In its latest cover story, the Atlantic asserted that “The End of Reading Is Here.” The piece accurately describes the United States’ dwindling reading habits, contributing to a narrative that has received no shortage of promotion in recent years: that the written word is dead and no one reads books anymore.

But there is a clear problem with the Atlantic article and the wider obituary for books in general. Invariably, when you encounter this assertion, it focuses almost if not entirely on the United States. And regardless of how much its people might think it so, America is not the world.

When you pull back and see the forest for the trees, it turns out that, yes, there is a gradual global decline in book reading taking place, but importantly, it’s not happening everywhere. What’s more, in some places, reading is on the rise, and a look at where it’s growing tells a different story about the role books play in global culture.

A clear example is in Nordic Europe, where Finland, Sweden, and Norway not only top global reading rates, but are holding stable or increasing. These countries also tend to outperform in metrics relating to quality of life, education, healthcare, happiness, and so on. I’m not saying that’s because of books, but I would not be surprised if there is a sort of literary oroborus going on by which the more a country reads, the more educated it becomes, and the more capable of solving problems, and therefore the more prosperous, which results in the time and resources necessary for ample book reading.

But perhaps the most noteworthy nation is China, where books read per year per capita have been increasing steadily for decades. And while much is being written about decreasing American book consumption amidst a wider narrative of U.S. decline, China is growing in stature as a superpower.

The story I’m telling is simple and goes back to that oroborus—the self-eating snake. The United States is reading less amidst its decline, which diminishes critical thinking, which further contributes to national decline. Meanwhile, the Chinese are reading more and more as China develops rapidly and expands its power around the globe.

I mean, the Chinese president referenced Thucydides while jabbing the U.S. over this very dynamic. That’s some high-brow, literary superpowerism right there. There aren’t many people who have waded through the ancient historian’s 800-page tome, and let me tell you, we were all impressed.

In the end, it’s premature to declare the death of reading. Reading is alive and well in countries that are flourishing. But what the data does suggest is that as a nation’s reading declines, so does the nation.

Lately I’ve been a little obsessed with Hakuna Kulala, a record label operating out of Kampala that primarily releases electronic acts from East Central Africa, but has dabbled in artists around the world who share their drum-forward, somewhat apocalyptic audio aesthetic.

Emerging from the underground scene of Mexico, ANSIEDAD1000 fits the bill. His latest, Abizzmo stitches together cumbia, the Beach Boys of Pet Sounds, the Reznor of Downward Spiral, and a few weird flourishes of British invasion, resulting in this pleasantly lurching monsterosity of a sound that seems like it would be chill music for Armageddon. There’s a grim edge, but honey to it. Or to put it another way, Abizzmo strikes me as a laid-back soundtrack to a mental breakdown. Real end of the world and I feel fine, vibes.

The reference to Pet Sounds is literal—he not only harkens to Brian Wilson’s psychedelic classic but samples it directly. At one point, you come upon a Spanish, Robotussin-infused take on the Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting,” while other moments feel like something out of the industrial bands of the early 1990s, the chillwave sleaze days of the 2000s, or the 1980s quaalude dream pop that inspired Millennial chillsleazers.

So there are all these flavors from throughout time and space, but in the end, the record still tastes like a distinctly contemporary Latino dish thanks in part to its cumbia grooves, but also because it has this aroma of the underground dance spots of Tijuana and Mexico City. You know what I mean if you’ve been before: often improvised club situations that, though the music may be electronic, spiritually have more in common with basement punk shows or the CBGBs of 1977 than they have with anything you’d see at Ibiza.

That being said, Abizzmo is beach music. It’s the kind of album you want on when you’re kicked back on the sand, smoking DMT and chatting with extradimensional beings. It’s a soundtrack of breakfast micheladas and watching a supernova during a manic episode. Or it’s just really danceable, no DMT or psychosis needed—though they certainly won’t hurt.

I’m a huge advocate for not just listening to the tracks on Bandcamp or Spotify or Soundlinator or wherever, but ordering the actual LP. Buying vinyl directly from a musician or their label is one of the best ways to support an independent act financially speaking, and in a world where media is almost universally digital, I am increasingly reverting to the value of physical things.

Records are cool. Buy this record.

Also, check out Rococo Ruine by Authentically Plastic and Cociage by Pö, ANSIEDAD1000’s labelmates. As far as I’m concerned, Hakuna Kulala is putting out some of the most exciting music for these apocalyptic times.

A Rare Interview With Nobel-Winning Author Han Kang - Vogue

Ai Weiwei on the “Catastrophic Status Quo” of Censorship - In These Times

Benjamín Labatut on Roberto Bolaño - Writers Talking Writers at Publishers Weekly

While AI is new in a manifest sense, humans have been telling stories of artificial intelligence for ages. Today we have Her and Ex Machina, but these stories owe much to tales that came before them. The ancient Greeks told of Pygmalion, whose statue was granted life. Mary Shelley imagined an artificial intelligence in an era when mathematician Ada Lovelace was creating the first computer algorithms. Lovelace’s father, Lord Byron, incidentally, was present when Shelley wrote Frankenstein.

The thread connecting all of these stories, according to University of California, Berkeley researcher Nina Beguš, is that we have persisted in humanlike, often gendered conceptions of artificial intelligence. And this, she argues in her book Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI, limits and misaligns AI as it emerges beyond fiction. In the book, she also explores the need for a new discipline — the titular “artificial humanities” — that would fuse the academic disciplines of science and the humanities to ensure that technological innovation is driven by humanist principles.

I spoke with Beguš about Artificial Humanities, why we need to get more creative with our conceptions of AI, and why instilling artificial intelligence with human-oriented motivations is essential in a time of rising authoritarianism.

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What are artificial humanities, and why do we need this new discipline?
Artificial humanities is an approach that treats AI both as a technical system and cultural artifact. It brings tools from the humanities—history, philosophy, literary and media studies—into direct collaboration with technical work.

Artificial humanities grew out of a need over ten years ago because many decisive aspects of AI are qualitative, not just quantitative, and went underaddressed. What role an AI system is meant to play: a tool, teacher, companion, or co-creator? Which metaphors are built into its voice and design interface? Which values as defaults?

What first got you thinking about this concept?
It was the early days of Apple’s Siri, actually, in 2012. It was clear back then that virtual assistants are not just a voice-based search but an entirely new product category that tries to feel relational. This sent me back to the history of conversational machines, such as Weizenbaum’s ELIZA from the mid-1960s.

​​Connecting these dots from the history of technology and from imaginaries around AI offered clarity about what we’re doing and where we’re going with AI. This is why I put Pierre Huyghe’s mask on the cover of the book: it marks a long history of projecting humanness onto machines.

A current example is the use of erotica in LLMs, with OpenAI now reaching to the market where Replika and character.ai have reigned so far. This idea that artificial beings could be humanlike or, even more, that they are perfected humans, goes back to the ancient Pygmalion myth. Pygmalion is known primarily from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where he creates an artificial woman and falls in love with her. The trope is rather archetypal and now holds power over relational technologies that play into the illusion of the human.

What do Pygmalion and Frankenstein have to do with AI? And why do you think we should question the humanlike conceptualization of AI?

We keep re-enacting the two myths in technology.

Pygmalionism leans into the fantasy of a perfect artificial being whose intimacy feels natural. And yet, the illusion inevitably breaks! In my view, it limits what machines could be and also brings a lot of baggage. Where do we stop the imitation of the human and lean into uniquely machinic abilities?

Frankenstein offers a counter-story of creation without responsibility, and what technologists would call great misalignment.

We cannot inhibit anthropomorphism: it discloses our inherent and deepest intuitions. We have known about the ELIZA effect since the 1960s, seeing the machine as human when it performs language. Human tendency for relationality is powerful. A society of 8 billion people and who knows how many AI companions was a logical trajectory of this tendency. We shouldn’t dismiss it just because it seems bizarre.

The Pygmalion myth — which is related to Shelley’s Frankenstein through the adjacent ancient myth of Prometheus — is in itself quite revealing of the human side of technological development. In Ovid’s poem, the artificial woman is a statue turned into flesh by the grace of a goddess. In the 19th century renditions, the central question in the Pygmalion myth is about the ability of art to imitate life. At the turn of the century, artificial women became more technological, merging with the idea of a robot and later cyborg.

Now, why is the Pygmalion myth so powerful in AI, centered around language?

The Pygmalion myth is a male fantasy. Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel goes against the grain: we met a male humanoid creature, capable of speaking and appreciating literature, even writing a chapter of the novel. In that century, it takes artificial women another few decades to gain a perspective and a voice. Thanks to women writers, they slowly acquire more agency and autonomy. Only in 1995, with Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, we got an artificial woman — a neural network! — that is trained in language and literature.

But the training of artificial women in speech has begun already at the beginning of the century with Shaw’s play Pygmalion, known also after film and musical adaptations under the name My Fair Lady. Here, a working-class woman, named Eliza Doolittle, is taught how to speak properly, in high-class English, and goes through a series of Turing tests. The play reveals many preexisting ideas about language machines, which had yet to be developed in technology: the line from Eliza Doolittle goes directly to the Turing test, ELIZA the chatbot, today’s language models and GANs, as well as elocution and language enhancement technologies.

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I’ve known people who are pretty traditionalist about the boundary between science and the humanities. Has anyone pushed back at the idea of artificial humanities?
Not really. At this point there is a consensus that the sociotechnical approach to AI needs to grow. The concept of artificiality, for example, began as a human characteristic and has developed to designate a contrast with nature — which is why I enjoy “artificial humanities” as a term! AI has challenged these basic concepts, making us question if machines can learn, have language or a kind of creativity.

I also see more understanding about arbitrary boundaries of disciplines themselves: we’ve created them because they were useful and productive but are, at least in the case of AI, becoming less so. Humanities are sciences of the human, and engineering of the machines. And yet, here we are.

Again, the need comes from the research topic and questions. I’ve been involved with a hard science group at the Lawrence National Lab for this very reason. Their scientific practices do not distinguish between nature, human, and technology in the way we’ve all been implicitly taught, which intervenes both with the way they set up their experiments and how they narrate their findings. They foster a planetary philosophy based on the science they practice, where they consider the biosphere as taking advantage of the Earth’s energetic sources, followed by the technosphere as a continuation of life’s activities that tinker with the same energetic potential. Our current hypersegmentation of disciplines misses out on synthetic insights afforded by such humanities-sciences collaborations.

Do you think any recent works of science fiction have done an especially good job at portraying AI?

It’s striking to see how hard it is to break out of the humanlike mold. Even in fiction, which offers an unlimited landscape of possibilities!

Pygmalionesque films Her and Ex Machina both make an attempt to represent the machine from a nonhuman perspective: Her with a metaphor, Ex Machina visually. In Her, virtual assistant Samantha breaks up with her human boyfriend but cannot explain to him adequately how her world has evolved, so she resorts to a metaphor of a book whose letters are floating further apart. In Ex Machina, the scene portraying the robot Ava’s visual perception didn’t make it into the film because the director said he failed to execute it well. Instead, we see Ava going through the Turing test from afar, passing as a real human before the helicopter pilot takes her into the city, into the society.

