It’s hard to disagree. We humans, the most complex and intelligent species on the planet, are also among the most helpless at birth, unable to even lift our heads without assistance. How we grow from feeble infants to (theoretically) sophisticated adults is the fundamental question asked by psychologists like de Barbaro, who studies early childhood development at The University of Texas at Austin. There, her Daily Activity Lab hopes to provide insight into the remarkable emotional and intellectual growth that children undergo and, more specifically, the role parenting plays in this journey.

An associate professor of psychology with a background in both cognitive and computer science, de Barbaro is combining wearable technologies and machine learning with traditional methods to capture a more complete picture of real-life parenting and how it impacts children.

“We’re interested in what caregiving looks like every day and what’s in the realm of normal,” she says, and thanks to new technologies, that “every day” is more accessible to researchers than ever before. Whereas previous child development studies were often limited by their lab settings, which don’t make for the most natural parenting environments, wearables allow de Barbaro and her colleagues to study parent-child dynamics in homes, playgrounds, and beyond.

“Used to, we’d bring people, usually a mom and her baby, into an empty room, we’d sit them on a blanket with two cameras pointing at them and some toys and say, ‘Play as you normally would.’ But there’s nothing really normal about that. Then we’d make all these conclusions from that 15-minute interaction,” de Barbaro says. Now she uses devices like LENA, a wearable 24-hour audio recorder tucked into a cute baby vest, to understand what happens in the world beyond the placid laboratory setting.

The LENA is able to capture multiple days’ worth of data, including not just every sound the baby makes but all the sounds around it. These sounds provide researchers insight into the experiences of babies and their caregivers. How much are parents talking to their babies? How many words do they say? How much television are the babies exposed to? How much multitasking are parents attempting? LENA hears it all.

Or almost all: To protect privacy, parents have the ability to stop recording at any time and to request the deletion of all or any part of a recording. Even so, the devices capture an enormous volume of detail.

With this level of access to real parent-child dynamics, what has de Barbaro gleaned from taping crying babies and their surroundings? Here are a few takeaways:

There is no perfect parent

One element de Barbaro and her team measure with audio recordings is “maternal sensitivity,” or a mother’s ability to notice and respond to her child’s needs. Basically, if a baby is crying or otherwise seeking attention, how effectively can mom figure out what’s wrong and address it?

What the data reveals is that there is more variation in the sensitivity of one mother over the course of her day than between two different mothers on average. No one is firing on all cylinders all the time, and factors in a mother’s environment can greatly influence her ability to attend to a child’s needs. Audio recordings can capture these myriad environmental interferences — other siblings competing for a parent’s time, rush-hour traffic, the chaos of preparing meals — allowing de Barbaro to examine how they affect maternal sensitivity. Her research has found that background media (e.g., TVs and phones) and tantruming siblings are particularly distracting.

The fact that even the most sensitive mothers are slower to respond to their infants while simultaneously managing a screaming toddler or trying to merge onto the freeway is an indication, de Barbaro says, that children are resilient to these kinds of “imperfections” in parenting: “Children of these highly sensitive moms are also experiencing less sensitive responses every day — and we know they are likely to grow up healthy.” But there is a line where lower sensitivity crosses into neglect. To help determine where that line sits, de Barbaro is working with UT colleague and attachment specialist Deborah Jacobvitz. They screen the children in de Barbaro’s studies at 12 months and again at 18 months to see if any are developing insecure attachments, a possible sign of neglectful parenting and a risk factor for future mental health issues.

Maternal mental health does impact kids, but it’s not entirely clear how

Studies conducted in labs have found that moms with depression are less responsive to their babies, but that’s not what de Barbaro’s home recordings show. When their recorded interactions were analyzed, mothers with depressive symptoms were no less sensitive to their children, on average, than those without. But children of depressed moms did display poorer regulation (i.e., they were harder to soothe) than others, indicating a link between maternal mental health and childhood development.

That a mother’s depression or anxiety can be transmitted to her child is well established — children’s mental health often resembles that of their parents to a degree unexplained by genetics alone — but how it is transmitted is murkier. In de Barbaro’s recordings, it is not that depressed mothers were slower to respond to a crying baby or less likely to provide comfort. It may be that the differences lie in mothers’ physiological attunement or their reactions to infant needs conveyed by more subtle means than crying, she says, factors yet to be explored in home settings.

The connection between mothers’ and children’s anxiety is similarly evident and mysterious. De Barbaro notes two everyday behaviors that might contribute to it. For one, an anxious mother might use more fearful speech around her child, a kind of worrying out loud, that teaches the child to worry too. Or she might limit the child’s exposure to new experiences because of that worrying, starting a cycle of anxiety and avoidance. Either of these, both, or something subtler still could lead a child to be more skittish of the world around them, de Barbaro says, but more research into the everyday behaviors of anxious mothers is needed.

Dads could stand to help out more

“People routinely ask me ‘Why do you study maternal sensitivity? What about the dads?’” says de Barbaro. “Well, unfortunately the data is that moms are still doing most of the work.”

Her studies have found huge variation in how responsive fathers are to their children. While mothers responded to children 80% of the time on average, the most involved dads responded more than half of the time, while others were largely absent.

De Barbaro suggests that this finding could serve as a call to action for dads, since greater paternal involvement is good for both children and mothers. Surveys de Barbaro has conducted to measure maternal mental health show that it’s strongly correlated with a mother’s perceived level of social support. Unsurprisingly, moms who feel they are parenting with little or no help report poorer mental health, so it’s likely that dads pulling their childrearing weight could be beneficial to mothers.

Cellphones are changing parenting

In a 20^th-century psychology experiment called the “still face,” adults presented infants with an unresponsive blank stare instead of normal facial expressions. The result? Some very confused and distressed babies. Infants are accustomed, if indignant, to being ignored while parents attend to real-world tasks, but they seem to find the simultaneous presence and absence of the still face unsettling. Unfortunately, the still face is the expression we often assume while scrolling on our phones, and some studies suggest this too is stressful for infants.

“Cellphones have changed so much of how we move through the world and undoubtedly of how we parent,” says de Barbaro, who also notes that cellphones differ from other kinds of parental distractions. “From a young child’s perspective, the phone is a very abstract, invisible kind of engagement,” she says. “The child doesn’t have much access to what you’re doing on the phone. You’re there, but you’re also just gone.”

Because of the ubiquity of cellphones, de Barbaro suspects that children are growing accustomed to the intermittent detachment of parental scrolling and may not be too emotionally impacted, but excessive phone use presents other concerns for the developmental psychologist. Her research has shown that mothers talk less to their children when their phones are on, which could be detrimental to children’s language development. However, de Barbaro also points out that cell phones can provide resources and connections to community for overwhelmed and isolated mothers, so the answer isn’t as simple as “turn them off.” “I think we need to be aware of the fact that phones can take our attention away from our children,” she says. “At the same time, if we continue to engage with our kids and attend to them when we’re not on our phones, that’s probably the most important thing.”

Parenting isn’t always uphill

With everything she knew academically about the difficulties of raising children, de Barbaro braced herself for suffering and exhaustion when she had her first child. But there was something she wasn’t prepared for: joy.

“Nobody talks about how joyful and amazing parenting can also be,” she says. By “nobody” she primarily means researchers and the popular press that reports on their work, which tends to focus more on the hurdles of parenting than on the pleasures. Yet de Barbaro regularly observes joyful interactions from the parents and children in her studies and hopes to be able to systematically capture that joy — and its effects on child development — in future studies.

“People just light up. You see these joyful smiles between the baby and parent,” she says. “That joy between parents and children is a really important predictive factor for children’s wellbeing, we’ve just studied it less than the challenges.”

We both admire and scorn amateurs. On the one hand, we all know the delight of losing ourselves in something that we care about only for love, not for money or status or because we have to. There is no purer devotion or full-body joy than that of the amateur. On the other hand, if you’re an amateur, you’re not serious. You’re not a professional, or a specialist, or an expert. And in conversations where the professionals hold sway, enthusiasm can be at best irrelevant and at worst a liability.

Amateurs in the classroom

In the fall of 2021, when I started teaching “Visionary Women,” a UT Austin first-year Signature Course seminar on Sappho, Hildegard of Bingen, Emily Dickinson, and Frida Kahlo, being an amateur was part of the point. These four artists are so different that it was pretty much a given that I — or anyone who attempted to teach such a course — would be an amateur in most of its subject matter. That didn’t bother me. In fact, it was a big reason I was interested in offering the class. I wanted to be a proud amateur, and I wanted my students to have the experience of being proud amateurs too.

Not being an expert doesn’t mean you’re incompetent or unqualified, especially with art. Anyone can look, or listen, or read. Anyone can enjoy the experience of talking with others about what they see or hear, even if they’re seeing or hearing something for the first time.

Having a good experience exploring something totally unfamiliar is fundamental to a liberal arts education, for both the students and the instructors. Being educated isn’t just about becoming an expert in a chosen field. It’s about being able to engage with things at which we are not expert at all.

Students who are admitted to UT Austin have worked so hard during high school to make their resumes as great as they can possibly be that sometimes learning for the fun of it has fallen by the wayside. Too often they’ve been trained to treat learning as a transaction. I do the work, the teacher gives me a grade, the college gives me a letter of admission. And that’s important. But so are the serendipitous discoveries in classes that students enroll in because the course fit the schedule, or part of the syllabus sounded fun, or their roommate was taking the class and they thought they’d join in. Those semi-random encounters can turn out to be the most memorable part of college. And they’re all built on an experience of amateurism, a willingness to bring open-minded enthusiasm to a new topic or question.

The first time I offered “Visionary Women,” we were all amateurs together. The students, most of whom were in their first semester of college, were inexperienced in the content and skills that the course required. But they were lovers of the artists, their fellow students, and encountering the artists together as a group. I was inexperienced in how to weave together these very different artists into a compelling unity, but I was also a passionate amateur — a lover — of each of the artists individually, of the discoveries that arose from putting together four badass women artists from different times and places, and of the amazing things my students said and did and experienced in our class. We all loved it, and we all learned a lot.

The love of learning

Almost five years have passed since I first offered “Visionary Women,” and many of that initial crop of students have recently graduated. I recently reached out to Kennedy Freyer, one of the “Visionary Women” students from Fall 2021, to reflect on that season of passionate amateurism. Kennedy’s final project for the course was a painting of one of Hildegard of Bingen’s most well-known visions, the “Cosmic Egg,” in the style of Frida Kahlo’s “Moses” (1945). As you can see below, it’s a beautiful piece of work. You’ll have to imagine the delighted gasps from the class when Kennedy showed us her painting.

Before we get to our conversation, here is what Kennedy had to say about her painting when she submitted it nearly five years ago.

Each symbol in the painting came straight from Hildegard’s words and Frida’s paintings. In the center, one can see an egg surrounded by an exposed, bleeding rib cage and lungs, then surrounded by fire (based on Frida Kahlo’s “Moses”). In Hildegard’s account of her vision of the Cosmic Egg, she described the outer membrane of the egg as “such horror that [she] was unable to perceive it properly.” I knew Frida included gore and raw images in her paintings, so I designed the “horrors” as guts. The guts can be seen bleeding in particular places. The first and largest trail of blood stems from the heart, but the smaller trail stems from where I feel my anxiety: what I can assume to be the location of the adrenal glands. Taking this artistic liberty and my definition of horrors allowed me to empathize with the women, intertwining my “visions” with theirs.

Through drawing inspiration from both of these visionary women, my painting “Frida’s Cosmic Egg” accurately depicts Hildegard’s vision while staying true to Frida’s niche style. I hope these women would agree and enjoy my art as much as I enjoy theirs. Although the women led highly contrasting lives, their art impacts our world, both secular and sacred, to this day.

When we reconnected earlier this year, Kennedy and I had a great conversation about teaching and learning, about what she took away from the “Visionary Women” class, and about the experience of creating her final project for the course. That conversation, lightly edited for clarity, is below.

Kennedy, I am very appreciative that you agreed to do this. I have a very vivid memory of your final project, which was an absolutely amazing piece of work.

Thinking back to more than four years ago, what did you think college would be like when you arrived at UT? What did you expect when you got to the 40 Acres?

I honestly didn’t really know what to expect. I had a vague understanding of what college would look like based on movies and TV, but college wasn’t a big thing that my family talked about. My dad actually went to UT — he jokes about taking one or two victory laps — but he was never super academic. And my mom went to a local community college near my home.

Going into UT, I didn’t really know the secret language of academia. It was very different than the impression that I had from high school, hearing, “Oh, college is going to be so hard, your professors aren’t going to let this kind of stuff slide.” Instead, I was welcomed into this really inclusive and collaborative environment, especially in the class that I took with you. But I didn’t really know what to expect, except for the fact that it was this whole big adventure.

It was a big adventure that might turn out to be big in a scary way as well as big in an exciting way.

Exactly.

How did college either meet or differ from what you expected before, to the extent that you had expectations?

It was infinitely better than I anticipated. And what’s funny is, I think the parts that I thought that I would thrive in, I did, to some extent. But the parts that ended up being my favorite were things that I didn’t necessarily expect.

When I think about my most formative memories from college, I do think of that final project that we did. Having that much autonomy over a final project that early in my college career was super transformative, because I had all this information, all these scholarly sources, and was like, “Okay, now I have to make something. What do I do?”

In what ways was it formative? What did it form?

I think it formed a sense of scholarly aptitude. It made me feel like I could do the thing, if that makes sense, and it made me realize that my ideas were good even though I didn’t have years and years of experience. I look back now as a master’s student, and I’m like, “That’s a pretty good project. I would do it again.”

So it was nice to have that much self-efficacy that early on. I don’t know if you do that strategically in giving a really ambiguous final project to a bunch of freshmen and being like, “Do something cool.” But whatever your intention is, it works.

A lot of the reason I do it is because so many final projects are very regimented and goal-oriented. Like, “show me these very specific competencies” or “answer these specific questions.” I do it for two other reasons, too. One is because I don’t think people are going to get a lot of opportunities to do that kind of project in the future. The other is that I hope that kind of assessment is less intimidating for people.

So it sounds like the class helped ease your transition into college — certainly socially, since I know you met some of your friends there. Were there other ways in which it contributed to your transition to UT?

I don’t know if you knew this, but I was a PACE student, which means I was dually enrolled between UT and Austin Community College. That was a little bit of a weird experience considering UT was my dream school. It was sort of a door in, but not really. I had that identity crisis of, “I’m this weird Frankenstein’s monster of two schools. What am I doing here?” So it was really nice to have a class at UT that not only was small and more intimate, but that also very much emphasized, “You are a scholar. You have good ideas.” And it was nice to have a place where you could make mistakes but also take yourself seriously as a scholar and as an artist, in my case.

If you’ve ever talked about our class with people who weren’t part of it, how did that come about? What did you talk to them about?

One of the classes that I’m in currently as a master’s student is supervised teaching, where we learn teaching methodologies, building a syllabus, that kind of thing. And I mentioned your class briefly my final essay. We had to write a paper explaining the decisions that we chose in our sample syllabus and sample assessment, and my opening paragraph was a brief story about my time in “Visionary Women.” For my sample assessment I wanted students to do what I called an artifact project, where they would find something and then tie it in a creative way to class concepts. I felt it would help them merge academia and practical usage. So I told a brief story about the final assignment in your class and how not only was it helpful in connecting the concepts, but also about the autonomy that such an ambiguous project gives you. I said having that experience so young was super helpful because it boosted my confidence and my ability to make critical decisions, and I wanted to offer my students a reminder that you can make good decisions.

Helping students have confidence in their own ability to make decisions is a great way to think about assessment. Not just “regurgitate information” or even “synthesize information,” which is a kind of higher order version of regurgitate, but “make good decisions.” I like that. Are there specific artists or works of art that we covered that you still think about?

I think about Frida Kahlo’s painting The Suicide of Dorothy Hale.

That’s interesting, because we didn’t do that one in class. I decided that forcing everyone to look at a painting of a suicide was a questionable pedagogical choice, and I wasn’t going to do that. Do you remember how you came across that painting?

I feel like we briefly mentioned it in class. And I imagine it was during my research for my painting technique and color scheme. In scouring her paintings, I probably came across it.

What would you like to go back and say to yourself at the time that you were enrolled in our course, and why?

“This class is unique. Enjoy it.” I think I expected every college class after that to be similar, with everyone meeting in this cool classroom with Roman marble statues and a thick wooden table; I imagined that all of college would feel like Dead Poets Society. Then I was disappointed to find out that most of college doesn’t look like that. So I would say that this is a unique experience, and to lean into it.

In a very specific way, you already spoke about a throughline from your final project in the course to the way you think about your own future syllabi. Are there other ways in which you can see that our course prepared you for life after UT?

It was my first ever long-term research project. I committed many hours to that painting; it was my first “I’m putting my head down, I’m working super hard” project. It made me realize I can do more than I think that I can do. I can commit to something and do it well.

I remember that from when you did the project too. You were clearly equally surprised and delighted that you’d actually pulled it off. I was like, “Oh, my God,” and the whole class was looking at it going, “This is amazing. Why are you surprised? This is fantastic.” I think you were worried that you were an amateur, in the sense of being less of an expert than the Studio Art majors in the class, but you killed it precisely because you were an amateur who really, really loved what you were doing.

Lifelong amateurism

Like Kennedy, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by my current book– whose working title is “Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse” – and what I can accomplish as an amateur. Every day, this project pushes me outside my comfort zone. I spend a lot of my time doing things I don’t know how to do, have never done before, am not good at, or all of those at once.

For example, when I was working on Hildegard of Bingen, I had a fascinating conversation with an eminent scholar who works on Hildegard’s music. Because I’m trained in how to read carefully, I knew I could study Hildegard’s writings by myself and learn from them. But I am not trained in music, so I wasn’t sure how to listen to her music in a more intelligent way than I’m currently able to, which is what I wanted to talk to this woman about.

So I said, “I am not a trained musician. How do I help myself become a better listener?” And she said, “Try singing the music.” And I was like, “That would never occur to me in a million years.” I haven’t done it yet, but I’m seriously thinking about doing an Instagram Live video of me singing incredibly badly.

Part of what I want this project to be about is, if we feel like we have to do everything that we do in front of other people perfectly, we’re going miss out on such a lot. And when we try things we don’t think we can do, sometimes we’re going to be pleasantly surprised by how well it goes. For both Kennedy and me, that’s been a really important lesson of passionate amateurism.

Deborah Beck is the Christie and Stanley E. Adams, Jr. Centennial Professor in Liberal Arts and Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. She is working on her current book through her weekly Substack, Four Horsewomen of the Apocalpyse.

Kennedy Freyer graduated from the Moody College of Communication in 2025 with a degree in communication and leadership. She is currently continuing her graduate studies at Moody, working toward a Master of Arts in communication studies with a specialization in interpersonal communication.

This is, of course, Shakespeare at Winedale, which opened its latest season of plays earlier this month. To celebrate the occasion — and mark her first season at the helm — new director Katherine Steele Brokaw joined us last week to talk about the history of the program, the power of adaptation, and how a lost collection of student journals informed this summer’s approach to Love’s Labour’s Lost. Read on for that conversation, and if you’re in the Central Texas area, make plans to catch one of this season’s remaining performances before the (figurative) curtain drops on August 9th.

Dr. Brokaw, thanks for joining us! To start big picture for anyone who isn’t familiar with what the Shakespeare at Winedale program is, because it’s unique to UT Austin, give us the lay of the land. What’s Shakespeare at Winedale? What makes it so unique?

Shakespeare at Winedale began in 1970 and was founded by an English professor, James “Doc” Ayres, who believed that the best way to learn about Shakespeare was to perform it. Every summer a group of up to 18 students comes out to the Winedale Historical Complex, which is part of UT’s Briscoe Center for American History, about 90 minutes east of Austin. We live out here in the countryside for the season and put on three plays. The students, for the most part, are unplugged; they’re studying and performing Shakespeare all day, every day. We spend six weeks preparing the plays, and then there’s four weekends of performances.

That’s the summer program, and there really is nothing quite like it in the world. We also have a spring class that comes out to Winedale for a few weekends and performs one play, and then for the last 26 years there’s been Camp Shakespeare for 11- to 16-year-olds. We also have an outreach program throughout the academic year that takes Shakespeare to elementary classrooms throughout the greater Austin and Round Rock area.

You mentioned Doc Ayres. One of the unique things about this program is that for 56 years it’s only had a small handful of directors — Ayres, James Loehlin, and Madge Darlington, who was interim for the past two years. What has stepping into this position been like?

“Humbling” would maybe be the first word. But also incredibly exciting, of course. Doc and James and Madge have laid such a strong foundation for a program that is so beloved and has incredible alumni support. I’ve really felt the power of that community behind us, and I’ve really tried to make the students this summer feel that — that there are hundreds of alums out there who are wishing us well, and who are wanting to see this program continue into the future. That has felt really powerful to me, and I think to these students as well.

One of our productions this year is an adaptation of Love’s Labour’s Lost that we’re setting in Winedale in 1976, and so the preparing of that for me and for the students has meant going into the archives, really learning about those early years, and recreating those moments on stage. It’s given the students and me such a sense of, wow, here we are in this barn doing things and feeling things that have been done and felt for 56 years in this exact space, and that’s really powerful and resonant.

I think that feeling that history has primarily felt inspiring, but it is also humbling because I know how important various aspects of this program are to so many people. As a new director, I’m trying to evaluate what really works for us going forward in an era of hotter summers, for example. Student needs are changing. All of the essentials of Winedale aren’t going anywhere, but are there adjustments that we can make to make sure that this program is really serving our students and keeping them healthy? For example, last year Madge moved our afternoon matinees to the morning, which has been great, but that is a change. So it’s things like that, and doing an adaptation for the first time this year, and doing a preview night where we are unveiling our 2027 season. I’m trying to take my experience and bring it to this program and figure out how to best meld the kinds of things that I’ve been doing with what Winedale has been doing — most of which is very similar.

Speaking of your background: What were you doing before you came to UT Austin and this program? And how do you see that experience informing your plans for Winedale?

I spent 14 years at University of California, Merced, which is the newest University of California campus. It opened in 2005 and I got there in 2011, so I helped build the university and the English program, which was a really exciting task, and in so many ways so different from working with a storied program like Shakespeare at Winedale.

While at UC Merced, in 2017 I started directing Shakespeare in Yosemite — UC Merced has a relationship with Yosemite National Park, which is two hours east — and that was incredibly exciting. We worked with the National Park Service for eight years, putting on an adapted Shakespeare production in Yosemite for Earth Day and Shakespeare’s birthday in April, in which we would use Shakespeare to talk about ecological issues that are facing Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada.

So, it was a very different crowd than Winedale in that it was the visitors to Yosemite National Park, not necessarily Shakespeare fans. And it was about leveraging Shakespeare and making Shakespeare really accessible and exciting and relevant. We did 90-minute musical productions, similar to our Love’s Labour’s this summer, that were site-specific and using Shakespeare to talk about the place in which they were performed.

I’m so curious about your production of Love’s Labour’s Lost 1976 — it sounds like a blast, for one thing, but it’s also the first Shakespeare adaptation that the Winedale program has put on. Where did the initial idea for that project come from? What has the process of putting it together been like?

It’s been really fun and moving. This production is really a love letter to Winedale, a labor of love if you will.

I had the idea when I was interviewing. One of the things I was asked was, “Okay, so you’ve been doing adaptations for Shakespeare in Yosemite, which has this very specific setting and purpose. How would you do something site-specific here?” Then it just came to me that Love’s Labour’s is this play about study and about being isolated, and also about connecting and falling in love, and it would work really well as a play that’s about Winedale. And I thought, you know, 50 years is a great amount of time for retrospection. I also knew that it was going to be the 250th anniversary of the country this summer, and of course in 1976 they were celebrating the bicentennial, and I thought that would feel resonant.

I also figured — and this was absolutely the case, as I said — that it would give me a chance to really get into the archives, interview alums from the ‘70s, talk to Doc, and force me to really learn about those early years of the program and then to share that with the students. And by total chance, like absolute kismet, a grad student found a bunch of archival materials in Parlin Hall this fall. We already had a whole office full of Winedale archives. But then we found this whole other stash that was basically a bunch of Doc’s stuff that I think he had lost when he retired, and it included boxes and boxes of student journals. I reached out to a few of those alums — these are highly successful people who are around 70 years old now — and said, “Could I read your journal that you wrote 50 years ago, when you were 19 and a scared sophomore?”

I ended up reading these journals in February, right around the time that I took my spring class out to Winedale for the first time, and I had them write reflections. And so much of what my 2026 students were saying about Winedale was almost word for word exactly what these students, now grown-ups, were writing in 1976. In our Love’s Labour’s, there are several moments where the characters sit down and start journaling and saying what they’re writing aloud, and it’s the actual words that were written in this place 50 years ago. And then we have tons of photos. We’ve recreated a few of the outfits from that summer — lots of thrifting.

Doc told me that in 1976 Shakespeare at Winedale entered the Round Top Fourth of July parade and won grand prize. He said, “You can find the ribbon in those boxes,” and I did. So we have the actual grand prize ribbon, and we recreate that parade, which was the project of the summer. Apparently they wrote out “Shakespeare in Winedale” in white carnations on their parade float, and one of our students said, “Oh, I know how to make white carnations out of paper.” It’s very laborious, and so we had hours and hours of these big assembly lines of tracing, cutting, and gluing to make these carnations, and then gluing them to the float. So we recreate the parade, we use that actual ribbon from 50 years ago as a prop, and do that moment. The characters are also rehearsing As You Like It, which was the play they did 50 years ago.

So it’s the plot of Love’s Labour’s Lost, and it’s mainly the words of Love’s Labour’s Lost. But a few words here and there are changed, and a few moments, like that parade, are added in.

So that’s Love’s Labour’s Lost 1976. But Shakespeare at Winedale puts on three plays a summer. How do you choose which plays to stage? Are there certain plays that work better than others for this program?

You want a balance in terms of genre, because for both audiences and for students, you want the richest possible experience. You don’t want just tragedy or just comedy.

