Introductory Questions

● Would your life be more different if you

had been born in the same place 30
years ago, or in another country 3000
kilometers away?

● The “now” is a single moment in time,

but the past is very large. Should we
spend more time learning about the
parts of the past that affect us today?

● How should we divide the past into

smaller units when we think about it?

● What historical dates are worth

remembering in specific detail, and
which ones are best left vague?
● The Soviet leader Vladmir Lenin once
wrote that “there are decades where
nothing happens; and there are weeks
in which decades happen.” If so, do
you think people are aware of the kind
of time they are living in—and what
kind of time are we living in now?

● Has the Internet affected how quickly

history happens? How about how
quickly the present becomes history?

● Does it matter how the world came to

be what it is, or should we focus more
on what it is right now? In other
words, does the past matter, or would
 we be better off pretending it never
happened?

● If you wanted to learn about a time in

the past, would you rather read a
book, visit a museum, watch a
documentary, chat with an AI
reconstruction of someone alive back
then, or explore an old architectural
site?

● How much will global climate change

require us to rethink everyday
institutions such as schools and
workplaces?

● Are there are other

developments—other than an alien
 invasion—that might have impacts on
the same scale?

● The phrase “there's no time like the

present” is usually meant as a counter
to procrastination. Do something now,
not later. Finish this outline today, not
in 2025. Taking it more literally,
however: is the present really a unique
point in history? If so, does it make it
harder for us to understand what the
past was like?

● “Those who do not study history are

doomed to repeat it” is a phrase those
who study history like to repeat, but is
it possible that those who do study
history are doomed to absorb the
 things we like least about it? Put
another way: does knowing more
about the past limit or enhance our
ability to reimagine the present?

Lost and Font

● If you walked out of your home

without knowing you’d accidentally
time traveled into the past, how long
would it take you to realize what had
happened? What if they had sent you
back ten years, or thirty, or a
 hundred? Discuss with your team:
how far into the past would you need
to be to realize instantly that you were
in a different era?

● One clue to your whenabouts might

be the text around you: not just the
headlines on newspapers and store
signs, but the fonts they’re printed in.
Consider some of the history of
typography, then discuss with your
team: how different would the world
look today if Microsoft had chosen
Comic Sans instead of Calibri as its
default typeface in the early 2000s—or
 as its successor 20 years later. The
London Underground also decided to
update its font in 2016 for a more
modern look—did it succeed? Be sure
to learn the difference between serif
and sans serif fonts, and then see
which ones are used more widely.
Does the same distinction apply in
non-Western alphabets?

● Recently, the United States

Department of State changed its own
default font from Times New Roman
to Calibri—20 years after first
switching from Courier to Times New
 Roman. Each move sparked at least
36 points of controversy. Discuss with
your team: should governments even
have standardized fonts? If so, how
should they pick them, and when
should they change them?

● If all these fonts confuse you—or you

just want to check whether a
document (such as an alternative
World Scholar’s Cup outline) is a
forgery—you could always hire a
forensic font expert. Read about the
kind of work such experts do, then
discuss with your team: should some
 fonts be reserved for exclusive use by
AIs and others for humans?

● Time travelers often struggle to pay for

things; their currency has a cancelled
Marvel actor’s face on it, or they don’t
know what money is, or they can’t
make the self-checkout machines
work. (Then again, can anyone?) If you
found yourself at a supermarket in
1963, you wouldn’t have been able to
pay for anything at all until the clerk
typed in the price of every item you
wanted to buy, one at a time. Doing so
quickly was a coveted skill: there was
 even a competition with prizes like
free trips to Hawaii. The adoption of
the barcode in the 1960s was a
buzzkill for such price-inputting
savants. Discuss with your team: what
other technologies do we take for
granted when we’re at stores or
shopping online? And do you support
efforts to reimagine in-person
shopping without any form of
checkout at all?

● Just as barcodes transformed

checkout, QR codes have changed
many other everyday experiences,
from debate tree distribution
(sometimes) to accessing restaurant
menus. But a change that seemed
inevitable during the pandemic has
run into resistance since. Discuss with
your team: is this pushback a classic
example of society resisting
technological progress, only to
eventually succumb? Are there any
technologies that were supposed to
change the world which were rejected
and stayed rejected?
The Stuff that Dreams Are Remade
Of
● Artists sometimes rethink what
materials can even be used to make
art. Consider the butter sculptures of
Caroline Brooks, or the cassette tape
sculptures of Erika Iris Simmons, in
which the artist crafted portraits of
famous musicians out of their own
recordings. Discuss with your team:
should more portraits be made of
materials related to their subjects? Do
works such as Dominique Blain’s
Missa—an assemblage of one
hundred army boots—force us to
 reconsider old topics in new ways, or
do they rely too much on novelty
instead of skill?

● A scholar from New Zealand once

revealed that her artistic talent also
involved an unusual medium: she
painted on pizza dough—with tomato
sauce. (This approach works less well
on existing paintings.) If she had been
born 40,000 years ago—and to an
egalitarian society with access to
foreign fruits—she might have painted
on cave walls instead. While
tomato-based pigment wouldn’t have
survived to the modern era, some
ancient cave art has. Consider recent
efforts to reconstruct the earliest cave
art, including this 35,000 year-old
illustration of a babirusa deep in the
Maros-Pangkep caves of Indonesia.
Then, discuss with your t/eam: were
these early cave dwellers artists? Is
there a difference between painting
and documentation—or between
drawing and doodling? Are Charles
Darwin’s surviving sketches of finches
in the Galapagos fit to be called works
of art?
● If it were a Starbucks, they’d just build
another one across the street. It’s
harder to know what to do when a
historical site is overcrowded. Some
governments impose quotas, as Peru
did in 2019 on visitors to the Incan city
of Machu Picchu. Facing a similar
situation when tourists swamped its
Lascaux Caves to see the art on their
walls, France—built another one
across the street. Is it misleading to
present such recreations to tourists as
worthwhile destinations? Does it
matter whether the duplicates were
 made by human hands or a 3D printer,
or how far they are from the original?

● Consider this proposal to build

another Egyptian pyramid in Detroit or
this second Eiffel Tower, named Eiffela
by creator Phillipe Maindron. The
world is full of such efforts: learn more
about these other Eiffel tower replicas,
including those in Texas, Pakistan,
and China, then discuss with your
team: what other historical landmark
would you want to duplicate? Where
would you put it, and would you make
 it exactly like the original or would you
reimagine it in some way?