Stanisław Lem is one of the rare authors who consistently delivers nonhuman intelligences without human projection. Think of Solaris portraying a planet-spanning entity, or The Mask, which portrays a Pygmalionesque woman lover that turns into an arachnid-like killer machine. Summa Technologiae is a whole treatise on the future of technology, and Golem XIV a philosophical essay given by a supercomputer.

One of my favorite Lem’s quasi-scientific graphs is the one below, on language development from his collection Imaginary Magnitude. I discussed it in the book, and we republished it in the project Latent Spacecraft. The graph shows computers taking use of human languages and inventing their own, which we cannot access. This is already happening in generative adversarial networks (GANs) that are encoding new information, unknown to us, into silences.

What do you think have been some of the most exciting recent developments in AI?

I focus largely on creativity and language. I’m seeing new uses of AI that are not based on the typical chatbot conversation in which the writer needs to comb through a flood of text and revise it through further prompting. Creative computational tools should support human creative decisions. Humans are not as good at brute force or calculation of the myriad of possible paths. We’re good at feeling, intuiting, imagining, meaning-making, valuing, responding with responsibility.

These capabilities are useful in scientific research as well, with AI serving as our augmentation. It will be exciting to see more scientific discoveries coming from human-AI collaboration.

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What do you think are the biggest risks to AI?

We are all navigating new conditions without an adequate chart. How to prepare for the labor market? Knowledge production is changing with AI: it is transforming the long-established norms, based on human authorship, editing, and control.

At all moments, we are close to both cognitive acceleration and atrophy. A cognitive diet of what we consume and outsource is now a crucial aspect of the 21st-century existence.

I suggest a thought exercise for any given challenge you’re addressing with AI: consider it at an individual level, at small group and community levels, and then scale up to the society. You get a very different view into the challenge in each, sometimes incommensurable with the prior layer.

For experts, two major bottlenecks will need to be solved with seismic innovations: one is the merging of human and machinic systems, the other is the environmental cost of AI. All attempts so far have been relying on more technology.

If we manage to ensure the continued energy availability, we can assume that the growth of digital data continues today’s trends, surpassing the total amount of biological data — DNA — on Earth in about a century. In any case, we are undergoing a major transition in information storage, transmission, and processing.

Some people argue that the existential threats posed by AGI are simply too great to proceed toward it. Do you ever find yourself thinking that maybe we should stop before it’s too late?

I don’t think halting development is a real economic and geopolitical possibility. We need to be pragmatic with no delusions either way. My approach is to include the humanities in the very process of creating these technologies, which allows for a deeper and fairer framework and more dignified, transparent, and accountable development. AI is a series of human decisions after all.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how AI can be used by authoritarians. How can artificial humanities help mitigate this danger?

This is exactly where the humanities should rise up to the task. It is becoming even more important for individuals, the media, and society to develop a critical eye on the use of AI, political narratives, trust, and truth. AI in politics and in law can be incredibly dangerous, adding to the fire started by social media, and before that, the Internet, and so on.

These are not new problems. And yet, even if we ban AI from politics, I can see a scenario where a politician would say that they will consult the most advanced AI on political issues and still get elected. (Reading recommendation: Richard Powers’s recent novel Playground brilliantly addresses the theme of AI in politics.)

In the past, we turned to philosophers for guidance on ethical and political decisions. Artificial Humanities argues that we should rely on humanities — with deep knowledge of human behaviors, desires, and cultures, including the narratives that we all inherit — for guidance on the new realities that AI enables, such as the relationships we form with AI agents.

In Experimental Narratives you found that when prompted to compose a fictional narrative, AI draws inspiration from the same media that humans do. Hany Farid told me that one of his concerns is that AI has been trained on media like the Terminator and 2001’s Hal 9000, and that it’s begun presenting as if it’s learned that it’s supposed to act that way. What do you think of that concern?

I share this concern. We mold AI with our cultural imaginaries. LLMs have been trained on all available data but keep averaging to clichés. There are so many other ways to imagine, build, and use AI from the single marketable form we have now. LLMs get all the attention, and my hope for the second part of the 2020s is that AI diversifies towards less exploitative and more creative directions. I believe in the human spirit and our ability to solve problems, as well as to create new ones.

I write in Artificial Humanities that “The responsibility of making these technologies is too big for the technologists to bear it alone,” and my new book, First Encounters with AI, is a continuation of the posited task.

Imagination has become more important than ever, and writers are specialists in alternative worlds. This is why I asked creative writers to reflect on the entry of AI into the writing space. The overwhelming majority of people are affected by AI but are not a part of the conversation about it.

I arrived in Bangkok on December 31st, 2019, with the intention of spending the next couple of months doing location research for a novel I was writing about a pandemic that emerges from East Asia. A couple of weeks later, what we would soon all know as covid arrived in Thailand. Everyone freaked out. By the time it hit the US, we in Southeast Asia had been deep in plague for months. I was on the second to last flight out of Hanoi as the world shut down at the end of March. It was wild.

The idea for a pandemic came to me via Vaclav Smil, the systems scientist renowned for his deep dive books on energy, food, economics, infrastructure, farming, globalization, and much so on and so forth. If, like me, you’re the kind of geek who wants to know why things are how they are, you’ll probably appreciate him.

Smil’s work first came into my hands while looking for a way to end the world, conducting research into a realistic, paradigm shifting, global calamity against which to set a smaller, more intimate drama. Along the way I came across his Global Catastrophes and Trends, where he made a compelling case that a pandemic was the most probable largescale threat to humanity, and that it was statistically likely to happen within half a century. He wrote that in 2008, by the way.

It gave me the pandemic bug, which brought me to Thailand, covid’s first foray out of China before kicking off its world tour. Too coincidental — we must be living in a simulation.

Whatever the case, I’m just about to crack open Smil’s latest, coming out in June — Speed.

It’s about just that, speed, along a spectrum of scales and scenarios, and explores how it shapes our world. What I love about Smil’s work is his ability to take these really ordinary aspects of life — like the speed of wind erosion, cheetahs, and evolution — and connect them to the bigger picture of our reality through a fantastically interdisciplinary framework.

I’ll be interviewing Smil about the book so will go into more detail about it then, but for now, if you enjoy nerding out on how hyperspecific aspects of reality spiderweb to the rest of it, put Speed on your list.

The ongoing collapse of the media industry left me scrambling for work for a minute there, and while one might assume that translated into plenty of time for reading, it in fact primarily meant spending all my waking hours sending pitches and scouring ever-thinner job ads. But I have happily remedied that situation, and the stability afforded by my first staff position in at least a decade (maybe more on that to come) has once again opened up my reading hours.

Back to chopping through the stack.

I have some in-depth reviews on the way, but in the meantime as my schedule is still somewhat hectic while the new position ramps up, I wanted to share a quick dose of bookishness.

Here are seven titles I’m excited to read in the coming weeks.

We Would Have Told Each Other Everything - Judith Hermann

Centroeuropa - Vincente Luis Mora

To See Beyond - Anna Badkhen

Last Night in Brooklyn - Xochitl Gonzalez

Sparta - Andrew Bayliss

Rasputin - Antony Beevor

Art Cure - Daisy Fancourt

One of the best things about my work is that I enjoy frequent opportunities to converse with smart people, and this week I have interviews out with two great examples.

For Rolling Stone, I spoke with journalist Michael Pollan about his latest book on the search for consciousness, his ongoing propensity for psychedelics, and the rising threat of AI.

Then for my Writers Talking Writers series at Publishers Weekly, Michael stuck around to chat about his affection for Henry David Thoreau, and I spoke with journalist Elizabeth Kolbert about the grandmother of environmental reportage Rachel Carson. The two chats couldn’t have been better paired.

Keep an eye out for my interview with Ai Weiwei coming out at In These Times sometime over the coming weeks!

A few months back, editor John Williams—who was today axed from his position at the head of the Washington Post’s Book World, which he helmed to great acclaim—pointed out that book/art reviews can perform well in the online marketplace as long as you prioritize a broader consideration for cultural coverage over a microparsing of article-by-article clicks.

This seems fairly intuitive. You can’t expect every review to perform the same traffic-wise. Coverage of, say, the latest Stephen King novel is of course going to get a lot more attention than some avant-garde European who only writes in single, book-length sentences.

But having both appear alongside one another, regardless of individual metrics, helps to build a wider bookish ecosystem. A smattering of readers who enjoy the Stand might find themselves clicking over to a review of Herscht 07769 and end up intrigued by a similarly vast if more challengingly narrated epic. And then they come back again and again not because they want to read about one author/title, but because they want to discover more.

This not only supports the overall success of a publication’s book coverage but expands and deepens our culture as a whole.

And you would think that Jeff Bezos—whose Amazon started as an online bookstore, which profits immensely off its “if you liked this” recommendation algorithms—might understand this.

But of course he doesn’t, because he lives in a reality where nothing matters more than clicks and his own enrichment. If an aspect of his business empire doesn’t directly boost his bottom line in a way that is readily apparent, it must not be worth retaining.

And now he’s ended the Washington Post’s book coverage, and our culture is all the poorer for it. This is part of a troubling trend in which media outlets are reducing or cutting books and art reviews in favor of attention bait, more and more AI slop, and stories that don’t threaten their owners’ political project. As a result, books and art have a diminishing place in our cultural conversation, and everyone is getting dumber all the time.

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Some of the dollars-and-cents-centric out there will argue that there just isn’t an audience for book coverage as no one reads anymore, but that isn’t the case.

Book sales have actually increased over the past 15 years, with sales of adult fiction inching up slowly but steadily. While it is true that a smaller percentage of people read than in previous decades, overall sales continue to climb as the population grows and those who do read enjoy access to more titles than ever.

Ironically, the very reason readers continue to expand their shelves is because the online review ecosystem brings them to authors they never would have encountered otherwise, and because Amazon made books globally and effortlessly accessible.

But instead of building on this key cultural pillar, billionaires like Bezos are knocking it down, even though the Post’s Bookworld staff asserts that the section was performing well in relation to the rest of the paper.

So here we are, with our cultural offerings further crumbling, presumably for two reasons:

The overt—Bezos sees a few bucks in it. Sure, he’s already worth around $250,000,000,000, but downsizing the Washington Post could easily add another drop to his enormous bucket.

The subtle—Bezos is profiting massively off the entrenchment of American oligarchy, which has soared under the rise of American fascism, which—according to the aspiring autocrat at its top—has benefited directly from the dearth of American education.

In other words, we get dumber, and they get richer.

There is no simple solution to any of this, but for the time being, I see only one way those of us who are bookishly and culturally inclined can fight—by abandoning platforms owned by oligarchial fascists and creating our own.

That won’t be easy. I’m writing this on Substack, for example, the leadership of which has expressed sympathy for certain aspects of the oligarchal mission. But if those with the resources aren’t going to provide them to us, we’re going to have to do it ourselves with what tools we can manage.

For today, I’m going to mourn the loss of Book World, which allowed me to do some of my favorite book coverage ever, and metaphorically pour one out to the capable editors and writers who have been harmed by Bezos’ relentless quest for as many clicks and as much power as possible.