Last year’s class did Richard II, and Henry IV Part I follows on from Richard II, so I figured that that would be a good kind of continuity. That’s a production that is sword fighting and doublets and hose, quite a traditional Winedale production. And it’s just such a great play. People don’t know it — I told the students, “It’s such a gift that you get to give this to a lot of people, because a lot of people don’t know how great this play is.” Great play, not a great title. But it’s funny, it’s got adventure, it’s got romance.

And then, because Love’s Labour’s Lost and Henry IV Part I are relatively deep cuts, I knew that we needed a ringer title in there as well. I was looking at what has been done in recent years out here, and it’s been a little while for Romeo and Juliet. I knew that audiences would be excited about it, and it’s also a play where we’re trying to bring new audiences, because kids are studying it in high school. But it’s really beautiful and it’s resonant. It’s about the dangers of deciding that you hate someone, and I think that that’s a really important message right now.

Looking beyond this summer, is there a play that you are particularly excited to do in the future, or a project that you’re looking forward to bringing to Winedale?

I’m trying to decide how much I should reveal, because we have our preview night coming up on August 8^th.

I will say that James Loehlin did a fair amount of plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, and I’m excited to do some of that as well. There’s a lot of people who’ve been coming to Winedale for many, many years, so they’ve seen multiple Romeo and Juliets, they’ve seen multiple Midsummer Night’s Dreams. We will always be doing those plays, but to show audiences some plays that maybe they haven’t seen before and to give students the opportunity to dig into not just Shakespeare — I’m excited to do that.

Thinking about the experience of the students and the opportunities this program gives them: I want to talk about the student experience at Winedale, because we know that it’s powerful. What do you see the study and performance of Shakespeare continuing to offer students today? What is drawing people to sign up for the Winedale program, and what do you hope that they’re taking away from that summer out in the hay barn?

I mean, it’s incredibly transformative. It’s deep focus and attention span. We basically don’t have screens — there’s no screens in the barn or the classroom — and we know what these devices have done to rewire our brains. Instead we’re going back to that ability to learn a lot of text, to focus, and to communicate with each other. That is incredibly powerful and important for students.

We get up early in the morning, and we’re working all day until 10:00 or so at night, so it also gives students a real sense of their capacity for hard work. It’s creative, not just figuring out how to stage these plays and these puzzles that Shakespeare gives us but also making a float of paper carnations. And it’s collaborative; it’s not just about individual achievement, it’s about working together. There’s always a shared purpose, and you’re trying to think about, “What is something that I can bring to this?” Maybe it’s, “Well, I can play the cello, and we should have a musical transition here.” Or, “I can paint,” or “I’m an English major, and I can help you figure out what this line means.” When everybody’s bringing their gifts to a project that has shared purpose, students are learning so much about themselves and the Shakespeare is just the wonderful vehicle that allows us to do that. And because these plays were never in copyright, we can be more creative with them than we can with other theater. Giving students the ability to be that creative and collaborative is something that they can bring to whatever challenges they’re going to face in the rest of their lives.

If William Shakespeare himself came to Winedale to see, say, Love’s Labour’s Lost 1976, or this summer’s production of Henry IV Part I, what do you think he would make of it?

I’ve said this before: Shakespeare’s super dead, so we don’t have to worry about what he thinks. But Shakespeare himself was also someone who took old stories and adapted them to make them relevant. Our program this year acknowledges the fact that Romeo and Juliet is this story that has been through multiple iterations before Shakespeare said, “I’m going to give it my twist.” And he’s looking at Holinshed’s Chronicles when he’s writing Henry IV. Almost all of his plays are like that, where he’s taking an old story and making it relevant, and he’s putting in tons of anachronism. There’s clocks in Julius Caesar. He’s trying to make these stories seem relevant; his actors are wearing mainly contemporary dress. So what we’re doing with Love’s Labour’s Lost in saying, “Okay, we’re going to take this old story that you wrote, and we’re going to make it resonant with this time and place,” I see that as a very Shakespearean thing to do.

That’s what I’ve talked about with my students, too, and empowered them to feel like these plays are this wonderful gift. And for 400 years so many people have done this. A lot of us who are in the international Shakespeare producing community can feel a little bit envious of people who put on Shakespeare in non-Anglophone countries. Because if you’re doing Shakespeare in Spanish or Chinese or Swahili, you have to adapt, and you get to translate it into language that sounds like what’s spoken in the here and now and make it into a contemporary play. A lot of the most exciting Shakespeare that’s happening right now is happening in continental Europe, because they’re able to be like, “Okay, we’re going to make this play about what’s happening in Warsaw right now.”

The language is a gift, but in some ways it’s also, in the theater, a challenge and often a barrier. A lot of audiences don’t want to come hear a language that they don’t understand. And it’s not their fault they don’t understand it. It’s very hard to hear a language that’s evolved for 400 years and to know what’s going on. So I think it’s exciting to empower students to think, “Okay, adaptation’s happening all over. Can we do both? Can we wrestle with this language — which is such a great challenge, and it’s so beautiful, and we’re so lucky we get to read it in English — but also think about what is fun about trying to invite new people who maybe don’t think that Shakespeare’s for them into the tent or into the barn by adapting these plays a bit?”

Last question is an easy one: Any last words for our readers?

We’re just really excited to invite people out to the barn. I think there’s something for everyone this season. It’s a really talented and dedicated class. We have free Sunday night shows this year, and it would be great to see people there.

For more than a century, education has been a pathway to getting a good job. Before then it was a sign of elite pedigree, and before then it fueled the growth of organized religions. Today, with the changing nature of work and people living longer and healthier, it may be our ticket to keeping up, adapting to the new challenges, maintaining a personal safety net and taking advantage of new opportunities that were beyond our imagination when we were children, adolescents, or even young adults. If so, we will need education more than ever. But what is it about education that we will need?

Over the past decade and a half, I’ve had a chance to study this question using survey data from about 45,000 people who were, for the most part, born during the Baby Boom, first interviewed in high school, and who are now retiring. Some graduated from high school the year The Godfather was the top grossing film, and others were first interviewed when Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back held that honor. Telephones connected to landlines, students learned typing not keyboarding, and manufacturing and secretarial jobs paid a living wage. Just over a fifth of National Longitudinal Survey of 1972 sample members, who graduated from high school in 1972 and are now around age 72, earned a college degree by their mid-twenties. About the same share of the sample members of the High School and Beyond 1980 study, who graduated in 1980 or 1982 and are now between ages 62 and 64, completed a baccalaureate degree as young adults. In recent interviews, almost half of both cohorts reported that they are in very good or excellent health, and many have a decade or more of good health in their future. They’ll bring their education with them on the journey.

As my collaborators and I found, those who had taken more advanced and challenging courses in high school, scored better on achievement tests, and earned higher grades live longer, are healthier, show signs of slower aging, and have much better cognitive functioning around ages 60 and 70. These results suggest that the value of education goes far beyond the canonical idea that education gets you a better job. It’s true that education usually leads to better jobs, higher wages, and generally contributes to economic security. But in our research, we’ve seen that even people who stop out of the labor force, take a lower paying job, or leave the labor force altogether still reap lifelong benefits from quality education.

Why? We have some hypotheses which, if correct, can provide us all with principles that apply equally well to Boomers and Zoomers.

The first may seem self-evident: A quality education positions people to grasp abstract concepts, be curious and inquisitive, and to love to learn. This better positions them to make informed decisions, find more than one solution to a problem, reason through problems they have never seen, and adapt to new challenges. These skills in turn not only protect people from the worst effects of technological change, but they also appear to protect their cognitive functioning as they age.

Take the Baby Boomers’ experiences in work and everyday life in the late 20^th century, which was completely transformed by technology. Some of the first evidence my collaborators and I saw for the value of education was that study participants who took more challenging high school coursework, especially in math and science, adapted better when their jobs (like “typist” or “switchboard operator”) were replaced by technology. It wasn’t just that they found new jobs, though they did, for example in the health care and computer sectors.

Strikingly, the advantages of education filtered into other realms of life. Not only was the self-reported health of people who had taken more challenging courses markedly better than that of students who hadn’t taken similar coursework, they were also less likely to die early, and they suffered from fewer preventable or treatable conditions such as high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, and diabetes. These health outcomes are beneficial on their own, but those preventable or treatable conditions are also linked to cognitive health outcomes in later life. Altogether, we’ve been able to predict cognitive functioning around age 60 with about 70% accuracy using mainly education information from childhood, high school, and early adulthood.

A few short decades after computer technology and the internet transformed work and life for previous generations, AI is now threatening to change every aspect of Zoomer’s march into later life. Although the technology is different, the challenges may be consistent. So too may be the lifelong benefits of a good education. Our research leads us to believe that young people today who have access to higher quality education will be similarly resilient in the face of uncertainty. They’ll be better positioned to adapt to a changing world than those who have not developed the skills to problem solve, take on challenge, think abstractly, and find multiple solutions to a problem — what learning scientists might refer to as higher order thinking skills.

When my collaborators and I used our data to look to the past to gain insights into our futures, we were surprised to find that over the last few decades people are using higher education differently. Adults are returning to the classroom in unprecedented numbers. Nearly two-thirds of our sample returned to school in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, and they will likely continue the trend into their 70s. Although many of us hold a traditional notion that people finish school, then get a job, then have a family, our research found that people are following different pathways.

Many adults in our study samples used school to continue to learn and fulfill long-held aspirations. Some finally got the degree they planned to get when they were teenagers. Others went back for a second or third credential, or maybe to just learn something new. Altogether, over 40% of our sample earned a new degree in midlife. When they did, they got similar returns to their education that those who benefited earlier experienced. Even people who had a bumpy road out of high school and returned to school in midlife to finally complete college or graduate education had better outcomes. Cognitive functioning was better for people who completed higher education at any point compared to those who did not have as much education. Those with higher education also had better health outcomes: Indicators of healthy aging — cardiovascular and metabolic health and cognitive functioning —were better for those who completed higher education, even if they finished their degrees later in life.

In our research, we’ve used statistical techniques to account for selection factors, such as family background, resources, and area of the country, that might contribute to both getting more education and having the improved outcomes. Even so, it is impossible to be certain that education causes the better outcomes. What is certain is that it’s never too late to learn, grow, and improve the quality of our lives.

In a nutshell, education slows the pace of aging. It’s about learning to reason, continuing to change and grow, controlling what you can, and adapting to the rest. It’s about building strength and resilience through agency. Education is much more than just a degree or a piece of paper in a frame on the wall. It is a ticket to learn, approach challenge, avoid problems, stay engaged, and keep up — not be left behind — in our rapidly changing and uncertain world.

Chandra Muller is a sociologist at The University of Texas at Austin, where she holds both the Alma Cowden Madden Centennial Professorship and the Ashbel Smith Professorship, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her research is on how schools and education shape inequalities in later life work, health, and cognitive aging, and she is currently leading (with collaborators Eric Grodsky and Rob Warren) two nationally representative, longitudinal studies — the High School and Beyond (HS&B) and the National Longitudinal Study of the Class of 1972 (NLS-72). You can learn more about this work at https://edshareproject.org/

In his new book, American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington, Brands examines our first president’s leadership in the birth of America and the iconic status he continues to hold in the country today. The conversation below covers some of the same ground, as well as what remains unknowable about Washington more than two centuries after his death, what the U.S. might have looked like had he never risen to prominence, and the role of the historian as biographer. We hope you enjoy, and we wish you a very happy Fourth.

Dr. Brands, thank you for joining us today. We’ll start with a question about the character of George Washington. Given all the work that you’ve done on American history and the founders, you were not unfamiliar with him before you started work on this biography. But in the process of really boring down on his life and times, what surprised you?

He was a better writer than I expected him to be. I knew a lot about Washington, but I’d never read lots of his letters in detail, and by 21st century standards, he tends to be a little bit long-winded. His sentences sometimes require silent editing, where I will go in and put in a period where he just has a dash or a semicolon. But, on the whole, he’s a very good writer. And I was surprised by the extent of his journal keeping. I was aware that there was a journal, but Washington recorded the actions of his life in great detail: “We planted oats in this corner of that farm, and we set up a new fence and a water mill over there,” this sort of thing. His diary says very little of, “Boy, I wonder what the meaning of life is,” or, “When I did this, it really tore me apart inside.” We don’t get a lot of Washington’s inner life, but we get a lot of Washington’s outer life.

In doing Washington’s biography, I was also reminded how precocious he was as a military leader. By the time he was in his early 20s, he was the commanding officer of the Virginia Militia. This is because, in the first place, he was good out of doors — you can tell this guy’s not going to be working in an office somewhere; he’s going to be spending his life out of doors. Secondly, and it’s hard to get an appreciation for this from the distance of two and a half centuries and just reading letters, but he apparently was a very good horseman. That’s really important if you’re a general, because in those days, generals galloped across the battlefield. It mattered that he could do that, and that he was a big, tall, strapping fellow. When you put him on the back of a horse, he was impressive.

Your comment on what’s hard to appreciate after centuries and just from reading someone’s journals and letters — a person’s physical presence, the way they moved through the world — hits on one of the biggest challenges of biography. What about Washington was particularly difficult for you to capture as a biographer?

I really don’t have a very detailed sense of what Washington’s personal presence was like, and that’s really important for a military commander, especially when we’re talking about an army that was, at its maximum, 15,000 or 16,000 men. And there’s another aspect of Washington’s success that I still can’t exactly account for — I don’t think anybody can account for it — and that’s good judgment. Washington was successful because he made sound decisions, but you really only know they’re sound decisions after the fact. It’s almost like a weather forecaster: Maybe it’s going to rain tomorrow, maybe it’s not. But if you’re in charge of running a military campaign, you have to get it right. If you’re the President of the United States and deciding whether the United States ought to enter a war between Britain and France, you make the judgment, and you hope you get it right. If you get it wrong, you’re a lousy president; if you get it right, you’re a good president.

Washington had this knack for making good decisions. Now, some of this is the survivor effect and after-the-fact bias, where we study him because he made the good decision. Still, you want to account for how it happened. And I would say this: People who knew him commented on the fact that he did not arrive at his conclusions swiftly. He was a slow thinker, in the sense that he took care. He consulted as many people as he could. He was very good at gathering information and reserving judgment to himself.

I will say this, too, and I don’t know exactly where this comes from — it’s a temperamental thing — but there was relatively little of his own ego in the decisions that he made for his army or for his country. I never got a sense that it had to be this way or Washington would feel unfulfilled or he would feel disrespected or something like that. He seemed to have his mind cleared in a way that he could consult the best interests of the army, the country, whatever it might be. Of course, it helped that he was rich and he was well-respected.

Were the ways in which Washington was a good general different from the ways that he was a good president? They’re two radically different jobs that call on different skills, and somehow he seemed to have been good at both of those things.

He was good as a soldier, as a general, because he was very good at making decisions, giving orders, and seeing that the orders were carried out. As president, he was good at making decisions, but he realized he couldn’t give orders to the people he would like to be able to order around. As a general, everybody in the army has to take your orders. As president, people in Congress, and certainly voters, don’t have to take your orders. Washington was much happier as a general precisely for that reason. And when he was general, he didn’t have to deal with regular public criticism the way anybody does in politics. As president, he didn’t respond publicly to that criticism, but it bothered him.

When I said Washington had little ego in his decisions, he also had little ego in becoming president. It was partly because he thought of himself as a general, and as a general, he had won his war, so he had all the reputation he ever wanted. He knew becoming president would only diminish his reputation in the eyes of most people, so he became president reluctantly, and he got out as soon as he reasonably could. He was going to leave after one term, but he was talked into taking another term, and then he left after that. But as president, he found himself subject to the kind of criticism that people in politics encounter, and he wasn’t comfortable with it. It really made him think, “Eh, I shouldn’t have done this,” and as soon as he could, he went back to Mount Vernon.

How surprising was it to the people in that time for Washington to choose to not run for a third term?

The Constitution, written in 1787, then specified no term limits on any federal office holders. No term limits on members of the House of Representatives, no term limits on members of the Senate, no term limits on federal judges, and no term limits on the president. So, nobody knew what was going to happen.

There was no particular expectation among the people who wrote the Constitution around whether a president would serve one term, two terms, or as many terms as could be. There were some, like Alexander Hamilton, who hoped that the presidency would become something like the papacy, where the individual is elected but then the expectation is that person will get elected again and again for life. At the time it seemed, to Hamilton anyway, that the United States was suffering from a lack of energy and stability at the center, at the executive branch. What Hamilton wanted was a president who was as strong as possible, so he said, “Maybe we can hope that it’ll be a president for life.”

Washington took no position on this, and nobody knew what his attitude was, because at the Constitutional Convention he took no position on anything. He accepted election as president of the convention, which he interpreted as presiding officer of the convention. But like the speaker of the British House of Commons, even today, that person doesn’t take part in the debates, just says, “Okay, your turn. Now, your turn. Out of order. Bang.” They don’t debate. And so, during all these debates, nobody knew what Washington’s position was.

It was assumed that because Washington made no effort to acquire the office, and because when he was asked, indeed implored, to accept the office, he was reluctant, that he wasn’t likely to make a life out of this. These days when somebody says, “Oh, no, no, no, I don’t want the job,” you know they don’t really mean that. But in those days, it was quite plausible, because the presidency then wasn’t what the presidency would become.

I should add that people recognized that, for Washington, the presidency was not the apex of his ambition. He’d already had the apex of his ambition. It was commanding general of the Continental Army, and he had won. He had all the laurels he wanted; the presidency was a victory lap. He was willing to do it, but no big deal. And as I mentioned, he wanted to get out after one term.

How widely was it known that Washington was reluctant as president?

That’s hard to say. Washington was someone who spoke only when absolutely necessary. He was not a particularly good public speaker, and he rarely spoke. In fact, Washington was a good example of the person who makes silence his friend, and people assumed that he was deeper than he was. When he said nothing at the Constitutional Convention, all those people who were arguing back and forth about what Congress ought to do and what the powers of Congress ought to be, all that stuff, they assumed that Washington had a broader and deeper grasp of everything than they did. And one of the reasons that Article II of the Constitution, which is about the executive branch, is so thin compared to Article I, which is the one about Congress, is because the convention had kind of run out of gas by then, and they all took comfort in looking over at George Washington and saying, “Well, he’s going to be the first president. Let him figure it out.”

When he did decide to leave after two terms, there was no weeping or gnashing of teeth in the streets. People went, “Okay, it’s time. He’s been there long enough.” And he didn’t leave for the purpose of establishing this precedent that everybody else would leave after, at most, two terms — he left because he was really fed up with politics — but it did have that effect. He died during what would’ve been his third term, so if instead he had accepted the third term and died in office, then the precedent wouldn’t have been a limited presidency. The precedent would’ve been a presidency for life, and there’s no telling what that would’ve meant for the evolution of American politics.

To broaden out a little bit from Washington the man to his legacy today: How important was it for us as a country that Washington was our first president? What might the U.S. have looked like had he not been around?

To answer that question requires the historian and the biographer to argue a counterfactual. What would happen if not Washington? And my general feeling about this is that there’s almost never anybody who is really indispensable. If Thomas Edison had never lived, we would have electric light. And if George Washington had never lived, there would be an independent country. We might call it the United States of America, we might not. It wouldn’t have occurred at the same time. Or, alternatively, if the Continental Congress had declared independence and Washington had been named head of the Continental Army and they lost the war, then there wouldn’t have been a United States then.

The way I put it is this: In 1776, European-dominated empires were common. There were empires elsewhere. By 1900, those empires had shrunk, and by 2000, the empires had largely gone away entirely. So, the United States today would not be still attached to Britain in the way that it was back in the 1700s whether Washington had lived or not. But something might have happened that Washington’s contemporary and sort of co-indispensable man, Benjamin Franklin, proposed as early as the 1750s. Franklin noticed that the population of the British American colonies was growing very rapidly, far more rapidly than the population of Britain was growing, and he projected forward to say, essentially, “Within a couple of generations, there will be as many Englishmen living in North America as there are in Britain and then Ireland. What the British Parliament needs to do is just take note of this and allow for the American pillar of this British Empire to grow into an equal status. Then we will have this British Empire that will span this corner the Atlantic, and it will go on forever and ever.”

Now, this didn’t happen because of the American Revolution, and then during the 19th century there was no prospect that anything like this would come about. But during the 20th century, the United States and Britain have been close allies. And if we include Canada, during most of this period, Canada has been good friends with the United States. So if the British had had more vision back then and said to America, “Okay, we’re going to allow you to advance from junior partner to equal partner,” then there might never have been a break at all.

What I was thinking as you were saying that is: Okay, we can say that the United States would have happened in some recognizable form, in the way that Canada did, for instance. At the same time, it’s the United States that has been a kind of ideological inspiration for the rest of the world. A lot of those decolonial movements were subsequent to it, and that may not have been the case if the American Revolution didn’t happen when it did.

You’re absolutely right, and it would’ve been very interesting if, for example, the model of modern revolutions against old regimes, revolution against aristocracy and monarchies, had been France instead of the United States. The French Revolution was somewhat influenced by the American Revolution, but there was enough going on in France that they didn’t require something 3,000 miles away to make it happen. And if the French model had been the one that was presented to the world, there’s no telling exactly what that would’ve meant. Perhaps the world would’ve been put off by the violence into which the French Revolution descended, whereas the American Revolution took place in an arena where the losers, the Loyalists, could leave, and so they didn’t get massacred in score settlings after the war. Who knows?

I would add one thing on this, though. Most Americans would probably say it’s a good thing that the United States became independent, and maybe a good thing that it happened when it did. But if one imagines a scenario where, let’s say, the Parliament in 1765 or 1770, instead of doubling down on its prerogatives and telling the Americans, “You’re going to obey or we’re going to make you obey,” changed its policy so that there wasn’t a revolution, then the United States might have been spared some of the problems of its own historical development.

I’m thinking of two problems in particular. One is the problem of our federal system, where we have states and we have a central government. We have states because when this revolution broke out, the United States of America was construed as plural states, and each one was a sovereign entity because each had a direct relationship to Britain that it didn’t have to the other states. Some people like our federal system, but there are definite problems with it. The other possibility is even deeper: The United States might have ended slavery differently and more easily than it did, because slavery was ended in the British Empire 30 years before it ended in the United States. So, it might have happened sooner than it did, and it might have averted the American Civil War.

Or that’s when we would have had the American Revolution.

Exactly.

Sorry to be cynical about it. But that segues directly into my next question, which is: Can you tell us about Washington’s complicated relationship to slavery?

Washington, like many slave owners before the American Revolution, gave little thought to the ethics of owning slaves. He believed that there were things in the world that were pleasant and things in the world that were unpleasant, and he owned a bunch of slaves.

Now, its important to note, for Washington’s own intellectual development on the subject and also for his own actions: Most of the slaves that worked on the Mount Vernon plantation, Washington did not own. They had come to his marriage through his wife, who was a widow of a very wealthy guy named Daniel Custis, and he left her hundreds of slaves. Except, here’s the complication even to that: Martha Custis Washington didn’t own those slaves either. They were held in trust for her children, so she couldn’t have freed the slaves, and this was fairly common. Think about the way most people today don’t actually own their houses; instead they take out a mortgage, and the bank owns the house. If I was all of a sudden feeling very charitable, I couldn’t just give away my house and give the proceeds to the poor because my creditors, the bank, wouldn’t let me.

Anyway, Washington didn’t think much at all morally about slavery before the American Revolution, and, I would add, neither did almost anybody else. There were a few people, a few Quakers and a few Baptists, who said, “This is not such a good idea.” But by and large, it was just part of life. But once the Declaration of Independence says all men are created equal, and Washington tells his soldiers “the Declaration says we’re fighting for freedom and for equality,” then he realizes, wait a minute, I’m the head of this army fighting for freedom and equality, and I’ve got hundreds of people that have to answer to me, and they’re not free or equal. He begins to see that there is this contradiction here.

I see no evidence, or very little evidence, that Washington thought that slavery was a sin in any kind of religious or moral sense, but he thought it was sort of a civic sin and that it was going to undermine the credibility of small R republican politics in the United States. So, he asked himself, “How can we end this?” and he thought about it for the country as a whole, but he realized that this was something that was going to take time.

It was also quite possible for people in the 1780s and 1790s to believe that slavery was dying. It’s easy to criticize the Constitutional Convention of 1787 for not dealing head-on with the issue of slavery, but it’s a little bit unfair because, from their perspective, slavery was beginning to be outlawed. It had been outlawed in several Northern states, and there was this feeling that it’s probably going to be outlawed among the Southern states, and so if we don’t make too big a deal of it, it’ll go away of its own.

So, while Washington was president, he began to think, “We have to do something about this.” And he began thinking of how he could sell off some of the property at Mount Vernon in a way that would free the slaves. Then, when he died, he arranged that the slaves that he actually did own would be freed upon the death of Martha, and the reason for that delay was that his slaves and Martha’s slaves were all mixed together. They were intermarried, they had families, and for half of them to be freed and the other half to be remained enslaved would disrupt lives and break up families. So that’s the evolution of his thinking on it.

If people are going to read two books on George Washington, one of them being yours, what is the other? What was the most important to you in writing this book?

I’m going to confess something that is maybe a bit unusual for my approach to history, and that is: When I decide to write about George Washington, for example, I make a point of not reading potentially competing biographies.

The reason for this is, first of all, the thing that interests me in history is not what historians have to say about history. It’s what the actors in history had to say about themselves. I got hooked on history when I was in college and shortly afterwards by reading old diaries, collection of letters, the journals of trips across the American West, and stuff like this, and the immediacy of what historians call the primary documents was really crucial to me. In fact, I would say my primary mission in writing and teaching history is to allow my readers and my students to see what the world looked like to the people back then, not to hear what Brands has to say about them. There’s some of that, inevitably, but for the most part, I want the reader of this book to see what George Washington’s world looked like to him. I tell my students and tell audiences that the superpower of the historian is the ability to see the world through other eyes, and this is what historians do all the time. This is the way we do what we do.

So, I tend to avoid other biographers, partly because I like the immediacy of the primary sources themselves, but also I don’t want to feel as though I am writing either against an interpretation of somebody else or in favor of an interpretation of somebody else. I want to come at it myself.