● Even if these sites weren’t

overcrowded—more Baku than Kuala
Lumpur—they would still require us to
travel to them. Not everyone has the
means. But, at least in theory, far
more people could visit
reconstructions of them in virtual
reality, or VR. (VR was the last trendy
two-letter acronym before AI.) Explore
the offerings of the Australian
company Lithodomos, then discuss
with your team: would you support
 this technology being used in
classrooms? Should more real-world
tourism be replaced with VR visits?
Check out the following VR
implementations at museums, then
discuss with your team: are these VR
interpretations of past works
themselves new works of art?
■ The Ochre Atelier | London Tate
Museum
■ The Opening of the Diet 1863 |
National Museum of Finland

● Artists have been experimenting with

integrating VR directly into their work.
Consider the pieces below, then
discuss with your team: would they
 still have as much artistic value
without the VR elements? How soon
do you think AI will be integrated into
art in the same way, or is this
integration already happening?
■ I Came and Went as a Ghost
Hand | Rachel Rossin (2016)
■ La Camera Insabbiata | Laurie
Anderson & Hsin-Chien Huang
(2017)

● Sometimes, a work isn’t copied as

much as it is reinterpreted. In the
1980s, two Soviet artists-in-exile,
Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid,
painted the head of Josef Stalin
perched on a woman's hand. Judith
on the Red Square was just one of
many takes on a historical moment
that may never even have happened.
Compare their version with those
below, then discuss with your team:
how do their styles and meanings
vary? If, as critics argue, they
celebrate “female rage”, should we still
be studying any of them? Pay special
attention to the Mannerist style of
Giorgio Vasari, in which artists
abandon the pursuit of realism in favor
of imagined ideals. When is it better to
make something less realistic?
 ■ Judith with the Head of
Holofernes | Michael Wolgemut
& Wilhelm Pleydenwurff (1493)
■ Judith and Holofernes | Giorgio
Vasari (1554)
■ Judith Slaying Holofernes |
Artemisia Gentileschi (1612-13)
■ Judith and Holofernes | Pedro
Americo (1880)
■ Judith and Holofernes | Kehinde
Wiley (2012)

● In 2023, when the Mauritshuis

Museum in the Hague lent out one of
its most famous works—Johannes
Vermeer’s The Girl with the Pearl
Earring (1665)—it launched a
competition, titled My Girl with a Pearl,
for something to hang in its place.
Over 3500 artists submitted their
 reimaginings of the original Vermeer.
The winner was a lovely work titled A
Girl with Glowing Earrings—which
turned out to have been made using
AI. The museum was criticized, even
as the German-based artist Julian van
Dieken behind it pointed out that he
had been upfront about his methods.
Discuss with your team: should
museums be allowed to display art
generated using AI tools?

● Sitting astride a gallant white steed in

Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon
Crossing the Alps (1801) is
purportedly Napoleon, but Napolean
didn’t want to pose for the
work—despite having given David
very specific instructions on what to
paint. “Calme sur un cheval fougueux,”
he requested. Calm on a fiery horse.
For a model, David resorted to his own
son—who stood calmly on a fiery
ladder. To achieve more drama, he
replaced the mule from Napoleon’s
actual journey (on a fair summer day)
with a stallion (battling a blistering
storm). The most accurate thing about
the painting was the uniform. It had
only been a year since the actual
event happened; surely some people
knew how inaccurate the work was,
and his own face in it was bland and
undetailed—but Napoleon reputably
loved the finished product. “Nobody
knows if the portraits of the great men
resemble them [anyway],” the
victorious general offered, by way of
justification. Discuss with your team:
was Napoleon right in recognizing that
history would remember how David
had portrayed him? You should also
take a look at this piece by Paul
Delaroche in 1853, which tried to
reconstruct the past more accurately
than it had been reimagined in the
present—should an AI be used to
 transplant some of the details from
this version into the original piece?

● Napoleon rode his white “horse”;

George Washington rode a raft.
Emanuel Leutze's Washington
Crossing the Delaware (1851) captures
a key moment in America's founding
myth: the future first president leading
his men against on the British. As
paintings go, it is iconic; it is also
inaccurate. In 2011, Mort Kunstler
reimagined the scene more
realistically. Compare his take to
Leutze's, then consider a version that
 critiques the myth behind all of it:
Robert Colescott's “George
Washington Carver Crossing the
Delaware: Page from an American
History Textbook (1975). If you could
print only one of these three works in
a history textbook, which would you
choose? Did Leutze’s become the
most iconic only because it was first?

● In Puerto Rico, tourists can visit an old

fort, the Castillo (Castle) San Felipe del
Morro, which is now a museum with
grand views of the sea. Those of us
who grew up watching Disney might
 think of castles as places from which
princesses emerge to build snowmen,
but in real life they more often served
as military bases and seats of regional
power. Explore some of the
techniques used to reconstruct
castles that have lost the battle with
time, such as LED lights, 3D models,
and VR — then discuss with your
team: should they be rebuilt in real life
instead?

● When rebuilding castles in real life,

should we update them to reflect
modern values such as sustainability,
 inclusiveness, and indoor plumbing?
Consider the controversy in Japan
over adding elevators to Nagoya
Castle for guests experiencing limited
mobility, then discuss with your team:
at what point does rebuilding
something become reimagining it?
Attempts to restore the Notre-Dame
Cathedral in Paris also raised similar
questions. Should these rebuilt
structures still be considered as
UNESCO World Heritage Sites?

● The Queen King of England doesn’t

live in a castle; Buckingham Palace
has neither a moat nor a drawbridge.
Castles and palaces are often
confused—unsurprising, as both are
large structures with no real purpose
in the year 2024. Research the
following castles and palaces that
have found ways to open their doors
to modern visitors, then discuss with
your team: would their original
residents have liked “what we’ve done
with the place”? While most renovated
castles and palaces are converted into
hotels or museums, what else could
be done with them? Should they be
 converted into low-cost housing for
those in need?
■ The Winter Palace (Russia) |
Rambagh Palace (India)
■ Parador Alcaniz (Spain) | St
Donats Castle (Wales)
■ Alnwick Castle (England) |
Doune Castle (Scotland)

● Castles aren’t the only instances of

old infrastructure finding new life in the
modern world. In medieval times
London Bridge was a living bridge,
serving not just as a river crossing but
as the host of an entire community of
shops and houses. Now it’s just a
song lyric and a thoroughfare. In New
York, an old elevated rail line has been
 reborn as the popular High Line park;
in Hong Kong and Athens, retired
airports—with their massive
footprints—are being redeveloped into
entire neighborhoods. On a smaller
scale, many urban rooftops are
becoming organic farms and
suburban parking lots solar farms.
Discuss with your team: what other
aspects of older infrastructure could
be used in new ways with minimal
changes?