Tomorrow, I’m going to get back to churning out my own book coverage, because to once again quote Don DeLillo, “I moonlight, except there’s nothing I’m moonlighting from. Moonlight is all that’s out there.”

With new advance reader copies showing up every day, my to-read stack towers ever taller. Here are six coming out over the course of 2026 that are at the top of my pile.

On Censorship, Ai Weiwei - March 3

Few artists have faced censorship as directly as Ai Weiwei, whose persistent rankling of Chinese authorities resulted in his imprisonment and exile. This little 80 page book dives into a big topic: how censorship is wielded by both authoritarian and democratic frameworks—something we would all be wise to consider right about now. I’ve interviewed him previously and recently wrote the intro for a short comic he penned, and suspect On Censorship contains valuable insight for our moment in history.

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The Things We Never Say, Elizabeth Strout - May 5

Pulitzer recipient Elizabeth Strout is known for really getting into the heads of her characters, and with her latest she writes of a man who feels psychologically isolated in a world that’s teetering on the brink. I don’t know much more about it beyond that, but it certainly seems like a feeling with which many of us can identify.

On Witness and Respair, Jesmyn Ward - May 19

Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward is renowned for her fiction, so I’m looking forward to checking out this series of autobiographical essays. The titular piece is a meditation on the loss of her partner just before the pandemic then grieving during lockdown, with other pieces examining her key writing influences and formative experiences.

Constrapposto, Dave Eggers - June 9

Supposedly Eggers has been working on this one for two decades, and I tend to like or at least appreciate obsessive passion projects. I also have a penchant for globetrotting eccentrics, and as the book follows what are guaranteed to be a pair of oddballs as they travel the world in the name of art, it has high promise.

Beginning Middle End, Valeria Luiselli - July 28

I know almost nothing about this book except that it’s by Luiselli, whose The Story of My Teeth and Lost Children Archive left lasting, outright haunting impressions on me. They’re the kind of books that continue to bother you for long after you’ve read them for reasons you can’t quite explain. A couple years back, I had an excellent chat with Luiselli about the Mexican classic Pedro Paramo for the Writers Talking Writers series at Publishers Weekly.

Exit Party, Emily St. John Mandel - September 15

Mandel’s work tends to have high levels of prescience and coincidence, so we should probably all pay close attention to Exit Party, which is set in a post-collapse United States just a few years from now. Beyond that, I know very little about it, except that I’m excited to read it. She too sat down for Writers Talking Writers to discuss how Irene Nemirovsky wrote through the acutely tumultuous times of WW2.

Michael Pollan’s A World Appears delves into the latest research on consciousness—human, animal, and otherwise. This is a different tack for Pollan, whose work has previously focused almost entirely on the things we ingest and how they affect us. Here he’s seeking (mostly) scientific solutions to existential questions that largely arose during his recent forays into psychedelic climes.

Keep an eye out for my interview with Pollan for Rolling Stone, which will publish near A World Appears’ February 24th release date, as well as our discussion on Henry David Thoreau for my Writers Talking Writers series at Publishers Weekly.

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Álvaro Enrigue’s Now I Surrender is a revisionist western centered around the Mexico-US border region 200 years ago, during the early years of the fledgling republics and the final years of Apacheria. Weaving narratives following a posse’s search for a kidnapped woman, the surrender and death of the Apache leader Geronimo, and the author’s modern-day familial road trip and visa application travails, cloaked within its story of gun-toting, horseback adventure is a subtle examination of the malleable nature of national and ethnic identity.

Now I Surrender is out March 3rd. I interviewed Enrigue about his previous novel You Dreamed of Empires, which delivered a delightfully mushroom-fueled revisionish take on the arrival of Cortés in Tenochtitlan and the last days of the Aztec Empire.

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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie is one of those wonderful reads that defies easy categorization. The author—a practicing cosmologist, physicist, and artistically-minded person—carries us on a journey through some of the key mysteries of the universe via a vast expanse of poetic and pop culture references. In the process she not only takes some of the unfathomability out of hard concepts, but brings in voices that have typically been marginalized in STEM conversations. Prescod-Weinstein’s previous book The Disordered Cosmos was widely hailed, winning the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for science, and I’m thoroughly enjoying her follow-up.

The Edge of Space-Time comes out April 7th, and I’m speaking with Prescond-Weinstein for an interview appearing at Nautilus sometime in March.

“Trump, Erdogan, Netanyahu, Putin,” the driver—who according to the app is named Adem but introduced himself as Dominic Toretto—declares with a decisive hand gesture. “All are shit. They fuck everything up.”

It is the beginning of two weeks in Istanbul during which I will taxi constantly between the half-dozen hotels I am reviewing, the apartment where my in-laws are staying, and the galleries, markets, and other random locationalia. It’s a great city and all, but I’ve spent too much time here over the years, so at this point I’m less interested in the increasingly suspect Grand Bazaar or the crowds of Taksim than I am in pulling the ear of local taksi drivers. That’s how you really learn something about a place, and through inference, the wider world.

Dom/Adem had started out talking about movies (Fast and the Furious in particular), and when I ask if he likes Istanbul, while he is initially positive, he caveats with a noise of disapproval and admits it is way too expensive.

He asks where I am from and I tell him.

“America?” Dom looks at me in the rearview and flashes an amiable grin that has a couple degrees of teasing. “Trump is shit.” And then he elucidates on this point in regard to the rest of the previously mentioned tyrannical madmen.

Later another driver—Burak, who also works as an optometrist but was forced to supplement his income by driving a cab as the economy soured—declares that he hates Istanbul. It is too full.

“Twenty-two million documented, probably thirty million really.” He makes the disapproving noise. “Five hundred thousand Syrians. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans, Azerbaijanis. The Kurds.”

He asks if I live in Istanbul with a wariness I have come to recognize in those who feel their cities have been devoured by so-called digital nomads—migrants of another variety. I tell him I am visiting my in-laws who have flown in from Iran.

“Iranians?” He shakes his head. “Too many of them here too. Half a million.”

“There are a lot of problems in Iran,” I note. “And in Syria.”

He nods. “This is true.”

And then there is Metmoud, who rockets my Grand Bazaar-weary family away from that tourist hive faster than the proverbial hell bat.

At first his attention is fixed on the road, weaving through traffic with a daring and precision wielded only by those of truly refined skill and recklessness. But then we pull beside a great metal fortress of a vehicle bearing the mark of the police. It is an impressive piece of respresssory. I’ve seen the ironclad machinery wielded by overarmed police regimes from Tunis to Thailand, Cairo to Compton, but I do believe this is the largest armored car I’ve ever seen driven by nonmilitary forces. It is a bank vault on wheels.

I say wow, but Metmoud recognizes the noise of disapproval.

He begins digging around in his English vocabulary for something to say about it, but can’t quite come up with the words. So he takes up his phone and—while continuing his highly active traffic navigation—enters into the translator what comes out the other end as something like:

“There’s a water cannon inside that they use on protesters.”

This opens the conversation right up—me posing questions in pidgin English, he entering things into the translator and occasionally glancing at the road.

It turns out he has a brother in San Diego. He’d been there for twelve years and reports that America is a real shit hole. Everything all about money and toil, everyone stressed out all the time, no one doing any actual living. Way too many guns. The political situation crazy.

Having recently moved back to the US after nearly a decade abroad, his brother’s abysmal assessment corresponds with my experience.

Also concordant is the unanimous assertion among the taksi drivers of Istanbul that the city’s cost of living has shot way too high, and fast. When we were last in Istanbul for few months in 2023, the price of kebab—as good a measurement as any (and we’re talking baseline kebabs here, adana or urfa; you have to shell out more for kuzu)—was roughly 150-250 lira. Now it’s between 300-450.

That’s a huge jump, even if you’re bringing in the stronger dollar, so it is especially bad for those earning Turkish currency, which is plummeting in value. Today the Turkish lira trades against the dollar at about 42/1. In 2023, it was 18/1. When I first came in 2018, it was just 6/1.

So things are not good with the Turkish economy, but on a macro scale, this all speaks to a global phenomenon far beyond the banks of the Bosphorus.

Everywhere I go, people talk of the cost of living crisis. The housing crisis. The migration crisis. The environmental crisis. The political crisis. In Mexico City, Hanoi, Istanbul, Athens, Berlin, Tunis, Vancouver, Bangkok, Cairo, Barcelona, and across the USA, of course.

And everywhere I go, people blame some specific, localized figurehead or group. In the US, for example, it was the constant refrain from some corners that life had become too expensive because of Biden. But what about the concurrent inflation crises in Turkey and Vietnam, in Italy and South Korea, in just about every other country in the world? Was that all Biden’s fault too?

This crosses into many realms. There is migration crisis in Turkey, Germany, Iran, Mexico, and beyond, and the discussion of it in each can be just as vitriolic as the anti-immigrant rhetoric you hear in the US. As can outrage about housing issues, and so on and so forth.

The point is, from what I’ve seen, people seem to be grappling with the same problems all over the world, and the response is almost uniformly to blame one’s own government or some specific president, party, or prime minister. It’s Biden or Trump, Tories or the Labour Party, Macron or Scholz, Morena or the PRI—always someone—even though the issue persists after said person or party rotates out of power.

We’re not seeing the forest for the trees. The refugee crisis, economic inequality, artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, environmental catastrophe, pandemic—these challenges are inherently transnational, transcending any singular person, party, or state. We have witnessed firsthand that viruses don’t respect borders. Climate change doesn’t care which passport you carry. The most pressing matters of our moment have global impact and are loomed of countless global threads—unraveling them will require similarly global solutions.

This very concept—often referred to as “globalism”—makes people across the political spectrum nervous, and not without valid reason. The globalism we’ve experienced so far has not been great. It’s destroyed the planet to enrich a small minority of people, all while leaving most of us behind, from the Congolese lithium miner getting cancer so that we can all have phones, to the on-paper middle-class American family who is just a few hundred dollars from financial catastrophe at any given moment.

It makes sense to be skeptical of and even outraged by globalism. In its present conception, it has only fucked us over. But the reality is, it’s going to take a globalized effort to confront the biggest issues of the day. You can’t stop a refugee crisis without addressing the many international factors that create the situation in the first place. Same with poverty and nukes, AI and climate change. These are impossible to solve without global collaboration.

But we need to rethink and restructure globalism. I don’t know exactly what that looks like, but if an individual or a nation is expected to participate in a global community, that community must deliver care and consideration back to that individual and that nation. It must be a moral rather than exploitative exchange. Without that reciprocity, the endeavor is doomed to begin with.

So we need to begin discussing—how do we envision and implement a form of globalism that genuinely brings us together rather than merely extracting our economic value?

As I write this, the Trump Administration is doing its damnedest to drum up war with Venezuela. While the country is probably better off without Maduro, one thing that the war hawks never seem to consider as they gnash their fangs and drool over regime change is the fallout. We have seen again and again how this turns out, but somehow are still surprised every time destabilizing a country results in a fresh torrent of refugees.