But, since you asked the question, I will tell you what was deeply formative to me in writing about George Washington. When I was a kid, my father — he was a businessman, not an academic at all, but he had an interest in the world and he occasionally read history books while he was working — in his home office, up on a bookshelf, he had a collection of a multi-volume biography of George Washington written by a Virginian named Douglas Freeman, who was a full-time journalist and part-time biographer. And my dad would point to those books and say, “Billy, I’ve read all those books, and I can tell you what George Washington had for breakfast every day of his life.” I was impressed, and I worked my way through the volumes, and I thought, “Well, this is an interesting guy. It’s an interesting time.” And when I started writing about Washington, I did think, “well, I’m not going to write so much. I’m not going to tell you what he had for breakfast.” That’s more than we need to know 250 years later. But I was impressed that here’s a big story, a big canvas, and so there’s a big story to tell.

So that’s the book, I would say. Get that one. It’s probably out of print, but you can get it used. And then mine, of course.

Did you have an imaginary friend as a child? A stuffed animal you told your deepest secrets to? A longstanding hope you’d catch the Tooth Fairy in the act?

If the answer is yes, you’re in good company. Not only do almost all children engage in imaginative play involving made-up characters, pretending, and belief in the existence of things that aren’t real, but that imaginative play is crucial to learning to identify what is real. And our understanding of the distinction says a lot about who we are, as humans, when we grow up.

Jacqueline Woolley, a psychologist at The University of Texas at Austin who regularly teaches a course called “Why We Believe Weird Things” and whose research and teaching focuses on these phenomena in children, says that imaginative thinking of this type starts much earlier than you might expect. Her own research into the fantasy/reality distinction concentrates on kids as young as 3, when they’re able to speak somewhat expressively, but other research indicates that even infants seem to have the ability to differentiate between real and not-real things. It’s this distinction that enables kids to create vivid imaginary companions but not confuse them with their real friends, Woolley says. It’s also what enables kids to distinguish between what’s possible — like walking — and what’s not — like walking through a wall.

Woolley stops short of saying that this type of thinking is innate. As a psychologist, the question of nature versus nurture underpins most research in her field, and she notes that we are introduced to environmental, or “nurture,” factors basically from birth. But she does believe that humans are born with certain predispositions that facilitate beliefs in fantastical things.

Take the human tendency to identify patterns. “We’re always looking for things that kind of fit together or that maybe look like something else,” Woolley says, and this type of “connection finding” sometimes causes us to recognize patterns and affiliations that don’t exist. We may also experience two events that happen close in time and then mistakenly infer that they’re causally related.

“This is how a lot of superstitious beliefs form,” Woolley says. “We might wear blue one day, win our tennis tournament, and think those two things are connected by the same basic physical causality as when a ball rolls and hits another ball and makes it move. These two things happened close in time, so we infer that there’s some special relationship between them.”

As a species, we don’t like to feel out of control, Woolley explains, and our superstitious beliefs help us feel in control of our lives. If you want to win your tennis tournament, you may make sure to wear blue. If you want control over something bigger, like why bad things happen, you might look to fate, the supernatural, or even God.

The connection between the imagination and superstitious or supernatural belief might also explain why there are some cultures in the U.S. that discourage this kind of imaginative thinking, Woolley says. For example, certain fundamentalist Christian groups don’t suggest to children that there may be some other omniscient being other than God (like Santa, for one). And the Mennonites, who seem to steer their kids away from pretend play and fantasy worlds, might do so because they want their children to focus that productive, generative energy toward their community instead. Interestingly, research shows that kids in these cultures still believe in Santa and still engage in pretending, even if they keep their beliefs to themselves.

But how exactly does one measure an understanding of “reality” anyway? Asking small children these kinds of philosophical questions can be challenging, Woolley says, but it’s also essential to her research. One way she helps define reality to kids is by defining what it’s not. “Is this real or is it a dream?” she asks. “Is it real or is it fake? Could this happen in the real world, or could it not happen?”

“I feel like it’s hard to ask about reality without presenting which alternative you’re talking about,” Woolley explains, “so we try to capitalize on that with kids.” And, she’s found, the distinction between real and the “pretend,” is one of the first contrasts that kids use in their natural language, often as early as age 2.

So, what does it all mean? And why is it important? Turns out it’s pretty ontological. “It’s a fundamental aspect of adult cognition,” says Woolley. “It’s the basic question of what is, what exists,” meaning this type of imaginative thinking is how we begin to question who we are and why we’re here.

The shared distinction between real and unreal is also necessary for further communication: Without it, we might not be able to talk to kids on their level at all. This ability to communicate with kids in turn enhances their learning by enabling them to engage in a process of “figuring out” what’s real and what’s not. They become active investigators. Woolley says she likes to think of kids’ experience believing in fantastical beings like Santa as “imagining the impossible.” She believes it helps our brains to think out-of-the-box, to be more creative and more innovative, and that this might translate to creativity and critical thinking skills in adults.

But if all this imagination is important for children’s development and likely contributes to creativity and invention in adulthood, what’s the flip side? Is there a danger of having too much imagination? Is there a correlation between creative thinking and adult fringe groups like conspiracy theorists? Can “weird things” somehow go wrong as we age?

“That’s the $64,000 question,” Woolley says. For the most part, these early tendencies seem to evolve into positive qualities. She cites previous research on famous authors that found they were more likely to have had imaginary friends in childhood — but it’s not impossible that the same tendency that allows us to believe in Santa Claus might also allow us to glom on to anecdotal evidence as scientific evidence on the efficacy of a juice cleanse, for example.

“I do see kids who are on the skeptical end of things and kids who are on credulous end of things,” Woolley says. “Is it something that they’re born with? Or is it something about their family environment that is making them this way? That’s the core question of any developmental research. I always think that it’s both.”

Woolley points to adult research on personality, particularly the “Big Five” personality test, to consider why some people are more likely to believe weird things and others not. Openness, one of the components the Big Five measures, aims to measure imagination and curiosity. It’s hard to capture this well in kids, Woolley says, but it may be that some kids are just more open and curious by this definition. Perhaps those are the kids who will turn out to be our inventors or artists, or perhaps those are the kids who will turn out to believe in conspiracy theories.

Another factor that might explain why people believe weird things is cognitive reflection, which refers to how much someone explicitly reflects on their thoughts. “If I give a quiz,” Woolley says, “some people will just spit out the answer right away and other people will reflect for a longer time. This is speculation, but maybe people who are more inclined to reflect about their own thinking are able to resist superstitious behavior or maybe even conspiracy theories.”

But for people who can’t resist conspiracy theories — groups like the Flat Earth Society, for example, who commit their lives to believing something fundamentally untrue — Woolley has found, most of the time, that misguided beliefs rarely come from simple errors in thinking or critical reasoning. In fact, she says, they often come from a much more complex desire that individuals have to belong to a group and to feel like they have some kind of defined identity. That desire is so strong in humans that it can affect belief.

Between the desire to belong, the desire for the control, the desire for patterns, and more, Woolley’s research demonstrates that belief is never as simple as fantasy versus reality. Regardless of our age, imagination and curiosity overlap with and shape our shared sense of reality. So, the next time you wear your blue shirt to your tennis tournament or slip a quarter under your kid’s pillow, remember that the distinction between real and unreal can be as hard to pin down as Santa or the Tooth Fairy.

As artificial intelligence moves from science fiction to everyday reality, questions about how this new technology will reshape human life are everywhere, with few answers in sight. This is perhaps especially true in higher education, where faculty and students find themselves caught somewhere between the old world and the new. What skills will the workers of tomorrow need? Will there be workers of tomorrow at all? Is there still time and space for humanistic thinkers and researchers to help shape developing AI models, or are we already locked into a timeline of limitless expansion, whatever the cost?

Here at UT Austin, the AI+Human Objectives Initiative, or AHOI, is a new faculty collective “interested in ensuring that the social impact of advanced artificial intelligence is aligned with human goals and values,” which is to say it’s interested in making sure any coming AI revolution doesn’t crush us all. Last month I met with two of its leaders, linguist Kyle Mahowald (you may have played his crossword puzzle) and philosopher Harvey Lederman (you may have read his essay on ChatGPT and human meaning). In the lightly edited and condensed version of our conversation that follows, we discuss whether alignment is a hopeless project, why universities have been “asleep at the wheel,” how AI is already transforming research and teaching, and what kinds of social institutions we’ll need to navigate potential upheavals in work, democracy, and education.

Welcome, Kyle and Harvey. Tell me more about what AHOI is and what attracted each of you respectively to this question of how we make sure that AI doesn’t strip us of our humanity.

Harvey Lederman: For the AHOI initiative, the idea was to create an interdisciplinary group that was thinking in a big way about the future, trying to look ahead and act and research on the hypothesis that this technology was going to be as impactful or more impactful than the Industrial Revolution. Whether or not that’s true, we think that we could have the most to do and say if we take that hypothesis seriously and try to think about how to make a transformation of this magnitude go well.

So, we’ve had talks on a wide array of different dimensions of that topic. Some are thinking in a kind of classical way about AI safety: “Let’s make sure it doesn’t kill us all.” Some are thinking about what the future of human employment might be in a world without work. Others are thinking in more technical detail about how we understand what’s going on in the head of AI models. All of these are things that we think are highly relevant to understanding how the human future might look. We’ve also had talks on the politics of the future. How do we make models that respect human autonomy, things like that.

So, the current project is to try to create a flexible forum for creating collaborations going forward. And then we are hoping that subgroups will continue with more substantive projects in different directions. To a certain extent, that’s already happened. Scott Aaronson, one of our members, has already developed a whole part of his group in the direction of AI safety and alignment, and various subsets of us have also been applying for other further projects.

Kyle Mahowald: A big part of this group is based around the idea that, for decades, work in AI took place in computer science and engineering departments with the goal of developing the technology. It was a really hard goal, and for years they didn’t make much progress. But it seems like just in the last few years, this is now happening. Extremely intelligent agents are around, they’re being used for coding projects and all kinds of things. And now the project of studying AI extends far beyond engineering and computer science. It touches every area of academia in various ways, including the humanities, and a lot of interesting philosophical questions and questions in cognitive science, linguistics, and neuroscience are being richly informed by what’s happening in AI. I think all of those disciplines have a role in this big project that is in front of all of us now, which is: How do we navigate this transition as these technologies become not just sci-fi but something that’s really here? A big goal of this project is to bring together those communities and put them in contact with what’s happening in AI.

One question I wanted to ask is — I’m going to say this bluntly and then I’ll try and refine it — is it totally hopeless? I don’t mean that in the sense of “are we all going to die?” But I fear sometimes that the idea of alignment, of making AI human or bringing humanistic expertise and wisdom to it, is kind of beside the point, because OpenAI, Anthropic, and everyone else are in what feels like a structurally inevitable, inexorable arms race to move as quickly as possible, irrespective of all of these concerns we have.

So, one way of asking the question is, is it hopeless? Another way of asking it is: Make the best case possible that the kind of work that you guys are doing with the AHOI initiative will actually make a difference in how we integrate this technology into our lives.

Mahowald: I’ll take the somewhat more optimistic take, which is that this project of alignment is not hopeless. Maybe it’s worth saying what we mean by alignment here. This term has come into vogue in the AI community and basically refers to getting the goals and ends of AI aligned with the goals of humans. You could imagine some AI which has some goal: There’s a famous example of trying to produce as many paperclips as possible. If the AI has that goal and thinks, “Okay, I can kill all the humans and turn them into paperclips,” that would be an example of a misaligned AI. An AI which is aligned with human goals is one which works with and towards aims that, as humans, we’ve decided are the ones that we want. Then you get this really interesting question, which is, what are the goals and aims that we want? That’s why philosophers have a lot to say about these issues.

The thing that gives me some hope is that a few years ago, these models, like Claude and ChatGPT, were based fundamentally on next word prediction. It seemed like it would be really hard to ever get them to behave in ways which avoid the really bad behaviors of texts out there, because there’s tons of hateful stuff on the internet. The project of getting these models aligned with being cooperative and helpful and harmless, which are some of the buzzwords at these companies, I feel like that’s gone reasonably well. If you talk to Claude, it’s generally not going to spew hate speech, even if you try to get it to. It’s pretty good at not doing that, even though its training corpus includes lots of terrible stuff from the internet. I think that’s proof of concept that if you have some reasonably well-scoped goal and try to get the model aligned with that goal, it’s possible to bring these things into some kind of alignment. As they get better and more widely used, it gets harder to think about what the goals are and how to bring them into line, but I think there’s some hope.

Lederman: I think if you encountered this problem in 2014 — which I’m picking because it was the date of a relatively famous book called Superintelligence by the philosopher Nick Bostrom — people were thinking, “We’re going to have to give the AI goals, and when we give the AI goals, we might make a mistake. And the AI is going to be super powerful, so if we make a mistake, it’s going to exploit that mistake, and this could lead to absolutely catastrophic results.” That was the alignment problem as it was understood then. Now it seems like the AI acquire goals through a mix of the text that they learn and then what’s called post-training, which is the sort of thing Kyle was talking about, where humans actually tell it which things it’s okay to say and which things it’s not okay to say. And I think for many of us, it seems absolutely insane that this has worked as well as it has up until now.

That isn’t to say that the risks are avoided by any means. But, sort of surprisingly, in part because of the way that the models arise by sort of ingesting all of the internet, somehow human values have ended up being easier to elicit than people anticipated in 2014. That’s not to say alignment is solved or that it’s over, but I think it’s fair to say that one part, the part up to the capabilities that we now have, has turned out to be easier than people anticipated.

My “hot take” on this is — and I don’t think this is at all original to me — is that we are much farther behind in societal readiness, in the sense of organizing social institutions that are going to handle the mass deployment of this technology, than we are in alignment of the models. The models pose tons of threats, and there is still an enormous amount to do there. But we also really need to think about what sorts of institutions are going to manage the deployment of these models and how the societal disruption that many anticipate from their widespread use. I think we have done a very bad job of thinking seriously so far about proposals that would allow the development of the technology but also regulate it in a reasonable way. We also haven’t done a good job of thinking about what happens if we get mass unemployment of white-collar workers in the next few years. How do we manage that as a country? How do we think about trying to equalize economic power in an age where it might be that a lot of individual productivity comes from how much computing you have, i.e. just how much wealth you have?

And there is the possibility that this technology makes capital a perfect substitute for labor in general. I don’t think that’s an inevitability; many people think that it won’t be a perfect substitute, at least not for a very long time. But if it is a perfect substitute, it basically means that you don’t need workers, you just need wealth. If that becomes true, there will need to be some kind of governmental or societal intervention that makes it so that those of us who do not run an AI are not totally economically or democratically disempowered.

On these questions, I think we are lagging far behind even where we are on the technical solutions, where there is also a lot to be done. I’m hopeful that there will be increasingly more work on this in the next seven or eight months, but we don’t have an infinity of time to solve these problems, and I think there’s a lot more that we need to do to solve them.

You’re talking about the social institutions needed to manage this transition. So, let’s talk about the one that you guys operate in, which is the university and teaching. How has AI changed your teaching? How will it change your teaching? How are you thinking about that?

Mahowald: I think it’s a very open question. I’m pretty sympathetic to what people are calling the dumbbell approach, which is a focus on skills on both the extreme AI end and the extreme not-AI end. One of the things I’ve been trying is to get students using AI in critical and interesting ways in my classes. I’m teaching “Ethics and AI” right now, and we have this elaborate semester-long exercise called Claude’s Ethics Emporium, where the students go in and they do ethics assignments in exchange for Claude bucks with the AI acting as a shopkeeper. It’s not only a chance for them to do the assignment but also a chance to try to mess with the system and see if they can get it to give Claude bucks when it shouldn’t. They write essays about what the risks and challenges are of putting an AI in charge of a system like this. It’s a chance for them to think critically and understand strengths and limitations of AI.

On the other hand, we’re giving midterms and finals on pen and paper and weighting those more heavily than we used to because it’s very easy to ask the AI for the other assignments. So, I don’t think the answer is to say, “Well, let’s not teach students to write anymore. Let’s not teach them to do these kinds of things anymore,” because it’s good for them to learn how to write and learn how to think. I don’t think AI is going to mean humans don’t need to think anymore. Basically, I want to try to cultivate skills on both sides.

Lederman: I’m going to use my little platform as a soapbox here, but I’m absolutely astonished how many faculty are doing business as usual, just assuming that students won’t cheat. I think people are incredibly naïve about how good the technology is, and I think this is a huge mistake. My first impulse was to do everything on bluebook for that reason, but I think Kyle’s absolutely right that, long term, students need to have opportunities where they’re going to learn to write, and I think we haven’t cracked how to do it yet.

In my current class, I’m doing something like what Kyle described, where you’re not going to do well in the class unless you do well on the bluebook assignments. But there are also opportunities for writing outside of class. I’m experimenting with different ways of managing tools for basically watching what students are doing. In this case, I’m having students make me an editor of a Google Doc so I can see the edit history. That’s not uncrackable; you can definitely cheat in ways that make the edit history look plausible, but it makes it that much more demanding. I’m hoping that if we raise the difficulty bar for cheating enough, students will decide to just try writing it themselves.

Mahowald: We also don’t quite know the answers to questions like, “In a few years, what is going to be the best way to produce a research paper?” It’s probably going to involve AI in every step of the process.

I’m optimistic that in principle we should be getting the best, most clearly written papers that we’ve ever had. Somehow that’s not happening. What we’re getting right now is slop. So I hope we can get to a point where the humans and AI are working together to produce the best research output, the best writing, the best stuff we’ve ever seen. It hasn’t quite happened yet, but it should.

Can you tell us, in really concrete terms, how you’re using AI to do your own core intellectual work? What tools are you using? Are you running agents? Are you developing software? Just so people understand what questions you’re facing when you’re thinking about how to use these tools in your own research.

Mahowald: There’s a lot of different points in the pipeline where it comes in now. The easiest and most dramatic one, just in the last few months, is Claude Code for writing software. A big part of what we do when we’re doing research in linguistics or computer science, where we’re running empirical experiments, is writing software basically to run experiments on machine learning. Claude Code has largely replaced doing that by hand. It’s very good and reliable, so it’s possible to do a lot more and be more productive. Right now it doesn’t mean the human’s completely out of the loop, it means there’s a human interacting with Claude Code saying, “I want you to write a script which does this.” It’ll say, “Here’s the script.” Then you have to still right now think, like, “How do I make sure it hasn’t messed up? How can I sanity check it? How can I make sure the right thing’s happening?” But it’s sped up the pace of software development by more than tenfold, I would say. It’s made things possible that were not possible before.

Lederman: I just co-authored a paper with Kyle that I wouldn’t have been able to do in the relevant time without Claude Code. This was an experimental paper where I was running experiments on open source large language models. I think I could have taught myself to do that without these tools, but never within the timeframe that was required to make a relevant contribution to this literature. So this was a project that was totally possible in January in a way that it hadn’t been possible in November.

What was the experiment?

Lederman: We’re building on a paradigm that was introduced by someone at Anthropic named Jack Lindsey. He does something he calls thought injection, where you identify a meaningful vector — basically, you identify the representation of a meaningful concept in the model — and then you can essentially stimulate the model to think about that concept, to focus on it. A famous example was a version of Anthropic’s model Claude that was called “Golden Gate Claude,” which was constantly stimulated to think about the Golden Gate Bridge. So you’d ask it, “Claude, I’m thinking about proposing. Should I do this?” And it would say, “Yes, the Golden Gate Bridge would be an incredible place to do this.” Every conversation turned to the Golden Gate Bridge.

We did a lot of things in our paper, but one thing we did was to replicate an experiment where Anthropic had stimulated the model in this way, and then asked the model, “Can you tell whether you’re being stimulated, i.e. whether you’re having a thought injected?” And they found, remarkably, that when the model is not being steered in this way, it never says yes. But when it is being stimulated in this way, 20 to 40% of the time it says yes. So, in some sense, it can tell that you’re messing with its internals, or at least that’s what it looked like.

Kyle and I were very inspired by this, but also a bit skeptical. So we ran a lot of similar experiments on open source models while also trying to kick the tires to see how real this phenomenon was. We found a bunch of controls that made it look like this was indeed a bit not true. The model wasn’t really noticing something about itself, but was responding “yes” in a context-sensitive way, but not differentiable from yeses it was giving to other neighboring questions. At the same time, we did also find, sort of surprisingly to both of us, evidence that it was doing something much more like introspection, and we tried to pin down exactly how that was working.

So, this was a sort of distinctive product of AHOI. It was a very philosophical question about the nature of introspective knowledge that had this technical experiment that we could develop.

Mahowald: This question of introspection is one of the things I think Harvey and I are both really excited about. You can go ask Claude, “What is it like to be you, Claude?” and it’ll give you some answer. It’ll be like, “Oh, I don’t really have feelings, but I kind of have this sense of seeing words in the distance and I pick the next word,” and it’ll give you this whole story. I think it’s a completely open question whether that story has anything at all to do with what’s happening inside Claude. It’s also very plausible that Claude has been trained on tons of sci-fi and it’s read about what humans have imagined it’s like to be a robot. So when you ask, “What is it like to be an AI?” it’s plausible that it’s giving you an answer based on how humans have imagined it’s like to be an AI. At the same time, it’s not completely implausible that it actually is able to somehow tell you something about what it’s like to be Claude, and distinguishing those is really tricky and interesting. That’s something that we’re excited about and a lot of people, I think, are excited about in the field right now.

I’m going to combine a few questions into one that you guys can take on however you want. One is, has AI changed the quality of your discussions in class? And the other is, how do you plan on curbing cognitive surrender in students to AI? I think there have been a lot of stories — and I think we should have appropriate skepticism of them — that there’s been a real deterioration in the last few years over students’ capacity to think and that that may be due to AI as well as to phones and things like that.

Lederman: I’ll say, I have had a lot of fun in the classroom this semester. I’m teaching Chinese philosophy, which is a survey course from Confucius to neo-Confucianism, which is a movement that started in the 11th century. These are pretty obscure, demanding texts, and a good percentage of my students are very engaged. They’re really doing the reading. They’re really thinking about it. We have great class discussions. I would say that it’s been one of my most fun classroom experiences in a while. I would not say there’s been any real deterioration of quality of discussion or thought, and there’s been a lot of the sort of beautiful earnestness that is what college is all about and that you would not think exists if you only read the newspapers.

I often feel, reading these very critical discussions in the public press, that people are just judging, without any actual experience, what they think is likely happening. They have not spent significant time on a college campus now, or ever since they were students, but they still think they know that everything is broken. They haven’t actually talked to the kids! And a lot of the kids, not every kid, but a lot of the kids are all right. They’re serious, they’re thoughtful, and they’re willing to learn about crazy things in a way that I personally find very inspiring, as it has always been.

What roles do universities have to play in this field right now? Are we players or actors in this larger drama, or are we observing from the sidelines? When we’re doing applied research in AI, are we just cogs in the larger machine that’s ultimately being driven by OpenAI and Anthropic?

Lederman: I’m going to take the bait and try to give an even more provocative take than I’ve been giving. I think universities have been totally asleep at the wheel on this and actually have an enormous role to play. We have basically let the the AI companies lead the conversation about what these models are, how they’re going to impact society, and how people should respond to them. And universities, especially humanists, have basically responded by saying, “Oh, no, my students are plagiarizing their essays,” which matters, sure, but it is just not the main thing that is happening or going to happen. The main thing that is going to happen is there could be an enormous displacement of labor. Why are researchers at universities not giving concrete proposals about how regulation of this technology should work, or about how society should be structured to preserve democracy? Why are we not giving concrete proposals about how to audit the models in a way that the AI companies are not incentivized to? The university could be a huge source of power and new ideas if we faced seriously what the technology is, but collectively, so far, we’re asleep.

Of course these are things that some individuals at universities are doing, but I think universities have not been the sort of concerted test bed for especially policy ideas that we could in principle be. Instead, the conversation has been led by denialists who are either pretending that this doesn’t exist or who are mainly concerned about plagiarism. Frankly, that is just not the biggest point and not the biggest issue that we are going to face as a society. For me, it’s been incredibly disappointing in the last few years to see how behind universities and faculty have been. I hope that people start waking up and giving more serious engagement with what is actually happening in the world instead of worrying so much about the take-home essay.

Mahowald: I think that’s right, and I think that’s the kind of thing we’re hoping to achieve with this initiative. I also believe very strongly in the role of the research university, especially for something like this. These companies have enormous motives, which are not just to communicate the truth to the public.

This introspection study that we based our work off of came out of Anthropic. It was very interesting work released as a blog post, but quite far from the standards of academic publishing. People complain sometimes about the pace of academic publishing and lots of aspects of it, but there’s something good and important about the academic standards and the way that we do research at universities. So I think there’s a chance for universities to really step up and be big players here.

There has been hand-wringing at times about how we don’t have the scale and resources to keep up with the kind of research that’s happening at labs. A few years ago the numbers came out about one of the earlier models, and I remember it was like, “Oh, you would need five million dollars to train a model like that. We can’t possibly do it.” And five million dollars is a lot, but universities have five million dollars; five million dollars is not an absolute end-of-the-world number in the sciences. Over the last few years, I think that probably universities should have been putting more resources into building and training models. The cost is high, but it’s not so enormous. We can start to do this more now, and we should.

I’m going to close on a massive question, which is: If we made you, Kyle and Harvey, czars of the university in charge of all policies, procedures, and budgets, etc, how would you organize the university to respond to the revolutionary, transformative moment that it’s possible AI represents?

Lederman: From an education perspective, I actually have a more conservative vision than many people. Kyle mentioned this barbell approach; I believe in that. But I think people need to learn how to think. The university has been teaching that. If you weren’t doing a good job of that before, the bad job you were doing is going to continue to be bad. But if you were doing a good job of that before, I think those are skills that continue to be valuable.

We don’t know what the future’s going to look like, now more than ever. We don’t know concretely what things are good to teach. But being smart and a critical thinker and a deep thinker is going to continue to be important, maybe even more important, as the leverage at the very high end of ideas is probably increasing with this new technology.