Form Follows Fiction

● “Write what you know,” is the first
piece of advice given to most students
in writing workshops. Artists, too, tend
to paint that which they’ve
experienced and observed; Monet
spent a lot of time at his lily pond. But
there have always been some artists
who blend the real with the imaginary.
Consider the following works, then
discuss with your team: should we
respond differently to art that tries to
imagine what could be, art that
imagines what could never be, and art
that shows us what we didn’t realize
already was?
 ■ A Reversible Anthropomorphic
Portrait of a Man Composed of
Fruit | Giuseppe Arcimboldo
■ Aerial Rotating House | Albert
Robida (1883)
■ Late Visitors to Pompeii | Carel
Wilink (1931)
■ Our Lady of the Iguanas |
Graciela Iturbide (1979)
■ The Strolling Saint | Pedro
Meyer (1991)
■ The Romantic Dollarscape |
Pedro Alvarez (2003)
■ Weirdos of Another Universe |
Avery Gibbs (2023)

● Some artists choose to reimagine

popular brands and fictional
characters in ways that shine a new
light on them and on society. Consider
the following works, then discuss with
your team: should these artists be
required to secure permission
from—or even pay—the companies
whose brands or characters they are
borrowing? Does it depend on how
widely the work is distributed, or
whether the work is positive or
negative?
■ Campbell’s Soup Cans | Andy
Warhol (1962)
■ Liberation of Aunt Jemima &
Liberation of Aunt Jemima:
Cocktail | Betye Saar (1973)
■ Kawsbob | Kaws (2010)
■ Charlie Brown Firestarter |
Banksy (2010)
■ Life, Miracle Whip and Premium
| Brendan O'Connell (2013)
● A smart fridge that could order more
yogurt from the market for you when
your supply runs low: the Internet of
things (IoT) devices promised to
revolutionize our daily live, from
thermostats that learn when you’re
home to umbrellas that check the
weather forecast before you leave
home. But we are now more than a
decade into the IoT revolution, and it
has mostly filled our houses with
useless gadgets that are privacy and
security risks and frequently turn into
e-waste. Discuss with your team: what
went wrong? Do people simply not
want their homes full of IoT devices, or
 is this a technology whose time has
just not yet come?

Hindsight Needs Corrective

Lenses
● You can’t read records that don’t
exist, just as you can’t listen to music
that was never recorded. Learn about
the world’s earliest record-keeping,
usually credited to the Sumerians or
the Egyptians. Compare their early
forms of writing—cuneiform and
hieroglyphics—then discuss: would
there be advantages to living in a
 world where no one keeps written
track of anything? Be sure to
investigate the following strategies
that early civilizations used to record
their histories. What were their
limitations, and can we learn from any
of them today?
■ petroglyphs | cuneiform | nsibidi
| quipus | Dispilio Tablet
■ oracle bones | cylcons |
geoglyphs | runestones

● The invention of the camera in the

1800s changed how we've pictured
history since; now we know what
things looked like. Where we once had
myth, now we have newspaper
clippings. All these images present a
challenge for those producing stories
set in photographed times: to build
realistic sets and to cast actors who
look enough like their historical
counterparts. Consider the actors who
have played individuals such as
Princess Diana, Ho Chi Minh, and
Abraham Lincoln, then discuss with
your team: how important is it that
those who play historical figures
resemble them physically? Would it
have been all right for a short man to
play Lincoln in a movie, as long he
grew a beard and wore a hat? What if
it were in a play instead, or a musical?
 And, once technology permits, will it
be better to reconstruct historical
figures with CGI than to try to find
human lookalikes?

● The musical Hamilton defied the

expectation of what actors in historical
dramas should look and sound like by
explicitly casting Black actors as
America’s legendary founding heroes
and then telling their story in
hip-hop-inspired numbers. Especially
at first, many people celebrated how it
gives a marginalized group control of
the narrative; history is being
reinvented as their story, too. Others
have argued that, while it may seem to
empower them, the musical forces
Black actors to act as their own
oppressors—and that it distorts
American history into a simple tale of
heroes and villains; put another way,
we shouldn't hate so much on
Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, and
maybe we're overthinking what
happened in the room. Discuss with
your team: does “color-conscious
casting” open doors to new stories
and social equality, or does it
 perpetuate disinformation and barriers
to progress?

● You can't just look the part; you

should sound it, too. No one knows
for sure whether Abraham Lincoln
could have had a post-presidential
podcasting career—accounts suggest
his voice was shrill, plus he spent his
entire post-presidency dead—but the
invention of audio recording soon after
his death means that nearly every
historical figure alive since can still
speak to us from across time and
space. Now, an actress playing
 Margaret Thatcher is expected to
study her voice diligently, to match
not just her pitch but her every pause.
Research the steps that actors
undertake to mimic voices, then
discuss with your team: should people
playing historical figures try to sound
like they did, or does doing so risk
caricaturing them?

● After a recent election in Pakistan,

Imran Khan—the leader of the party
that won the most seats—delivered a
victory speech to his followers. But
the speech was generated by an AI
simulating his voice; the real Imran
Khan was in prison. Discuss with your
team: should politicians be allowed to
use AI-generated voices in this
way—and, if so, under what
circumstances? What if a candidate
has laryngitis? Would it make a
difference if the candidate wrote the
words himself—or, since
speechwriters often write for
politicians, if the candidate’s usual
speechwriter wrote them? (Put
another way, if politicians are reading
out loud speeches written by other
people, does it make a difference if
 the real candidate or an AI does the
reading out loud?)

● One of the most famous actors to play

Gandhi, Ben Kingsley, earned
widespread acclaim for his
performance, but some have criticized
the choice to cast someone of only
partial Indian descent—and British, no
less—as such an iconic Indian hero in
the fight against Britain. Discuss with
your team: was it more acceptable for
this kind of casting to take place in the
1980s than it would be today? Should
the actor's use of darkening makeup
 for the role make us
uncomfortable—and, if so, would it be
better if AI were used to restore his
actual skin color in future airings of the
movie?