Where do Americans think refugees come from? Do they not realize that when you destroy a place, when you push it to total chaos, the people there will be forced to seek refuge elsewhere?

Clearly this is not part of the equation they consider.

The other day, walking through one of Istanbul’s most charming markets comprised largely of refugees from the Syrian war:

“Even with the war over, I will stay here,” a shopkeeper shrugs. He is about my age, forty, hair and beard going silver in similar spots, wearing the exact same Columbia parka that I do in Seattle. His stall sells ornate boxes handmade in Damascus. “I have been here for fourteen years. It is home now.”

Down the street at a booth where they sell Aleppo soap and incense, however, the proprietor—fresh-faced in his early 20s, originally from the port city of Latakia and studying logistics at the local university—says that it was good to visit recently and that he will go back when he can.

“My country touches the ocean,” he says. “We need people who know the logistics of shipping.”

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Later, a news alert pops up: three Americans—two soldiers and an interpreter—have been killed in an ambush in Syria. The TV-host in charge of the Pentagon gnashes his teeth and howls for blood, and a different TV-host in charge of the White House expresses similar bloodlust, promising retribution.

I can’t help but wonder if this administration—which has already made clear its willingness to leverage any opportunity to justify the expansion of violence—is about to drag us into yet another Middle Eastern war? In addition to its Latin American war, of course.

And also, where do those advocating for it (typically the same who abhor the arrival of immigrants) expect those in the paths of our wars—whether in Venezuela, Syria, or whatever comes next—to go but elsewhere? And that the US is one of the biggest elsewheres in the world?

If we are serious about addressing issues like the migration and refugee crises, we must be willing to admit to our own role in creating them.

Then, just as I am posting this, a news alert: US carries out ‘massive’ strike in Syria. American fighter jets, helicopters, and artillery unleashed yet again. The article cites a Pete Tweet in which he declares, “This is not the beginning of a war—it is a declaration of vengeance.”

And so the cycle of violence, war, and displacement continues—a venomous snake eating its own tail.

On Saturday, the government shutdown will cause food stamps to stop, casting some 40 million people into greater food insecurity than they already were. The results should be obvious—hunger and starvation, a rise in crimes of desperation, kids doing worse at school, the further decay of society, and so on—but instead of everyone agreeing that these objective realities are worth avoiding, there has been a fierce outcry among the anti-SNAP, I guess pro-starvation camp.

Oftentimes their talking points are outright racist. Just as often, they pretend to be under the impression that all those 40 million food stamp recipients are lazy do-nothings, ignoring the now widely shared fact that 39% of recipients are kids, 20% elderly, and 10% disabled, while of the remaining 30%, half of those are working but underpaid—our tax dollars are therefore subsidizing those low paychecks so executives at Walmart and McDonalds can stuff their own pockets full of cash. That leaves just over 7 million jobless, able-bodied, adult SNAP recipients—2% of the US population—which is about half of the unemployment rate. In other words, there are actually fewer people on SNAP than there maybe should be.

But at the moment, I’m focusing on the other common argument wielded by anti-food stamp warriors, those valiant soldiers of hunger and strife: “Why should I pay for someone else to eat?”

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Setting aside basic human compassion—I for one don’t think anyone should starve and that all people deserve aid in times of need, but hey, whatdo I know, I’m just a godless atheist—it’s here that one of the great flaws in the American psyche is revealed: a dangerous lack of imagination.

Even from a vantage of pure self-interest, they simply cannot imagine a situation where they end up the one in need. They cannot imagine losing their job and slipping into poverty. They cannot imagine being a parent unable to put food on the table, cannot imagine being a child sitting in a classroom with a hungry belly. Cannot imagine getting sick. Cannot imagine growing old.

And they cannot imagine how they might benefit from feeding those in need. They cannot imagine how rising hunger fuels crime. They cannot imagine packs of hungry kids flunked out of school and roaming the streets. Cannot imagine how a starving country is a place teetering on the brink.

This lack of imagination inflicts itself upon other realms. It is, for some, simply unimaginable that a person could come from anything but a white, straight, relatively middle-class or even wealthy home. It is unimaginable that one could become a refugee forced from their home by circumstances beyond their control. Unimaginable that we could live in a world structured around anything other than capital and consumption. Unimaginable that the little things we do every day could heat the planet enough to destroy civilization as we know it.

This impoverishment of imagination comes at a time when the very antidote to it—the humanities (humanity is literally in the name)—are under attack. Nothing places you in the shoes and mind of the supposed “other” quite like a novel, or a poem, or a thoughtfully made film, or any other work of art that provides a window into a perspective not one’s own.

What the anti-EBT, every-man-for-himself crusaders forget is that mutual aid is quite literally what made humankind what it is. We are a social animal, and we survived the savannah and the ice age not despite our instincts to work collectively, but because of them. It took empathy, and it took collaboration, and it took imagination.

We need to be able to imagine what it’s like to be in another person’s shoes. We need to be able to imagine how we’re going to get out of this mess. We need to imagine a future we actually want to live in, then realize that it is through imagination that we carve our path there.

To end with what I assure myself is veeeery clever, you can’t spell “imagination” without “nation.” We need to be a country—a world—of dreamers.

Today along with the yet untallied millions across the United States, I participated in a No Kings march, which have been vilified by House Speaker Mike Johnson and other republicans as “hate America” rallies. It is worth taking a moment to mention that this exact term has been used to denigrate protest in the past.

As noted in Matthew F. Delmont’s excellent upcoming book on Coretta Scott King and the intersection between the Vietnam War and civil rights protest efforts, Until the Last Gun Is Silent, after Martin Luther King Jr. led his first peace march in 1967, longtime Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins announced he would no longer publish the reverend’s writings, “accusing him of fueling a ‘Hate America’ movement.”

Cousins later became known for his dedication to platforming messages of global peace, so perhaps we can extend him some grace and assume his position evolved, but in any case, such antagonism to Martin Luther King has not aged well.

And neither will Johnson’s cartoonishly toolish stance.

I saw a lot of things at the latest No Kings. A Darth Vader impersonator crooning Epstein accusations. A plethora of placarded political punnage. A guy dressed as a koala. A massive rabble of the angry, weird, and hopeful.

If anything, it reminded me that maybe there are still things to love about America yet.

As we plunge ever further into dystopia, so relentless is the barrage of disconcerting news that I suspect one tidbit few noticed was the recent addition of Paragon spyware to ICE’s fascist toolbox.

Paragon is a surveillance state’s dream come true. It allows the powers that be to hack virtually any device, regardless of encryption. Essentially this means that all texts, emails, and other communications are wide open to government monitoring.

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ICE and the Administration would undoubtedly argue that it will be used to locate and deport criminal “illegals,” but as anyone who is paying attention knows, it can and will be used far beyond that already dubious purpose. For example, it is an excellent resource for any government looking to quash protest and political opposition, both of which Trump has made clear are among his foremost priorities.

And we don’t need to imagine such an occurrence—it’s already happening in Egypt and around the world.

In 2023, I spent a few paranoid weeks in Cairo reporting on the repression of political artists, in the process of which I learned that the Egyptian government—helmed by fiercely repressive President El-Sisi, who is in fact a dictator—has been using a combination of Paragon, Predator, and Pegasus programs (all developed by Israeli firms, incidentally) to spy on the citizenry, with a particular emphasis on political opponents, journalists, artists, and the like.

And this is not passive surveillance. Egypt is among the world’s top jailers of dissidents, with tens of thousands languishing in its prisons for crimes like writing song lyrics that offend El-Sisi or opposing him electorally.

So that’s what we have to look forward to. Trump has made it clear that he wants to imprison mayors, governors, protesters, comedians—anyone who does or says something that offends his monstrous insecurity and/or fascist political project. We are already seeing him attempt to ramp up such efforts, and it’s ongoing going to get worse.

But in the face of that—and surprisingly, I must admit, for I have long been a staunch police skeptic and critic—we are seeing local police take increasingly hostile stances toward ICE and federal imposition. A small town sheriff’s office posting warnings about ICE activities. The Portland police chief pushing back against the administration’s nonsense warzone narrative. The Seattle police chief saying SPD will not support ICE or National Guard operations, and asking the city council to ban law enforcement from wearing face masks. And even a general from the Oregon National Guard saying he would deploy his troops to protect ICE protesters.

That’s amazing stuff, and a true opportunity for solidarity between communities and local law enforcement—a long-strained relationship.

It brings to mind when I was in Spain in 2017 reporting on an eruption of Catalan separatist protests, which drew million person crowds to march through the streets of Barcelona. The reasons underlying this struggle are complex and date back hundreds of years, but for a large part involve a desire to once and for all cast off the fascist influences that reigned for 35 years after the Spanish Civil War.

The early days of the protest were marred by violence at the hands of a federal police force called la guardia civil—old ladies getting whacked by batons, and so forth—and by the time I arrived, the vibe in the streets was tense. Everybody expected the feds to show up and start cracking heads at any minute.

Two arrivals changed the atmosphere dramatically.

First came several vans of what to me looked like any other police force, but a friend I’d made at some point (hotels booked solid, I spent three days and nights in the protest encampments) grinned and shook his head at my concern.

“No, those are the Mossos d’Esquadra,” he said. “Something like Catalan state police. They’re on our side.”

I didn’t see much action on the part of the Mossos, but everyone seemed comforted by their presence.

The bomberos—firefighters—however, were the true heroes of the day. Earlier in the protests they had already displayed their willingness to disrupt federal police violence, and now a literal million people rallied around them—all cheers and hugs and besos—before the firefighters led marchers to the parliamentary building and formed a protective line between protesters and police.

From there the protest turned into something of a festival, and everyone partied late into the night—uniformed firefighters too.

It was a powerful moment of community. Seeing the bomberos young and old put themselves between the protesters and the violence of the police, and the collective rejoicing afterward…it brings a tear to my eye thinking about it. I’ve never felt such solidarity in my own society.

But perhaps we’ll have our opportunity.

When the federales come for us, will the police be there for our—for their—community?

It seems like we shall see.

If there is an upside to crisis, it is that it is just as likely to bring us together as it is to tear us apart.

Yesterday, Gallup released the unsurprising news that less than one in three Americans holds a favorable view of the media—an all-time low. I’m not going to parse the causes driving this diminishing trust, as we all have our own reasons depending on our respective politics, education, and cultural echo chambers. Instead, let’s look at a specific example where it’s very clear that a media outlet has failed.

It’s a story we’re all aware of by now: Don and Pete play Patton. When the New York Times wrote up Hegseth and the Nectarine Nazi’s big day at Quantico—during which it was suggested that the military retrain to fight “the enemy from within” (arguably the most alarming statement made by a US president in living memory, maybe ever)—the Old Gray Lady started out fine, aptly imparting the menacing absurdity of the whole charade, but fumbled at the end of the piece with a bad cut to one of Trump’s many blustering quotes:

Even though Tuesday’s speech was not so different from all the others, he still seemed intent on winning over his audience with it.

“I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” he said as he began. He acknowledged that members of the military were not meant to act like partisans, but told the crowd not to be concerned with such customs. “Just have a good time,” he instructed. “And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want.”

