giving credibility to the story’s opening lines, “I am a sick man…I am an angry man…I am an unattractive man,” the Underground Man, having been kicked out of the party, goes as far as to tell a young prostitute that she can come live with him, only to turn her away when she shows up at his doorstep.

Rácz from Rivers of Babylon

Rivers of Babylon, written in 1991 by the Slovak author Peter Pišťanek, tells the story of a young, simple-minded, and broad-shouldered ex-soldier called Rácz who leaves his impoverished village in the Slovakian countryside to work as the stoker of a hotel in Bratislava. There, he gradually gets caught up in the criminal underworld that hijacked the country’s privatization following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Rácz reluctantly accepts the job so he can earn the money he needs to marry his childhood love. Once in Bratislava, where he acquires a taste for money and power, his aspirations change. Instead of returning to the countryside, he becomes involved with and eventually establishes himself as the tyrannical boss of the illicit currency exchange business operating out of the hotel lobby. Forgetting all about his engagement, he starts dating a dancer who moonlights as a prostitute, then abandons her when she is no longer of use to him. He imprisons two immigrants in the hotel’s boiler room to do his dirty work for him. By the end of the novel, having become one of the most powerful mafia bosses in all of Slovakia, he sets his eyes on the mayorship of Bratislava. Pišťanek does not philosophize, but his message is clear: The big city did not “corrupt” Rácz so much as it brought out his true character.

Rácz has been interpreted as a foil to Vladimír Mečiar, a real-life politician who served as Slovakia’s prime minister between 1990 and 1998 and was heavily criticized for his autocratic tendencies, strongman persona, and ties to organized crime. Balkan Insight fittingly described Mečiar’s time in power as reading “like a cheap thriller” that saw Slovakia turn from just another Soviet satellite into a “black hole in the heart of Europe,” a description that would not feel out of place if printed on the jacket of Rivers of Babylon.

Eugène de Rastignac from Father Goriot

Eugène de Rastignac is a recurring character in La Comédie humaine, a series of interconnected novels and short stories by the French writer Honoré de Balzac that take place in and around post-revolutionary Paris. The protagonist of Father Goriot, Rastignac arrives in the capital a poor and sheltered nobleman eager to carve out a place for himself in high society.

But social mobility in this dog-eat-dog environment comes at a high price, one the benevolent Rastignac is initially unwilling to pay. Staying in an affordable boarding house, he nobly refuses an offer from one of its seedy residents — a con artist called Vautrin — to seduce an impressionable socialite, opting to rely instead on his own charisma. Throughout the Comédie humaine, Balzac contrasts Rastignac’s relatively principled personality to that of another climber, Lucien de Rubempré, who accepts Vautrin’s help only to suffer the consequences.

That’s not to say Rastignac is portrayed as a saintly figure. Far from it: Throughout Father Goriot, the nobleman learns that to get ahead, he too must compromise on his ideals. He does so by pursuing a relationship with Delphine, daughter of the titular Goriot, a successful vermicelli maker who forced himself into poverty after passing all of his hard-earned wealth into the hands of his spoiled, neglectful children. When the abandoned Goriot lies dying, it is Rastignac, not Delphine, who stays by his side and attends his funeral. Although Balzac casts Rastignac in a positive light, he concludes Father Goriot on a pessimistic note: with the protagonist turning his back on the old man’s grave and heading back into the city, into the arms of Delphine.

Paul Atreides from Dune

Frank Herbert’s science-fiction epic Dune tricks readers into thinking that its protagonist, Paul Atreides, is a straightforward hero: a ruse that is further reinforced by the casting of Timothée Chalamet in the recent film adaptation. But although Paul’s journey may follow the conventional “hero’s journey” story arc as outlined by Joseph Campbell, moving from life to death to rebirth, Paul is not the messianic figure the Fremen tribe of Arrakis believes him to be.

Upending age-old narrative traditions, Paul’s heroism takes a sinister turn when Herbert reveals that the Bene Gesserit, an Illuminati-like secretive order of psychic matriarchs, has long been conditioning the Fremen to expect the arrival of a messiah, or mahdi, in their native tongue.

Paul, similarly caught in the Bene Gesserit’s web, finds himself losing control of the religious order he was supposed to lead. As emperor of the galaxy, he is told he must follow the “Golden Path,” a potential future that, through countless sacrifices great and small, allegedly ensures the survival of mankind. Herbert never explains what the Path is supposed to save mankind from, and throughout the Dune books, he hints that other, less destructive paths could well lead to the same outcome. Ultimately, Paul’s ascension to the imperial throne is not the happily-ever-after ending that, say, Aragorn’s crowning represents in The Lord of the Rings. Instead, it’s an allegory to real-world history in which kings and prophets use religion as a means to justify their actions.

by Tim Brinkhof

“The bittersweet memory of that day, eighteen years ago, had never left him. It was the second time he had been sold in his short lifetime, reduced to nothing more than a name and number scratched on a wax tablet, and still no one came to save him. He sometimes saw Poppaea in the streets. He always made sure to avoid her eye.”