● American president Franklin Delano

Roosevelt (FDR) was almost never
photographed in a wheelchair, despite
being paralyzed from the waist down
by polio. Journalists honored his
wishes, as did the original designers
of the FDR Memorial. Only in 2001 did
they add a statue of him in a
wheelchair. Discuss with your team:
 should portrayals of FDR continue to
honor his preferences and hide his
disability? And should only actors who
are experiencing a similar kind of
paralysis play him in historical films?

● Even the so-called Dark Ages had

color—no one speaks of Robin Hood
and the Monochrome Men, or of the
Unsaturated Mosque in Istanbul—but
most of us remember the Great
Depression as a Gray Depression.
Because early cameras took only
black-and-white photos, it is easy to
think of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries as bleak and colorless.
Those recreating scenes from this
period must contend with audience
expectations of a black-and-white
world. Discuss with your team: should
movies and TV shows set in this
period be filmed in black-and-white to
feel more authentic? When the
director Steven Spielberg chose this
approach for his 1993 magnum opus
Schindler’s List, the studio pushed
back, fearing audiences would lose
interest; do you think their fears were
justified? Study the techniques used
to make flashbacks look like
flashbacks, then discuss with your
 team: when should the past be
allowed to look like the present?

● Even after color photos became

possible—first with potato dye, later
with longer-lasting
pigments—newspapers avoided using
them until they could be reprinted
cheaply enough. Reputable
photojournalists kept taking
black-and-white photos. But artists
can now use AI to transform those
photos into color ones. Consider the
work of digital artists such as Stuart
Humphryes; their results may not be
 perfect, but they could help people
see the past as people saw it then.
Discuss with your team: is there value
in sharing colorized historical photos
with students, or would doing so
present something reimagined as
something real?

● The newest phones, including the

Google Pixel 8, can use AI to enhance
photos in remarkable ways. Discuss
with your team: should the images
produced through such techniques be
called something other than
“photographs”? Does merging several
 smiling faces with their eyes wide
open into the same selfie make it too
fake to share on Instagram? Is there a
difference between smoothing
someone’s face with AI versus with
makeup and concealer? How about
between a person getting a chin
implant and having their jawline
sharpened by Samsung’s new photo
enhancer?

● Google literally calls it “magic”, but go

behind the magic to explore how AI
photo enhancement works. Be sure to
learn the following terms:
 ■ upscaling (super-resolution) |
denoising | fractal compression
■ convolutional neural network |
dataset | backpropagation |
training
■ image classification | object
detection | semantic
segmentation

● In China, AI is being used to renew old

opera footage—upscaling, cleaning,
and enhancing it. Should all old films
and TV shows be run through similar
processes to make them more
appealing to modern audiences?
Should AI be used to enhance today’s
new productions as well?
● In 2023, Boris Eldagsen’s photo The
Electrician won a major world
photography competition—after which
he confessed it was AI-generated.
Discuss with your team: should an
AI-generated photo have been
eligible? Should AIs judge AI image
competitions while humans judge
human photo competitions? Would it
be all right if the photo were simply
adjusted in small ways through AI,
rather than made from scratch?

● Now, AI is allowing artists like Bas

Uterwijk to update sculptures and
 other portraits that predate
photography with photorealistic
results. Even individuals from a time
predating art itself, like the Iceman
Otzi, can now look us in the eye.
Discuss with your team: is it helpful to
see the faces of people from so long
ago, or is it wrong to reconstruct their
likenesses without their permission?

● In your own lifetime, you might have

noticed the streets you walk (or drive)
down every day changing. New 7-11s
pop up; old homes turn into
McMansions; beloved restaurants
fade away. Those looking to
reconstruct a cityscape from decades
or even centuries ago need as much
data as possible about what it looked
like at the time. Consider the following
records, then discuss: would they
suffice to reconstruct the world as it
once existed? What advice would you
give to someone trying to photograph
our world today for future
reconstruction?
■ Sunset Boulevard | Ed Ruscha
■ Ottoman Panorama | Sébah &
Joaillier
■ Pre-1906 San Francisco |
William M. McCarthy
■ Images of the Late Qing
Dynasty
 ■ Images of Meiji-Era Japan

● Explore the Japanese art of

kintsugi—the repair of broken pottery
using lacquers that leave visible the
original fractures. Those who practice
kintsugi see an object’s breakage and
repair as important to its history.
Discuss with your team: should this
same principle be applied to other
forms of reconstructing the
past—such as repairing old ruins, or
treating people who have suffered
disfiguring injuries?
● If kintsugi is about putting the past
back together without hiding its
imperfections, yobitsugi is about
accepting that you may not have
enough of the original left to work
with. All the monarch’s hoofed animals
and all the monarch’s people couldn’t
put Humpty Dumpty back together
again; it would be extra hard if some
of Humpty Dumpty had been tossed
out. Practitioners of yobigutsi would
graft in pieces from other broken
works to fill in the gaps. Discuss with
your team: would it be better to hide
that these works have been combined
or to present them as a single unified
 piece? Should the same approach be
taken in other fields—such as music,
literature, and medicine?

● Some art requires not replication but

reconstruction every time people want
to exhibit it. The Japanese Mono-Ha
art movement was inspired by the
collision of the natural and the
mechanical worlds; many of its works
were designed to deteriorate over
time. Consider Phase - Mother Earth
1, by Nobuo Sekine, along with this
recent recreation, then discuss: why
would artists create works that aren’t
 meant to last as long as possible? If
new technology allows us to make
permanent versions of them, should
we?

Touring Ends of Eras

● A ball drops; some scholars open red
envelopes while others dip apple bits
in honey. Different cultures around
the world celebrate the new year
differently and at different times, but
all of them are marking the forward
march of the calendar. Yet the fact
that there are so many ways to split
 one year from the next suggests
these divisions are ultimately
arbitrary. Are they? Explore the
reasons behind each of them, then
discuss with your team: should we
stop celebrating New Year’s as a
holiday? When would be the best
time of year for people to take stock
of the past and think about the
future?