He told the brass, “You just feel nice and loose, OK?”

Here’s the thing: there’s a line missing between the “anything you want” and “nice and loose” bits, and its extraction dramatically alters the tone and meaning of what Trump (who looked like and spoke with the vigor of a lump of melting wax) was actually saying. Here’s the quote in full:

“Just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want. And if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future, but you just feel nice and loose, OK?”

See the difference? In the Times, he’s telling the generals to have a good time, do anything they want, to feel nice and loose—trying to win them over. Here in reality, however, he included a dire caveat: If you don’t like it, I’ll ruin you. He’s warning them, not “winning” them. I suspect those in his orbit would argue that he was joking, but I don’t think there are many people out there who laugh when Trump threatens retribution anymore.

At some point along the Times’ writing and editing process, someone decided to remove the teeth from Trump’s statement. Perhaps he still came off as the buffoon he is, but this depiction dulled the blade Trump is holding at our throat. And it’s precisely this sort of beige journalism that got us here in the first place.

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So the media sucks, and most everybody knows it. When it’s not actively causing harm, it is passively watching it happen.

The view from inside the Hindenburg is even worse, because those of us working on this hot-airship have few choices but to go down with it.

In the past decade, it has become increasingly difficult to make a living as a journalist, especially over the past two years, and most especially if you aim to produce work of any real value. There are many reasons for this, but I think three stand out.

The first is technological. The internet and rise of freelancers as a primary labor source began the erosion even before artificial intelligence was on the scene, but now AI is changing the media landscape fast. The robots are taking our jobs, so to speak. It’s more complicated than that, but not by much.

The second is economic. Fire all the statisticians you want—the economy is contracting, there are more people competing for fewer jobs, and consumer optimism is down. This puts the squeeze on publications in a variety of ways I won’t bore you with here, but suffice it to say that newsrooms are experiencing massive layoffs and editors are being more selective about freelance pitches due to dwindling budgets.

And the third blow to the realm of journalism has come from the tightening throttle of censorship. It’s not always as direct as the government limiting speech, or coverage directives from billionaire media moguls—though these things do happen, a lot—but often a matter of self-censoring.

Editors know, consciously or not, which way the wind is blowing, and they secure stories and edit them accordingly. We are, after all, living in the era of ”there goes your rank, there goes your future.” And journalists fear for their own professional, social, legal, and even physical safety. In 2025, firings, threats, harassment, intimidation, arrest, and violence are all possible outcomes for reporting the “wrong” story, so sometimes it seems smarter just to avoid it altogether. (I’ll be sharing my own experience to this end soon.)

So…I’m ramping up things here at my newsletter. I feel the industry pressure too, as it’s harder every day to place stories that would have found publication easily two years ago. Sometimes they’re shot down for budgetary reasons, and sometimes due to the toxic political atmosphere. Whatever the case, it’s time to carve out my own corner of the internet, if only upon the techno-fiefdom of Substack.

And to that end, your subscription—whether paid or not—is greatly appreciated. That small act of support helps to maintain the sort of independent journalism that will prove vital in the coming years.

A few topics you can expect from me in the near future:

• Why I’m afraid of government retribution if I cover the immigration and deportation situation.

• What John Steinbeck’s time in post-WW2 Russia has to tell us about our current moment.

• How America has become a nation of lonely, creepy weirdoes—and hopefully some solutions.

• The rise of xenophobia everywhere, from Trump’s deportations to anti-foreigner movements around the world.

• Interviews with a slew of artists, scientists, activists, and everyday people doing important work to confront the world’s most pressing issues.

More on all of that soon, and good luck to us all. It’s getting wild out there.

It is December 2022 at True Digital Park West, a futuristic looking building in one of the hipper sections of Bangkok’s Sukhumvit region. The place is abuzz with conference goers wearing lanyards that bear their names and credentials who chat over coffee before filtering into a lecture hall. Media Lab – the prestigious interdisciplinary tech research and development program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – is holding its first Southeast Asian forum, entitled “Beyond the Elephant in the Room.”

The opening speaker – a Thai man of 27 wearing a black overcoat adorned with a triple row of what he calls “stegosaurus spikes” protruding from the back – takes the stage. This is Pat Pataranutaporn.

He introduces himself by discussing his then-latest projects: a bio-digital system for recycling waste that was being tested for use in space on the International Space Station, digital AI “clones” of himself and a Media Lab professor, and so on. From there, he listed some of the looming technological challenges of our time, asserting, “These are big issues that are facing today’s society. We cannot ignore this elephant in the room anymore.”

This indeed was the purpose of the conference: to discuss the already emerging technologies that have the potential to transform our society. Over the next three days, attendees would learn about cutting edge research into nanorobotics, “smart” tech for urban planning, digital beings, and how AI could be used to improve education, amplify human intelligence, and preserve connections to the dead.

But before all that, Pataranutaporn concluded his introduction with the choked-up admission that to bring the MIT Media Lab to Thailand was a dream come true – one of several of his greatest life goals, like launching an experiment into space, that he’d managed to achieve.

It was proof, he said, that, “No matter where you come from or how big your dream is, everything is possible.”

Unbeknownst to those of us who were at the conference, Pataranutaporn was then amidst the realization of yet another of his greatest ambitions: to produce a work of science fiction.

Pataranutaporn came of age in during one of the more tumultuous periods in Thailand’s recent history.

“I grew up in the Thaksin era,” he told me, referring to the telecommunications magnate Thaksin Shinawatra, who became Thailand’s first democratically elected Prime Minister in 2001. “He recommended that people read a book on nanotechnology, and I was like wow – the country is going in the right direction.”

Thaksin presided over a period of rapid social and infrastructure development, reducing poverty, improving roads and public transit, implementing a universal healthcare system, and slashing the country’s debt. In 2005 he was reelected by a landslide, before being overthrown in a military coup the following year, his opponents accusing him of corruption. Since then the country has endured a series of contested elections and then another coup in 2014.

It was in this social climate that Pataranutaporn found a burgeoning passion for technology and science fiction. One of his earliest influences was the Japanese cartoon Doraemon, about a boy who is aided by a robotic cat from the future. Today he credits the show for instilling him with a positive view of technology and artificial intelligence.

“I did not grow up with the Terminator,” he explained. “Doraemon helped the boy who was a loser become a better version of himself. Technology could help humans flourish.”

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Later he would come upon a TED Talk by Media Lab Professor Pattie Maes on Human-Computer Interaction, discovering the field where he saw that the line between science and science fiction blurred. He committed himself to attending Media Lab, where he completed his PhD dissertation on Cyborg Psychology in August 2024. One year later, he was named Assistant Professor—his position as of this writing—and co-chair of Media Lab’s Advancing Humans with AI Program.

Somewhere along the way, photos of him began popping up in various science publications, typically wearing the distinctive dinosaur jacket he debuted at the 2022 Bangkok event.

“That conference was very special,” he said, “because I came from Thailand to MIT Media Lab, and this was the first time that I could bring Media Lab to Thailand. I wanted a way to honor that special event, so I decided to dress as a dinosaur. I always want to dress as a dinosaur.”

Said dinosaur jacket was designed by Thai artist Kawita Vatanajyankur, with whom Pataranutaporn has collaborated on a number of AI-infused artworks, including “The Machine Ghost in the Human Shell”, which recently premiered at the 11^th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Queensland, Australia.

A month after that, Netflix released the miniseries Tomorrow and I.

An exploration of identity in a world with evolving gene editing possibilities. A fictional city (that bears a striking resemblance to Bangkok) has its society up-ended by the replacement of sex workers by sexbots. A technologist-turned-monk seeks Buddhism’s place amidst an increasingly digital culture. Coming of age in the thick of climate change in a steadily flooding Bangkok – a fate that has been projected for large portions of the city by 2050.

These are the central narratives driving the four episodes of Tomorrow and I, which Pataranutaporn and his co-creators wrote and produced in conjunction with Netflix. Beyond their core concepts, each installment delves into a galaxy of speculative questions spanning 3D printed organs, lunar colonization, app addiction, trans acceptance, the commercialization of religion, economic inequality, climate change, child prostitution, and numerous other technological innovations and social ills.

“We thought a lot about different issues,” Pataranutaporn explained. “We had a lot of debates. It was almost like writing a scientific research article. You need to understand the issue from different angles and also think about, what is the outcome? You need to show the complexity of things that are influencing the future.”

While the series’ anthology format and preoccupation with just-around-the-corner tech makes it an clear cousin to Black Mirror, Pataranutaporn said there is a key difference between the two shows. While Black Mirror tends to emphasize the problems with technology in relation to individual failings, “I think Tomorrow and I is more focused on the systemic issues that affect everyone.”

He suggested another difference: “Black Mirror is always dark and ends badly, but I think the future is more complicated than that. It’s not utopia or dystopia, it’s everything in between: paradistopias – paradise and dystopia. The question is, how do we navigate this complex entanglement of science, technology, society, values, belief, and all that? Tomorrow and I is an invitation to reflect and think about this.”

According to Pataranutaporn, the sci-fi he grew up with tended to be more positive than it is today. One of his biggest influences, Jurassic Park, showed both “the wonder and the danger” of dinosaurs. “But later on things became more pessimistic around technology, with inequality and big tech companies having too much power.”

So he wanted to create a series that would balance the “challenge and the possibility.”

“At MIT, we always say we need to go against the reductionism perspective of the world because that will lead to more problems rather than helping us solve them,” he explained. “So I wanted the stories to reflect that.”

The series opener, “Black Sheep”, is an example of this ethos. Without getting into spoilers (for there are some Twilight Zone-worthy twists and turns to the series), it ponders moral issues around cloning and explores the difficulties and possibilities faced by transgender people in the near future.

“For me, the episode is not just about LGBTQ or gender identity,” said Pataranutaporn. “Being a scientist who struggled with being different, I definitely identified as a black sheep growing up.”

When the show aired, Pataranutaporn received messages from viewers asking if he really thought negativity toward LGBTQ people would still exist in a more advanced future. But shortly after that, he saw that Donald Trump had claimed that he was going to remove the word “transgender” from the American dictionary.

“Sometimes we take a step forward in things like technology, but we take many steps backwards and regress in other aspects,” Pataranutaporn mused. “The future is not homogenous. We don’t all progress in the same ways.”

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Another episode, “Buddha Data”, arose from a similar tension. In it, a new app akin to Pokemon GO gives users merit points as they go about and perform good deeds, theoretically driving engagement with Buddhism and a sense of philanthropy. Gamifying religion, however, proves to have unintended consequences, raising pointed questions about the commercialization of religion and our growing addiction to tech.

“I’m always interested in the intersection of technology and spirituality,” explained Pataranutaporn, “especially as someone who grew up wondering, why am I doing this? Why do we need to make merit? What is the real meaning of Buddhism? And what would happen if technology started to challenge that?”

“Technology is always associated with progress, but the technology that robs us of time and the ability to reflect is a regression for humanity,” he warned. “When you capitalize on religious belief and then you combine that with AI, you have the perfect formula for a massively manipulative technology.”