This moment is from The Lost Voices of Pompeii, a new book that follows seven historical figures in the hours leading up to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Contrary to what its novelistic style suggests, it is a work of history, not historical fiction. Its author, the historian and archeologist Jess Venner, relies on an increasingly popular research method known as critical fabulation to bring the ruins of Pompeii to life.

As she discussed with Big Think, Lost Voices uses critical fabulation to dispel many common myths surrounding the world-famous Italian city and its inhabitants.

Giving a voice to the voiceless

Put simply, critical fabulation is the practice of using evidence to speculate about historical events for which we have few written records. Coined by cultural historian Saidiya Hartman in her 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts,” which confronts the impossibility of truly understanding the lives of enslaved Black women in the U.S. with things like personal diaries and official documents alone, the methodology helps uncover the voices of people whom history has rendered voiceless.

“The strength of this approach,” Venner writes in her introduction, “lies in its refusal to treat gaps in the evidence as dead ends. Instead, it regards absence as a productive space, one in which we can explore historically grounded possibilities, and reconstruct plausible scenarios using our common sense as fellow human beings, rather than simply acknowledging the loss.”

In other words, critical fabulation “allows the historian to restore complexity, agency, and emotional depth to those who were historically marginalized or flattened by dominant narratives.”

One such individual featured in Lost Voices is Petrinus, an enslaved person. The only known record of his existence is a transaction in which he and another slave served as collateral. However, general knowledge about slavery in the early Roman Empire allows Venner to imagine how Petrinus might have spent the day of the eruption. The story follows Petrinus as he buys ingredients for a banquet held to bolster the electoral campaign of his master, a local politician named Caius Cuspius Pansa. At the banquet, Pansa makes a show of his generosity by emancipating Petrinus in front of his guests — an act which, though empowering, also leaves the freedman in need of a new job and place to sleep.

Initially met with resistance due to concerns about accuracy and bias, critical fabulation is becoming more accepted in the academic world.

“One reason for this,” Venner tells Big Think, “is that historians are also increasingly moving away from merely reconstructing past events in favor of examining the sensory, lived experience of historical figures. Instead of saying, ‘Here’s a wall with an old painting on it,’ they’re interested in learning how people from the past would have seen and related to that wall painting.”

A cataclysm revisited

Pompeii’s historical popularity and prominent role in popular culture have given rise to more than a few misconceptions. One is that the eruption happened so suddenly that it instantly froze the town and its people in time.

“The eruption didn’t happen in seconds,” Venner clarifies. “It took over 24 hours, meaning there was a lot of time for people to escape.” Only around 10% of the city’s population — up to 20,000, including the enslaved — is thought to have perished. The rest were forced to resettle elsewhere, becoming “refugees within their own country.”

There is also some confusion about the town’s condition. While it’s true that layers of volcanic ash helped preserve evidence that may have otherwise been lost, the city wasn’t in particularly great shape at the time of its demise.

“Earthquakes had been taking place in the region for at least 17 years,” Venner points out. “A huge one almost completely destroyed the entire town, and it was still recovering when Vesuvius erupted.”

Even the date of the eruption itself may not be what we think. The earliest reference to the event, a letter from Pliny the Younger written two decades later, marks Pompeii’s final day as August 24. However, Venner and other scholars believe the eruption may have taken place months later. The discovery of fresh pomegranates and other fruits harvested from September onwards, not to mention the fact that several households appeared to have been firing up their braziers before the evacuation, suggests the eruption may have taken place as late as October, when the weather was growing colder.

Pompeii vs Rome

Perhaps the greatest misconception about Pompeii is that the town played an insignificant role in Roman history, its inhabitants existing disconnected from events in the imperial capital. In truth, Pompeii found itself at the forefront of Roman politics on several occasions, most notably during the so-called Social Wars, when municipalities across Italy rebelled against Rome after the Senate repeatedly refused to extend citizenship rights beyond the inhabitants of the Eternal City.

Pompeii was one of the first towns to take up arms, and one of the last to put them down, continuing the fight even after the Senate promised to grant citizenship to those who surrendered. Ultimately, the Pompeians faced off against none other than Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the general who, in the wake of all this civil strife, declared himself dictator of the Republic, paving the way for Julius Caesar.

“Traces of the battle,” Venner writes, “are still visible today: holes left by Sulla’s ballistae [stone-throwing artillery] can be seen in the city walls.”

As punishment for their insubordination, Pompeii rejoined the Republic not as an ally but a colony. Colonizers moved into the city, taking over the wealth and power of the city’s old elite.