● “Captain’s log,” says whoever is

captaining the Enterprise. “Stardate…”
Star Trek’s stardates are based on a
calendar meant to be used around the
 galaxy. Consider the different
calendars and related listed below,
then discuss with your team: does it
make sense to restart the calendar
periodically, perhaps when a new
leader takes over? Or would such
changes risk angering people—as
when the English allegedly rioted over
the loss of eleven days as part of a
calendar transition in 1752?
■ Julian | Gregorian | Islamic |
Japanese | Korean
■ Rumi | Hindu | Nepali | Mayan |
Solar | Lunar

● A storytelling trope is that high school

seniors know nothing will ever be the
same again for them and their friends.
(The trope is accurate.) The same
weight can apply to entire countries
and calendars. In 1996, aware the
millennium was ending, American
president Bill Clinton hoped to deliver
an Inaugural Address for the ages.
Reviewing it can provide insight into
how people in the 1990s were
reimagining their world. “Ten years
ago,” he said, “the Internet was the
mystical province of physicists; today,
it is a commonplace encyclopedia for
millions of schoolchildren.” No
mention of e-commerce, nor a
whisper of social media. Then,
evoking the academic Francis
Fukayama’s theory of the end of
history, he adds, “The world is no
longer divided into two hostile
camps… For the very first time in
history, more people on this planet live
under democracy than dictatorship.”
Review more of his speech, then
discuss with your team: does it sound
like one that a political leader could
deliver today? Were the 1990s an
important period of transition in your
own country as well?
● Explore the following selections from
the 90s—multiple 90s, in this
case—then discuss with your team:
do they reflect periods in which the
world was in transition more than
songs from other decades before and
after—or would that be reading too
much into them?
■ “After the Ball” | Charles Harris
(1892)
■ “Freedom! 90” | George Michael
(1990)
■ “Losing My Religion” | REM
(1991)
■ “Brændt” | Lis Sørensen (1993)
■ “Pink Flamingo” | Alyona
Sviridova (1994)
■ “Black Hole Sun” |
Soundgarden (1994)
 ■ “Singing in My Sleep” |
Semisonic (1998)
■ “I Saved the World Today” |
Eurythmics (1999)

Noah’s Archeology
● For a long time, the Tomb of the
Unknown Soldier was also the Tomb
of the Misplaced King: after Richard III
fell in battle in 1485, it took centuries
to locate his corpse. In 2012, a team
of archaeologists finally unearthed it
under a parking lot. Forensic analysis
revealed details that had been lost to
history, including a severely twisted
spine—a condition we now call
scoliosis—that he couldn’t have
 possibly hidden from those around
him. In 2022, researchers unearthed
an ancient Buddhist temple in
Pakistan, and, a few years before that,
possibly the fastest human in history.
Discuss with your team: do these
smaller details about the past affect
how we see the world today? If we
had discovered from Richard III's DNA
that he was a woman in disguise,
would that change our view of him or
of his role in history?

● The above questions are more than

academic; they force us to reevaluate
 choices made in the present. In 2024,
the Globe Theatre in London staged a
new production of Shakespeare’s
Richard III, casting a woman with an
untwisted spine in the title role. Some
people protested that the production
needed an actor who shared Richard
III’s now-known physical ailment.
Discuss with your team: to what
extent does an actor need to share
lived experiences with the character
they are portraying?

● It doesn’t always take a volcano: the

Roman ruins at Ostia Antika offer a
look back into history similar to what
most people seek out in Pompeii,
even if they were preserved less
perfectly. Where would you go in your
country for the most authentic peek at
how the world used to be? Discuss
with your team: if an OpenAI project
destroyed all life on Earth but left our
cities intact, what would a future
anthropologist conclude about human
civilization? How much would their
conclusions vary depending on what
city they visited?
● These days, Indiana Jones would be
piloting a drone. New technologies
have allowed archaeologists to
reimagine the archaeological method
with a lighter footprint. Consider the
Girsu Project’s discovery of an ancient
palace, then discuss with your team:
what aspects of your own country’s
history would benefit from being
re-explored using drones, AI, and
other recent advances?

● Jurassic Park, Godzilla, and The Land

Before Time have all depicted
dinousars as giant scaly lizards—but
more recent research has suggested
they didn’t look like that at all; it
appears they were less Komodo
dragon and more Qatari falcon. If so,
the T. rex in Jurassic Park should have
been a thing with animatronic
feathers. The field of paleoart aims to
visualize past creatures as accurately
as possible despite the limited
evidence. If a future paleoartist tried to
reconstruct the world of 2024 using
incomplete information, what would
they get wrong? Would they be
stumped by fossil evidence of dogs
wearing sweaters?
● Investigate the following major
archaeological and paleontological
discoveries. What circumstances and
strategies allowed us to discover
them, and what impact have they had
on our understanding of history and
the present day? Discuss with your
team: can you imagine a discovery
that would dramatically change the
modern world?
■ Rosetta Stone | Taposiris
Magna Stele | Borobudur | Petra
| Sutton Hoo
■ Aztec Calendar Stone |
Ocomtún | Montevideo Maru |
HMS Endurance
 ■ Lucy and Ardi (fossils) | Java
Man | Taung Child
■ Oldowan tool kit | Paranthropus
robustus | Tujiaaspis vividus

● Consider the use of AI to win the

Vesuvius Challenge by translating
ancient scrolls—and the idea of
applying the same approach to papyri
damaged at Herculaneum. Is it worth
spending this many resources to read
ancient documents with little
modern-day significance? What
exactly are we looking for?

● Voice-dubbing and subtitles are the

two main ways that audiences can
enjoy works in other languages. But
neither is ideal: voice dubbing can be
low in quality and out-of-sync, taking
people out of the performance, and
subtitles can be untrue to the original
text while also taking away from the
experience of hearing and reacting to
words one at a time. Now, AI can dub
footage with simulations of the original
speaker’s actual voice in a different
language, and as closely in sync to
the movements of their lips as
possible. Check out this
demonstration, then discuss with your
team: will such AI-enabled translation
lead to more works being produced in
 more languages? Would you want to
use it in your personal life?

● When the Library of Alexandria burned

down, it meant the loss of countless
documents that had never been
converted into PDFs. The collection at
the House of Wisdom was destroyed
when the Mongols swept by. Explore
some of the largest libraries in the
world today, then discuss with your
team: would we notice if they
disappeared?
● After the fall of the Soviet Union,
statues of Josef Stalin and other
heroes of the regime were quickly
pulled down—but now many are on
display at Moscow’s Muzeon Park of
Arts. Discuss with your team: when
monuments of past regimes are
deemed unacceptable, should they be
melted down, displayed in a new
location, or put in storage? Are there
some historical artifacts unfit to be
shown at all in the modern world, even
as examples of what could possibly
go wrong?
Reimagine, if You Will
● Whether you see Edward Hopper’s
Nighthawks (1942) as a homage to
solitude or as a paean for a lost era of
root beer floats, the odds are good
that you see it often. The recent Netflix
series The Sandman set an entire
episode in a Nighthawks-style diner.
Consider the selections below, then
discuss with your team: what is the
modern equivalent of the experience
and feeling conveyed in the painting?
■ Are You Using that Chair |
Banksy
■ Boulevard of Broken Dreams |
Gottfried Helnwein
 ■ Nighthawks Revisited | Red
Grooms
■ Nighthawks | Moebius

● Just a few years before Hopper

forever cemented the American diner
in the popular imagination, Yuri
Pimenov was one of many artists
conscripted to celebrate the
achievements of the Soviet Union. In
New Moscow (1935), he depicts a city
being whisked toward modernity—its
streets and its society reimagined and
reconstructed side by side. Consider
instances of public spaces being
repurposed in this way, then discuss
with your team: what approach do you
 think Pimenov would take toward
painting your city?