Arguably the most intriguing episode is “Paradistopia” due to how its production ended up intertwining fiction with reality. In it, an entrepreneurial woman launches a company where sex robots replace human sex workers, allowing the latter to profit off the sex industry while the ‘bots do the dirty work.

“Sex workers are a big issue in Thailand,” explained Pataranutaporn, with estimates placing the number of sex workers in the country anywhere between 200,000 and over one million. “When we did the show there was a lot of conversation about whether sex work should be legal or not, and we wanted to take that issue into the future.”

From the technological perspective their question became: would sex robots solve the problem or perpetuate it? In the episode the outcome is complex, but the matter became further complicated due to real-world intervention.

“They only censored that episode,” said Pataranutaporn, referring to Thailand’s film censorship board, which told the production that (again, without getting into spoilers) the original ending was “too sensitive” and needed to be changed so that the pro-sex worker protagonist was punished.

Scripts for shows or movies filmed in Thailand must be approved by this censorship board, which then supervises on set to ensure productions stick to it. White Lotus, for example, would have gone through the same process.

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In the case of the Tomorrow and I episode, not only was the ending changed, but it had to be set in a fictional city rather than Bangkok, which is infamous for its sex markets. But we don’t have prostitution in our country!, declares one character, with a knowing look to the audience.

“That was the exact reason they said we needed to change the ending,” said Pataranutaporn. “Because Thailand has no prostitution – exactly like that. They said if you’re going to do this, it needs to be in a fictional city.”

“So we went through the same process as Jessica in the story,” he pointed out. “We had an argument with a conservative ideology organization, and they said we need to change things and make compromises in order for the series to come out. Life imitates art and art imitates life.”

An interesting element to keep in mind while watching.

While Tomorrow and I represents a personal milestone for Pataranutaporn, he asserts that it’s about more than merely producing a work of science fiction.

“Growing up I often said, none of this science fiction has Thai characters in it,” he explained. “There was no UFO abduction that happened with the Thai prime minister. It’s always the US president. And often those who get to imagine the future are people in the US or in western countries. Recently there was a boom in Afro-Futurism where we saw a different type of imagination based on that cultural heritage. But in Southeast Asia we haven’t seen that. So I hope this show helps pave the way for more Southeast Asian imagination around the future.”

He notes that in the United States where the genre has long been part of the entertainment, science fiction has been mainstreamed.

“In Thailand this is the beginning, so we need to think of ways we can empower more filmmakers and storytellers to think about science fiction,” he said. “What I realize after making this first sci-fi is that one project is great, but in order for people to think about the future and be aware of the future, you need to continue that momentum. Now I have a bigger goal: to help other people and empower other people to be able to continue.”

This aspirational approach to the genre was inspired, he explained, be the renowned sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who said that science fiction offers the freedom to imagine the world differently.

“You don’t have to accept the world as it is,” Pataranutaporn asserted. “There are other possibilities that could exist out there.”

Sci-fi, he said, allows us to explore those possibilities.

“It’s a feedback loop,” he concluded. In the decades following the release of the movie Jurassic Park, for example, researchers began to seriously explore the idea of cloning extinct animals like the woolly mammoth, and many have chalked up recent discoveries relating to DNA to the movie’s inspiration. “You create the imagination of the future that you want to have, and then have that imagination realized in society. It’s a cycle we need to start.”

“We’re already bored with what hasn’t happened yet,” declares a stanza in poet Vincent Toro’s latest collection Hivestruck. Throughout the book, Toro grapples with a central imperative of the techno-politics of our age: that the digital tools and realms we frequent have changed us as individuals and a society in ways that are evolving so fast that we barely recognize the evolution. It’s only by looking back through the onslaught of incremental innovation, he suggests, that we begin to notice that the future we’re being sold is more advertising than advancement.

“No one uses those formats anymore, don’t you know,” his carnival barker narrator chastises at one point, pitching the next upgrade to we hapless rubes. “They’re mad outdated.”

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Born in New York of Puerto Rican descent, Toro’s previous work tended to focus on matters pertaining to the Latin American struggle, particularly in relation to immigration and the border. With Hivestruck he opens his lens somewhat, exploring the more universal implications of technology, if with a frequent Latinx bend.  

“Text without context” is destroying our ability to discern reality from mirage, he argues, diminishing our ability to react to the actual issues that exist beyond the technological smokescreen. “I can fix it all by posting on your wall” becomes the naïve creed of the day as problems and their solutions grow so remote that we interact with them solely via social media. And even digital protest is barred when the “boss tells me not to take a position on what I observe.”

As Toro explains in the following Q&A, the solution is to pull back the curtain on the technopoly’s grand dysillusion.

Where did the poems in Hivestruck come from?

That’s the big mystery, right? Where do poems come from? I think most of my poetry is born from tension and conflict. Something is burning in me because I am torn about something, or something has hurt me or someone else in the world, or I am perplexed by some affliction or problem. With the Hivestruck poems, the tension that birthed them came from that paradox of technology bringing magnificent things into the world while also inflicting a lot of damage to our psyches, our communities, and our environment. I wanted to understand my own complicated feelings about the tech boom (and my own complicity), why I felt simultaneously thrilled and troubled, fascinated and exhausted. When I am conflicted by something, my instinct is to learn more about the thing that is troubling me. I learn primarily by reading and researching, and also by making art.

The technopoly has us all living in the Wizard of Oz. We are dazzled by the technicolor magic of it all. Because we are dazzled, we forget to stop and ask how it all happens. It takes an astute little Toto to help us see that there is a man behind the curtains who is pulling levers and turning knobs to keep creating the illusion that keeps us mesmerized. I realized I didn’t really know much about how the technology we use actually works. I wanted to understand the thinking behind what has been created, who created it, and why these things were made this way and not another way. I spent about ten or so years reading books on computers, technology, and social media. While reading, I collected language, ideas, images, lyrical fragments, and questions. As a kinetic way of processing what I was learning, I took this raw material and started shaping it into the poems that eventually grew into a book.

The duality or tension between an appreciation for the modern digital life and a fear of it was definitely what stood out to me most.

I would say that the duality you speak of is the spine of the book, though I might use the word “apprehension” rather than “fear.” That tension, that duality, was the root of my motivation to write Hivestruck. The process of researching for and writing the book brought me to the understanding that the duality you speak of is not so much a matter of appreciating or fearing a digital life. The primary conflict seems to be (as it always seems to be) about humanity’s obsession with creating inequality. The technologies that make up the operating system of our digital world are all man made and man managed. And I am using the word “man” deliberately, as the tech industry is still very much overwhelmingly male, straight, and white. The hardware and software we use has been imbued with the history and value system of this very homogeneous, hierarchically fixated subculture or men. As a result, our digital world as we know it has become a more sophisticated social stratification machine. So what we end up with is progress tainted by greed and corruption and colonization of (virtual) territory. The outcome is magnificent breakthroughs in telecommunication and medicine suffused with the rise of surveillance culture, ecological crisis, and the largest economic disparity in recorded history. All this is to say that when I started this endeavor I thought I was grappling with a duality related to the technology itself, and ended up with the sense that the duality was a matter of the human condition. I came to see technology as a multivalent metaphor for what humans do to each other, and to ourselves. 

What is “Latinxfuturism”?

Latinxfuturism is an ever expanding constellation of art and literature that employs elements of both science and science fiction to explore Latinx and Latin American identity, culture, and history. Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is sometimes considered a godfather to this movement and aesthetic, but it can be traced back at least as far back as Mexican writer and inventor Juan Nepomuceno Adorno’s short story “A Distant Future,” written in 1862. As with other artistic movements, Latinxfuturism is essentially a mode of knowledge production and culture making. It draws from science and science fiction distinctly for the purpose of confronting issues particular to Latinx and Latin American people. At the center of that venn diagram of Latinx issues is colonialism. Latinxfuturist works tend to respond to, critique, examine, and attempt to dismantle our colonial situation and its adjacent problems of race, gender, migration, dictatorship, capitalism, and environmentalism. So, for example, space exploration takes on a different connotation in Latinxfuturist work, as it is instead perceived not as exploration but space imperialism, as in Agustín de Rojas’ space travel novel A Legend of the Future. It is an art that seeks to imagine alternate realities for Latinx people that might provide us with a path to transcend - and even eradicate - colonialism and fascism. Other Latinxfuturist books like Edmundo Paz Soldan’s Turing’s Delirium and Rita Indiana’s Tentacle help our gente to envision our own survival and possible liberation on our own terms.

Adjacent to this, another primary characteristic of Latinxfuturism is the theory of the hybrid as formulated by Latin American thinkers such as Silviano Santiago. Latinx and Latin American people are by definition hybrid beings, the product of both benevolently voluntary and violently imposed racial mixing. Our life in the Americas is a hypercomplex experiment born of the colonial project from which has sprung a rhizomatic array of communities, languages, histories, foods, inventions, governing systems, and cultural practices. We’re basically Brown Star Trek IRL. A quintessential work of Latinxfuturism is the film Sleep Dealer. Sleep Dealer synthesizes our urban with our rural lives, tackling the issue of borders and the exploitation of Brown labor by depicting a world where our gente from south of the U.S. border are made into “sleep dealers” that export their labor from a futuristic maquila to el Norte via cyberspace. They work in El Norte but their bodies remain in the south where there is also a crisis of mass dehydration because el Norte has stolen and fenced off all major sources of potable water. Citizens trying to reclaim the water are policed by other Brown folks from the U.S. who are assigned to protect the water from their kin in the south. Essentially you have Brown folks on both sides of the border laboring and fighting against each other all for the benefit a virtually invisible (white) entity that controls all of them. Eventually, though, the gente on both sides come to realize who the real enemy is and decide to help liberate each other by hacking the system that has held them captive. Sleep Dealer is puro Latinxfuturism.   

In “A Brief History of My Screens” you describe the many screens you’ve owned. While reading it I was struck by how each screen iteration always seems state of the art, but only a few years later looks at times almost laughably outdated. What do you think of this passage from cutting edge to obsolete? Is this what you later call “addiction to the upgrade”?

Absolutely! Addiction to the upgrade is necessary to maintain the technopoly. Drug dealers have to make you dependent on their product, right? A defining strategy of the entities that make and maintain our hardware and software is “planned obsolescence.” I was a little shocked to learn in my research that these big tech companies actually have future products lined up and ready for the next 10-15 years. So whatever the most current model of your phone is, for example, that company already has the next three or four upgrades all ready to sell to you. They also build the devices to have a laughably short shelf life. If they were to simply put out the most advanced technology they have and make those devices well, they wouldn’t be able to generate the kind of revenue they want to get from you over the next several years. They need you on the hamster wheel of purchasing upgrades so the investors are happy with their portfolios year in and year out. But this steady churning out of new products with upgrades is contributing massively to our current ecological crisis. But no one is willing to stop that practice and slow things down, because everyone is addicted, everyone wants their dopamine hit. The companies want their dopamine hit that comes from the profits being shot into their bloodstreams, and the consumers want the dopamine hit that their consumption will bring them. This is why I open the book with the poem “Such Acceleration Produces Fusion…” I am hoping people will slow down to observe how our addiction to what is next and what is new is impacting both our present and our future.   