“Public buildings were Romanized, Latin replaced Oscan as the dominant language. Some local families managed to retain their status, but many were deposed, their land confiscated and redistributed to the veterans of Sulla’s army,” Venner adds.

How often do you think about the Roman Empire?

We don’t know ancient Rome as well as we think we do. Surrounded by countless history books — not to mention beloved media properties like Rome and Gladiator — it’s easy to forget that an estimated 99% of ancient texts have not survived into the present. Those that have survived were written almost exclusively by members of the upper class, often decades or centuries after the events they detail, and always with ulterior motives. Were emperors Nero and Caligula really crazed tyrants, or were they slandered by historians hoping to delegitimize their rule? Did Livia, wife of Augustus, really poison several imperial heirs, or was her character assassinated by Romans critical of changing gender norms?

In Livia’s case, Venner thinks the former. “Augustus wanted to center Roman society around an ideal Roman family, with a man at the head, and a matron behind him running the household,” she explains. After his long reign, there were fewer laws preventing women from reaching positions like those of Julia Felix, a wealthy widow in charge of her own affairs and finances, and one of the characters in Lost Voices. “By the time Vesuvius erupted, women had already been able to own property for some time. And while they technically needed to have a male guardian to help run things, most historians — myself included — think this role was largely a formality.” The aforementioned transaction, with the enslaved Petrinus as collateral, was signed between two women. No guardian mentioned.

Unlike written sources, archeological evidence does not purposely omit, mislead, or discriminate. Though its scattered ruins may not always point to clear and obvious conclusions, Pompeii provides a direct connection to the past, unmitigated by the motivations and prejudices of people. “There’s a bit of graffiti near the amphitheater where someone wrote they love a certain person,” Venner tells us, offering one example of this connection. “Then someone else wrote a reply saying something along the lines of ‘No, she doesn’t love you, she loves me.’”

She also points to excavations at a nearby private garden, which likely recorded a family’s final moments before the eruption began. “You could see the ash where they’d cooked their last meal and offered some food to the gods. Toys lay on the ground, probably exactly where the children had dropped them, along with a woman’s hairpin that had probably fallen out accidentally.”

Many other clues, pieced together through critical fabulation, resurrect the ancient town in a way that a written document never could.

“Pompeii is often remembered as a dead city,” Venner says, “but we need to think of it as a living one. Otherwise, we’ll just keep talking about it as a place that is, and always has been, dead.”

by Kevin Dickinson

“Is she your mother or your sister?” A seemingly innocent question, perhaps even a flattering one under the right circumstances. Such circumstances, though, were not found in Auschwitz.

Josef Mengele asked Edith Eva Eger this question when she first arrived at the concentration camp in 1944. An SS officer and physician, Mengele would go on to earn himself the nickname “the Angel of Death” for the atrocities he performed under the Reich’s auspices. Eger had yet to learn of his monstrous reputation or the horrors that awaited her. She also didn’t realize that only one answer would protect her mother. She only knew that she was a scared, confused 16-year-old girl.

“Mother,” she answered truthfully.

Her mother was directed to a line of Jewish women on Mengele’s left. Eger and her sister, Magda, to the one on his right. Neither would see their mother again.

Auschwitz took the lives of an estimated 1.1 million people, among them Eger’s mother, father, and her young beau, Eric. She and Magda endured the hellish conditions for months before being led on death marches to other camps by Nazi forces desperate to evade the encroaching U.S. and Russian forces. They were rescued by U.S. troops at Gunskirchen a year after their imprisonment. There, Eger had been left for dead among the bodies of other victims — emaciated, back broken, and body wasted by pleurisy, pneumonia, and typhoid fever.

She survived and was nursed back to health, but while her body recovered, it would take decades before she would escape the prison of guilt and denial she had built inside her mind.

The prison of the mind

Today, Eger is 97 years old. She enjoys life in sunny La Jolla, California, and during our conversation, she wears vibrant oranges and yellows to match the natural beauty surrounding her. In her early fifties, she earned her PhD in psychology, specializing in post-traumatic stress. She also raised a family and has written two books on her experiences during the Holocaust, The Choice (2017) and The Ballerina of Auschwitz (2024).

She is as far from the horrors of Auschwitz as it is possible to travel in a lifetime, but the road to La Jolla was long and far from straightforward. “It was close to 20 years until I finally admitted to people that my classroom was Auschwitz,” Eger tells Big Think.

After the Holocaust, neither Eger nor her sister talked about that grueling year. They chose instead to suppress the pain and ignore the memories, but despite their efforts, the experiences managed to bleed out of them. When confronted with images from the Holocaust, Eger would become physically ill, and even seemingly innocuous and everyday sights or sounds could trigger crippling flashbacks.