From a policy perspective, I think we have to be taking this really seriously and thinking, as you said, that it is going to be a transformative technology, and trying to engage with it on those terms. I think too many of the discussions that are happening are in the denial phase of grief. We need to get past that, and we need to start thinking, “okay, the world has changed or it will change. Where are we going?” or better “Where do we want to go? How do we get there?”

Mahowald: As a research university, that’s what we do. We try stuff, see what works, and write about it. I think that’s something we could be doing a lot more of. Like Harvey said, we need to be throwing ourselves headfirst into these issues and saying “this is what works, this is what doesn’t,” and trying to produce knowledge, as we always have.

In a similar spirit of reflection and celebration, we here at EC headquarters thought we’d take this moment to share some college highlights and superlatives from the last few months (many featuring some familiar Extra Credit names). Without further ado…

Most videogenic

English professor Janine Barchas, of “Paper Jane” fame, received a 2026 President’s Research Impact Award from UT Austin in honor of her work bringing Jane Austen to new generations of readers. Part of the award: A video deep-dive into her research and its impacts in Austin and abroad.

Alongside Barchas, COLA English professor and fiction writer Oscar Cásares was honored with the university’s Creative Research Excellence Award for his “Postcards from the Border” project, a theatrical adaptation of an essay he wrote for Texas Monthly. He also got a video, as well as a feature story in Life & Letters.

Most viral

Sometimes it’s hard to know what research will resonate with press and the public. Fascinating work — did you know, for example, that wetlands were essential to the ancient Maya’s ability to adapt to climate change? — will often get some regional or area-specific attention without breaking through to a national audience.

Other times, it’s easy to see that a new paper is going to hit the big time. Take Aaron Sandel’s recent work on a deadly schism in the world’s largest chimpanzee community:

In a study published in Science, researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and other institutions report the first clearly documented permanent fission in wild chimpanzees and the years of violence between the two groups that followed. The findings draw on three decades of ongoing field observations of the Ngogo chimpanzees of Kibale National Park, Uganda — a population featured in the Netflix documentary series “Chimp Empire” — and may offer insight into causes of conflict in our own species.

The community was cohesive for the first two decades of research. Individual chimpanzees moved between flexible subgroups, or “clusters,” and maintained social ties across the community — a fission-fusion dynamic typical of the species, in which individuals temporarily separate and reunite. In 2015, however, the team witnessed signs of polarization, with the Western and Central clusters increasingly avoiding each other. This shift coincided with a change in the male dominance hierarchy and came one year after the deaths of several adult males who may have functioned as bridges holding the larger community together.

By 2018, the fission was complete. The chimpanzees now belonged to two distinct groups with separate territories: a Western group with 83 chimps and a Central group with 107 chimps. What followed was a series of lethal attacks by the Western group on members of the Central group. Between 2018 and 2024, researchers directly observed or documented from physical evidence seven attacks on adult males and 17 on infants.

“What’s especially striking is that the chimpanzees are killing former group members,” said Aaron Sandel, associate professor of anthropology at UT Austin and the study’s lead author. “The new group identities are overriding cooperative relationships that had existed for years.”

Within days of the release quoted above, Sandel’s research was in or on The New York Times, BBC Wildlife Magazine, NBC, and Scientific American. If you somehow missed the news, consider this your chance to catch up.

Most “enhanced”

Historian John Hoberman, author of last week’s Enhanced Games takedown, was interviewed for the NYT Magazine’s recent cover story, “The Testosterone Moment Is Here. And Men May Never Look the Same.” TL;DR: Hoberman’s 2005 book Testosterone Dreams: Rejuvenation, Aphrodisia, Doping correctly predicted the hormone’s inevitable popularity, now playing out in real time.

Most “inside the box” (and a sneak preview of Extra Credits to come)

Almost two years ago, Extra Credit celebrated its first birthday with a crossword by linguistics professor Kyle Mahowald. Now Mahowald’s back in the Life & Letters spotlight with more insights about what makes for a good puzzle:

“There’s something very structural and mathy about designing (and filling) a crossword grid and solving a puzzle in the same way there’s something scientific about linguistics,” Mahowald says. “At the same time, the underlying phenomenon is linguistic. If you really enjoy language and wordplay and thinking about words, (crosswords) can be a really fun way to get to do that while also exercising multiple parts of your mind.”

While many can say they have solved a crossword puzzle, fewer can say they have made one. So how is it done? Mahowald begins by fashioning the grid, which is typically done with the help of computer software. This involves thinking “defensively” about the relationship between each answer word and black square, he says.

“You want the grid to be full of fun, lively answers and generally free of obscurity,” he says. “You don’t want it to be the case that if the puzzle is a hard puzzle, it’s hard because the person just doesn’t know the words, right? That’s kind of unsatisfying.”

Rather than unfamiliar words, a puzzle’s difficulty should come from the clues, which are written after the grid is complete and often changed by a puzzle’s editor, Mahowald says. By strategically crafting his grid, Mahowald can better avoid “crosswordese,” or words that appear frequently in crossword puzzles but infrequently in everyday conversation. Rather, he strives to introduce fresh yet familiar phrases within his puzzles.

“If someone is the first to use some new phrase that has come around and is now very familiar, that can be a kind of thrill as a constructor,” he says.

In addition to writing and solving crosswords, Mahowald is also at work (alongside EC writer Harvey Lederman) on a new initiative at UT working to ensure that AI outcomes are aligned with human goals and values. Watch this space for more on that project soon, and thanks as always for reading Extra Credit.

By John Hoberman

The use of performance-enhancing drugs in elite sports over the past 70 years has been massive, unknowable in its scope, and beyond effective regulation. The doping control system managed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has been spectacularly ineffective. Since drug testing began in 1968 at the Mexico City Olympic Games, far less than one percent of the athletes tested at the Olympic Games have tested positive for a banned doping drug. Informed estimates of doping prevalence are much higher, depending on the sports discipline.

The concept of athletic “doping” has existed for the past century. It arose in Germany during the 1920s to enforce a distinction between “natural” athletic effort and the ethically illegitimate boosting of human performance by means of performance-enhancing drugs.

Given the well-known failures of the drug-testing regime, some have argued that doping drugs should not be banned at all. Advocates for legalized doping have long argued that doping athletes under medical supervision is a safe and fair arrangement that creates a level playing field for all competitors. In fact, as we will see below, medically supervised doping has never been safe.

The American sporting public may remember the most recent American doping scandals that prompted, not an acceptance of doping, but widespread condemnation. The BALCO steroid doping scandal in 2003 compromised the reputations of the baseball superstar Barry Bonds and star sprinter Marion Jones. In 2013 the American super-cyclist Lance Armstrong finally admitted to having doped throughout his spectacular career. Also in 2013, Biogenesis, a Florida-based rejuvenation clinic, was exposed for supplying doping drugs to Major League Baseball players.

The doping epidemic that has developed for most of the past century has proven to be intractable. At the same time, major sports organizations and sports fans have accepted the status quo so that our sports culture can continue to provide its enormously popular entertainments.

So the question arises: How might this stalemate between the irresistible pressures to dope and the official mandate to offer the public “clean” sport be broken? Who might have a formula to resolve this dilemma?

In June 2023, an Australian lawyer and entrepreneur named Aron D’Souza told the world that, along with the American billionaire Peter Thiel and other hyper-wealthy investors, he was going to stage “Enhanced Games,” a drug-fueled athletic competition to challenge the International Olympic Committee’s ban on the use of performance-enhancing drugs by Olympic athletes.

Over the next two years, D’Souza fed the gullible global media a series of sensational and misleading claims that inspired headlines such as “Enhanced Games: “Event for doped athletes backed by group who want to ‘cheat death’” and “A doping free-for-all Enhanced Games calls itself the answer to doping in sports.” “‘I want to see 60-year-olds breaking world records,” D’Souza exclaimed, and the overwhelming media response was to take him at his word.

After the first sensationalistic phase of publicity, the Games leadership has implemented an anticlimactic shift from the initial fantasies of a debauched pharmacological carnival where anything goes to a tamer version of conducting doping experiments on human athletes. “It’s not a complete free-for-all,” D’Souza said in 2024. “We don’t want to do anything that’s like really pushing the boundaries – insurance won’t let me do that.”

During most of two years of media-generated publicity, D’Souza had been happy to watch credulous reporters spread the idea that these Games were going to be a no-holds-barred doping bacchanalia of taboo-breaking that would set the venerable IOC back on its heels. This was the swashbuckling ethos that had kept the Games in the public eye. But now the goal was to portray the Games as a benign medical operation that cared only for the medical safety of the athletes and that would generate medical data that would advance human health. At this point there were promises of comprehensive medical supervision of the athletes and a guarantee that this doping experiment would be the “safest” elite sports event ever staged for the sporting public.

The Enhanced Game’s leadership’s claims about medical care for their doped athletes has been as opaque and unreliable as their claims about the recruitment of their experimental subjects. There is no indication that any of the members of their “Independent Medical Commission” have treated the athletes. All the doctors purportedly treating the athletes remain anonymous. The only doctor named is Dr. Ravi Trehan, an orthopedic surgeon at the Sheikh Shakhbout Medical City in Abu Dhabi, where the athletes are being doped before leaving for Las Vegas in May.

In fact, medically supervised doping has never been safe. The expert doping doctors of the former East Germany caused hundreds of female athletes to suffer terrible medical injuries to their reproductive and other organs. Doping doctors have never achieved medical legitimacy, in part because it is unethical to administer non-therapeutic drugs to patients, and because they recklessly disregard the medical dangers that lurk everywhere. In short, the Enhanced Games project has promoted the subversion of standard medical care.

The medical dangers of athletic doping have been thoroughly documented. Anabolic steroids can cause liver damage and depression, blood doping can cause strokes and heart attacks, human growth hormone can cause high blood pressure and diabetes. The Enhanced policy has been to avoid the subject of doping side-effects or to discount them.

The recruitment of athletes to compete in the Games has turned out to be an abject failure, following a long series of false or simply fanciful claims and assurances D’Souza has fed to the media. Having devoted his adult life to making money, he assumed that throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars at athletes would convince them to sign up. He apparently did not realize that his “Olympics on steroids” would prompt the International Olympic Committee (IOC), as well as the major international sports federations, to expel any athletes who took D’Souza up on his offer. Nor did he understand that wealthy Olympic champions do not need “life-changing” money from a rogue operator sponsoring an allegedly revolutionary type of athletic competition.

Below is a narrative of some of the false or simply fanciful claims and assurances D’Souza has fed to the media over a period of almost two years.

In July 2023 a member of the Enhanced Games Athletes Advisory Committee claimed that “over five hundred athletes had contacted him asking him for more information.” In August 2023 D’Souza claimed that there were over 500 “sleeper athletes” who were “breaking world records in their basements and sending us videos of it.” In early 2024 D’Souza said that he was getting more than 100 requests for interviews every day. In March 2024 he stated that “On our peak day, we’ve had 4000 inbound requests.” In May 2024 D’Souza claimed that 1500 athletes had made formal applications to compete in the Games. In February 2025 he estimated the number of athletes who would participate to be “maybe a couple of thousand.”

As of April 26, 2026, the Enhanced Games website listed exactly 39 athletes as participants in the Enhanced Games that are scheduled to take place in Las Vegas on May 24, 2026.

D’Souza’s claim that the Enhanced Games represent a novel “scientific” methodology for using drugs to stimulate record-breaking athletic performances has always been pure hyperbole. For one thing, there is nothing less original than doping athletes for the purpose of setting world records. Doped world records have been set on countless occasions throughout the doping epidemic in elite sport that dates from the 1960s. In fact, two steroid-fueled world records set by Czech and East German women in 1983 and 1985 are still standing today and are acknowledged as valid records on the website of World Athletics. It is, therefore, remarkable that D’Souza’s bravado and the falsehoods he has trafficked in over this long campaign have induced so many journalists to accept his claims at face value.

The grand irony of the Enhanced Games operation is that its investors’ ultimate ambition to sell performance-enhancing drugs to a global market has long escaped public attention. Today the Enhanced Games website is selling allegedly performance-enhancing substances to anyone looking for a way to promote a feeling of well-being or lift a flagging libido. Testosterone and the newly fashionable peptides are the prime attractions. In 2024 D’Souza said, “if there’s a magic pill that makes us younger, the fountain of youth, there’ll be infinite revenue there.”

In a word, the Enhanced Games entrepreneurs have joined a long list of shills selling supposedly life-enhancing substances to a public that is too uninformed to judge what these substances may or may not do for their energy levels or to their bodies.

The prospects for breaking records at these Games are not good. When I heard Aron D’Souza speak at a conference in August 2024, he assured us that his enhanced athletes would break multiple world records at the Games. Given the past athletic achievements of the 39 competitors, this prediction borders on the impossible. The Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev may shave a few hundredths of a second off the 50-meter record, but it is also the case that swimming records fall more often than in other sports.

Short of using thick rubber slingshots to launch the sprinters and spring-loaded prosthetics to catapult the weightlifters upwards, the chances we will see world records set are slim.

In summary, the Enhanced Games have been a massive publicity stunt based on fraudulent claims about recruitment, pseudoscientific claims about boosting human performance, and unsubstantiated claims about providing “world-class” medical expertise to athletes currently working with doping doctors in Abu Dhabi, where lenient drug laws permit them to do so.

John Hoberman is a doping historian at the University of Texas at Austin. He is an internationally recognized expert on doping and has published three books on doping and anabolic steroids.

By Harvey Lederman

For the last three years, since the release of ChatGPT, I’ve been suffering from fits of dread. It’s not every minute, or even every day, but maybe once a week, I’m hit by it—slackjawed, staring into the middle distance—frozen by the prospect that someday, maybe pretty soon, everyone will lose their job.

At first, I thought these slackjawed fits were just a phase, a passing thing. I’m a philosophy professor; staring into the middle distance isn’t exactly an unknown disease among my kind. But as the years have begun to pass, and the fits have not, I’ve begun to wonder if there’s something deeper to my dread. Does the coming automation of work foretell, as my fits seem to say, an irreparable loss of value in human life?

The titans of artificial intelligence tell us that there’s nothing to fear. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, the maker of Claude, suggests that: “historical hunter-gatherer societies might have imagined that life is meaningless without hunting,” and “that our well-fed technological society is devoid of purpose.” But of course, we don’t see our lives that way. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, sounds so similar, the text could have been written by ChatGPT. Even if the jobs of the future will look as “fake” to us as ours do to “a subsistence farmer”, Altman has “no doubt they will feel incredibly important and satisfying to the people doing them.”

Alongside these optimists, there are plenty of pessimists who, like me, are filled with dread. Pope Leo XIV has decried the threats AI poses to “human dignity, labor and justice”. Bill Gates has written about his fear, that “if we solved big problems like hunger and disease, and the world kept getting more peaceful: What purpose would humans have then?” And Douglas Hofstadter, the computer scientist and author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, has spoken eloquently of his terror and depression at “an oncoming tsunami that is going to catch all of humanity off guard.”

Who should we believe? The optimists with their bright visions of a world without work, or the pessimists who fear the end of a key source of meaning in human life?

I was brought up, maybe like you, to value hard work and achievement. In our house, scientists were heroes, and discoveries grand prizes of life. I was a diligent, obedient kid, and eagerly imbibed what I was taught. I came to feel that one way a person’s life could go well was to make a discovery, to figure something out.

I had the sense already then that geographical discovery was played out. I loved the heroes of the great Polar Age, but I saw them—especially Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott—as the last of their kind. In December 1911, Amundsen reached the South Pole using skis and dogsleds. Scott reached it a month later, in January 1912, after ditching the motorized sleds he’d hoped would help, and man-hauling the rest of the way. As the black dot of Amundsen’s flag came into view on the ice, Scott was devastated to reach this “awful place”, “without the reward of priority”. He would never make it back.

Scott’s motors failed him, but they spelled the end of the great Polar Age. Even Amundsen took to motors on his return: in 1924, he made a failed attempt for the North Pole in a plane, and, in 1926, he successfully flew over it, in a dirigible. Already by then, the skis and dogsleds of the decade before were outdated heroics of a bygone world.

We may be living now in a similar twilight age for human exploration in the realm of ideas. Akshay Venkatesh, whose discoveries earned him the 2018 Fields Medal, mathematics’ highest honor, has written that, the “mechanization of our cognitive processes will alter our understanding of what mathematics is”. Terry Tao, a 2006 Fields Medalist, expects that in just two years AI will be a copilot for working mathematicians. He envisions a future where thousands of theorems are proven all at once by mechanized minds.

Now, I don’t know any more than the next person where our current technology is headed, or how fast. The core of my dread isn’t based on the idea that human redundancy will come in two years rather than twenty, or, for that matter, two hundred. It’s a more abstract dread, if that’s a thing, dread about what it would mean for human values, or anyway my values, if automation “succeeds”: if all mathematics—and, indeed all work—is done by motor, not by human hands and brains.

A world like that wouldn’t be good news for my childhood dreams. Venkatesh and Tao, like Amundsen and Scott, live meaningful lives, lives of purpose. But worthwhile discoveries like theirs are a scarce resource. A territory, once seen, can’t be seen first again. If mechanized minds consume all the empty space on the intellectual map, lives dedicated to discovery won’t be lives that humans can lead.

The right kind of pessimist sees here an important argument for dread. If discovery is valuable in its own right, the loss of discovery could be an irreparable loss for humankind.

A part of me would like this to be true. But over these last strange years, I’ve come to think it’s not. What matters, I now think, isn’t being the first to figure something out, but the consequences of the discovery: the joy the discoverer gets, the understanding itself, or the real life problem their knowledge solves. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, and through that work saved thousands, perhaps millions of lives. But if it were to emerge, in the annals of an outlandish future, that an alien discovered penicillin thousands of years before Fleming did, we wouldn’t think that Fleming’s life was worse, just because he wasn’t first. He eliminated great suffering from human life; the alien discoverer, if they’re out there, did not. So, I’ve come to see, it’s not discoveries themselves that matter. It’s what they bring about.

But the advance of automation would mean the end of much more than human discovery. It could mean the end of all necessary work. Already in 1920, the Czech playwright Karel Čapek asked what a world like that would mean for the values in human life. In the first act of R.U.R.—the play which introduced the modern use of the word “robot”—Čapek has Henry Domin, the manager of Rossum’s Universal Robots (the R.U.R. of the title), offer his corporation’s utopian pitch. “In ten years”, he says, their robots will “produce so much corn, so much cloth, so much everything” that “There will be no poverty.” “Everybody will be free from worry and liberated from the degradation of labor.” The company’s engineer, Alquist, isn’t convinced. Alquist (who, incidentally, ten years later, will be the only human living, when the robots have killed the rest) retorts that “There was something good in service and something great in humility”, “some kind of virtue in toil and weariness”.

Service—work that meets others’ significant needs and wants— is, unlike discovery, clearly good in and of itself. However we work— as nurses, doctors, teachers, therapists, ministers, lawyers, bankers, or, really, anything at all—working to meet others’ needs makes our own lives go well. But, as Čapek saw, all such work could disappear. In a “post-instrumental” world, where people are comparatively useless and the bots meet all our important needs, there would be no needed work for us to do, no suffering to eliminate, no diseases to cure. Could the end of such work be a better reason for dread?

The hardline pessimists say that it is. They say that the end of all needed work would not only be a loss of some value to humanity, as everyone should agree. For them it would be a loss to humanity on balance, an overall loss, that couldn’t be compensated in another way.

I feel a lot of pull to this pessimistic thought. But once again, I’ve come to think it’s wrong. For one thing, pessimists often overlook just how bad most work actually is. In May 2021, Luo Huazhong, a 31-year-old ex-factory worker in Sichuan wrote a viral post, entitled “Lying Flat is Justice”. Luo had searched at length for a job that, unlike his factory job, would allow him time for himself, but he couldn’t find one. So he quit, biked to Tibet and back, and commenced his lifestyle of lying flat, doing what he pleased, reading philosophy, contemplating the world. The idea struck a chord with overworked young Chinese, who, it emerged, did not find “something great” in their “humility”. The movement inspired memes, selfies flat on one’s back, and even an anthem.

That same year, as the Great Resignation in the United States took off, the subreddit r/antiwork played to similar discontent. Started in 2013, under the motto “Unemployment for all, not only the rich!”, the forum went viral in 2021, starting with a screenshot of a quitting worker’s texts to his supervisor (“No thanks. Have a good life”), and culminating in labor-actions, first supporting striking workers at Kellogg’s by spamming their job application site, and then attempting to support a similar strike at McDonald’s. It wasn’t just young Chinese who hated their jobs.

In Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work, the Irish lawyer and philosopher John Danaher imagines an antiwork techno-utopia, with plenty of room for lying flat. As Danaher puts it: “Work is bad for most people most of the time.”“We should do what we can to hasten the obsolescence of humans in the arena of work.”

The young Karl Marx would have seen both Domin’s and Danaher’s utopias as a catastrophe for human life. In his notebooks from 1844, Marx describes an ornate and almost epic process, where, by meeting the needs of others through production, we come to recognize the other in ourselves, and through that recognition, come at last to self-consciousness, the full actualization of our human nature. The end of needed work, for the Marx of these notes, would be the impossibility of fully realizing our nature, the end, in a way, of humanity itself.

But such pessimistic lamentations have come to seem to me no more than misplaced machismo. Sure, Marx’s and my culture, the ethos of our post-industrial professional class, might make us regret a world without work. But we shouldn’t confuse the way two philosophers were brought up with the fundamental values of human life. What stranger narcissism could there be than bemoaning the end of others’ suffering, disease, and need, just because it deprives you of the chance to be a hero?

The first summer after the release of ChatGPT—the first summer of my fits of dread—I stayed with my in-laws in Val Camonica, a valley in the Italian alps. The houses in their village, Sellero, are empty and getting emptier; the people on the streets are old and getting older. The kids that are left—my wife’s elementary school class had, even then, a full complement of four—often leave for better lives. But my in-laws are connected to this place, to the houses and streets where they grew up. They see the changes too, of course. On the mountains above, the Adamello, Italy’s largest glacier, is retreating faster every year. But while the shows on Netflix change, the same mushrooms appear in the summer, and the same chestnuts are collected in the fall.

Walking in the mountains of Val Camonica that summer, I tried to find parallels for my sense of impending loss. I thought about William Shanks, a British mathematician who calculated π to 707 digits by hand in 1873 (he made a mistake at 527; almost 200 digits were wrong). He later spent years of his life, literally years, on a table of the reciprocals of the primes up to one-hundred and ten thousand, calculating in the morning by hand, and checking it over in the afternoon. That was his life’s work. Just sixty years after his death, though, already in the 1940s, the table on which his precious mornings were spent, the few mornings he had on this earth, could be made by a machine in a day.

I feel sad thinking about Shanks, but I don’t feel grief for the loss of calculation by hand. The invention of the typewriter, and the death of handwritten notes seemed closer to the loss I imagined we might feel. Handwriting was once a part of your style, a part of who you were. With its decline some artistry, a deep and personal form of expression, may be lost. When the bots help with everything we write, couldn’t we too lose our style and voice?

But more than anything I thought of what I saw around me: the slow death of the dialects of Val Camonica and the culture they express. Chestnuts were at one time so important for nutrition here, that in the village of Paspardo, a street lined with chestnut trees is called “bread street” (“Via del Pane”). The hyper-local dialects of the valley, outgrowths sometimes of a single family’s inside jokes, have words for all the phases of the chestnut. There’s a porridge made from chestnut flour that, in Sellero goes by ‘skelt’, but is ‘pult’ in Paspardo, a cousin of ‘migole’ in Malonno, just a few villages away. Boiled, chestnuts are tetighe; dried on a grat, biline or bascocc, which, seasoned and boiled become broalade. The dialects don’t just record what people eat and ate; they recall how they lived, what they saw, and where they went. Behind Sellero, every hundred-yard stretch of the walk up to the cabins where the cows were taken to graze in summer, has its own name. Aiva Codaola. Quarsanac. Coran. Spi. Ruc.

But the young people don’t speak the dialect anymore. They go up to the cabins by car, too fast to name the places along the way. They can’t remember a time when the cows were taken up to graze. Some even buy chestnuts in the store.

Grief, you don’t need me to tell you, is a complicated beast. You can grieve for something even when you know that, on balance, it’s good that it’s gone. The death of these dialects, of the stories told on summer nights in the mountains with the cows, is a loss reasonably grieved. But you don’t hear the kids wishing more people would be forced to stay or speak this funny-sounding tongue. You don’t even hear the old folks wishing they could go back fifty years—in those days it wasn’t so easy to be sure of a meal. For many, it’s better this way, not the best it could be, but still better, even as they grieve what they stand to lose and what they’ve already lost.

The grief I feel, imagining a world without needed work, seems closest to this kind of loss. A future without work could be much better than ours, overall. But, living in that world, or watching as our old ways passed away, we might still reasonably grieve the loss of the work that once was part of who we were.

In the last chapter of Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence, Newland Archer contemplates a world that has changed dramatically since, thirty years earlier, before these new fangled telephones and five-day trans-Atlantic ships, he renounced the love of his life. Awaiting a meeting that his free-minded son Dallas has organized with Ellen Olenska, the woman Newland once loved, he wonders whether his son, and this whole new age, can really love the way he did and does. How could their hearts beat like his, when they’re always so sure of getting what they want?

There have always been things to grieve about getting old. But modern technology has given us new ways of coming to be out of date. A generation born in 1910 did their laundry in Sellero’s public fountains. They watched their grandkids grow up with washing machines at home. As kids, my in-laws worked with their families to dry the hay by hand. They now know, abstractly, that it can all be done by machine. Alongside newfound health and ease, these changes brought, as well, a mix of bitterness and grief: grief for the loss of gossip at the fountains or picnics while bringing in the hay; and also bitterness, because the kids these days just have no idea how easy they have it now.