At some point you write “Nothing is an exact science. Everything is an art.” Can you elaborate on this?

Oh… this could get very “meta” right now if I am not careful. Okay, lines like this one are born out of my fascination not only with ambiguity in language, but also with how language can get tangled up in its own tricksterism to create strange loops such as the one Douglas Hofstadter presents in his mind boggling text Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid:

               The following sentence is true.
               The preceding sentence is false.

Hofstadter uses this to illustrate the Epimenides Paradox and the effects of self-referential language in our consciousness and our coding. For me, it functions as a kind of zen koan. Koans are constructed to dismantle conventional logic in ways that allow us to think in more expansive  and surprising ways. The thing is, trying to explain a koan to someone else dilutes the power of the koan, because their point is for the reader to meditate on it and come to their own meaning. Lo siento if it seems I am being elusive in my response. There is so much of my work I am all too eager to speak at length about, but with this one I just don’t want to rob any readers of the satisfaction of digesting the line in a way that allows them to build their own unique and personal bit of knowledge. The line was constructed to be read in countless ways that are dependent on the reader’s own experience and world view, their own sense of what the words “nothing” and “everything” and “science” and “art” might mean to them. But I would love to hear what it means to you (and other readers).

Social media is a major theme throughout the book. What are your thoughts on the benefits and drawbacks of social media?

I mean, high speed communication is clearly quite useful to us. Elderly folks can see and talk to their families across great distances without having to travel, which can be more difficult to do as we age. Not to mention the bureaucratic red tape of our political borders also makes such travel even more difficult. Telecommuting to work means less carbon emissions from driving. Social movements are aided by the technology for purposes of organizing and relaying information to large groups of people quickly, as we have seen with the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matters, and #Metoo, for example. Social media platforms have brought people together from across long distances, which has allowed marginalized groups to build solidarity around each other's causes. Doctors and sciences can share discoveries and information almost instantly, allowing us to respond to environmental and health crises much faster, thus saving more lives. These are just a few of the ways I see these applications aiding human experience.

The problems with social media are maybe not as easy to see, which is why we give ourselves over to these platforms so fervently. As I see it, the problems with social media are rooted not in the tools themselves but in the people we have agreed to bestow with responsibility of building and managing these platforms. Those who currently control these systems have turned social media and the internet into a massive engine of surveillance to police populations of people. As we are slowly coming to realize, the algorithms that steer social media are not neutral, self-driving, unbiased entities. They are programmed by a very specific group of humans who have a very specific worldview. As such, they program the algorithms to proliferate content that suits their own agendas while silencing the voices of those who think and live counter to their agendas. Social media is in essence a censorship engine, but because most people don’t think about how the algorithms are designed and who is designing them and to what end, they don’t fully understand that some information is being withheld from them and other information is forcefully being flooded into their feeds, and that this is entirely deliberate, that it is other humans making these decisions for them. One major decision that was made for us by tech industry elitists is that these platforms will be geared toward advertising to us rather than to the free and fair exchange of information and ideas. These elitists have very much decided that misinformation is good for their own purposes, that they have the right to suppress online voices of dissent. And they don’t even have to be openly opposed to equity, their algorithms will perform the work of creating inequities for them, so they don’t have to be held accountable when crisis and backlash occurs. These are very real problems with tangible consequences (as we have seen with the 2016 election, for example). Documentaries like The Social Dilemma have helped more people become aware of this problem, but for the most part, far too many people still use these platforms without understanding how much personal information they are surrendering, and to what extent their views and decisions are being steered by a system that privileges the steward’s of this technology to the detriment of absolutely everyone else.  

What do you think about AI?

Well, let’s start with the fact that it cannot think. What is being marketed to us as Artificial Intelligence is very much not intelligent at all. Noam Chomsky nailed it when he called “AI” just a massive plagiarism engine. This again goes back to my concern about which humans have been bestowed with the power to control the tech industry. They have chosen to use their power to redux the colonial project, to claim territory and shape the world in their image, to plunder all of the information we share, all of our intellectual property, to create systems that absorb our books, our films, our texts, our paintings and lay claim to it under the banner of their brands. This is why the stakes felt so high during the writers and actors strikes from last year. The unions were actually working to defend their constituents (and to some extent, all of us) from having their lives’ work stolen by these companies. I have colleagues who found out, entirely by accident, that their books were being scanned and uploaded to these plagiarism engines without their permission. The alleged “AI” systems are built entirely upon pillaged materials, as was the case with the first colonization and subsequent colonizations.

At the level of being a tool, some of these systems might prove to be helpful for research and experimentation in select fields. But for the most part, right now what we are seeing is a massive marketing campaign to sell snake oil, because these systems cannot think. The bait and switch is that we’ll agree to surrender our information and intellectual and creative property so that this new “intelligence” will make our lives easier, but the product they are advertising is not the product we end up buying. Truthfully, even if the product did come as advertised I would still have concerns, because of its cultural impact. In my work, in the field of education, we are dealing with massive fallout from all of this, as “AI” is being marketed to them as the solution to their academic worries. So the “AI” industry makes money off of the students who are already paying an exorbitant sum for their education, only for them to find that these machines can’t really provide a solution to their problems. From the other end, the “AI” marketing campaign has worked to incite panic in the hearts of educators so they can sell us tools, books, applications, lectures, and workshops on how to manage “AI” in their classrooms. Essentially the predatory nature of the current “AI” industry is playing out in real time in my field. Students, educators, and institutions are being exploited as we are converted into new revenue streams for big tech. Their coffers are fed. The damage to our education system is rendered collateral damage in the tech industry’s agenda.

I want to be clear about what I am saying, because I don’t deal in binaries. I am not against “AI” (even though the “I” is a misnomer). It’s clear there are also some exciting things being done in the field, and these technologies have great potential to help build a better world. But the potential for breakthroughs should not seduce us into giving these companies absolute power over our lives. Tech industry elites should not continue to be given carte blanche to exploit us. Their past and current actions make it clear that new and different leadership is needed, leadership that is more diverse in its representation, leadership that is more compassionate, leadership that does not have profit driven, colonial tunnel vision, leadership that has had an education in the humanities.      

Do you worry about the future, or are you more optimistic? At one point you quote Kurzweil, who is about as unabashedly optimistic about the future as they come.

It is a very human thing to worry about the future, so of course I worry. But I have a good deal of optimism about it all, too. It’s not a binary and it is not an either/or proposition. I possess both optimism and worry in me to varying degrees and at different times. It’s true, I do quote Kurzweil in Hivestruck, but the poem where I do so was intended to be quite satirical. As I see it, Kurzweil’s unabashed optimism is steeped in his position of privilege as a straight white male. His SWM optimism appears to be quite myopic about how technology exacerbates economic disparities and helps to further marginalize communities of color that are kept without access to certain technologies. It seems to overlook how technology breakthroughs are readily used to further exploit laborers in the Global South, how “computing purposely heightens power differences,” as Mar Hicks writes in “Sexism is a Feature, Not a Bug,” how search engines and surveillance technology have been coded with racist biases (as Safiya Umoja Noble articulates in her research), how mass production of tech products have contributed to our current ecological crisis. It takes a whole lot of privilege to not have to see these other outcomes of the technopoly while instead focusing on how we can upload our dads to the cloud.

That said, my optimism outweighs my worry, because my optimism is not rooted in hardware and software. My optimism is rooted in my love for humanity. Within my own lifetime, I have seen so much human progress that has been guided by the intention of our being better to each other. I am a student of history, and human history is replete with evidence of progress sprung from mass movements and individuals committed to social justice. My optimism is not one built on Kurzweilian fantasy, but on what humans have already shown we can do to heal and to liberate ourselves and each other. So, yes I have copious worries about the technopoly, pero like I have much more optimism about our ability to imagine and construct a better world, one where technology is used to improve the lives of all humans rather than to replicate and further entrench age old hierarchies and inequalities. 

With Thucydides' minutely detailed account of the Peloponnesian War -- the war fought between 430-405 BC, the book written throughout, resulting in a dauntingly dense tome that in modern pages approaches a monstrous 700 -- he essentially created the field of history as we know it. It's been some 2,400 years since this consequential conflict pitted Athens against Sparta, and though ages have passed in the interim, Ferdia Lennon's debut novel Glorious Exploits reminds us that humanity is not so different today from what it was then as it explores our persistent inclination toward violence, art, and compassion.

Set just after the war in a Sicily overabundant with Athenian prisoners the vengeful Syracusans have elected to more or less starve to death, this tale of mirthful tragedy follows the local pauperous poetry aficionados Lampo and Gelon as they attempt to stage the great plays of Euripides with the Athenian slaves for a cast. You can hate a people, they reason, but why hate their art? And when else would they have the opportunity to see Athenian plays performed by actual Athenians? As the collaboration forges an appreciation for their once-enemies, a struggle ensues between the empathy inspired by art and the hatred galvanized through conflict.

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In a novel twist, Lennon brings an immediacy to this time-distant tale by putting contemporary language into the dialogue between his ancient characters. Lampo comes off like any broke, boozy stumblebum literati you might meet in a Dublin bar today, rambling about Joyce and Orwell between asking if you can spot another pint, only he and Gelon muse over the couplets of Euripides and Homer. This linguistic trick bridges the gap between then and now, revealing something enduringly congruous about the human experience over time.

Ever enthusiastic to geek out on some antique Greek historio-cultural critique, I chatted with Lennon about the great ancient texts, the state of Irish literature today, and art's role in creating empathy during times of war.

I’m one of the few people in the world who has read Thucydides in its entirety, and I’m guessing that was a pretty key part of your research. Reading such a dense, lengthy, old tome begs the question: what’s the point of remembering history?

Delighted to hear you’ve read it all. Thucydides’ history is one of my favourite books and was really the starting point for the project. As to what is the point of remembering history, I think Thucydides answers that better than me when he writes, “It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future.” Anyone who reads enough history notices that certain patterns appear again and again. We are obviously technologically worlds apart from 5^th century BC Athens and Syracuse, but the human mind hasn’t really changed at all.

Why did you decide to set your novel against the backdrop of the Peloponnesian War?

One of the many things I loved about Thucydides’ history is that, although it’s an incredibly detailed chronicle of warring states, in another sense, it reads like a Greek tragedy where Athens is the hero, brought down by its own fatal flaw of imperialistic ambition, and the Sicilian Expedition is at the heart of that tragedy. I wanted to write about this but hadn’t found my point of entry; then I stumbled across the passage in Plutarch’s Lives, where he describes how defeated Athenians in Sicily survived because the Sicilians were so enamoured with Athenian poetry that they would give them rations, and in some instances freedom, in exchange for recitations of his work. Suddenly, this epic historical war narrative became very intimate, strange, and relatable, and I knew what my book would be.

Where did you get the idea to put modern Irish English in the mouths of ancient characters?