In The Choice, Eger describes a time when she was riding the bus to her factory job after immigrating to the U.S. She boarded, sat, and waited for a ticket collector to come by, as was customary in her European homeland. When the bus driver confronted her, yelling to either buy a ticket or get off, she fell to the ground, shaking with fear.

After moving to El Paso with her husband, Béla, Eger began studying psychology at the University of Texas. The career choice led her not only to help others reconcile with their crushing pasts but also to recognize the need to confront her own.

“I have talked to many, many survivors who were able to function well and be able to have families, and they don’t live in the past. You remember the past, and you can even do many things that you learned [with it]. But you’re not there,” Eger says.

Her studies and conversations led her to a crucial lesson on trauma’s influence over the mind: It’s not what happens to you; it’s what you do with it. It’s a lesson Eger has passed on through her clinical practices, in her books, and to her family.

Please allow me to clarify: Neither Eger nor I is saying to forget the Holocaust’s many atrocities. Eger endured its barbarous inhumanity first-hand. She watched as some captives, broken and disconsolate, chose to walk into the electrified fences surrounding the camps. Others lost themselves to the despair.

In a heartbreaking story recounted by Eger, a fellow prisoner named Anna convinced herself that they would be liberated by Christmas 1944. “All Christmas Day, she pauses to listen,” Eger writes in The Ballerina of Auschwitz, “to lift her eyes to the farthest line of fence, breath fogging the air around her head, a smile on her chapped lips. But our liberators don’t come. The next morning, Anna is dead.”

Such Holocaust stories are heartbreaking and numerous, and it would be an injustice to its victims to forget. However, what’s often missing from our telling of the Holocaust, Eger’s grandson, Jordan Engle, pointed out during our interview, is what happened after 1945 — the stories of the people who chose not to let this suffering define them but to use it, learn from it, and pursue their life’s meaning in spite of it.

Eger personifies this aspect of the Holocaust: “I am free. It’s a lot of effort to be free from the prison that is in your mind, and the key is in your pocket.”

The key in your pocket

While the shape of any one person’s key will be unique, Eger believes a vital notch is learning to accept your authentic self. For her, that meant recognizing that she was victimized at Auschwitz, but she was not a victim. Those experiences would be an indelible part of her life, but they didn’t define her identity or life story. Rather than pretend they didn’t happen or let them control her thoughts, she would choose how to think about and live with those experiences. For her, that meant using them to help others and better understand the best and worst of what it means to be human.

“I want people to know that no one can replace them,” Eger says. “Maybe [someone else] looks like you. Maybe they talk like you, but there is just one of you here.”

Another notch in the key is an adherence to kindness. While Eger’s memoirs don’t shy away from the atrocities of the Holocaust, they shed light on the small acts of grace and mercy that helped people endure. Eger sharing a loaf of bread she had tucked away with others. A kind word that raised another’s spirit for a moment. A guard who looked the other way when a prisoner broke the rules.

Such acts not only helped many survive; they showed Eger the shared humanity that bound everyone who experienced Auschwitz together, a recognition that ultimately led her to forgive her tormentors. As she expresses in her writings, she realizes that the Nazis themselves had been brainwashed. Their rigid thinking and identities made them prisoners of their minds, too, and that prison ultimately destroyed them.

“I shook my fist at God before I got to this [point]. And I’m still not done,” Eger says. “I’m still in the process of hopefully being free from my own prison, which is in my mind, and the key is in my pocket. I know it’s there. I just have to reach for it.”

Only you can choose to be free

In 1990, Eger returned to Auschwitz. When asked why, she says simply, “To experience it one more time and wonder, ‘How did I survive?’”

When she went, the wrought-iron words Arbeit macht frei (“Work sets you free”) still hung over the entrance to “the world’s biggest cemetery.” The first of many false promises meant to keep Auschwitz’s victims complaisant in the face of their looming deaths. But the lie that haunted Eger on her return was the one told to her by Mengele: “You’ll see your mother very soon.”

For decades, Eger wondered if she had condemned her mother. She chastised herself for her naiveté and questioned how it might have been different if she had simply lied. But the important choice, she came to realize, was not the one made when she was “hungry and terrified […] surrounded by dogs and guns and uncertainty.”

Instead, she writes, the choice that matters is the one she makes now. The choice to accept herself; the choice to be imperfect and even so be happy; the choice to stop questioning why she survived and commit herself to the truly freeing work of serving others and making the world a better place.

“I didn’t run away from the past,” Eger says. “I did a lot. I’m still doing a lot. As long as I live, I’m going to work. I don’t believe in any kind of retirement.”

Welcome to Big Think Books, your direct line to the books and ideas that shape our world. I’m Kevin Dickinson, and here are some great reads to check out this month.