As I look forward to the glories that, if the world doesn’t end, my grandkids might enjoy, I too feel prospective bitterness and prospective grief. There’s grief, in advance, for what we now have that they’ll have lost: the formal manners of my grandparents they’ll never know, the cars they’ll never learn to drive, and the glaciers that will be long gone before they’re born. But I also feel bitter about what we’ve been through that they won’t have to endure: small things like folding the laundry, standing in security lines or taking out the trash, but big ones too—the diseases which will take our loved ones that they’ll know how to cure.

All this is a normal part of getting old in the modern world. But the changes we see could be much faster and grander in scale. Amodei of Anthropic speculates that a century of technological change could be compressed into the next decade, or less. Perhaps it’s just hype, but—what if it’s not? It’s one thing for a person to adjust, over a full life, to the washing machine, the dishwasher, the air-conditioner, one by one. It’s another, in five years, to experience the progress of a century. Will I see a day when childbirth is a thing of the past? What about sleep? Will our ‘descendants’ have bodies at all?

And this round of automation could also lead to unemployment unlike any our grandparents saw. Worse, those of us working now might be especially vulnerable to this loss. Our culture, or anyway mine—professional America of the early 21st century—has apotheosized work, turning it into a central part of who we are. Where others have a sense of place—their particular mountains and trees—we’ve come to locate ourselves with professional attainment, with particular degrees and jobs. For us, ‘workists’ that so many of us have become, technological displacement wouldn’t just be the loss of our jobs. It would be the loss of a central way we have of making sense of our lives.

None of this will be a problem for the new generation, for our kids. They’ll know how to live in a world that could be—if things go well—far better overall. But I don’t know if I’d be able to adapt. Intellectual argument, however strong, is weak against the habits of years. I fear they’d look at me, stuck in my old ways, with the same uncomprehending look that Dallas Archer gives his dad, when Newland announces that he won’t go see Ellen Olenska, the love of his life, after all. “Say”, as Newland tries to explain to his dumbfounded son, “that I’m old fashioned, that’s enough.”

And yet, the core of my dread is not about aging out of work before my time. I feel closest to Douglas Hofstadter, the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach. His dread, like mine, isn’t only about the loss of work today, or the possibility that we’ll be killed off by the bots. He fears that even a gentle superintelligence will be “as incomprehensible to us as we are to cockroaches.”

Today, I feel part of our grand human projects—the advancement of knowledge, the creation of art, the effort to make the world a better place. I’m not in any way a star player on the team. My own work is off in a little backwater of human thought. And I can’t understand all the details of the big moves by the real stars. But even so, I understand enough of our collective work to feel, in some small way, part of our joint effort. All that will change. If I were to be transported to the brilliant future of the bots, I wouldn’t understand them or their work enough to feel part of the grand projects of their day. Their work would have become, to me, as alien as ours is to a roach.

But I’m still persuaded that the hardline pessimists are wrong. Work is far from the most important value in our lives. A post-instrumental world could be full of much more important goods— from rich love of family and friends, to new undreamt of works of art—which would more than compensate the loss of value from the loss of our work.

Of course, even the values that do persist may be transformed in almost unrecognizable ways. In Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World, the futurist and philosopher Nick Bostrom imagines how things might look. In one of the most memorable sections of the book—right up there with an epistolary novella about the exploits of Pignolius the pig (no joke!)—Bostrom says that even child-rearing may be something that we, if we love our children, would come to forego. In a truly post-instrumental world, a robot intelligence could do better for your child, not only in teaching the child to read, but also in showing unbreakable patience and care. If you’ll snap at your kid, when the robot would not, it would only be selfishness for you to get in the way.

It’s a hard question whether Bostrom is right. At least some of the work of care isn’t like eliminating suffering or ending mortal disease. The needs or wants are small-scale stuff, and the value we get from helping each other might well outweigh the fact that we’d do it worse than a robot could.

But even supposing Bostrom is right about his version of things, and we wouldn’t express our love by changing diapers, we could still love each other. And together with our loved ones and friends, we’d have great wonders to enjoy. Wharton has Newland Archer wonder at five-day transatlantic ships. But what about five day journeys to Mars? These days, it’s a big deal if you see the view from Everest with your own eyes. But Olympus Mons on Mars is more than twice as tall.

And it’s not just geographical tourism that could have a far expanded range. There’d be new journeys of the spirit as well. No humans would be among the great writers or sculptors of the day, but the fabulous works of art a superintelligence could make could help to fill our lives. Really, for almost any aesthetic value you now enjoy—sentimental or austere, minute or magnificent, meaningful or jocular—the bots would do it much better than we have ever done.

Humans could still have meaningful projects, too. In 1976, about a decade before any of Altman, Amodei or even I were born, the Canadian philosopher Bernard Suits argued that “voluntary attempts to overcome unnecessary obstacles” could give people a sense of purpose in a post-instrumental world. Suits calls these “games”, but the name is misleading; I prefer “artificial projects”. The projects include things we would call games like chess, checkers and bridge, but also things we wouldn’t think of as games at all, like Amundsen’s and Scott’s exploits to the Pole. Whatever we call them, Suits—who’s followed here explicitly by Danaher, the antiwork utopian and, implicitly, by Altman and Amodei—is surely right: even as things are now, we get a lot of value from projects we choose, whether or not they meet a need. We learn to play a piece on the piano, train to run a marathon, or even fly to Antarctica to “ski the last degree” to the Pole. Why couldn’t projects like these become the backbone of purpose in our lives?

And we could have one real purpose, beyond the artificial ones, as well. There is at least one job that no machine can take away: the work of self-fashioning, the task of becoming and being ourselves. There’s an aesthetic accomplishment in creating your character, an artistry of choice and chance in making yourself who you are. This personal style includes not just wardrobe or tattoos, not just your choice of silverware or car, but your whole way of being, your brand of patience, modesty, humor, rage, hobbies and tastes. Creating this work of art could give some of us something more to live for.

Would a world like that leave any space for human intellectual achievement, the stuff of my childhood dreams? The Buddhist Pali Canon says that “All conditioned things are impermanent—when one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering.” Apparently, in this text, the intellectual achievement of understanding gives us a path out of suffering. To arrive at this goal, you don’t have to be the first to plant your flag on what you’ve understood; you just have to get there.

A secular version of this idea might hold, more simply, that some knowledge or understanding is good in itself. Maybe understanding the mechanics of penicillin matters mainly because of what it enabled Fleming and others to do. But understanding truths about the nature of our existence, or even mathematics, could be different. That sort of understanding plausibly is good in its own right, even if someone or something has gotten there first.

Venkatesh the Fields Medalist seems to suggest something like this for the future of math. Perhaps we’ll change our understanding of the discipline, so that it’s not about getting the answers, but instead about human understanding, the artistry of it perhaps, or the miracle of the special kind of certainty that proof provides.

Philosophy, my subject, might seem an even more promising place for this idea. For some, philosophy is a “way of life”. The aim isn’t necessarily an answer, but constant self-examination for its own sake. If that’s the point, then in the new world of lying flat, there could be a lot of philosophy to do.

I don’t myself accept this way of seeing things. For me, philosophy aims at the truth as much as physics does. But I of course agree that there are some truths that it’s good for us to understand, whether or not we get there first. And there could be other parts of philosophy that survive for us, as well. We need to weigh the arguments for ourselves, and make up our own minds, even if the work of finding new arguments comes to belong to a machine.

I’m willing to believe, and even hope that future people will pursue knowledge and understanding in this way. But I don’t find, here, much consolation for my personal grief. I was trained to produce knowledge, not merely to acquire it. In the hours when I’m not teaching or preparing to teach, my job is to discover the truth. The values I imbibed—and I told you I was an obedient kid—held that the prize goes for priority.

Thinking of this world where all we learn is what the bots have discovered first, I feel sympathy with Lee Sedol, the champion Go player who retired after his defeat by DeepMind’s AlphaGo in 2016. For him, losing to AI “in a sense, meant my entire world was collapsing”. “Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated.” Right or wrong, I would feel the same about my work, in a world with an automated philosophical champ.

But Sedol and I are likely just out of date models, with values that a future culture will rightly revise. It’s been more than twenty years since Garry Kasparov lost to IBM’s Deep Blue, but chess has never been more popular. And this doesn’t seem some new-fangled twist of the internet age. I know of no human who quit the high-jump after the invention of mechanical flight. The Greeks sprinted in their Olympics, though they had, long before, domesticated the horse. Maybe we too will come to value the sport of understanding with our own brains.

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic of the creations-kill-creator genre, begins with an expedition to the North Pole. Robert Walton hopes to put himself in the annals of science and claim the Pole for England, when he comes upon Victor Frankenstein, floating in the Arctic Sea. It’s only once Frankenstein warms up, that we get into the story everyone knows. Victor hopes he can persuade Walton to turn around, by describing how his own quest for knowledge and glory went south.

Frankenstein doesn’t offer Walton an alternative way of life, a guide for living without grand goals. And I doubt Walton would have been any more personally consoled by the glories of a post-instrumental future than I am. I ended up a philosopher, but I was raised by parents who, maybe like yours, hoped for doctors or lawyers. They saw our purpose in answering real needs, in, as they’d say, contributing to society. Lives devoted to families and friends, fantastic art and games could fill a wondrous future, a world far better than it has ever been. But those aren’t lives that Walton or I, or our parents for that matter, would know how to be proud of. It’s just not the way we were brought up.

For the moment, of course, we’re not exactly short on things to do. The world is full of grisly suffering, sickness, starvation, violence, and need. Frankenstein is often remembered with the moral that thirst for knowledge brings ruination, that scientific curiosity killed the cat. But Victor Frankenstein makes a lot of mistakes other than making his monster. His revulsion at his creation persistently prevents him, almost inexplicably, from feeling the love or just plain empathy that any father should. On top of all we have to do to help each other, we have a lot of work to do, in engineering as much as empathy, if we hope to avoid Frankenstein’s fate.

But even with these tasks before us, my fits of dread are here to stay. I know that the post-instrumental world could be a much better place. But its coming means the death of my culture, the end of my way of life. My fear and grief about this loss won’t disappear because of some choice consolatory words. But I know how to relish the twilight too. I feel lucky to live in a time where people have something to do, and the exploits around me seem more poignant, and more beautiful, in the dusk. We may be some of the last to enjoy this brief spell, before all exploration, all discovery, is done by fully automated sleds.

Harvey Lederman is a professor of philosophy at UT Austin and a leader in the university’s AI+Human Objectives Initiative.

“ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life” was originally published on Shtetl-Optimized, the blog of UT Austin computer science professor Scott Aaronson.

This question leads her to examine many creations related to suicide in Japan. There are the writings themselves, of course — the suicide notes and the autobiographical work of creatives who went on to die by suicide — but also sites across Japan made famous by their association with suicide and memorials set up to the dead. The analysis of each site, letter, and death requires a sensitive approach, and Cather’s commitment to understanding is evident on every page. In their award to Cather for Scripting Suicide in Japan, the judges of the Association of Asian Studies’ John Whitney Hall Prize explicitly cited her “rare sensitivity and rigor” in this “interdisciplinary, hauntingly beautiful study of mapping, noting, and mourning that honors the voices of the dead and asks what it means to read and write beside them.”

Earlier this month I met with Cather to discuss her book and the writing and teaching processes that shaped it. Along the way we cover samurai stereotypes, YouTube scandals, and the difficult but necessary work of talking about suicide out loud. Read on for an edited and condensed version of our conversation, and for more on Cather’s work you can read Scripting Suicide in Japan on Open Access.

Kirsten, congratulations on the book and the awards! You have been getting a lot of positive attention for this work, and it’s extremely well deserved.

To jump in with the obvious acknowledgement: Suicide is an extremely complicated and difficult topic. Where did the idea to focus on suicide — both suicide sites and writings of and about suicide — come from? The question of suicide is an enormous one; how did you get started working in this field?

It was a little bit out of naivete: I started writing about this because I was teaching on the topic of suicide in Japanese fiction while I was writing my dissertation on censorship and living in D.C. I had a chance to teach at George Mason and University of Maryland, and they said, “You have to do something that’s going to interest the kids today.” And something that had always puzzled me was what I would say is the overrepresentation of suicide in translated works of Japanese literature and film. It was so omnipresent. And then there were the overly simplistic conclusions people draw about it: It’s celebrated, it’s honorable. There’s a samurai tradition. It’s part of “the” cultural psychology of “the” Japanese. And I thought, surely there’s a better way to think about this.

So, I think like most books, it grew out of a dissatisfaction I found in the existing work. It was often a version of the celebrated honorable samurai — which, for contemporary Japan, that link is quite difficult…

Right. For one thing, there’s hundreds of years and a huge cultural distance between the samurai past and now.

Yeah. And I would say that there were honor suicides in Western cultures too. The gentleman given the bottle of whiskey and the pistol and left alone for a few moments.

So I just started probing and trying to think it through. At first the project was very much about fictional representations of suicide, but then I realized that I really wanted to figure out the even more difficult question of when real life and fiction entwine in uncomfortable ways. I soon realized that one of the problems was that people made overgeneralizations about Japanese stereotypical culture, or they regarded these suicide notes and other writings about suicide very cynically, like “this person was looking for posthumous fame.” Surely if you are writing about something as dire as self-death and then go on to die by suicide, you’re doing something more complicated than just seeking monetary rewards. But there’s a lot of antipathy towards suicide and people who die by suicide. So you would see that strain [in the reactions to these writings], or you’d see the very naive, “Oh my gosh. We can see into their soul in the very moments of before they died.”

As if the writer of a suicide note becomes perfectly open and vulnerable to produce a work of total self-disclosure.

Yes, and unintentional self-disclosure at that! Just a subconscious slip of the pen, like “whoops, I just revealed to you my deepest thoughts.” I found that very frustrating.

Eventually I realized I really did want to think about real life and representation and the moments when those things collided. I thought the autobiographical fiction would be the easiest, and that ended up being the hardest part, which is interesting. I thought, fiction’s a safe refuge. I can talk about it; I’m very used to talking about it. And I thought the suicide notes would be the more difficult representations, but it was trickier when a writer so obviously implicated fiction in the project of self-writing their self-death.

I also realized that, not that I didn’t care about their motives for dying, but I didn’t think that the traces these writers leave behind were useful to investigate that question.

And that is the inevitable question anybody looks at after somebody dies by suicide. What was the motive? What was happening? What would lead somebody to make this ultimate decision? And in this book you’re pointing out both that ultimately we can’t know and that there are other questions to ask that are more interesting.

I think so, because I think — I hope — my approach brings us to a more compassionate place of discovery by trying to put us in the shoes of that person in their moment of writing. That was the thing that, when that clicked for me, a lot unlocked. And it took me a long time to discover and get comfortable with that sort of positionality, if we want to call it that. I couldn’t figure out a way to explicitly say, which I do in my introduction, that I want us to stay in the moment of writing. And sure, there are limits to that approach, but the other approaches have been so overdone and so critiqued, and we haven’t found other ways of doing this.

Tell me more about that decision to say “I want to stay in this moment,” because it structures the book. You say you came to that a little bit late in the process. When did you realize that’s what you wanted to do?

I don’t remember exactly when, but I do remember one piece that led me there. This wonderful colleague of mine who teaches at Georgetown pointed me to a short piece on these suicide maps made in the 1920s by Kon Wajirō, who was an early ethnographer. This is in chapter three of the book, and it’s about a suicide map that he makes of Inokashira Park, an area where I lived for a year before I had even thought about this place as a former suicide hotspot.

You read “suicide map” and you think, there’s not going to be anything ethical about this approach. He’s mapping suicides and he also has a map of picnics. There’s one essay that he writes and literally it’s a 5-minute sketch of “they were eating hard boiled eggs, and these lovers were entangled hands on the bench…” and then the companion essay becomes the suicide map. My initial reaction was, no, you cannot do that. But then I read a piece where he stages the struggle he was having to talk about and research this topic in a way that captured this moment of disappearance, this moment of self-willed self-absence. Like, “I’m disappearing myself from the equation, but there are traces that remain.”

His essay was key for me. Something about it really got me on this idea of traces and capturing and the ethical compulsion surrounding them. The compulsion to mark one’s own perspective, this absence, and then the project of us left behind to capture that in a way that doesn’t just simplify. I was like, this is him struggling with exactly what I’m struggling with. And then I thought, well, make that obvious in the book, make it more obvious how I’m constantly making my presence a little more felt, which is not something we’re always taught to do in academia.

That partly answers a question I was going to ask you about whether there was something you found as part of your research process for this book that changed the direction of the final book.

Going to actual locations.

Was that it?

Yeah, it was. Getting away from books and texts that sterilize the subject and physically visiting these sites was really powerful and illuminating.

I went to historical sites like Inokashira Park and Kegon Falls, though I couldn’t go visit the volcano of Mt. Mihara in the end because the pandemic hit, unfortunately. But those visits forced me to come more nose-to-nose with the idea that there were physical bodies that were dying at these real-life sites. And I did try to go to the apartment complex of the more recent suicide of the filmmaker, and I felt like a ghoul. Then I realized there was something really important about these visits and there’s also some importance about my maintaining distance. And I decided that the Aokigahara suicide forest is too much. It’s too visceral now. So I decided not to go there.

This may say something about me and my age and my time spent online, but whenever I think of the suicide forest I think of the influencers like Logan Paul who go and film there. The idea of the touristic draw to this place of real sadness and loss is so strange.

I wrote a short op-ed after Logan Paul’s video. I was so not ready at that point, but interestingly I found myself thinking about how Logan Paul himself got caught up in that in a very uncomfortable way. I don’t know if you saw that video before it got scrubbed from the internet, but the critique was that he shows himself, he focuses on himself. But I think there’s a real question in there that we have to face. There’s no easy answer to whether and how to represent the dead.

This ties in with my first project on censorship. As I was writing this book, things were disappearing from the web. Suicide prevention in Japan went in this direction of “let’s foreclose all representations.” But there’s another approach, which is to show the dead in all their visceral reality: “Let’s show these bodies in the hopes of de-romanticizing the act and thereby preventing suicide.” This goes back to an Edo period practice where lovers’ bodies would be displayed under bridges for days to dissuade other would-be suicides. It’s not easy. Neither is a good solution.

One thing that I was thinking about as I was reading the book — and this is projection on my part — was that suicide is such a heavy topic. It’s so freighted with all kinds of meanings, but also emotionally very difficult to sit in. What was it like for you personally sitting with this material for that long?

For so many years, yeah. It was hard. People say about me, “You’re one of the more optimistic, happy people I know. Why would you choose this topic?” But I think the compulsion to try to do this ethically helped mitigate how I was feeling. I felt I had a responsibility to these voices to try to do some kind of justice to them.

It was interesting to see which ones really got me and which ones I could read more easily. Some of them are written with levity. That is interesting too, that this person was seemingly laughing at themselves and wanting to produce things that would seemingly produce laughter. I’m nervous when we talk about intent because I don’t know what their intent was, but I was sometimes surprised by the levity, the winking at us, and the sort of self-conscious acknowledgement of even me as a reader not just decades later but sometimes a century-plus later.

And you know, you do start entertaining the idea of your own death and the deaths of people you know. Nobody who I know has been untouched by suicide at this point in their lives. So there’s some version where you think of voicing, or trying your best to voice, things that would otherwise be dead and disappeared. In my wildest dreams, that’s what literature does. It allows the preservation of these voices.

You even start for fast forwarding to like, “when I’m dead, somebody’s going to read this, and then what?”

And then they’re going to think, “What was she trying to tell us?” Which is sort of mind-bending to think about.

But I do need a happier topic for my next work. My mother, she’s Irish Catholic, she’s like, “Please, Kirsten, could you do something else? Your first book was on sex and obscenity and your second book’s on death and suicide. Can you please do something I can talk to my friends about?”

That’s hilarious. And to jump back to book ideas: It sounds like the earliest roots of this project were in a class that you were teaching. Were there projects that you considered and set aside before you settled on this one?

Not really. This one was pretty clear to me. I knew it mattered to me enough to work with it for so long, and I always want to make sure my topic’s going to matter and be of interest to a broad variety of people. I’m pretty wary of specialization. I’m a Gemini; I am always interested in everything. I dabble, and I encourage dabbling with my students. It’s the way we grow.

There was one idea I sort of toyed with. I wanted to stay in the vein of my first book and write about copyright and copyright law in Japan, thinking about copyright infringement cases. But it just didn’t interest or matter to me as much as thinking about life and death.

I can see how the stakes would be difficult to compare.

Yeah. But what I didn’t totally realize was I had really had to work on legal language in Japanese, which was like two foreign languages for me, for my first book. And then the second book had all of this medical and psychological literature that got pretty dense. A lot of it didn’t end up making it into the book, but that took longer than I thought. Everything took longer than I thought.

Everything always takes longer than we think. I have yet to talk to anybody who’s like, “It was so easy. It all just fell together.”

What drives me crazy is listening to authors of historical fiction books who have these six figure contracts for their books, and they’ll say, “And I spent two months in the archive!” People say, ahh, two months! And I’m like, are you kidding me? I’ve got like $0 for this book, and I can tell you I spent more than two months in the archive.

I was going to ask: How much time did you spend in an archive for this?

I mean, so much time. I can’t even calculate. But I never did a long stint. This was an interesting part of the second book versus the first book project. You have a lot more leisure in your second book to spread things out, but you don’t have that dedicated time of your dissertation research fellowship.

Of that dedicated year abroad, yeah. My husband’s a historian and I basically didn’t see him for almost a year because he was off at archives. I was like, “Happy for you! But…”

“Happy for you, but gosh, I miss you.” Yeah. My husband and I got married and I left two weeks later for Japan for my dissertation research, and then he came over three months later for a few months. I wasn’t willing to do that with my young kids growing up for the second book, so I just kind of stole time when I could in madcap two-week visits. Things have gotten so digitized that archives were less necessary. Instead, I’d go interview and talk to people, go to sites — that’s what you do when you go to Japan. You spend that time like that, because everything else is copyable.

Still, a lot more than two months in an archive is what I’m hearing.

And for a lot less than six figures.

Was there anything in the archive that surprised you, that you came across and thought, “oh my goodness…”

The Harry Ransom Center has the Alfred A Knopf publishing company’s archives, in which there was outright acknowledgement of, “We are gonna make a lot of money because Mishima just died by suicide and we’re in the midst of translating this work by him, so let’s get on it.” The willingness to put that on paper and then to be able to use that, that was wild.

And then sometimes what was most surprising was the disappearance of the very material in the archives. Once, I was researching suicide prevention materials put out by a Japanese organization. Because I’m totally still analog, I printed everything. When I looked back, I found that I could trace what happened to the language used to describe a “poetic suicide site,” a jisatsu meisho, that had very poeticized beautiful classical imagery, or as beautiful as you can get when you say “suicide” next to it. And then they changed the wording to something like “a site where there are numerous suicides occurring therein.” Very stiff, very buttoned up. And I was like, “oh my gosh, they actually censored themselves here,” because my theory was there was this move toward unrepresentation.

Thinking about changing how we talk about suicide in consideration of who might be listening brings me to a question about audience. When we think of an audience for an academic book, you think of other academics, and usually specifically other academics in your specific field. Were you thinking about a different audience when you were writing this book? Who did you think would read it?

My base concern was to create something that’s good for the field that people can build upon, something that opens the conversation and doesn’t close it, that offers a helpful methodology. And then when I saw the New Interventions in Japanese Studies series [at University of California Press], I thought, yes, I am trying to intervene, even though I am not a theory-heavy person. That’s not my comfort zone; my comfort zone is close readings of texts. But, oddly, I think it was an intervention, which is interesting because it’s an old-school methodology.

So, there were some meta-methodology thoughts about my field in my mind, but I also want to write what I want to read, and I want to read anything that’s interesting. I want to read things that are written in real language for real people, to make it as accessible as possible.

I was also thinking about my experience teaching a grad seminar on this topic and my experience teaching undergrads. As I’m talking I realize that everything and everyone I’d ever talked with about the book stuck in my mind, even every conference talk I ever gave. And it was shocking the way that the audiences would react sometimes. One time I gave a talk about the suicide forest and had a person say, “Why should we care about these dead bodies in the forest? Why should the Japanese government care?” And I was like, wow, ok, so some of my audience is going to be thinking that.

Let’s sit with that for a minute. That’s wild!

Like, can I just reflect your question back to you for a moment so you can hear yourself?

I do want to come back to talk about the classes in a minute, but I bet you have had a lot of strong reactions over the years. As you said earlier, this is a topic that ultimately touches all of us in some way, and people bring a lot of themselves and their own experiences, I imagine, to this material. That seems like it would shape the experience of working on a book about suicide.

Yeah. Eventually you have to have your own thing, your own rationale for why you’re doing what you’re doing, and know you can’t do all the things.

Now to go back: This is a course you were teaching for a while?

And I don’t teach it anymore. I don’t feel like I can in this climate. I feel students are in a really vulnerable place. We’re more aware of how vulnerable they are, and it started feeling not right, so I stopped.

But teaching it as a young, naïve professor in a different era, I had the students do creative projects at the very end that allowed them to digest the material in a different way. And I remember in the last class from ages ago some students brought up their own experiences with suicide – their own struggles or losses and their upbringing where even uttering the word suicide out loud was an unspoken taboo. The class just went around opening up to one another. There were tears, there were hugs, there was warmth, but what the students were saying was, “This gave me an avenue by which to approach this difficult topic, to talk about suicide.” The class really seemed to help. I know that’s not always going to be the experience, but for a moment there, it was a very lovely. But then I became a lot more self-conscious about it. I was like, this is a difficult dialogue, and I need to make sure I’m trained in how to do this. I need to make it clear that this is not therapeutic. That’s not the goal.

But it was really interesting to hear these students talk about finally tackling their thoughts and feelings, mostly about being suicide survivors, having had classmates or family members who had died by suicide. I thought, this is an interesting methodology, to think that if you start with distant, ancient Japan and you allow the students to creep at this topic, it could be helpful. But it also feels very precarious.

That makes sense to me: It’s difficult to both look back on this class as such a warm and positive experience, one that could foster a lot of connection among students and with this difficult, almost impossible subject matter, but also to acknowledge that there’s a risk in teaching it, that it might push a particularly vulnerable student in a dark direction.