I was reading modern translations of Aristophanes’ comedies and having a grand old time when it struck me that these were really the only contemporary works written about ordinary Athenians rather than the mythic heroes of the tragedies or the elites of Athenian society. Just as the subject matter was completely different, so too was the way people spoke. These plays are bawdy, sweary, wildly funny, and urgent. It seemed odd that most fiction set in classical Greece followed the convention of having characters sound like they had stepped out of a British period drama like Brideshead Revisited. After reading them, I knew my language needed to be contemporary. Hiberno-English made sense because the Greek Sicily of my novel, like Ireland, was an island which had been colonised, and I wanted to convey this in a way that was fun and different yet held its own logic.

Your novel has a lot to say about the role of the artist in times of war. So to put it bluntly, what is the role of the artist in times of war?

I think the answer to that question depends a great deal on the artist and the war, their own personal beliefs, artistic sensibilities, and the war in question. When I think of Irish examples, James Joyce wrote most of Ulysses during World War I. During World War II, Samuel Beckett wrote comparatively less and spent much of his time risking his life as part of the French Resistance.  I would say one thing that art can sometimes do is create a sense of recognition and empathy, which can -- for a short while, and in an imperfect way -- bridge seemingly unpassable lines of division. It was this Sicilian fascination with Athenian drama as the reviled Athenians lay starving and defeated before them, the inherent contradiction in it, that drew me to this subject.

Who are your favorite of the ancient Greek playwrights, why, and what should contemporary writers learn from them?

My favourites are Euripides, Sophocles, and Aristophanes. Aristotle said it best when he said Euripides was the most tragic of Athenian dramatists. So for depth of feeling and extreme characters engaging and enduring an almost wretched excess, he is your man. For structure and perfectness of dramatic form, I would say Sophocles, and for raucous, surreal comedy that still holds up today, Aristophanes. To be fair Aeschylus is no slouch either. You can’t go wrong with any of them, to be honest.

Ireland has never been shy about producing great works, but it seems like it’s been churning out consistently quality literature over the past couple of decades in particular. Why do you think that is?

I think the fact that so much great literature has historically come out of this tiny country and continues to do so gives Irish writers a great sense of possibility and also the feeling of being part of something. It perpetuates its own momentum, and then, on a very practical level, there is significant government investment in the arts. In Ireland, it’s far easier for a writer to access grants and bursaries than in, say, England. I think part of the contemporary flourishing of Irish writing can be attributed to something as simple yet key as grants giving Irish authors more time to finish their books.

This is your debut novel, and as someone relatively new to the world literary scene, what would you say are the biggest problems with literature and the wider publishing industry today? What are the solutions?

As you said I’m very new to the world literary scene and can’t speak with any great authority on the publishing industry. In most eras, people tend to feel that things are wrong and that they were better at some point in the past. Writers, in particular, often feel a sense of belatedness, a nostalgia for a prior golden age they never experienced, but if I’m honest, I think literature will be just fine. There will be good books, okay books, terrible books, and great books, and the last will category will always be in the minority, but this has been the way right back to the ancients.

When Karl Marlantes was a student at Yale during the early days of the Vietnam War—in which he would enlist and receive the Navy Cross, rendering the experience later in his acclaimed novel Matterhorn—he first became aware of his own naivete after his dormmates laughed at his assertion that the American president would never lie. During our conversation about his latest work Cold Victory, I noted that the protagonist seems to share some of that youthful wide-eyedness. Marlantes nodded, saying, “She is a character that I very consciously made American-naïve because I think it's one of the great things we suffer from.”

Set in Finland during the immediate aftermath of World War Two, Cold Victory follows two women attempting to navigate their roles as the wives of military attaches from the United States and Soviet Union. When their husbands agree to a friendly 500-kilometer ski race through the isolated Finnish wilderness, the women are plunged into danger and intrigue after the international press gets word of the competition and touts it as a grand geopolitical rivalry. Loosely based on real events involving Marlantes’ uncle, it’s a paranoid, thrilling narrative that is all too relevant today.

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“When the Russians took Crimea in 2014,” explained Marlantes, “I was in the middle of Deep River, but I said to myself, it’s time for this novel. Because Finland and Ukraine are so similar. David and Goliath. Tough people.” His comparison has become even more accurate in the ensuing years with the outbreak of widescale war and the rising signs of authoritarianism at home and abroad—another theme in Cold Victory. “I wanted people to realize what is it like to live under a totalitarian system. We’re doing it to ourselves. It’s that naivete.”

In the book you write that, “Dictatorships need just a few ardent supporters. Democracies need everyone. That’s harder to do.” Lately we’ve seen the rise of authoritarianism around the globe. Why do you think that is?

I think it’s in us. When the primitive tribe was threatened—and I’m talking about back when we were apes: protohumans—everybody had to rally around the leader. As Martin Luther King said, every generation has to fight the battle again, because you’ll never defeat fascism.

It’s somehow in us. I think it’s a genetic thing that only consciousness and education can avoid. And warnings—we’re falling into it again. Our job is to try very hard to bring it to consciousness and always fight against it. And every generation will have to do it otherwise we lose it. The minute you relax you’ll have Donald Trump running the country.

You write “the basic need of every society on earth: to teach the children how to think.” How do we do that?

You let everybody see everything and then teach them how to discern truth from untruth. I think we’ve gotta teach kids how to understand Facebook and X because there’s a lot of nonsense on there. Half of our country thinks that everything they see is true—I read it in the paper sort of thing.

The one that I just groans me is, I'm not interested in politics. I don’t like to think about politics. I mean, will you fucking grow up and become a good citizen? Vote with some intelligence. How do we fix that? Again, I think it's education. You do not live in this republic without voting and knowing why. The naivete...

One of your characters notes that “’politics,’ was invented to settle differences without violence…no matter how dirty politics gets, it’s never as dirty as war.” These days you hear a lot of talk about the failure of politics and the possibility of violent conflict.

The American Civil War happened because we couldn’t figure out how to compromise. And there are some things you can’t compromise on. That’s why we have wars. I’m not anti-war. I’m anti-stupid war, and you wish that we could solve everything with politics but some things we can’t. But yes, the way we can avoid fighting all the time is by fighting it out politically.

Where do you think we’re headed now?

I once had a very wise, older woman friend of mine say, Old gods die hard. And that’s where we are right now. We are in the middle of a pretty significant change in the way society wants to see itself, and the old gods are represented by MAGA Republicans. They really, I think, deep down want to see America one color and not a lot of immigrants and everybody Christian.

We go through this change periodically. That’s what the Civil War was. I don't think that people should be owned like cows. What do you mean!? Black people are like cows. No, they're not. There was an unmistakable shift. We ended up with a civil war instead of political turmoil. Another time this happened was with the unchecked capitalism versus checked capitalism fight which I wrote about in Deep River. It culminated in the thirties with the labor movement and Roosevelt and very nearly fell into fascism again. Same thing—they didn’t want to see the world change. But it did change, in all the cases. I don't know if that's called being an optimist, because those changes were extraordinarily painful. Just like gay marriage. People were like that's impossible, that's impossible, that's impossible, and then all of a sudden, it's okay. Because that God died. So I'm an optimist in the sense that we're going to go through this horrible time—we're in the middle of it—but we can save ourselves if we get serious about it and stop being so naive. And we'll come out the other side.

I'm hoping that we keep democracy by voting the right way. But it's a very closely run race, and they always have been. The North could have lost the Civil War. Capital could have crushed Labor instead of compromising. I won't get involved in these in these dirty politics. Okay—now your hands are clean, but you’re a slave with clean hands.

In a post-Napster media landscape where the audience typically expects content to be free, subscriptions won't cut it, so in the end it all comes down to clicks. The more clicks that come in, the more clicks may or may not go to ads, and the more ads a publication can sell. Therefore, many orient their content strategies around that which will gather the most clicks. Not the most important information, or the best story. Not societal value or even personal ideology. It’s all about those clicks.

So enters the infamous clickbait -- the checkout aisle impulse candy that no one needs and maybe don’t even want, but can’t resist. It’s so sweet and colorful, they can’t help but click. “11 Movies You’ll Definitely Hate-Watch.” “You’ll Never Believe What This 90’s Celebrity Did This Time.” “This Weird Trick Will Put Your TikTok On Fleek.” A tremendous amount of creative energy goes into producing the relentless barrage of clickbait, and all of a sudden a slew of writers who studied Capote and Woodward and Didion find themselves scrawling out “14 Things You Should Be Ashamed Of, Alan” for seven cents a word.

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Because the current media paradigm rewards quantity over quality, even journalists who don’t end up in the clickbait mines are frequently spread far too thin to produce anything of value. There was a time when reporters performed most of their work out in the world, digging up information about a story in order to put together something substantial.

Not anymore. Now they have to churn out four stories or more a day in order to fill the maw of the 24-hour-news-cycle, so instead of being out in the street getting the facts, they’re sitting in front of a computer screen refabricating press releases and stories from other outlets.

The result is bad for everyone. Journalists fill their hours pouring out drivel. Publication reputations suffer as the value of their content diminishes. Readers are less and less informed, which leads to the problems attendant to a weakened fourth estate that we're already seeing today -- misinformation, failing trust in institutions, and the decay of democracy.

And to make matters worse on an employment level, the clickbait bombardment is increasingly produced by AI, eliminating much of the low-level work that was once the bread and butter of media novices but is increasingly relied upon by even seasoned journalists as newsroom budgets evaporate. Next come the layoffs, and then even more of the content burden is taken up by uninspired, frequently inaccurate AI. Readers notice the failing quality, clicks fall, and the race toward the bottom continues as the investment firm in charge scrambles to right the ship by cutting costs yet again...

Everyone loses in the current scenario, and while there don't seem to be a whole lot of signs that the situation will change for the better anytime soon, the fact is that the very cause of much of the problem could be the solution: AI could save journalism -- if those in charge of the industry will allow it.

In theory, it's rather simple. If websites must have their clicks, so be it -- let the robots make the clickbait. This frees journalists to focus on creating work that offers actual humanist value. Stories that are satisfying rather than soul-sucking to produce; that inform the audience rather than merely fill a hole in their content stream. Instead of dashing off ten listicles or a handful of barely researched articles a day, journalists could once again take their time crafting stories that matter. Let the toaster make toast while the chef concocts a fine meal.

Now everybody wins: websites get their clicks, journalists are doing work they enjoy, and audiences receive both content-candy and high-caliber information. Who knows what benefits could follow? There’s a lot of social value in good journalism.

This only works, of course, if the publishing powers that be actually reinvest the money saved via AI back into a newsroom full of humans. Instead of viewing artificial intelligence as a means to eliminate staff and cut costs, it must be seen as an opportunity to improve assignment quality, freeing up journalists to go back to good reporting.

But here's the rub: a media that is driven by profit-motive rather than social responsibility won't do that. If the goal is to maximize profit for investors, a publication will be forever under pressure to trim costs, and as we've already seen, it is typically done at the expense of quality journalism.

So while many in my profession may call heresy on my advocacy for ceding work to machines, I suggest that the problem we face isn't the arrival of AI in publishing, but the persistence of the profit-motive. Until we decouple the need for profit from news, the news will be whatever sells papers -- and whatever costs the least to produce it.