The lessons learned on mother’s knee

Growing up, my mother had an unspoken rule: There would always be money for books. This was a big deal for me. While we weren’t poor, it was still the kind of household where the parents got a little edgy toward the end of the month. Toys and video games? Those had to wait for a birthday or for my meager allowance to vest into a rare moment of financial freedom. But books? We’ll see what we can do.

I attribute my lifelong love of reading to my mother*, who not only made books accessible but also an enjoyable, not just a required, part of my life.

She read to me every night and introduced chapter books early, so I could enjoy adventures in Narnia and the spooks of Goosebumps well before I could venture out on my own. I always had a bookshelf (never a TV) in my room, and I filled it with the stories and subjects that mattered to me. Bringing home a Scholastic Book Order form felt like a mini-Christmas sprinkled randomly into the year. And if a book really wasn’t possible — just one of those edgy months — there was always a walk to the library.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because, as you may have heard, reading for pleasure isn’t as popular as it once was. Studies and polls continue to show that more Americans are reading fewer books than they did just a decade ago. The potential causes are many: digital distractions, mental fatigue, busyness, reading more for work than for fun, but mostly digital distractions.

No judgment. Even as a professional book guy, these things zap my reading time more than I’d like. But through her example, my mother taught me how to keep reading at the forefront of my life: Make books a central part of my relationships.

Growing up, she always expressed interest in what I was reading. She borrowed books from me and recommended them to me. And we always had conversations about them. Now that I’m a parent, I’m making every effort to make books an integral part of my relationship with my son. (Though, with how fast he goes through them, my to-read pile has reached truly unstable heights.)

If, like me, your mother nurtured a love of reading in you, then be sure to thank her this Mother’s Day. Please also take the time to share a book with a friend, loved one, or your mother. In that spirit, here are eight books we think are worth checking out and discussing. As always, if you’re interested, you can click the link to enjoy a preview on Big Think.

Keep reading,
Kevin

*P.S. My father deserves credit here, too, but he’ll have to wait till June to get his kudos (as the holiday gods decreed).

1. The Wage Standard: What’s Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It

by Arindrajit Dube

I’ve mentioned it in this newsletter before, but one of my favorite things is when a book allows me to see the world through an expert’s eyes. Since I am not an economist, this book fits the bill perfectly.

In it, Dube explores why wages for much of the workforce have stagnated even while the economy overall continues to grow. He dispels common myths, exposes unfair practices, and suggests ways to reverse the trend. If you want to understand wages beyond the usual talking point — or, like me, you have a thing for graphs — this book is one you should consider spending time with.

2. Thinking Sideways: How to Think Like a Chess Player and Win at Life

by Jennifer Shahade

“Chess is a metaphor for life.” I have no idea who first said this famous quote, but I have a hunch that Shahade has taken the idea to heart more than anyone. Her new book is all about the life lessons we can learn from chess. Despite what the subtitle claims, her message isn’t about winning the game of life. Not really. It’s more about learning how to recognize the “moves” available to you so you don’t feel trapped playing the same game as everyone else.

As a bonus, the book is full of interesting stories from the chess world — did you know the longest game of chess lasted more than 20 hours and took 269 moves? It makes what might otherwise be a typical self-help book fun and unique.

3. Ignorance: What We Do Not Know, Cannot Know, Must Not Know, and Refuse to Know

by George G. Szpiro

Books don’t typically celebrate ignorance. Quite the opposite, actually. While Szpiro’s latest may not be a celebration of ignorance, the books does want to show us the many things we can learn thanks to it.

From cosmic questions to mathematical proofs and philosophical quandaries, each chapter examines some facet of reality humanity remains ignorant of — whether that’s because it is impossible for us to know or because we simply choose not to know it. While no chapter dives particularly deep into its subject matter, its buffet-style approach to human knowledge and Szpiro’s straightforward style help you appreciate all we’ve learned as a species and how much we still have to discover together.

4. The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom

by Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff

One of the odd paradoxes of modern life: We seem to have more speech than ever before, yet more people seem to complain that freedom of speech is under attack. Mchangama and Kosseff fall in with the latter camp, and they make a good case.

One of the things I appreciated about the book was that it doesn’t simply look at the present moment and clutch its pearls. It considers the historical lead-up to our present, from free speech’s global post-war expansion to the different ways authoritarian regimes and liberal democracies have tried to suppress speech.

Will all free-speech advocates rally around the authors’ cries? Probably not. But readers who value free speech will nonetheless find the questions they raised alongside their trenchant examination to be worth earnest consideration.

5. Our Brains, Our Selves: What a Neurologist’s Patients Taught Him About the Brain

by Masud Husain

“Who am I? What makes me me?” These questions forever fascinate people because they focus on our favorite subject of all: us. Husain, a cognitive neuroscientist, investigates questions surrounding the brain and identity through the stories of his patients. Their stories lie at the heart of the book, making it feel less like a textbook and more like a series of discoveries the reader makes alongside the author.