I remember reading this one journalist turned suicidologist from the 1940s. He wrote these books [about suicide] and then he wrote about how one of his books had been found by a body of a suicide and how devastating it was.

But then you talk to professionals and they’re clear that not talking about it is not the solution. Of course, this difficult dialogue needs to be in the hands of trained mental health professionals. But I think back to your question of audience, and I do hope that somebody could read parts of this and think about suicide in a different way. And for me too, the writers I talk about in this book helped me think about people in my life who have died by suicide in a different way, and that was wonderful and useful.

By Zeltzyn Rubi Sanchez Lozoya

We were already seated on the plane headed to Chicago when the captain announced over the speaker that the flight was going to be delayed. A collective groan moved through the cabin. Resigned, I instinctively took out my phone to pass the time and opened the New Yorker story I was reading, Sam Lipsyte’s “Final Boy.”

A few minutes later, I was pulled out of the story and back to my American Airlines seat when Lipsyte’s narrator, to avoid describing an obscure sitcom, broke the fourth wall. “I won’t even try to explain that,” he said. “Look it up on the device you no doubt hold in your hand.”

I looked up and around as if he was in the cabin with me, waiting to make eye contact. I felt called out by this hyper-aware narrator and wondered if he knew I was switching back and forth between the story, emails, and scrolling. Or, even worse, that I was saving the downloaded audio version of the piece for when the plane took off and I lost WiFi, fully knowing that I might fall asleep listening to it.

By calling out the reader for being on their phone, Lipsyte not only recaptured my wandering attention but also exposed a larger truth about modern media consumption. He knew that the device used for reading his story was the same one distracting his reader. Losing their attention was just a notification away.

Because we now consume media constantly, be it books, movies or TV shows, and largely just to pass the time, we rarely give it the attention necessary for analysis, questioning, or even real enjoyment. Dedicating time to read a book or watch a movie without multitasking has almost disappeared. Instead, many of us incorporate media into our life as background noise, selecting a Netflix movie or TV show for “casual viewing” while folding laundry or washing dishes. Even film students have trouble watching an entire film without distractions. This disconnect directly contributes to the ongoing decline of media literacy, the ability to analyze and make sense of media presented to us.

Last week, as thousands of educators, artists, and entrepreneurs gathered in Austin for South by Southwest and SXSW EDU, they discussed the trials of creating art and media at a time when audiences’ attention spans are fragmented and an overflow of information has shifted our relationship with media from active engagement to passive consumption. As one of the participants, I was there to share my suggestion: To improve media literacy, we need to do nothing.

Over the years, driven by our need to constantly do something, our collective relationship with media has changed to “time pass.” Comedian Kanan Gill explains this brilliant Indian concept in his Netflix special “Yours Sincerely” as “both an activity and a review of an activity.” What do you do when you are doing nothing? “Time pass.” How would you describe a movie that wasn’t that good? “Time pass.”

Looking at media as “time pass” implies a constant, superficial consumption that doesn’t allow for questioning or meditation and that’s driven by the contemporary need to always be doing something. Something to do to minimize or eradicate boredom, something to do with our hands, something to do to appear busy. In the modern digital age, it appears there’s no room to do nothing.

In her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, artist and writer Jenny Odell expands on this idea to argue “nothing is harder than to do than nothing.” For Odell, “in a world where our value is determined by our productivity, […] doing nothing [is] an act of political resistance.” To do nothing, Odell argues, is to disengage with technologies that are designed to capitalize on our attention and our data and which do not allow us the time and space to question, evaluate, and digest the media we are consuming.

To reclaim our attention, and with it not only the joy but also the time to critically engage with art and media, it is imperative that we practice doing nothing. If we allow ourselves to drastically limit our consumption of media, then we can engage with it better and more deeply. We can check a source before sharing, figure out if we like a movie without reading other people’s reviews, read beyond the clickbait headline, recognize when a post is actually an ad, and realize that is not the real Will Smith eating spaghetti. To rebuild media literacy, we must practice doing nothing. Instead of consuming media for time pass, slow down, waste time, look up.

Zeltzyn Rubi Sanchez Lozoya is an assistant professor of instruction in The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Asian Studies. Her first book, Female Lead: India's Women Filmmakers in the Age of Netflix, is currently under contract with Routledge, and she hosts the film podcast Watch Next.

Consider two images, or visions, of the study of the liberal arts. One is of a bright young student looking intently at a beautifully burnished bookshelf. On the shelves are rows of books that are obviously part of a carefully curated series, all the same size and spun off from the same design template.

The other is that same student but in a big library. She’s looking up in wonder at a forest of brightly colored books surrounding her, each volume a portal into a wholly different world.

The first image we might call the “great books” vision of studying the liberal arts. The texts have been carefully chosen by the wisdom of the ages and the elders to provide the student a single curriculum she must absorb in order to become a cultivated and educated citizen of our society.

The second is what we might call the “abundance” vision of studying the liberal arts. The student is given access to the whole wide world of texts, cultures, ideas, and narratives, then encouraged to craft from these riches her own curriculum, a remix of her own tradition, guided by various mentors each offering a distinct perspective.

There’s a temptation to plot each of these visions on the contemporary partisan spectrum, with abundance on the left and great books on the right, but that framing confuses more than it clarifies. The great texts of the past aren’t so easily shoehorned into any contemporary political framework. That’s true whether you’re talking about major thinkers of the Western canon, many of whom were radical deconstructors of the orthodoxies of their era, or major thinkers of the non-Western canons. Was Karl Marx a conservative? Was the Buddha a liberal? Darwin? Nietzsche? Freud? Borges? Achebe? Naipaul?

Abundance, similarly, is not intrinsically a left-wing approach to learning, but rather a liberal one in the classical sense of the term. It’s opened up the curriculum to a lot of texts, courses, perspectives, and departments that have a more leftish flavor to them. It has also, however, been a conduit through which a more consumerist or free-market orientation toward education has seeped into the university.

For the university communications professional, the question isn’t which vision is better in the cosmic sense but rather which story, at any given moment, better captures the essence of what the university is doing. After World War II, for example, it’s easy to see why the abundance vision of the liberal arts made marketing sense. Thanks to the GI Bill and post-war economic expansion, the numbers and kinds of Americans going to college dramatically increased. This was mirrored in the expansion and diversification of the people who were teaching college and devising the curricula.

What had been an elite endeavor, oriented toward white men of means, became a mass phenomenon, encompassing more middle- and working class people, more people of color, and more women. In this context, liberal arts abundance made marketing sense. It spoke to people’s optimism. It aligned, conceptually, with the expansion of the consumer markets. It created space to accommodate people and populations who had been excluded from the old story. And in the context of material abundance, in an era when the prestige of the liberal arts remained high, this kind of expansion didn’t require a rejection of the great books approach to liberal arts education. It encompassed it. Students of all disciplinary and demographic stripes still enrolled in big survey courses on Shakespeare, ancient philosophy, American history, political theory, and the like, and many of them chose to major in traditional humanities disciplines with fairly traditional curricula.

When I was an undergraduate liberal arts student in the mid-1990s, this was the vibe. We enrolled in the big survey courses to get our informal core curriculum of the great books and thinkers, and then we spread out to our respective disciplines where we got more specialized knowledge. Even the STEM majors, most of the time, wanted to get their Shakespeare and Plato on the side. There didn’t seem to be a conflict between the two visions.

It feels different now, for a few reasons. One is that there are simply fewer students taking humanities courses. Another is that the cultural expectation that graduates of elite colleges should have at least a facsimile of knowledge of Moses, Plato, Shakespeare, Austen, Ellison, Morrison, and Rawls seems to have diminished below some critical threshold. An English professor at Duke told me last year that the department can’t fill their Shakespeare lecture survey courses anymore, so they’ve been eliminated. You can still study Shakespeare at Duke, but it will be in a small seminar room, seated almost exclusively next to other English majors, of whom there are many fewer than there used to be.

Instead of abundance, then, there is scarcity. And instead of the great books regime that preceded it, with its elite product developed for an elite customer base, there is fragmentation. And then, of course, there are the politics. Every choice being made, right now, about what and how to teach in the liberal arts is occurring within an intensely polarized, politicized context, with a lot of different actors with different agendas fighting to have influence.

We’re in a period of transition, in other words. Who are we? Who do we want to be? What should we hold on to, or go back to, and what should we move past and let go? Who will we be allowed to be?

And what tableau should we be painting? The burnished bookshelf? The vast library? A tiny free library? The cloud?

When UT Austin sociologists (and married couple) Robert Crosnoe and Shannon E. Cavanagh first set out to research what eventually became their new book, The Journey into Adulthood in Uncertain Times, their own children were in preschool.

“A grant was given to us to analyze the impact of the Great Recession of 2007-09 on people transitioning to adulthood, and the idea was that our study would be done within a few years,” says Crosnoe. “But we just didn’t find anything terribly interesting in the short-term effects. We became more interested in the long-term trends.”

Now, nearly two decades later, both of their kids are themselves young adults, and the initial study has grown into a sweeping, data-rich portrait of what it means to grow up in 21st-century America.

Their findings challenge the familiar hand-wringing about “adultolescence” and “lost generations.” Instead, Crosnoe and Cavanagh argue, the journey from adolescence to adulthood has long been shaped by slow, inexorable forces rather than single, seismic events.

I spoke to them recently about their book and its implications. A lightly edited and condensed version of our conversation is below.

Rob, Shannon, welcome. Tell me about your new book. It sounds like it’s been a big endeavor for the two of you.

Robert Crosnoe: It’s the product of a large-scale study using a variety of data to look at how markers of the transition to adulthood — employment, education, family formation, mental health, and behavior — have changed over the course of the last 50 or so years, and whether those changes are more acute during times of crisis, like the Great Recession.

The basic thrust of what we found is that young adults today look very different than young adults from 50 years ago or even 25 years ago. But those changes do not represent the specific impact of any one thing, like a recession or the pandemic or the invention of the iPhone. It’s been a slow, gradual change over many decades. They look different today than they used to, but there’s really no critical period over the last 50 years that made that happen.

Is there a relatively technical way that you or the field defines what this period of young adulthood is?

Crosnoe: We picked 18 to 26, in part because of the data we had but also because the National Academy of Sciences used that marker and it was related to policies for young adults.

The whole idea of adolescence, to put it in context, is only about 120 years old. It came into existence because the times changed and you had these people who looked like adults but were treated like children. Now we all just think adolescence is this naturally occurring phenomenon, when in reality it was something we created.

The same thing is going on right now with young adulthood. The transition from being an adolescent to an adult is getting longer and longer, so now it seems like maybe this isn’t a transition anymore. Maybe it’s its own stage of the life course. That’s where a lot of the ambiguity comes into play.

What’s the argument of the book? What are the big changes over the period of time you’re covering?

Crosnoe: There are two buzzwords that people often use to describe these changes. One is the “lengthening” of this young adulthood period. The other, and this is going to sound more pejorative than people mean it, is the “disorder.” What that means is that young people are spending longer achieving what adults think of as the markers of adulthood: leaving home, finding a job, starting a family. And they’re doing it in a different and less predictable order than they did in the past.

What does that look like? Young adults are spending a lot longer in the educational system than they used to, not just because they’re pursuing higher education but because they might be going in and out of the educational system over time. They’re pushing back their entry into the labor market and spending more time in more insecure positions before they become full-time labor force participants.

Shannon Cavanagh: Family formation is also slowing down tremendously because of insecurity in the economic realm. Young adults today are less likely to cohabit, much more likely to remain single, and even less likely to get married. Teen fertility has never been lower than it has been in the last 15 years. So there’s a real slowing down.

The other thing to keep in mind, in family and in education and work, is the incredible inequality. There are some young people who are continuing on in education, gaining more degrees, and transitioning into paid full-time labor. Those people are also more likely to be in a cohabiting union and eventually move into marriage with children. Then there are tremendous numbers of young people who are not in work, not in school, not in romantic unions, and not tied to any institution that we think of as central to citizenship. That’s really striking. It’s mostly men, and disproportionately men of color, who are out of these primary social institutions like work or school or marriage.

Crosnoe: There’s a pretty clear trend that alcohol use, which is a big activity during this period of young adulthood, goes up by age, as you’d expect, but is going down overall over time. With depression, it’s the exact opposite. It goes down with age, but it’s going up by calendar year. So young people are less likely to be depressed as they get older, but they are more depressed as a cohort than 19-year-olds were before.

You’ve said that when you started this project, you were looking at how the Great Recession did or didn’t affect these observable trends. What did you conclude?

Crosnoe: We found that they really weren’t affected. For the most part, the long-term evolution of society trumps any one event. But when we interviewed young people, we found many (but not all) really thought they had been affected by the Great Recession. They would’ve predicted that the quantitative results would look very different.

We were comparing people who went through the transition to adulthood in the ‘90s, 2000s, and 2010s. The biggest influence on whether they felt they’d been negatively affected by the recession — whether they’d been screwed versus having this “grit” idea of “I came out better for it” — wasn’t their social class. It was whether they were downwardly mobile. Doing worse than their parents had done really made people look at the recession very negatively.

We also found something interesting: when we asked them about the transition to adulthood, nobody really talked about family formation at all. They only talked about work and school, even though almost half of them had already started families. They just didn’t bring it up, even though in some cases they were doing it.

You’ve both described these changes as being “due to economic insecurity” in a significant way. What do you mean by that, and how do you understand it as a driver of these trends?

Crosnoe: We’re talking about economic insecurity rather than overall economic outcomes. If you go back to before economic restructuring started in the 1970s, there was this middle part of the labor market where you didn’t really need a college education to guarantee a decent life. You could go into a job, stay in that job, and move forward with benefits over time. That has disappeared, and young people really struggle with that. They either need to go through higher education to find something more secure or they’re bouncing around a lot more during their twenties. Even those who go to college are going to be changing jobs a lot and be unsure about themselves. So it’s not so much that they’re economically disadvantaged, if you step back and look at their incomes, but that they’re uncertain about their economic futures.

Has that been something that has progressively been more the case in the last 50 years?

Cavanagh: Yes. Whether it’s real or not, there’s a general sense that there’s less security and also fewer “good jobs” out there, and that a lot of the jobs that are available are gig economy jobs and not at all secure. That makes independence, which is at the heart of the idea of what adulthood is, feel like a harder and harder thing to achieve.

Crosnoe: That’s where the marriage stuff comes in too. There’s this relatively new idea that young people feel like they need to meet some level of economic security before they marry. They want to get married; they just feel like they need to reach this bar. That idea is what’s pushing back the age of marriage, because it’s taking them longer and longer to think they’ve reached that bar. It doesn’t mean they’re not going to achieve it. It’s just that a 22-year-old today is going to be in a more uncertain terrain than one from 50 or 60 years ago, even if they eventually turn out fine.

Are there drivers other than economic ones? You were talking about people not being in churches, unions, the whole “Bowling Alone” phenomenon. Is that purely economically driven, or are there cultural or other macro drivers of these shifts?

Crosnoe: One thing we write about a lot in the book is parenting and the way that parents view their children. We’ve reached a point now where the majority of parents do not think that kids in their early twenties are adults. That’s a new thing, this whole idea of your kids being your kids a lot longer than they used to be. Your stage of active parenting is a lot longer.

This is certainly related to economic insecurity too, wanting to keep these kids in the nest longer and investing more in them to really launch them into adulthood, but it has generalized far beyond that to this idea that 20-somethings are not adults. And when we don’t think of them as adults, we don’t treat them as adults, which makes it harder for them to act like adults. It’s this self-reinforcing thing. It is related to economics, but it’s taken on a life of its own.

Cavanagh: I don’t think you can separate the cultural from the economic. You could try to parse it out, but these things move together.

Rob was talking about marriage. There’s a sociologist, Andrew Cherlin, who talks about how historically we thought of marriage as the cornerstone of adulthood, literally the first thing you build, and then you build your life around it. Now it’s the capstone. It’s the thing you do once you can afford everything and everything is in a row. Partly this is a cultural shift driven by generalized uncertainty about marriage and divorce, which feed into a general cautiousness. Then there’s the real economic reality that for many young people, there aren’t the kinds of jobs that can get them started. Forty percent of young men in our sample are neither in work nor school. That’s an incredible percent of young people not doing things, and no one’s going to want to marry them or have a child with them. We have underinvested in or limited supports for young people as they move into adulthood.

Crosnoe: I think the thing about “Bowling Alone” and social isolation is something we need to grapple with, and we don’t really know how things like the internet have affected that. We do know that young people are closer to their parents than they used to be, which seems like a good thing. But the decline in drinking really struck us because we thought, if you think of drinking as a marker of stress, in many ways you’d expect it to be increasing. But it’s decreasing, and there’s some evidence it decreased even more during the Great Recession. What is that suggesting? Well, it’s probably something about social isolation. Coupled with the depression stuff, the decline in drinking might be suggesting young people are a little bit more untethered now than they used to be in the past. That doesn’t mean we want kids to go out drinking, but we’re trying to think critically about what those trends are doing.

In your work you’ve identified five or six pathways young people typically take between the ages of 18 and 26 or so. What are those pathways in brief?

Crosnoe: They tend to be characterized by the age at which young people do things. The easy ones are the people who just stay single the whole time; that’s a path. There are a couple of pathways where they’re partnering and having kids at a really young age, versus ones where people are partnering eventually but never having kids within this 18-26 window, versus ones where they’re doing all of the above: having kids and going in and out of relationships.

For socioeconomic attainment, it’s the most disadvantaged — low education, leaving the educational system early, then having unstable employment trajectories — versus the people who go from high school to college to the labor market versus those who go from high school to college to some sort of extended educational state, usually graduate school, before entering the labor market.

And then there’s this group in the middle that’s a pretty sizable group, but it’s a throwback to the ‘60s and ‘70s. They leave high school, go into full employment, and stay there. Interestingly, they look a little bit more like the kids going through higher education than they do other high school graduates in terms of family formation, their health behavior, their depression, where they’re coming from. That group is also very heavily Latino.

Looking back on this project as a whole, what makes you most optimistic and most pessimistic?

Cavanagh: Reading the qualitative interviews and hearing how young people made sense of things, I saw a lot of grit. I learned a lot about how people make meaning. They were telling stories of, “We’re going to get through this, and I’m stronger because of this, and it’s going to be okay.” That wasn’t everyone, of course, but it was a lot of people. That was really interesting to me and hopeful. We make meaning all the time, and we mostly err on the side of optimism.

Crosnoe: The way we close this book is by acknowledging that young people today do not look the way young people did when we were born. And we adults tend to say, “Well, why aren’t they doing this? Why aren’t they doing that?” In reality, what’s really happening is that the world has changed. The world is not the same as it was 50 years ago, and young people are adapting to this new world. Our concerns too often are more about whether they’re following the rules we think are right based on the world we grew up in rather than the one we have created for them.

So, if we’re going to do this hand-wringing about what young adults are doing, it’s not about whether they’re growing up or not, because they are growing up. It’s whether they’re trying to play by rules that we set for them that no longer apply. And I take that as very hopeful. They’re going to find their way, and they’re going to change the script for us. And then someday they will probably look down at their kids and think that they’re not growing up too.

Is there something general you can say about the way young adults today look at the world, their values and priorities?

Crosnoe: I’ll say it this way: the goals that young people have today are really not that different than the goals we had. Eventually, they want to be in the same place we wanted to be.

They want a stable job, they want to get married, they want to have kids, but how they’re going to do that is what’s changing?

Crosnoe: Yeah. This is the thing. We talk about the decline of marriage. Most young people want to get married. And most of them will, over time, but not as young adults. The path they take to that goal is going to be different than what we took. So the book is really about how the path has changed, not how the goal has changed. That’s an important way of looking at this.

When we’re talking about building a life, the goals are really not that different. Young adults today just take a different path. They’re adapting to the world we created for them.

Shannon, what about you? How are they different or the same?

Cavanagh: I think they feel they’re navigating a very different world than even we did 25 or 30 years ago. What was very clear in the qualitative research is this idea of uncertainty, and that data is now eight years old. What would it look like if we did those interviews during the pandemic or thereafter? This is a generation that has grown up confronting 9/11, the Great Recession, the pandemic, two discontinuous terms of Trump. It’s a really intense historical moment. The way they talk about their lives reflects that there’s this kind of uncertainty.

At the same time, Rob is right: young people want to get married, they want a home, they want a job. They’re also rational. This is my critique of a lot of the low fertility discussion: It’s not that people’s values have shifted, but that we always do what’s rational based on the circumstances in front of us. In a world that feels less certain, the rational choice might not be to have five children.

Are you going to keep working on this project?

Cavanagh: Right now I am working with grad students to look at the effect that housing may play in slowing down family formation. Who are young adults living with, how long are they staying at their parents’ home, how that is slowing everything down? The cost of housing could be a real pinch to family building in general. I think it adds another layer to the stories we have about young people.

Crosnoe: I’m really interested in the parenting part. If your kids are going to have a more dependent relationship with you through their twenties and thirties, what does that mean for you as a parent who, in the old days, might be letting go of a lot of those responsibilities? Your active parenting phase is longer than it used to be. That’s really what I’m studying now.

People want that, I think. Their kids are their friends, and vice versa.

Crosnoe: They do. Parents and kids are a lot closer than they used to be. They spend more time together and they’re more connected. Some people view that as bad, like it’s delaying their independence, but as a parent, it’s hard for me to get upset about that.

Part of it is that parents are being more vigilant because their kids are having a longer path to independence. And part of it is they like this new model. They like maintaining the active role. Those things are all driving each other.

In the 20th century, there was a lot of research on parenting adolescents and what that would mean, because this new idea of what an adolescent was emerged. Now I think this century is going to be like: What is parenting a 25-year-old, or a 35-year-old?

On December 16, 1775, future novelist Jane Austen was born in a village in Hampshire, England. Two hundred and fifty years later, her birthday celebration has spanned continents and lasted for months, complete with newspaper features, commemorative teas, and a birthday parade in Bath.

Of course, it’s not just Jane herself that’s being celebrated — there are, after all, her novels to consider. From elegantly bound volumes to mass market paperbacks, the many iterations of Austen’s books have profoundly shaped her fame and public reception, and no anniversary would be complete without a close look at this material legacy. So argues Janine Barchas, professor of English at UT Austin and author of, among other titles, The Lost Books of Jane Austen. And so argues “Paper Jane: 250 Years of Austen,” an exhibition at the Grolier Club in New York City on which Barchas served as co-curator. With exhibits ranging from first editions to “pinked” paperbacks and signed film posters, “Paper Jane” tells the story of Austen’s growing fame through her print history and examines the way her extended family and their descendants used their own publications to both reveal and obscure her life and work.

Earlier this month, I spoke with Barchas about the exhibition and Austen’s enduring popularity. Our conversation below, which has been lightly edited and condensed, covers the Grolier Club, “public intimacy,” and the many generational adaptations of Pride and Prejudice. Read on for more, and if you’re in the New York area, you can race to catch “Paper Jane” in person through February 14. For the rest of us, there’s always the web version.

Janine, thank you for making time to talk to me about “Paper Jane”! To get us started, give me the in-a-nutshell intro to the exhibition: what it is and why it’s at the Grolier Club.

The Grolier Club is America’s oldest book collecting club, and its exhibitions, like this one, are open and free to the public. The “Paper Jane: 250 Years of Austen” exhibition is really a love letter to Jane Austen that showcases the books and objects — very unequal and eclectic — owned by three collectors, of whom I am one. All of us are members of the Grolier Club with different expertise in Jane Austen and different collecting strategies and goals.

Austen is an author who wrote only six published novels, so you might think, well, what is there to collect other than those six books? But it turns out that one of us focused on collecting the scholarly history, especially books by members of the extended Austen family, and tracking their interferences and contributions to Jane Austen’s reception history. One of us is a schoolteacher who collected very widely, starting with first editions, but who also is interested in how children read and interact with Jane Austen. Did Victorian kids in Britain have a different idea of Jane Austen than, for example, American kids in the 1940s or 1960s?

And then there’s me, who wrote a book called The Lost Books of Jane Austen. For that project I collected for years the cheapest, most throwaway, tawdry, least-authoritative editions of Jane Austen that had enjoyed, in my view, the largest readership and therefore exerted the greatest impact on her reception history. These are editions with misprints galore that don’t get collected by rare books libraries because they’re not important firsts, but they are the reprints that kept her name alive and fed her reputation. Those were the copies that had the widest readership, whereas Jane Austen’s first editions had a very narrow, elite readership. She was a bit of a sleeper during her own lifetime and did not enjoy the kind of popularity that we associate with her now; that popularity grew over time.

The three of us put together “Paper Jane” for the 250th anniversary. It has five different sections that cover 50 years each, organized temporally. That allows you to see, during each 50-year increment, what happens to Austen’s reputation. What does she look like in terms of her material incarnations as books? And each period in the show offers a different perspective — a different Jane.

Walk me through how this came about. At what point did you and your co-curators think, “we could really pool our resources, both intellectual and material, and put on this show for this major anniversary?”

Because the Grolier is a book collecting club, you already have that context of people meeting because they share certain kinds of interests. And Sandra Clark and I had already worked together on The Lost Books of Jane Austen, for which she opened her collection to me as a scholar. It’s a mode of working that is just magical, really: to be able to rifle through someone’s collection in their home, to be able to befriend them and talk over things and use their private archive. I’d had that experience working with Sandra and knew her collection complemented mine in many ways. Hers was so much more extensive than mine that it cemented the claims that I would otherwise not have been able to make. She had collected for 50 years and I had only been doing that for a decade or so at the time of our joining forces, so she had so many more of these lost books than I had been able to find amongst the flotsam and jetsam of eBay.

So Sandra and I had already worked together. And when, as part of the Grolier Club, we met Mary Crawford, whose name is identical to that of a character in Mansfield Park…

I loved that that’s called out on the website and in the notes for this exhibition. “Mary Crawford — not the character.”