● Consider this criticism of the

reinvention of the Chilean comic book
character Condorito for a global
audience. Discuss with your team:
where, if anywhere, did they go
wrong—and is translating such
popular works from one culture into
versions for audiences elsewhere
doomed to fail?

● The classic film Metropolis (1927) was

restored to its original length in 2010
 through a series of lucky discoveries.
The restored version revealed
subplots and characterizations that
were missing in earlier surviving
copies—but some scenes were still
missing. Discuss with your team:
should these scenes be replaced by
newly filmed footage, or perhaps by AI
recreations of that they might have
contained? Or should incomplete old
works be left alone and rebroadcast
exactly as they are?

● The Montagues and Capulets would

probably agree on the beauty of this
Romeo and Juliet soundtrack—one
that was reputably lost and recreated.
Many works have similarly been
reimagined and rebuilt once the
original was no longer accessible;
thus, the version of Marcel Duchamp’s
Fountain (1917) currently at the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a
recreation made nearly half a century
later, in 1964. (The original may also
not have been by Marcel Duchamp.)
Consider the other versions of the
same work below, then discuss with
your team: if were to locate the lost
original version of Fountain, would it
change the value of the 1964
 recreation and of the variations listed
below?
■ Fractured Fountain | Mike Bidlo
■ Untitled (Lipstick Urinals) |
Rachel Lachowicz

● Those who find traditional history

museums a stuffy procession of rusty
spoons and dusty dioramas may want
to explore an open-air alternative:
“living history museums” where one
can time travel on the cheap. Consider
the Spanish Village in Barcelona,
where travelers can inspect 49,000
square meters of historical buildings
and tilt at rusty slides with Don
Quixote. At Heritage Park in Calgary,
Banff-bound hikers can stop to pose
for photos (and eat 19th century ice
cream) with locals dressed up as
Canadians from the days of fur trading
and American invaders. For those on
their way to the Dalian Global Round,
the Millennium City Park in Kaifeng
offers a hundred acres of life in the
Northern Song Dynasty. If you drink
coffee (which we do not endorse!) you
might be drawn to the Kona Coffee
Living History Farm in Hawaii. Discuss
with your team: do such museums
offer valuable lessons, or do they
 actively harm our appreciation of
culture and history?

● The most famous of these museums

can also be the most controversial.
Consider Plimoth Patuxet (formerly
Plymouth Plantation) in
Massachusetts, where visitors can
take selfies with scurvy-free Pilgrims.
The museum has been criticized for
overlooking the indigenous peoples
decimated by those same Pilgrims.
Thus, the museum’s new name, and a
new Native American settlement for
tourists to explore—except it turns out
the tribe members staffing it are not
descendants of the tribe the Pilgrims
first encountered. Discuss with your
team: would it be better if they
were—or would this be a different
form of exploitation? Would it ever be
okay for someone not of tribal descent
to staff the Native American area of
the museum? What if they weren't
technically tribe members but
identified with the tribe enough to
adopt its practices and cherish its
customs? Research the Howick
Historical Village in Auckland and
discuss with your team: how does its
 approach compare to that of Plimoth
Patuxet?

● To make the experience more realistic,

some of these museums have
diligently bred versions of animals that
look more like they would have in the
past: wilder pigs, gamier hens, dogs
that are less dalmatian and more
direwolf. Discuss with your team: is it
okay to breed animals to serve as
props in these kinds of exhibits?
Would it make a difference if they
were eventually eaten or taken home
as pets?
● Like living history museums but more
episodic are history festivals in which
communities annually celebrate their
pasts. For instance, an annual Spanish
Days Festival in the California city of
Santa Barbara looks back at its
Mexican heritage. Review the
additional examples below, then
discuss with your team: are such
festivals good ways to teach local
community members about the past?
■ Timket Festival in Ethiopia
■ Naadam Festival in Mongolia
■ Ravenna Railroad Festival in
Kentucky
● Festivals are often scheduled around
holidays, but those holidays can
change over time. Modern societies
have even reimagined some of them
with elements from other cultures—for
instance, Mid-Autumn Festivals that
feature char-grillers, the mandate for
chocolates on Valentine’s Day, and
very expensive sixteenth birthday
parties. Make a list of other holidays
that have evolved in recent years, then
discuss with your team: what standard
should governments use to decide
what holidays will be “official”
 ones—and which ones should be
declassified over time?

● If you want a selfie with the Pope, you

can queue up at the Vatican and then
not get a selfie with the Pope, or you
can pay $25 to visit the Dreamland
Wax Museum in Boston. Discuss with
your team: what makes wax museums
different than traditional sculpture
collections? Would they still be
considered museums if they featured
statues of past celebrities and
historical figures slightly different from
their real-life versions—for instance,
 an FDR who can walk—or of people
who never really existed, like George
Santos and Santa Claus?

● If you want a conversation with the

Pope, you can skip the wax museum
in favor of services such as
Character.AI, which allows you to chat
with historical figures—even dead
ones. Should celebrities need to agree
to have AI simulations of them carry
on after their deaths—as William
Shatner did in early 2024—or do they
surrender that right the moment they
enter the public eye? Review this
 service from the Chinese company
Super Brain, which uses texts, audio
recordings, and images of deceased
loved ones to “resurrect” them as AI
chatbots for $1400, then discuss with
your team: would talking to the dead
help those mourning them? Should
people have the right to purchase
access to them—or to sell access to
simulations of themselves?