Yes, I know this book came out last year, but I missed it then, so I’m taking the opportunity to highlight it now that it’s out in paperback. If you missed it too, it’s definitely worth checking out.

6. Jan Morris: A Life

by Sara Wheeler

Jan Morris lived a fascinating life. A historian and travel writer, she is best known for writing the Pax Britannica trilogy about the British Empire and as the journalist who broke the news of the first ascent of Mount Everest. Morris was also born James Humphry before transitioning in the 1960s.

Then again, a fascinating life is a prerequisite for a biography. What I specifically appreciate about Wheeler’s approach is how it celebrates Morris through her accomplishments and her struggles. Wheeler is not in the business of trying to make her subject fit some neat, didactic message. This is a biography that looks head-on at the contradictions and complications inherent in any life, and it’s all the better for it.

7. Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents

by Valerie Fridland

Fridland’s Like, Literally, Dude was one of my favorite books in 2023, and her latest will definitely be one of my favorites this year. What can I say? I’m a word nerd, and Fridland has a gift for revealing the provocative qualities of language that we interact with every day, but seldom pay attention to.

Here, she tackles accents: Why we have them, how they developed, and why we feel about them the way we do. Through this lens, she reveals why the language we use, and how we use it, is such a personal and powerful part of our lives. Highly recommended!

8. Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed

by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff

I don’t understand Elon Musk. I can’t fathom why he does the things he does, or why people treat him like he’s either the messiah or mecha-Hitler. Given that, it’s probably obvious why I picked up Slobodian and Tarnoff’s book.

The authors look at the historical forces that shaped Musk into a man who believes in building a technological utopia while fervently fighting to roll back the humanist progress of the past half-century. These fused, yet ultimately incompatible, beliefs form what the authors call Muskism (read: Fordism for the 21st century).

After reading the book, do I understand Elon Musk better? No. That man will forever be an enigma to me. But I do have a deeper appreciation for the social and cultural forces behind him and what that could mean for the times we find ourselves in.

Kevin Dickinson is the books editor at Big Think. He holds a master’s in English and writing, and in addition to Big Think, his work has appeared in RealClearScience, Pop Matters, the Writer Magazine, and the Washington Post.

by Anne-Laure Le Cunff

There’s a feeling I love almost more than anything: the feeling of sinking into a good book while the world around me fades away. My breathing slows, my shoulders drop, and the mental chatter in the back of my mind goes quiet.

What’s happening in those moments goes far deeper than entertainment or education, and we seem to sense this instinctively. Reading is relaxing, and many people do it as a counterbalance to our overstimulated age.

But what exactly is happening when we read? What’s going on beneath the surface that makes reading a book feel so restorative?

The answer lies in how reading changes our neurochemistry in real time. Reading isn’t just about decoding words on a page. It’s a complex neurochemical process that affects everything from our heart rate to our hormone levels.

The neurobiology of reading

Reading uses some of the oldest circuitry in the human brain. For most of our evolutionary history, we were readers — just not of books. We read animal tracks in mud, storm patterns in clouds, danger signals in the rustle of leaves. Our ancestors who could decode these natural patterns survived; those who couldn’t often didn’t.

This ancient pattern-recognition system is what we access every time we open a book. Since written language only emerged about 5,000 years ago — recent in evolutionary terms — our brains haven’t had time to evolve dedicated reading circuits. Instead, we’ve repurposed the neural networks that once kept our ancestors alive in the wild. Neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene calls this the “neuronal recycling hypothesis.”

When you read, your brain’s visual system recognizes letter shapes and transforms them into words. Language networks map those words to meanings stored in memory. Attention systems keep you focused on the narrative thread while memory systems integrate new information with existing knowledge. Multiple brain regions work together in coordinated activity.

This process shifts your entire nervous system into a different state. Unlike the fragmented attention that digital media demands, reading requires sustained focus on a single stream of information.

Your brain processes fictional experiences as low-stakes rehearsals for actual life.

This focused attention actively shifts your autonomic nervous system from the sympathetic “fight-or-flight” state toward the parasympathetic “rest-and-digest” state. As this happens, you experience measurable physiological changes: your heart rate slows, your breathing deepens and becomes more regular, and your muscle tension decreases.

When we read fiction, something even more specific occurs. Brain imaging shows that reading about experiences activates many of the same neural regions as actually having those experiences. Encounter a description of running through a forest, and your motor cortex activates as if you’re moving. Read about a character’s emotional pain, and brain regions involved in empathy and emotional processing respond as if witnessing real events.

This simulation gives rise to “embodied reading” where stories provide practice for real-world scenarios. Your brain processes fictional experiences as low-stakes rehearsals for actual life, building neural pathways that can be activated when similar situations arise beyond the page.