So we knew one another and our shared interests. And as you do when an author you love is having a standout anniversary, you put your heads together and say, “Hey, how can we share our interest with others and bring people to the Grolier?” Once we had conjured up the idea of dividing the exhibition into 50-year increments, it became clear how we could pull from each of our collections to tell a larger story about her changing reputation.

Now we keep saying that the result is more than the sum of its parts. None of us could have done anything like this on our own. It’s only when you put different collecting instincts together — and of course a scholarly library or a scholarly context ultimately does that, pulling from different individuals and their perspectives — that you can shape a new story.

When you’re putting together an exhibition, many people have to collaborate to make it happen. Whereas, when we lay folks think about the typical work of an academic — writing a book, for example — the idea we often have is one of solitary pursuit. How do you think about or approach the differences between those two kinds of projects?

Everything has its place and its importance. I learn different things from writing a book, and the depth of the research behind something like that is different than what you do for an exhibition. In a way the exhibition comes last. It comes after all that learning and is an opportunity to showcase the learning in a different way and reach a different audience. Just as teaching and scholarship go hand in hand, an exhibition is a different product of the same intellectual work that it takes to write a book. You’re using the same material, but it has to be presented differently. You can’t just take a paragraph from a book and turn it into a museum label.

And while I enjoy my own solitary time in my intellectual cave here and there, I really do also enjoy what it means to coordinate with other people, and not just about taking your ideas and putting them in front of a new audience in an exhibition. Rather the collaboration means that the end-product is something you couldn’t have generated on your own. There’s growth and learning that happens in the process itself.

What did you learn from putting this exhibition together?

Everyone has their prejudices, and coming into this exhibition I had my prejudice against the Austen extended family during the Victorian period. All those interferences! I just wasn’t really interested in all those Victorian relatives who sanitized and adjusted their Aunt Jane’s reputation. But the other collector, Mary Crawford, pointed out in our discussions that yes, but these books were still very important. Even though members of the Austen clan did sanitize and edit out things and commit these horrible crimes that I was accusing them of, they nonetheless also showed people Jane Austen’s voice in letters that the world had not yet seen. That newly published material then generated new thinking and new scholarship about Jane.

After a while there were so many things she mentioned that, quite frankly, I’d never read, that I began to read them. And I began to ask questions like, how’s this book related to this other book? Whose relative was that? Mary ended up drawing us a sort of schematic to explain it all, and once we started working on that visual explanation, it was clear that this “family book tree” had to be part of the show.

Even though I still feel that not all these family contributions were by any means equal, and not all of them were for the better, the sheer number of them kind of convinced me that yeah, of course they had this extraordinary impact. You can dismiss them as misguided, but that isn’t the whole truth. So, occasionally this sort of scholarly habit of sneering at this or that popular thing gets corrected when you work with other people who rightly see the value of those things. There’s some course correction that happens that’s really healthy.

Now, the second part of the question: What do you hope that a visitor would take away from visiting “Paper Jane”?

I would hope that a visitor who knows nothing about Jane Austen enjoys walking through a timeline of what is essentially book history and pop culture to see what the last 250 years in print looks like for an author that they may not have ever read. Although I think you’d be hard-pressed to find somebody now who hasn’t been exposed to Jane Austen in some way.

At the same time, we’ve been very gratified by reactions from other Jane Austen scholars and fans who know a great deal about her but who nonetheless have never seen a first edition of this novel or a railroad edition of that one and who can now see the popular culture kaleidoscope that Jane Austen was in the early period.

I have a confession about this exhibition, which I think gets at something about how we think about Jane Austen generally. When you first told me about this project, you said, “here’s some information about my ‘Paper Jane’ exhibition,” and I thought for a long time that the title of the exhibition was “My Paper Jane.” Now, looking back on that misunderstanding, there’s something about that possessive “my” that feels appropriate. A lot of people really feel a connection and almost an ownership over the works of Jane Austen in a way that feels unique.

Yeah, I think they do. Janeites call themselves “Janeites,” and I don’t think that Shakespeare fans call themselves “the Willies,” for example.

I wish that they would! But we don’t really do this with other writers to the same degree, and I wonder if you have any insight into why that is.

There is an intimacy that readers feel with the works of Jane Austen, and it might have something to do with how novels are read silently and alone. At the same time, movies do bring people together, and now Jane Austen’s popular on the stage too. But there is an intimacy to reading.

Joe Roach, who is a scholar of celebrity culture at Yale, calls any feeling of intimacy with a celebrity “public intimacy.” Celebrities awaken that feeling in a fan — true fandom — which is about feeling that intimacy with, in this case, a writer, or with actors from the screen or the stage. And that public intimacy is something that defines Jane Austen’s celebrity for certain. I don’t know if it’s more so than other writers, but it might be a reflection of her celebrity, of how famous she is, that people feel that close connection to her. It might be an aspect of fame rather than an aspect of her writing specifically.

Oh, that’s interesting. I would’ve thought the opposite, that she’s famous because she inspires this connection. But it could be the reverse, that her fame is what draws people closer to her.

It could also be a chicken and the egg issue.

Absolutely. And whatever the cause, I imagine that dynamic is something that you have to navigate as a scholar and teacher of Jane Austen.

I have taught many older novels that I need to sell to my students, where they’ve never heard of the authors and I really have to sell them on the book before they are willing to crack the spine. Like, “You really want to read these because they’re great! Let me tell you how great they are so that you will want to invest your time.”

And those are novels by Frances Burney, Sarah Fielding, Henry Fielding, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson. These are people who do not have an action figure and don’t have a movie and have no celebrity status anymore, even though they were bestselling authors in their day. So, I know what it’s like to have to sell a book and promote it and maybe even inflate its importance in order to make people pay attention.

When it comes to teaching Austen, it’s the opposite. You’re speaking to a room that’s already convinced. They already love her, and now it’s about turning that love into something productive so that we’re not just talking about how great Mr. Darcy is or how much Mrs. Bennett looks like our mother. I tell my students those things are off the table. I don’t want to know your feelings. Your feelings are for sharing with your friends. Let’s look at these passages; that’s what we’re doing here. But it’s a lot easier when you have to say “keep your feelings to yourself and let’s look at the book,” because those feelings animate interest, and they already direct a students’ gaze to the page. Whereas, when it comes to the lesser-known novelists who made Austen possible, it’s heavy lifting, no matter how great they were in their day. And that’s partly because, you know, Hollywood is working for me when it comes to teaching Jane Austen.

Absolutely. There’s always another adaptation just around the corner.

And I can’t wait for Netflix’s new Pride and Prejudice that they’ve promised to release this year.

I hadn’t heard about this. That’s exciting. And Pride and Prejudice in particular feels so generational, doesn’t it? I was of the Keira Knightley generation…

Of course you were! As she rolls her eyes.

Whereas my mother-in-law, who is a devoted Jane Austen fan and has been her whole life, can’t stand the Keira Knightly adaptation.

I’m with your mother-in-law on this one. But ultimately I love them both for bringing students into my classroom.

It’s a well-known truism that money can’t buy happiness. Just think of the clichéd miserable lottery winner or an oil-rich nation suffering from the “resource curse.” But what if that unhappiness is a phase rather than a permanent state? Is it possible to “reverse the curse”? And if so, how?

These are the questions that interest political scientist Delgerjargal Uvsh. A professor of Slavic and Eurasian studies at UT Austin, Uvsh is also a researcher working on the “resource curse,” the longstanding theory in social science that developing countries with abundant natural resources, such as oil and gas, will typically experience worse political and economic outcomes than their comparatively resource-poor neighbors. These nations, the theory goes, frequently have lower economic growth, less democracy, and generally poorer development while experiencing more corruption, more autocracy, and greater state interference in the economy. Think of OPEC countries with authoritarian regimes, or the diamond-rich Democratic Republic of the Congo’s long history of exploitation and civil war.

It’s an old theory, at least by the standards of social science, and continues to be influential (and debated). But Uvsh is less concerned with the resource curse itself than with what comes next.

“How do countries get out of this? When is it possible to reverse the resource curse, and when is that most likely to happen? That’s what I’m interested in exploring right now,” she says.

Uvsh’s interest in resource-rich nations is itself a natural one. She was born and grew up in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert just as the country was emerging from its Soviet past and transitioning to a democratic government. The questions that confronted Mongolians then continue to influence her research now. “My formative years in Mongolia were shaped by this curiosity about, ‘Is Mongolia on the right path politically, economically, and policy-wise? Are we going in a direction that will benefit the country as a whole or not?’ That is what we would hear on the news, what my parents and relatives were talking about,” she remembers. “So, it was natural for me to be curious about how changes happen in these post-Soviet countries.”

It turns out the answer, at least for Mongolia, is closely tied to the country’s natural wealth. Its deep deposits of copper, gold, and coal helped fund its transformation from one of the poorest former Soviet nations to an “oasis of democracy” and continue to support a huge portion of its economy. But while Mongolia’s enduring democracy is remarkable, the country hasn’t proven immune to the resource curse. It experiences a high level of corruption, and the Mongolian government has not always been transparent about how revenues from natural resources are handled or spent.

So how can a country like Mongolia reverse elements of the resource curse? In her current book project, Uvsh outlines one possible answer. It all has to do with “negative shocks,” or sharp and sustained declines in government revenues from resources that can lead to economic crises.

“In almost all cases of natural resource-dependent countries,” she explains, “they inevitably go through a decline in natural resource revenue. When it comes to oil and gas in particular, these times of negative shocks, particularly times of long-lasting negative shocks, are the exact moments when positive changes can happen. These moments of tough times can be used as opportunities to make policy changes because it’s then that governments are most willing to listen to business owners or other non-government actors. They are, in some ways, in a fiscally patient position.”

Mongolia’s recent history offers a helpful example of this theory in practice. In the early 2010s, commodity prices were high and money was flowing into the country, Uvsh says. Then, beginning around 2014, prices fell, with serious implications for government budgets across the nation. Tellingly, this period coincided with Mongolia taking steps to diversify its economy, such as increasing its support of the cashmere industry, small business owners, and female entrepreneurs.

The negative shock effect can be seen outside Mongolia too. Take the oil-and-gas-producing regions of Russia. “When the governments of these regions were faced with what they consider permanent negative shocks — when they thought the lost oil and gas revenue wasn’t coming back and there was a political story behind that — they worked really hard to expand their tax base,” Uvsh says. “They established things like one-stop windows that make state business interactions easier and state organizations that facilitate dialogue between the government and businesses. We see this increase in initiatives that the governments took because they needed to tax these businesses. That incentivized them to be more open, to be more inclusive, and to listen to these businesses more intently than in positive shock times.”

It may sound counter-intuitive that something called a negative shock could have such positive downstream effects, but Uvsh sees her findings as analogous to other parts of day-to-day life.

“On a personal level, when there’s something negative going on, we can look at it as an opportunity to change our lifestyle,” she points out. “So, I think this is a very intuitive finding that tough times force us to think about the longer term and can require us to make painful changes that we didn’t have to make when times were good.”

It’s the longer term thinking here that’s essential, Uvsh says, because short-term negative shocks can actually further entrench resource-curse-type governmental behavior. In the case of Russia’s oil-and-gas regions, for example, short-term shocks see upticks in corruption, state inspections, and general government interference in business.

“We can think of these instances as the government trying to hang on until their revenue comes back, and in order to do that sometimes they may have to resort to more extractive behavior from the business community,” she explains.

In addition to her work on the resource curse and negative shocks, Uvsh approaches her main theme — the causes of change in post-Soviet nations — in other ways. There’s her work on Mongolian political parties, for one, which she sees as both foundational to the country’s democracy and as exhibiting warning signs of instability. And then there are the undergraduate and graduate courses she leads, which expand far beyond Mongolia and Russia to encompass almost 30 present-day countries across two continents.

“We look into the experiences of the 28 countries that were either part of the Soviet Union or were satellites to it to understand how the political regimes and institutions have developed since the fall of the Soviet Union,” Uvsh says. “And we do a lot of comparison between different countries and different modalities that these countries have gone through in order to transition to different political regimes from the communist regime.”

Her emphasis on comparisons marks Uvsh as a scholar in the comparative politics subfield of political science, she says. It’s also one of the most important things she hopes students take away from her teaching and her work.

“These scientific-inquiry techniques are something we spend considerable time on,” Uvsh says, “because I want my students to be better thinkers and readers of science, to think about their own reflections, conclusions, and observations in a comparative term and be aware of why they’re reaching the conclusions they do. If they change their lens with another one, will that change their conclusion? How? The idea is that these are skills that they can then use for any question about any topic, whether it’s about politics, economics, or health.”

While the future for Mongolia and other resource-rich nations is far from settled — Mongolia itself is currently experiencing ongoing political uncertainty related to allegations of government corruption, and global resource markets remain unstable — Uvsh is certain that the social science techniques she practices in her own scholarship and shares with students will continue to expand our understanding of both the resource curse and what comes after. And she’s certain of this, too: The resource curse, like everything else, can change for the better.

Our guest on this episode of the Extra Credit podcast is English professor Frederick Luis Aldama, or “Professor Latinx,” as he’s affectionately known in the world of comics and comics studies. He is co-editor of the newly published comics anthology From Cocinas to Lucha Libre Ringsides: A Latinx Comics Anthology, for which he invited an array of talented comic artists and writers to collaborate to create short graphic stories on either sports or food that intersect in some fashion with Latino identity and culture.

We talk about the book, which includes a story on which he is a collaborator. We also talk about the greater world of Latinx comics scholarship, a field of study which he helped bring into existence and within which he has written dozens of books over the course of decades. He’s more than just a scholar, in other words. He’s an institution, community, and canon builder, which is a rare thing to be able to say about someone.

This isn’t the first time Aldama has featured here on Extra Credit: Back in our very early days he generously provided a reading list for anyone new to the comic genre or looking to dive deeper, and it’s just as insightful and inspiring now as it was then. Review that list at the link below, read more about Professor Latinx’s origin story here, and listen to our discussion here or wherever you get your podcasts.

Julija Šukys, associate professor of English and author of Artifact: Encounters with the Campus Shooting Archives, recommends The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing

Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time proceeds by association. Using the rehabilitation of her new-to-her home garden as a frame, the author then fans out across history to consider what horticulture reveals about power, care, and time. She introduces us to towering figures like Capability Brown, whose grand landscapes inspire both admiration and unease, bound as they are to authority and hierarchy. Surprisingly (at least to me), the book considers W. G. Sebald as a garden writer, providing a new view on a beloved literary figure, asking what it means to tend what is fragile, fleeting, and shared.

Chad Seales, associate professor of religious studies and subject of “Deus Ex Machina?”, recommends God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’Gieblyn

This is the one book that I’ve recommended the most this past year. It’s a book that makes you think twice about the promise of Artificial Intelligence and predictive technologies to usher in new forms of human freedom and flourishing. O’Gieblyn, who exited the theological world of evangelical Christianity with a host of questions that led her towards agnosticism, found the theological problems she thought she left behind regenerated within technological futurism. Rather than professing faith in a mysterious God who predestined some for heaven and some for hell, humans now submitted to the unknown forces of data machines that determined our fate. God, Human, Animal, Machine is a wonderfully written and staggeringly honest account of what it means to be human in the face of the unknown we have come to believe can know us more than we know ourselves.

Kirsten Cather, professor of Asian studies, director of the Center for East Asian Studies, and author of Scripting Suicide in Japan, recommends The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa

Even in my pleasure reading, I can’t seem to get away from dark, haunting topics. But this novel haunts in a good way. It begins with a simple premise: a totalitarian world where things disappear one-by-one, from the seemingly frivolous — roses and perfume — to essentials like maps, photographs, and books. First the object, then the words for that object, and eventually all memories are obliterated. For most people, these frictionless disappearances hardly disrupt their daily lives, but a select few retain their memories and become enemies of the state. Ogawa’s novel offers a beautiful meditation on the ways that censorship remains ever-present, shrinking our worlds. At the same time, it reminds us that being haunted by the beloved people and things we have lost in our lives offers its own form of salvation.

John Hoberman, professor of Germanic studies, recommends Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

It is no accident that Colson Whitehead has won two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction. He demonstrates perfect pitch as he creates the mood of his (Black) first-person narrator and the vernaculars that he and the other characters employ. He has a gift for composing conversations that flow effortlessly. On a larger scale, he invokes the major themes of African-American life with subtlety and weaves them into a larger narration about the various forms of segregation and fraud that are inherent in American life.

Kathleen Griesbach, assistant professor of sociology and subject of “Hustling Today to Rest Tomorrow,” recommends Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance by Karen Levy

Data Driven highlights the many (unintended) consequences of introducing new technology (specifically the electronic logging device, or ELD) into truckers’ work process in the 2010s. It shows how this technology only exacerbated truckers’ structural financial precarity while also threatening their sense of autonomy and expertise. The book is an ethnography that also highlights the modern history of trucking and how truckers’ lives and livelihoods came to be so insecure (for more on the latter, the sociologist Steve Viscelli wrote another great book called The Big Rig). Somehow this book also manages to be a rich and vivid investigation of the trucker in American culture! Data Driven has insights for thinking about trucking and technology today, including the experiments in driverless trucks we’re seeing on Texas highways. It shows how technology’s impacts are fundamentally shaped by social interactions and social forces, showing how technological change is contingent and unpredictable at a moment when it might feel inevitable.

Jason Cons, associate professor of anthropology and author of Delta Futures: Time, Territory, and Capture on a Climate Frontier, recommends Absolution: A Southern Reach Novel by Jeff VanderMeer

I typically avoid dystopian fiction: the climate realities that I work on are dystopian enough. But this year, I was thrilled by the return of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series. VanderMeer’s books explore “Area X” — a mysterious disturbed ecology cut off from but located in a place resembling Southern Florida. They are some of the eeriest, strangest, and most satisfying works of speculative fiction I’ve read. Absolution is a genre-bending prequel to his original trilogy that blends noir with Southern gothic and an eye for the profoundly uncanny. I loved this book.

Yoav Di-Capua, professor of history and director of the Institute for Historical Studies, recommends The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present by Fredric Jameson

Have you ever wondered what all the fancy academic talk about “theory” — French theory in particular — is really about? How did a post–World War II foreign system of thought come to exert such an iron grip on the cultural and political imagination of at least three generations of American professors? And what kind of cultural work did French theory perform on American campuses?

In this posthumously published book, American literary critic and philosopher Fredric Jameson takes the reader on a personal journey through half a century of French theory. At times idiosyncratic and at others more conventional, The Years of Theory is not intended as an introduction to contemporary French philosophy but rather as a meditation on it — and a distinctly American one at that. From the spectacular ascent of existentialism and structuralism, through post-structuralism and high postmodernism, Jameson explores key philosophical moments and turning points, engaging with household names such as Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Guattari, Deleuze, Kristeva, Foucault, Lyotard, Rancière, Baudrillard, Alain Badiou, and many others.

With characteristic irony, Jameson reflects on how “theory” shifted from a revolutionary mode of thought opposed to the totalizing nature of “the system” into a hegemonic system in its own right. Marked by an aura of exclusivity and elitism, and by the promise of an esoteric path to hidden knowledge about virtually everything, one might be tempted to dismiss theory as an irrelevant academic affectation. That would be a mistake. Its fingerprints can be found across nearly every front of the American culture wars — most notably in debates over grand narratives, great texts, and the structure of the college curriculum, to say nothing about questions of race and gender. Both critical and sympathetic, Jameson’s timely book invites us to imagine a much-needed new phase in the humanities, one in which a more synthetic and relaxed engagement with the cultural legacies of Europe and America might finally command broad consensus.

Frances Champagne, professor of psychology and associate dean of research in the College of Liberal Arts, recommends The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

In 2025, I read Hillary Mantel’s final novel — the third from her Wolf Hall trilogy — focused on Thomas Cromwell and the intrigues of 16^th century England during Henry VIII’s reign. Published in 2020, Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning historical fiction is a delight to experience and brings to life a personal narrative of its infamous protagonist. This final novel is full of foreboding as Cromwell navigates the ever-changing political landscape of his time and both the triumph and perils of royal favor. The novel weaves in imagined dialogues with ghosts from Cromwell’s past creating a haunting finale to a truly remarkable story.

Chelsi West Ohueri, assistant professor of Slavic and Eurasian studies and author of Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife, recommends Create Dangerously by Edwidge Danticat

Create Dangerously is not a new book, but it is a deeply personal and moving book by one of my favorite writers, and I revisit the book often whenever I am trying to envision, to write, and to create. I love to read Danticat’s words as she wrestles with memory, storytelling, and voice. During my most recent read I really connected with Danticat’s recounting of reading in public libraries in her youth because I too have been returning to reading and writing in public libraries. The book consists of personal essays which makes it a great source for reading sections at a time or finishing it all at once.

Emily Drumsta, assistant professor of Middle Eastern studies and author of Ways of Seeking: The Arabic Novel and the Poetics of Investigation, recommends The Parisian by Isabella Hammad

My favorite book that I read in 2025 was hands-down Isabella Hammad’s The Parisian. A work of historical fiction set during the British mandate era in Palestine (1917-1948), this chronicle of the life of Midhat Kamel, the son of a wealthy textile merchant from Nablus, introduces readers to the history of nationalism in and around Palestine better than nearly any work of straight-ahead history I know. Lost letters, star-crossed lovers, a mad priest in a Nablus asylum, and the negotiations of family, marriage, friendship, and other loyalties (ethnic, religious, nationalist) engage the reader from start to finish; you’ll barely feel its 595 pages as they pass. A highlight for this reader was a small, throwaway moment when the protagonist travels by train from Cairo direct to Nablus; if only such a journey were so easy today.

Brenda Boonabaana, assistant professor of geography and the environment featured in “People of the Park,” recommends The Routledge Handbook of Tourism and Indigenous Peoples, edited by R. Butler and A. Thompson-Carr

This book provides global perspectives on tourism and indigenous people. As one of the contributors (see chapter 12), I was motivated to engage deeply with the work of fellow authors, which made my experience highly rewarding. I love the book so much, and it made my year awesome!

I particularly enjoyed chapter 14, “Stewarding Māori Taonga for Sustainable Indigenous Tourism Enterprise,” by Ashley Puriri and Allison McIntosh. They nicely highlight the value of local community-based cultural and environmental stewardship that shape their sustainable business ethos. I quote: “Upholding the wisdom of their Kaumātua, the founders of Taiamai Tours strive to ensure they follow the advice of their elders to ‘Tiaki Te Taonga’ or, look after the rare and precious resources. This drives the enterprise’s commitment to both cultural, social and environmental sustainability, honoring intergenerational responsibility so that the world they live in will be kept the same way they inherited it from their ancestors.”

Desmond Ong, assistant professor of psychology, recommends Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by Karen Hao

Hao’s book puts forward a history and analysis of the latest wave of Generative AI technology, specifically focusing on the explosive growth of OpenAI. It discusses the worldviews and ideologies held by some of today’s most influential technology leaders, with Generative AI being the fastest-growing commercially-consequential technology. But it also sheds light on some of the outcomes of such concentration of power using an analogy to empires of old, such as the extractive and exploitative transfer of resources (intellectual property; human labor; minerals, electricity, and water) from Global South countries — as well as creative professions like writers and artists — to Silicon Valley.

Two weeks ago we ran the first half of a Q&A with UT Austin philosophy professor Michael Tye, one of our most influential contemporary philosophers of mind. If you haven’t read it, I encourage you to do so before you go any further — you can find it here. If you did, then you’ll remember that we discussed what it means to be conscious at all, how we can make determinations about who and what have this experience, and whether our understanding of consciousness could and should expand to include AI machines or models.

In this issue of Extra Credit, we’re sharing the second half of that discussion. The format here is a little different: Rather than continuing to ask Tye my own questions, I opened the floor for UT faculty, students, and alumni to ask theirs, and the resulting conversation covers a wide variety of related topics. The questions have been anonymized, and both questions and responses have been lightly edited for clarity. I hope you find it as thought-provoking as I did.

Michael, you seem to argue that if we observe sufficiently realistic outputs or complex behaviors, we can infer the presence of thinking or consciousness so long as there is no defeater. But isn’t the key defeater in the case of large language models that we know they have been programmed through semi-Pavlovian training to approximate plausible responses more and more closely over time? Why doesn’t that count as a defeater, at least in the case of LLMs if not of all possible artificial intelligence paradigms.

The networks are certainly trained up via reinforcement learning, and they’re trained up in such a way that they pick the most probable outcomes given the inputs. There’s no question that the training is sort of statistical, but it’s not clear that what ends up from that training itself operates in a purely statistical way. If it is indeed the case that the system is operating purely statistically — it’s just picking the statistically most likely outcome and there is nothing more complex than that going on inside — then I think that gives us a reason to think that there isn’t consciousness that’s present, but it’s not clear that that’s what’s going on in all of these cases.

You mentioned Claude Sonnet from Anthropic. What researchers found with respect to Claude Sonic was whether or not they gave it inputs about the Golden Gate Bridge in English, Korean, Japanese, or whether they gave it visual inputs of pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge, there kept recurring internally a pattern of activations which they thought was most plausibly viewed as a common representation of the Golden Gate Bridge. And it’s really quite striking because, after all, these inputs are physically very different. English doesn’t sound like Korean and none of the languages are anything like the visual inputs, but the same pattern of activation kept being generated. So somehow the network, through its training, had ended up — this was the claim made by the Anthropic people — constructing a representation of the Golden Gate Bridge which was then used in giving accurate responses to questions about the Golden Gate Bridge. If you’ve got evidence of that sort, then you’ve got evidence of a sort to make you think that the situation is more complex than it might first appear and that it isn’t just statistical.

But if it is just statistical, then I agree. You have to say, despite how the behavior looks, there isn’t consciousness present.

How might you address this argument: Machines, such as a very advanced LLM, might have behaviors and representations such as beliefs about things that they can’t possibly know, like the feeling of a breeze on skin. Humans can imagine this and can imagine new experiences, but they have to base it in things that they’ve already experienced, whereas this machine has never felt anything like a breeze. The knowledge of the machine, then, is based on learned facts. This is like the knowledge argument, where someone who learns all these facts about red but never experience red aren’t actually conscious of that experience. So we can’t trust that these representations of the machine are reflective of phenomenal consciousness, and therefore we should not believe that these machines are conscious.