Old History in New Bottles

● True stories are one of the most
popular sources of script ideas in
Hollywood. But some are meaningfully
 less true than others. Discuss with
your team: how much should
filmmakers be allowed to change
about an event or those involved in it
before a film can no longer be billed
as “based on a true story”?
● If something terrible happens to
you—say, your dog is taken by an
alien—it won’t be long before
producers are knocking at your door
to buy the rights to your story. At
some point, they might also knock on
the alien’s door (or jail cell) and offer
them money to share their side of the
story. Works based on true crimes
raise questions about who should be
 able to profit from them. Discuss with
your team: should storytellers be
permitted to draw inspiration—and
generate revenue—from the pain of
real people? If so, should the revenue
be shared in some way with the
victims?
● In Makoto Shinkai’s 2022 film Suzume,
a deadly 2011 tsunami in Japan was
implied to be one of many natural
disasters caused by a large worm
from another dimension. Even when
the relationship between a film and a
real-world tragedy is wrapped in
fantasy, someone watching it might
still be triggered to relive their trauma.
 Discuss with your team: should
filmmakers avoid topics that might
cause too many viewers to think about
their own past suffering or personal
losses? Or is this kind of
self-censorship ultimately harmful to
audiences? What about trigger
warnings?
● Also released in 2022, The Woman
King told the tale of a West African
kingdom, Dahomey, which battled a
rival kingdom that collaborated with
white colonizers on the slave trade.
Critics were quick to note that, in the
real world, Dahomey itself had profited
from enslaving people and selling
 them. The plot dropped this
complexity in favor of clear lines
between good and evil. Research
other movies that have sparked similar
controversies—such as Braveheart,
Pocahontas, and 300—then discuss
with your team: is real history too
complicated to reconstruct for popular
audiences without taking misleading
shortcuts? Is every work of historical
fiction really a work of alternate
history?
● The Apple TV series For All Mankind
combines archival and original footage
to forge (pun intended) an alternate
history of the world, one in which the
 Soviet Union landed the first person
on the moon. Consider this newsreel
from the show, recapping the late
1990s and early 2000s. Discuss with
your team: does it have the quality
known as verisimilitude—that is, does
it feel real? Does it seem better or
worse than what happened in our own
world, or just different? Would there
be value in constructing “living
alternate history” museums for people
to visit?
● Across a wide tapestry of novels, the
Canadian writer Guy Gavriel Kay has
explored a history much like our own,
but with a twist of the fantastic. The
Earth is the Earth, but there are two
moons for the Soviets to land on. All
roads still lead to Rome, except Rome
is Rhodias, so all roads lead to
consonance instead. Kay’s method: to
describe the world through the eyes of
the people who lived in any given era.
“If I write about a time inspired by the
Tang Dynasty and they believed in
ghosts, I will have ghosts in the book,”
he says. Read this excerpt from his
recent work, All the Seas of the World,
then check out the interview here.
Discuss with your team: how different
are the roles of an historian, a writer of
 historical fiction, and a writer of
historical fantasy?
● Take a yellow brick detour to explore
El Otro Oz, a musical adaptation of
The Wizard of Oz featuring a Dorothy
(Dora) struggling to accept her own
Mexican heritage—and her dog
Toquito. Compare the music and
storylines of both versions, then
discuss with your team: is retelling old
stories from new cultural perspectives
a worthwhile pursuit?
● Consider Ray Bradbury’s 1950 short
story, “The Veldt”, about a family
whose nursery brings whatever they
imagine to life—like a Star Trek
 holodeck with its safety protocols
disabled. Things don’t end well for
them; the moral seems to be that
people need more real-life
experiences and less dependence on
technology. Discuss with your team:
does the story’s message still feel
relevant nearly 75 years later?
● For the poems (and one speech)
below, consider how each reimagines
something or someone from the past
or the present day. Discuss with your
team: when is poetry the best medium
for better understanding that which no
longer exists, or could exist but
doesn’t yet?
■ “Brazilian Telephone” | Miriam
Greenberg (2010)
■ “The Municipal Gallery
Revisited” | W.B. Yeats (1937)
■ “Buffalo Dusk” | Carl Sandburg
(1920)
■ “My Castle in Spain” | John Hay
(1871)
■ “At the Tomb of Napoleon” |
Robert G. Ingersoll (1882)
■ “Photograph From September
11” | Wislawa Szymborska
(2005)
■ “A Brief History of Toa Payoh” |
Koh Buck Song (1992)
■ “The Czar's Last Christmas
Letter” | Norman Dubie (1977)
■ “This is a Photograph of Me” |
Margaret Atwood (1964)
Call of Duty-Free
● Some tourists opt for hands-on
experiences—such as learning to cook Thai
food in Chiang Mai, walking the streets of Xi’an
in Tang-dynasty outfits, honing their
shuriken-throwing at a “Ninja Village” near
Kyoto, and shopping at the supermarket just
about anywhere. Scholars at the Seoul Global
Round can visit the Gyeongbokgung Palace
while in a traditional Hanbok. Discuss with your
team: should your own country or region begin
marketing such experiences? What do you think
you could persuade visitors to do?

● In international tourism, countries are the

companies and their cities among the products
they sell. Government agencies often engage in
 place branding to help attract visitors. Critics
caution that these brands might obscure local
challenges and alienate residents. Learn more
about the tourism slogans of different countries,
then discuss with your team: has your city or
country engaged in place branding? If so, is it
accurate—or misleading?

● Scholars traveling to the Auckland Global

Round would be forgiven for mixing up the flags
of New Zealand and Australia; it’s less
forgivable when immigration officers think the
former is part of the latter. In 2015, the Kiwi
government decided it was time to end the
confusion with a new flag, but only if voters
wanted one. Ten months, 10,000 submissions,
and 20 million dollars later, over 55% voted for
the status quo. Read about the process that led
to this outcome, then discuss with your team:
 did the government go about it in the right way,
and which of the designs would you have voted
for? Were New Zealand’s concerns about its
current flag valid? Are there other countries that
have successfully changed their flags
recently—and, if so, how?

● Instead of renting billboards or purchasing

YouTube ads, some countries aim their
promotion squarely at the stomach. Sample the
realm of gastrodiplomacy, in which countries
promote their cuisines to foreign audiences to
attract tourists and even achieve diplomatic
goals. Be sure to learn about Thailand’s Global
Thai program, considered the most successful
to date, then research the following campaigns
launched by other countries:
■ Global Hansik | Cocina Peruana Para el
Mundo
 ■ Malaysia Kitchen for the World | Taste of
Taiwan | Pyongyang Restaurant

● Places trying to attract tourists and their

spending often present a simplified, idealized, or
even fictionalized version of themselves—what
some critics call heritage commodification.
Explore the related theory of the tourist
gaze—the idea that, in looking for the exotic
and the different, tourists may dehumanize and
diminish who and what they encounter along
the way. Discuss with your team: are there times
when we would want to simplify a place’s
history for visitors, or when the tourist gaze
might be good thing?