5 ways to make reading more restorative

If you’d like to go beyond simply picking up any book at any time (although that’s a great start), you can deliberately enhance reading’s calming effects by applying simple strategies.

1. Read a mix of content. While nonfiction engages analytical brain networks, fiction allows you to fully disengage from active problem-solving, and the imagination it requires provides the most complete break from stress and worry.

2. Time your reading strategically. While you can enjoy the benefits of reading at any time, strategic timing can amplify them. For instance, reading before bed prepares your brain for sleep by reducing stress hormones and activating the parasympathetic nervous system. Whenever you read, make sure to give yourself enough time to become absorbed — you don’t want to be rushing through pages.

3. Create reading rituals. Establishing a regular reading routine — the same location, the same time of day, perhaps the same pre-reading routine — and making it feel like a special treat will help ensure you keep making space for reading and consistently access its benefits.

4. Match your reading to your mental state. If you’re feeling anxious, complex literary fiction might feel overwhelming. Start with something lighter. As your nervous system settles, you can move toward more challenging material that engages different brain networks in new ways.

5. Follow your curiosity. The stress-reducing benefits of reading depend on full absorption rather than forced attention. If you’re not connecting with a book, put it down and pick up something you feel genuinely curious about.

Reading represents one of our most sophisticated yet accessible tools for nervous system regulation. In an age of constant stimulation and fragmented attention, books offer something incredibly valuable: an activity that simultaneously stimulates your brain and calms your body.

So the next time you settle in with a good book, know that you’re doing something your brain evolved to do exceptionally well — and giving your nervous system exactly what it needs to reset and recharge.

This article is part of Big Think’s monthly issue Biology’s New Era.

by Scotty Hendricks

Authors write novels for many reasons. Anthony Burgess, of A Clockwork Orange fame, was once described as a man “always on a money-fishing expedition.” Ernest Vincent Wright wrote Gadsby, a novel that avoids using the letter E, as a self-imposed challenge. Joan Didion processed her grief following the sudden death of her husband in her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking.

The books on this list were basically written as propaganda. Their authors devised them to advance a particular ideology or party line, with the hope that readers would be persuaded to take up the cause. We’ll dive into why they were written, what ideology they promoted, and how effective they were at achieving their goals.

Before that, we should note that we aren’t using the term propaganda in a moral or artistic sense. We’re instead using it to describe works that place heavy emphasis on influencing readers through symbolism and emotional appeals. Whether they are narrative masterpieces or utter dreck, whether they conform to reality or distort it beyond recognition, and whether we agree or disagree isn’t the point. For these authors, the top priority was to maintain the agenda while shifting public opinion.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)

Any mind that is capable of a real sorrow is capable of good.

The little book that started a great war, Uncle Tom’s Cabin explores the horrors of slavery in the 19^th-century United States. The novel centers on a group of enslaved people initially on a plantation in Kentucky as they attempt to survive the wretched conditions they find themselves in. Some try to escape to the Northern free states, while others are sold further and further down the river. Some die valiantly, some survive, but none escapes unscathed.

In many ways, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is as much counterpropaganda as it is propaganda. The antebellum South and slavery apologists went to great lengths to portray slavery as a benign, even benevolent, institution — one ordained by God and that was ultimately beneficial to the enslaved. Stowe’s novel shattered this illusion for many Americans. The story drew on accounts written by former slaves, but rather than a straight retelling, Stowe heightened the emotional appeal to sermon-like levels—she once claimed she had a “vocation to preach on paper.” She also infused the novel with religious symbolism. The eponymous Uncle Tom, for example, is a Christ-like figure who suffers greatly despite his immense kindness and unyielding faith.

Stowe wrote the novel in direct response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required officials to arrest people suspected of escaping slavery and punish anyone found aiding them. Originally published it as a serial in an anti-slavery newspaper, the book went on to become one of the most read in 19th-century America. In fact, it proved so effective at illustrating the odious reality of slavery that counter-counterpropaganda was produced in the form of anti-Tom novels and plays. These tried to mimic Stowe’s storytelling but distorted the message toward a pro-slavery agenda.

Over the past 150 years, Uncle Tom’s Cabin has garnered its share of criticism for how it depicts Black people — the title character’s name has become something of a slur, and many of the characters are stereotypical by today’s standards. James Baldwin thought it was a “very bad novel,” one that relied too much on “self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality” from Stowe, whom he called less a novelist than an “impassioned pamphleteer.” Nonetheless, its legacy as part of the 19th-century abolitionist movement endures.

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (1906)

Chicago will be ours!

The Jungle is the story of Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant to the United States who works in the Chicago stockyards. He and his family came to America with dreams of a better life, only to encounter every misfortune that could befall a working-class family in early-20th-century Chicago.