With respect to the case of pure large language models that are trained up with a linguistic input and then give a linguistic output, I agree there with respect to the example that you’ve just mentioned, because they don’t have any inputs of the right sort. But imagine that the situation is more complex — that you’ve got a much, much more complicated network which takes inputs through a whole bunch of different sense modalities. That network is embedded in a robot body and enables the robot body to move around and imagine that the inputs are something like the inputs that our own bodies have. Then I think the situation is not so obvious. It depends in part, as you say, on the situation that the robot has found itself in. If it’s in an environment in which there are breezes, as it were, which impact their receptors, maybe that robot is in more of a position to understand what it’s like to experience a wind or a breeze of a certain sort than one who hasn’t. I don’t see why we have to suppose there that there couldn’t be experience of the sort that we undergo.

But I agree with the following point, that being able simply to talk about consciousness, as a number of large language models can, is not sufficient to conclude that they genuinely are conscious. There was an engineer who worked for Google, Blake Lemoine. He had an AI called LaMDA, and he went public with the claim that, as a result of conversations with LaMDA, he was convinced that it was conscious. Google then fired him.

So he had these long conversations with LaMDA, and LaMDA talked intelligently about consciousness. But talking about consciousness and being conscious are two radically different things. I think in that case, the range of inputs was much, much too limited to license the conclusion that he drew. The kind of robot that I’m envisaging here is one in which you’ve got a much more complex multimodal input, taking a variety of inputs. I’m envisaging one that’s embedded in a robot body with an artificial skin that reacts to stimuli of various sorts — something like our skin that’s equipped with auditory systems, visual systems, and so on — and which has had a complex training, not unlike the training we have as we grow, it just would be faster for the robot given the way in which these things are done. Then I think, depending on how it behaves, it’s not irrational to think that it’s subject to consciousness at all.

Maybe you’ve mostly answered this, but have you seen evidence thus far that AI systems exhibit intentionality or are agentic in a way that would suggest something approaching human level consciousness? It sounds like what you’re saying, Michael, is that we’re probably not there yet. What we have evidence of is that there’s a likelihood that we will get there, or that we can kind of set some benchmarks such that, when we achieve them, we will feel some degree of confidence that we’ve gotten there, but we’re not there yet.

That’s essentially correct. I think that a lot of people don’t yet fully appreciate quite how far we’ve got. The latest AI from OpenAI can solve problems in theoretical physics which are too hard for most doctorates in theoretical physics. And if you ask the AI how it’s coming out with the solution, it’ll give you an answer, which sure makes it look as if it’s going through careful steps of reasoning. It will explain how it went from this to this to this and then got to the conclusion.

There’s another example that just came out in the last year of a very, very complex crossword puzzle that was given to Claude and to OpenAI’s latest AI. I think the crossword was really pretty dubious, but one of the clues was “Galaxy cluster.” You immediately think of stars and stuff. It’s a four-letter word, and the was “apps” — it was a play on Samsung Galaxy.

What happened when this puzzle was given to the AIs was Claude immediately gave an answer to that — “star” or something like that — which was wrong, and then Claude couldn’t do the rest of the puzzle. But the latest OpenAI machine, it paused for 108 seconds before it did anything. They probed it and asked, “what’s going on here?” And then they got responses from the machine and they were exactly the sorts of responses that you or I might give when we were looking at a really hard crossword puzzle: coming up with ideas as to what might be right and how it might fit in with other words we’ve thought of as answers to other clues. It’s strongly suggestive that something like reasoning was going on there.

When you put these pieces of data together — the bit about the Golden Gate Bridge, the capacity to solve new problems — I don’t really see any strong reason to deny that some of these machines are, or at least are very close to being, able to reason and think things through. Once you’ve got that and you’ve got a sufficiently complex range of inputs and you’ve got complex bodies, then I think you have to take seriously the idea that the robots can be conscious too and that you’ve artificially created something like an organism in the natural world.

I may be posing this question in the wrong way, but is consciousness, or what you’re talking about as the hard problem of consciousness, a yes or no phenomenon? In other words, in the case of an animal, can we decide whether they’re conscious or not? We said a leech’s nervous system is too simple; it can’t be conscious. But is there a level of complexity at which consciousness begins, and is there a gray area where we can’t really decide? I’m thinking in terms of human development. For example, are children conscious at birth, or do they become conscious over the course of time? Is there a transitional period when it isn’t clear whether they are or aren’t conscious?

Those are hard questions. One general observation first, which may not be directly related, but I’ve come to think that consciousness itself is an on-off matter. You’re either conscious or you’re not. The notion of borderline consciousness doesn’t make any sense. What makes sense is to ask how broadly one is conscious of things. With consciousness, it’s as if the light goes on, bang!, and then as one makes one’s way the light gets richer and richer. But the idea that there’s something present which is not definitely conscious and not definitely not-conscious, once you think about it enough it’s very hard to think of examples. If you wake up in the morning, you’re kind of groggy. People might say, well, are you conscious or not? I would say you’re conscious, but your consciousness is much less rich in that case.

So that’s a further puzzle. How could consciousness be something that’s completely on and off? Because things in the physical world generally are not just on and off, they admit of borderline cases. Now, obviously our consciousness is generally richer than that of other organisms, though of course in specific areas, other organisms may have a richer consciousness —for example, dogs with smells. What we want to explain is how it is that we get a richer consciousness rather than a less rich one.

So, it’s a good question, but I don’t see that as particularly puzzling, I’m afraid.

How much do you think that this whole recent boom in AI and LLMs has changed these fundamental philosophical questions about phenomenal consciousness? Is there some new data on the table or are we basically just having the same old conversations?

If you’re asking “have the new discoveries managed to give us a deeper understanding of phenomenal consciousness,” then I think the answer to that is no. But I don’t think that until recently, due to a lot of what has gone on recently, people have considered the question of the extent of consciousness in the way in which we are now considering it. Some of the things that these AIs are capable of doing, they’re not things that we would ever have predicted in the past. Now we find that they do do these things, we have to take seriously the question as to whether they’re conscious or not. But if you’re asking me, “have we managed with these new discoveries to come to a solution of the hard problem,” I would say no.

My sense is that it hasn’t fundamentally changed the questions, it’s changed some of our thought experiments. We can now carry around a Chinese room and a pea zombie in our pocket, which makes that thought experiment more interesting.

I think I agree with that sentiment. It’s not that the things that are happening now in the world of these machines has radically deepened our understanding of anything. But it’s challenged us to take seriously the question of whether there could be, actually in our lifetimes, genuinely conscious artificial beings. It now looks as if the answer to that is yes. The kind of intelligence these machines are beginning to exhibit in some cases is very striking.

There’s another company called One X, which I think is some sort of subsidiary of OpenAI, that has got a bunch of robots that operate completely autonomously. There’s a single neural net in their head, and the neural net controls their behavior and you can see them walking around, picking up packages, going to charge themselves, cleaning rooms, picking up toys that have been left around in a house, and so on. What you’ve got here are these machines that are operating autonomously via an internal net and engaging in quite complex behavior. This is going to continue and it’s going to become more and more complex. As it does so, then, I think we have to start taking seriously the idea that some of these nets will support consciousness.

I can’t resist mentioning this: I was woken up yesterday at my house by a noise at the courtyard at the front. There was a robot dog that had come down the steps and it was delivering a package to the front door. It delivered the package, dropped it, turned around and went up back to the street and sort of sat by the van to get in it, much to my astonishment. So this stuff is happening all around us, and it’s going to continue to get richer and richer and God knows what the final consequences will be.

You’re obviously paying close attention to the literature that’s coming from, I assume it’s primarily computer science journals, about what we understand about what’s happening inside of these large language models and maybe the robots that are operating on similar principles. Is there something you’re on the lookout for? Are there questions you think may be answered in the next few years that would be of particular interest to you in light of these questions? Or was the threshold the Golden Great Bridge example, where we start to see things that look like kind of cognitive representations in the software?

I think it would be interesting to see that develop further. And there’s some argument about whether there really is, in that case, a genuine internal representation of the Golden Gate Bridge. But I think it would be great if there was more done in that direction and if it could be agreed that internal representations are being generated by the machines that then are responsible for its behavior, rather than the machine operating in a purely statistical way as is the case with the auto complete on your phone. It’s hard to predict how it’s going to go, but I would be interested to see that, and I’m sure we’re going to get more and more of that since it’s crucially relevant.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with an example by Jeffrey Hinton, in which he gave a problem to Chat GPT, and it sure doesn’t look as if the machine giving its answer is operating purely statistically. The problem is quite simple really. You have a house in which some of the walls are white, some are yellow and some are blue. Yellow paint fades to white in one year. In two years’ time, you want all the walls in your house to be white. What should you do? Chat GPT came up with the right answer in less than one second. Hinton said it sure doesn’t look as if somehow, by combing through statistics from past problems like that, it somehow statistically came up with the right answer. It looks as if something else is going on there, just as it looks as if something else is going on with the latest OpenAI and the crossword puzzle or the AI that can solve problems in theoretical physics. It looks as if what happens is, after a sufficient amount of training, a kind of mechanism gets generated and almost clicks into place.

There was another case I read in which some workers at OpenAI had been trying to get a machine to add together two numbers, and it kept getting it wrong. They accidentally left it on for two days and when they came back, much to their amazement, it was finally doing it correctly. How come it suddenly got to do the math correctly? It’s like a mechanism had clicked into place. I talked last summer to a guy who has a part-time appointment at Imperial College London who’s also employed by Google, and he thought that that’s what happens in cases like this: that, in fact, via the training, various mechanisms get created, not deliberately, but they just end up getting generated, and those then have an impact on the behavior that results.

In our current age of widespread large language model AI, philosophical questions of consciousness feel particularly relevant. What does it mean to be conscious, and is this an experience exclusive to humans? If not — if we’re willing to accept that non-human organisms can experience consciousness similar to ours — could our understanding of consciousness expand to include sophisticated AI models, now or in the future?

To help answer these questions and more, I spoke earlier this fall with UT Austin philosophy professor Michael Tye, who also happens to be one of our most influential contemporary philosophers of mind. His books, including Ten Problems of Consciousness and Tense Bees and Shell-Shocked Crabs: Are Animals Conscious?, have helped shape current debates about consciousness in humans and non-humans. In his new paper, the well-titled “How Can We Tell if a Machine is Conscious?”, he turns his attention to the possibility of AI consciousness and alternatives to the famous Turing test.

Below is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for concision and clarity. The second half of our conversation, featuring an open Q&A-style discussion with UT Austin faculty, students, and alumni, will be published on Extra Credit in the coming weeks.

Michael, thanks for joining us. Before we get into whether machines can be conscious, I’ll start with the obvious question. What is consciousness? What do we mean when we talk about it, and what does it mean to have it?

I think it’s useful initially to distinguish between what is sometimes called “creature consciousness” and what is sometimes called “state consciousness.” Creature consciousness is consciousness that creatures have for various things. For example, imagine I’m conscious that I’m late for an appointment. That is an attribute of me; I’m a creature. That’s an example of creature consciousness, and it’s also a self-consciousness.

Another kind of creature consciousness is higher order consciousness. This is the consciousness creatures have of what’s going on in their own minds, consciousness of a mental state by another mental state. Then there’s a very general notion of consciousness which creatures have. Suppose I say to you, “let me go upstairs to see if my daughter’s conscious yet.” All I really mean there is, “let me go upstairs and see if she’s functioning properly, if she’s awake and can come down and have a conversation.”

Those are three kinds of consciousness. They’re important in various ways, but they’re not the kinds of consciousness that philosophers are primarily puzzled about. Historically, I think what has happened is that when scientists have talked to philosophers, they didn’t quite get the kind of consciousness that philosophers were on about. So they thought, what’s the big puzzle here? And then they proposed theories with respect to the sorts of consciousness I’ve just distinguished.

The kind of consciousness I haven’t gone through yet is state consciousness. The idea here is that some of our mental states — some, but not all — are inherently conscious. Some examples would be pain, the visual experience of red, the experience of anger, feeling an itch. Those mental states are such that by their very nature they are conscious mental states; they have a distinctive conscious or subjective character to them. That kind of consciousness is known as phenomenal consciousness, and it’s what philosophers have been primarily puzzled about. What is it exactly that these states have that makes them have their distinctive phenomenal or subjective character? And how are we to understand how that arises as a result of neurological activity? How are we to fit it into our overall picture of the structure of the world? This has given rise to what has come to be called “the hard problem of consciousness.”

What is the hard problem of consciousness, and why do we care about it?

Well, because we want to understand ourselves, and it’s a big stretch for our understanding of ourselves. The hard problem of consciousness is associated with David Chalmers, but he didn’t really invent this problem. There are plenty of people who’ve formulated the problem in one form or another right the way back to the late 1800s or something.

The thought is simply this: We get a story about what’s going on in the brain neurophysiologically, chemically, and, if you like to go down to this level, even quantum mechanically. We get a full detailed physical story of what’s going on when a certain kind of phenomenal conscious state is present. In the example of the feeling of pain, we get a complete physical story of the neurological chemical basis of the feeling of pain. It still seems to make perfectly good sense for us to ask ourselves how it is that that particular set of neurological goings-on generated this particular feeling. Why didn’t it generate a different feeling? Why didn’t it generate a feeling of an itch, for example? Why did it generate any feeling at all? There seems to be a huge gap in our understanding here; it’s called the explanatory gap. We can say that when this is going on physically, we get this subjective, conscious state, but we still want something more than that.

That’s the problem, and there are various strategies with respect to it. Some people argue that it’s not a genuine problem, it’s a pseudo problem. Other people take it seriously. And it’s resulted in there being some proposed theories that are, initially, at any rate, pretty counterintuitive.

In your paper, you give the example of a leech as something that doesn’t have anything like consciousness. It will move in such a way that we could imagine that it has a conscious experience of pain or desire, but from what we know scientifically about how the leech’s neurons work, we can draw a pretty strong conclusion that it doesn’t have conscious experiences at all. But we feel that there’s something different about our experience. Can you say more about that distinction?

The leech doesn’t have many neurons. Its body is divided into segments, and I think that each segment has something like 400 neurons. If you look at how it is that leeches move, they appear to operate in a completely automatic, stimulus-response way. They have receptors that respond to vibrations in the ground that are made by their prey, so they can orient themselves with respect to their prey, and they have other receptors which pick up the scent that their prey emanates. These receptors make the leech automatically move in certain directions. It doesn’t move in those directions because it has decided to itself that it’s now going to move due to a desire of a certain sort. That’s not how the leech operates. The leech operates much more like an automatic door opener. If you stand in front of the automatic door, it’s not that it decides to open or wants to open. It’s built in such a way that it inevitably opens.

Not many animals, in my view, are at all like the leech here. It’s the exception rather than the rule. Usually animals move as they do because of decisions that they make reflecting desires and beliefs that they have. There’s a mental antecedent to their behavior.

Now, I think that the experiences that we have by their very nature play a certain role for us. They enable us to form appropriate beliefs and make appropriate decisions. For example, suppose I have a visual experience of red. What it’s representing with respect to some object before me, that information is available to my cognitive centers. I can then believe that the object before me is red and make certain decisions as to where I want to move. Experiences in general, I think, are cognitively poised. They stand ready and available to make a direct difference with respect to what we want, what we believe, what we decide.

Another example is the feeling of pain. When you feel pain, that is immediately available to the centers that form desires. You want it to stop; you believe the source of the pain is over here; that then makes you form a decision to move in this other direction, and off you go. Experiences produce behavior, but they do so via various cognitive estates. In the case of the leech, you don’t have anything of that sort going on, so I think that leeches are not conscious. But in many other animals, I think it’s plausible to suppose that you get the behavior as a result of various cognitive states. It’s plausible to suppose that those cognitive states are present because various experiences are present.

When I think about the “hard problem of consciousness,” intuitively what I hear is that there’s something special about consciousness. It’s not just that it’s a hard problem — there’s lots of hard problems in science — it’s that there’s something special and distinctive about the problem of consciousness in particular. Do you think that’s right?

That’s a reasonable response. One thing we might say here is that there are other hard problems too, but the more you reflect on consciousness, the weirder the situation seems, because it doesn’t seem as if there’s any immediate connection between what we get from science about what’s going on in the brain and what we experience. Why does that collection of physical goings on feel this way? Why doesn’t it feel some other very different way? Our feelings vary hugely subjectively, so why does it feel exactly this way? It seems like there’s a reasonable question to ask. It seems like there should be an answer to it, but it seems whatever else we come up with, we get a more detailed story about what’s going on functionally. But again, why does that produce this feeling?

There are things that can be said, and I myself have said them through the years, because I’ve been a committed, straightforward physicalist, if you look back to many of my earlier publications. But the problem is, if you stick around long enough, you have time to reflect. And what you want, in the end, is a view that you can believe. And what I found myself coming to think was that something had been left out. Intellectual honesty required me to admit that and then to consider some other alternatives.

What do you mean when you say that in your earlier development you were a pure physicalist? Do you mean that you thought consciousness was a pseudo problem, that there was something about the way our brains work that made us feel as though there was an experience of consciousness that couldn’t be explained in traditionally physicalist terms?

Basically that was what I thought. We all have to agree that there is this puzzle here. We then can either take it at face value and admit that as yet we have no answer to it, or we can make various proposals that would be consistent with our saying things like “pain is such and such a neurological state” or “pain is such and such a functional state.”

One way in which people in philosophy historically have tried to do that is by saying that we have very special ways of conceiving of our experiences and feelings. They’re really just brain states or whatever, but we have special ways of conceiving of them that generate in us the illusion that they’re radically different from the physical goings on when in reality they aren’t. I and others have told detailed stories of that sort, but I think, in the end, philosophers have sort of collectively come to the conclusion that they’re not satisfying enough. And that’s what I think myself, unfortunately.

One view that at least I think is worth taking seriously is that maybe there’s a straightforward answer to the hard problem, but maybe we’re cognitively closed to that answer by the structure of our minds. It’s not as if, given the evolutionary niche we occupy, we’re going to be able to solve all problems with respect to the universe. If you take rats, for example, they can’t solve problems in theoretical physics, their minds aren’t appropriately structured for them to be able to do that. Maybe we’re in something like that state with respect to the hard problem and there really is a straightforward, satisfying solution, but we can’t get our minds around it. I think that’s possible, but it’s not satisfying. So we continue to consider whether there are alternative answers.

Let’s switch to the question of the day. Can machines be conscious? And before we get into what your answer means, what’s your yes or no answer?

Yes.

Okay. Maybe the next question is: What are the key things we need to know to be able to answer that? How do you go about answering a question like that for yourself?

It’s like the question about animal consciousness. I think the way to proceed there is to look at the animal’s behavior in the first instance and ask why the animal is behaving in the way that it is. Likewise, I think, with machines.

If you take our own case, for each of our experiences and feelings, there’s a kind of distinctive behavior that goes along with it. Just stick with a simple example of pain. Initially there’s a characteristic cluster of behaviors that’s generated by the feeling of pain. Some of these behaviors are more complex than simply pulling your injured limb away from the damaging stimulus. There’s something called trade-off behavior, which is very important. If you are feeling pain as a result of doing something, but you are doing it and it has great value to you, you’ll put up with the pain and continue to behave in that way. And if you go through it, there’s a complex cluster of behaviors that is generated by the feeling of pain.

When we look at other animals, one thing we see is whether that cluster of behaviors is found in them. If it is, then you’ve got the overt appearance of pain. I think that is a reason to believe that they genuinely do feel pain unless we’ve got some further information that undercuts that inference. Some debates go on about whether neurological differences are salient, but I think that, in the end, the best way to proceed is through the animal’s behavior. If you look at other mammals, fish, and arguably even some insects, you find quite complex behaviors that are straightforwardly explainable on the assumption that they’re feeling something like us, namely pain, and which can’t be explained satisfactorily if we take a different view.

In the machine world, imagine that we’ve got a machine that is running a variant on today’s large language models in that the machine not only takes linguistic inputs to its “brain” but also takes inputs of a whole host of sorts: inputs about what’s happening on the surface of its body, inputs visually to the system. Imagine the robot has a head and the neural network is embedded in the head auditory inputs. You get inputs on forces to the body, and you equip it in such a way that it can generate behavior of the appropriate source. Then imagine that what’s happening after this is constructed is that you’re getting very complex behavior under certain circumstances when the robot damages its body, behavior of the sort that we would produce if we were feeling pain as a result of damage to our bodies. Then I think prima facie we can at least take seriously the idea that the robot is feeling pain.

Now, that’s not the only possibility — and this is where things get kind of complicated — because what’s really going on in these networks, if we just look at large language models, is not well understood. We know what went on when we trained up these networks to give the desired outputs, but there are different views about exactly what’s going on internally in these networks. I think that makes a difference to how reasonable inference is with respect to there being in such and such an internal state.

You’ve coined a phrase, “Newton’s rule.” Can you talk about what that is? I think it’ll be obvious to people how that applies to this case, and I think it’s an interesting question of how we ultimately arrive at a conclusion and say a machine is or isn’t conscious. The one that a lot of people will know, which you don’t think is adequate, is the Turing test. You have a related but different approach to determining whether something is what it seems to be.

My view on the Turing test is that the way the system behaves gives us evidence of various sorts, but contra Turing, I don’t think being intelligent is just behaving in an apparently intelligent way. With Newton’s rule, what Newton said was: if you find in nature a given effect occurring on a bunch of occasions, and every time the same cause is operative, then when you meet that effect again on a new occasion, it’s rational for you to believe that the same cause is operative unless you’ve got some reason to think that there is a difference in the new case that makes a difference. Obviously the new case will be different in a bunch of ways, but unless you have evidence that those differences make a difference, you’re entitled to think that the same cause is operative for that effect.

In some ways that dovetails with what I said earlier about behavior. You find in the animal world the same behavior repeated, and that behavior matches the sort of behavior that we know in human beings is generated by the feeling of pain. The thought is in all the cases in which we have the behavior and we know the cause, we know it’s the feeling of pain that generates it. Arguably we don’t have reason to think that the differences make a difference, so it’s rational for us to believe that the same cause is operative there. Of course, we could be wrong. To say this even more cautiously, maybe we should say it’s rational for us to prefer the view that the organism feels pain to denying it. Maybe our credence level is not quite high enough to entitle us to be definite believers, but it at least makes it rational for us to prefer that view given the way the organism is behaving.

So, why shouldn’t we extend that methodology when we encounter a robot of the future, which has a body associated with the neural network and is behaving in exactly the way that we behave when we feel pain? What we have to do in order to reach further conclusions here is to try and form some further judgments about what’s going on internally in the robot. In our own cases, as I mentioned earlier, it’s not that the feeling immediately generates the behavior. Various cognitive states interact and generate the behavior. The question is whether you can find in the robot not just the behavior but cognitive states of that sort, and that would require you find in the robot representational states, because beliefs and decisions are states that carry information, they have representational content. The question then is whether the machine is just behaving in a purely statistical way or whether it’s somehow coming to form internal representations which are then having an impact on their behavior. It’s an open question, given the behavior, whether the robot is feeling anything. We need to look in further to what’s going on cognitively, if anything at all, in the robot.

When I was reading about your idea of Newton’s rule, I was thinking about what the contrary position might be. I read Newton’s rule as saying your working hypothesis is something like “if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.” If a machine is producing behavior that we would interpret in ourselves as the subjective experience of pain or consciousness, the working hypothesis, until we disprove it, is that it’s experiencing consciousness. Then we try to understand certain things about its neurology, and if we then have reason to discount that experience, we reject the hypothesis.

Some version of the counter position here might be “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” I would think there would be other people, and this gets back to these questions of the hard problem of consciousness, who would say something like, “that’s so counter to our intuition and to our subjective experience of how the world works that you have to do better than that. The burden of proof really rests on the person who would say that machines are conscious.” What you’re saying is the burden of proof rests on the people who want to reject the obvious inference that if a machine’s behaving as though it’s conscious and we have no proof otherwise we should assume it’s conscious. Is that a fair way of framing at least part of the controversy?

I think that’s fair enough. Let me add a couple of things on another way of viewing Newton’s rule, which is sort of as an application of Occam’s razor. Why multiply causes unnecessarily? You keep getting the same effect. Why insist in the new cause as a completely new cause when the simpler hypothesis that it’s the same cause that’s operative is present?

As for the thought that we are just as entitled to go the other way and say, “no, the onus is upon you to prove the same thing is happening.” Well, there’s the opposite observation I’ve just made about not unnecessarily multiplying causes, but there’s also the following two thoughts. One is that we know that in the animal kingdom, brains vary quite dramatically. We don’t take that in and of itself as a reason to deny that the animals experience things as we do. There are interesting questions here as well, by the way, about what really is needed in human beings for the feeling of pain to be present. So the first thought is, in the animal kingdom, brains vary quite a lot, but that doesn’t prevent or preclude us from attributing experiences to those animals. We just think there are different neural realizations for the various experiences that their behavior suggests very strongly that they’re undergoing.

Secondly, there’s a kind of thought experiment in our own case which strikes me as relevant. Imagine that we have a silicon chip. We design it in such a way that it functions exactly as a given neuron in the visual cortex. We implant it in the human visual cortex and it takes inputs in exactly the same way. You can have transducers connected to the silicon chip, so there are wires coming in and a wire coming out, so you’ve got artificial dendrites and artificial axon, and basically it passes messages in just the same way as the neuron it replaces. There’s a pretty good argument I don’t have time to go through here that says, basically, if you do this one by one and you keep building out, you end up with a purely artificial visual cortex that will have no impact on visual consciousness. Visual consciousness will continue just as it did before; you will continue to believe that you’re subject to the same visual experiences as before; you’ll make all the same discriminations. If that’s true, then silicon chips are things of a sort that can support consciousness. Add that to the thought that these other animals are conscious, and then why shouldn’t we say that not just individuals as we are now, imagining them like us with parts of our brains replaced with silicon chips, but individuals built from scratch with silicon chip brains can be capable of consciousness?