His situation improves only after he encounters members of the Socialist Party, who offer him support and a sense of agency. The novel ends at a rally where participants cheer the coming socialist control of the city.

To write The Jungle, Sinclair, a muckraking reporter, spent several weeks working in stockyards and slaughterhouses to collect information on the conditions he found there. Initially rejected for being too shocking to publish, the book was eventually serialized in Appeal to Reason, a socialist newspaper. The first hardbound copies even featured the Socialist Party’s logo.

The novel wasn’t quite as effective as Sinclair might have hoped. It garnered some positive reviews and massive sales. Jack London, a fellow socialist, even deemed it “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery.” But while Sinclair wanted people to focus on the plight of workers, most readers — including President Theodore Roosevelt — were more concerned with the depictions of the filthy slaughterhouses. The public became incensed over impurities in the food supply — even if Sinclair’s depiction of human meat accidentally making it into sausages was never confirmed.

Sinclair mused that he “aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” As a committed democratic socialist, he favored abolishing capitalism and the wage-labor system in favor of a more cooperative system. His depictions of life for the Chicago proletariat are designed to make the reader feel, not just know, that some workers’ lives were miserable under turn-of-the-century capitalism.

Later in life, he would run for governor of California on the socialist End Poverty In California (EPIC) platform. Given the radical nature of his platform and the nationalization of businesses hit hard by the depression, which would then be given to the unemployed workers to operate as co-ops, his earning 37% of the vote proved a respectable showing.

The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck (1942)

No little appetite or pain, no carelessness or meanness in him escaped her; no thought or dream or longing in him ever reached her. And yet several times in her life she had seen the stars.

Written specifically to encourage resistance movements during WWII, The Moon Is Down tells the story of the occupation of a Northern European city by an unnamed army at war with both Britain and Russia. Feel free to guess who that might be.

The story follows the citizens of the unnamed coastal town under occupation. Colonel Lanser, the invading forces’ leader, establishes fascist control over the town, which the people find more and more unbearable over time. After the execution of one of their own, the townspeople are roused to resistance. They sabotage the machinery and railway lines that the invading army relies on. Eventually, Allied forces begin airdropping supplies, including explosives, for the freedom fighters. But as the invaders’ fear grows, so too do their oppressive tactics.

Of all the books on this list, The Moon Is Down is the most obviously propaganda. The symbolism is less an abstract wink at a deeper meaning and more a knowing nudge. At one point, the fascist forces literally establish their base of operations in the home of the town’s democratically elected mayor. Many of the characters give speeches on democracy, freedom, and the unconquerable human spirit — concepts that would obviously have immense emotional appeal during World War II.

For that reason, Steinbeck’s book was smuggled into Nazi-controlled Europe for distribution among occupied peoples in hopes of fermenting a continued resistance. While it is difficult to tell if the book served that purpose effectively, it did earn Steinbeck the King Haakon VII’s Freedom Cross for outstanding service to Norway during wartime.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (1957)

Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking.

Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand’s magnum opus. The massive novel weighs in at more than 1,000 pages — over half a million words — meaning this overview will, by necessity, be cursory.

In a near-future, semi-dystopian United States, businesses are regulated to death, society is becoming less functional, and the successful are hounded by the unproductive masses. Against this backdrop, innovative businessmen and scientists have started to go missing. One daring industrialist, Dagny Taggart, seeks not only to endure in a world that both relies on and resents her, but also to learn what is becoming of some of her vanishing associates.

She eventually comes across others who share her capitalist worldview in an increasingly socialist world, and heaps of discussion over the merits of free markets and acting out of “rational self-interest” follow.

Atlas Shrugged is unapologetic propaganda for Rand’s Objectivist worldview. While Rand illustrated her ideas in several branches of philosophy, her political and ethical stances — namely her love of capitalism and ethical egoism — tend to attract the most attention. The novel clearly shows what she thinks happens when people are unable to pursue their own self-interest, and her take on the fate of unfree societies.

The book even includes a 40-page monologue on the virtues of Rand’s worldview, which the character of John Galt offers his full-throated endorsement. The section makes little attempt to disguise its status as an author filibuster. Rand herself was open about how the text was “to show how desperately the world needs prime movers and how viciously it treats them.”

The plot occasionally verges on the absurd in order to do this. For instance, the vanishing industrialists must have managed every aspect of their corporate empires themselves, given how poorly their companies fare without them — that or they were poor delegators with abysmal records for hiring competent managers.

The novel has sold well over the decades, but has generally collected mixed reviews. While academic writers have avoided Rand’s work in favor of other authors, her ideas have served as the nucleus of a school of thought. They also served as the foundation for the video game Bioshock, though the game is less enthusiastic about Objectivism than Rand is.