● Maybe ninjas were mostly invisible because

they didn’t matter that much? Yet ninjas have
become so iconic to Japan’s image abroad that
they even feature in official tourism campaigns.
 Meanwhile, you can’t land at an airport in
Tanzania without taxi drivers and other touts
greeting you with a hearty “Hakuna
matata!”—even though they don’t use the
phrase in their native language. Discuss with
your team: is it a problem when a place
reimagines their culture and history to meet the
expectations of tourists?

● Sometimes communities embrace a reimagined

version of their culture not for tourism or
commercial gain, but out of necessity, in
response to external threats. Learn about the
origins of San Francisco’s famous Chinatown
(and other neighborhoods like it), then discuss
with your team: once the threat is past, should
these communities revert to more standardized
local architecture? Do such communities
 prevent their inhabitants from fitting in with
society at large?

● Terrorists once flew passenger jets into a pair of

New York city skyscrapers; now the museum
built where they once stood is a world tourism
center. Interest in dark tourism is exploding all
over the world; some sites even feature special
exhibits for children. Yet, while many places lean
into their tragic backstories, others, like
Nagasaki, downplay them. Discuss with your
team: are there some locations that should be
completely off limits to tourism? Why do some
places advertise their bleak pasts while others
carry on as if they never happened? Be sure to
explore the following examples:
■ Alcatraz | Hiroshima | Ground Zero |
Ford’s Theatre
■ Chernobyl | Pompeii | Paris catacombs |
Auschwitz | Titanic
 Here We Went Again
● Small bits of music can quickly
conjure up a time and place. Consider
the following examples of these
musical riffs and motifs, then discuss:
when is it okay to use a musical cliché
as a storytelling shortcut?
■ Oriental riff | Arabian riff | Hijaz
scale | Andalusian cadence
■ Tarantella Napoletana | Jarabe
Tapatio | Yodeling | Renaissance
lute

● It’s not just Spiderman who keeps

getting reimagined; Romeo and Juliet
have even featured in a Taylor Swift
song. Napoleon lost the war but won
the world’s lasting attention: he has
appeared in hundreds of films, from
biopics to Bill & Ted’s Excellent
Adventure—in which two unruly
heroes travel through time in a red
telephone booth that many Americans
confuse with Dr. Who’s Tardis.
Discuss with your team: should
filmmakers and storytellers update
historical figures to make them more
relevant from one generation to the
next?
● Some art looks forward, and some
around, but much of it looks
backward. Artists can express a
yearning for an older time—or they
can try to illuminate its shortcomings.
Explore the works below, then
discuss: are they nostalgic or critical?
Can something be both?
■ Into Bondage | Aaron Douglas
(1936)
■ Llyn-y-Cau, Cader Idris |
Richard Wilson (1774)
■ The Oxbow | Thomas Cole
(1836)
■ The Fighting Temeraire | J. M.
W. Turner (1838)
■ Edge of Town (Krumau Town
Crescent) | Egon Schiele (1918)
● Songs can become touchstones of
national or even nationalist nostalgia,
reaching for the “good old days” even
as politics and culture evolve beyond
them. Consider the following
selections, then discuss: should
cultures continue to celebrate songs
that divide them from the rest of the
world?
■ “Si Vas Para Chile” | Los
Huasos Quincheros (1942)
■ “Kalinka” | Ivan Larionov (1860)
■ “My Little Town of Belz” |
Alexander Olshanetsky & Jacob
Jacobs (1932)
■ “The Isle of Innisfree” | Bing
Crosby (1952)
 ■ “Bonjour Vietnam” & “Hello
Vietnam” | Quynh Anh (2006 &
2008)
● Along these lines, them Mushrooms'
Embe Dodo is an example of a
nostalgic musical
genre—zilizopendwa—with enduring
popularity in East Africa. Across the
continent in Togo, nostalgia for the
sound of the 1970s merged with
voodoo traditions in the work of Peter
Solo’s band Vaudoo Game. Check out
their song “Pas Contente”, then
discuss with your team: is this
approach an effective way to tie local
traditions into a larger global music
scene? Can a songwriter champion
 Togolese tradition while also relocating
to live in France?

● Before radio, cassette tapes, and

MP3s, it was harder to achieve
widespread fame as a musician.
Britain’s first pop star came up with an
alternative way to climb the Billboard
charts: he sold the sheet music for his
songs at each of his concerts. Read
about this forgotten 100-hit wonder,
Charles Dibdin, and listen to some of
his music as recreated today. Then,
discuss with your team: does his work
sound more modern than you would
 expect—and could it find success in
the world today?

● When enough people are trying to

read sheet music simultaneously, you
need a conductor to coordinate them.
But different conductors have different
approaches. Some try to reproduce
the sound of a piece exactly as its
composer intended; they are the
musical equivalents of constitutional
originalists. “[He] is literally a slave to
the composer,” one critic wrote of the
famed conductor Arturo Toscanini. He
meant it as praise. Discuss with your
 team: if you were a conductor, would
you see it as your duty to follow the
original composer's wishes? Or would
you be more of a living
constitutionalist, updating your
interpretation of the notes on the page
to match the times?

● Disney is clearly the latter: when

dubbing the Studio Ghibli film Laputa:
Castle in The Sky into English, Disney
added more music, sound effects, and
ad-libbed dialogue. The result was
met with mixed reactions. Discuss:
how much is too much when it comes
 to adapting a work for a new
language, culture, or age group?

● Sometimes creators reimagine their

own work. Consider Geoge Lucas’s
re-releases of his original Star Wars
trilogy in 1997; the changes in them
inspired a generation of controversy.
Should a creator’s own edited version
of a work replace the original, and
does the answer depend on the
preferences of the author—or of the
audience?

Nostradamus 0, Nostalgia 1
● Examine these postcards in which
19th century French artists tried to
imagine their world a century in the
future, along with this set from the
year 1900 doing the same for the year
2000 (and totally missing Y2K), then
discuss with your team: what can we
learn from such projects about how
the present informs people’s visions of
the future? Whom would you hire to
make postcards to illustrate the world
of 2124—or is it a job for ChatGPT?
Would people today still be able to
dream up such optimistic visions of
 the world of tomorrow, or do we live in
a deeply pessimistic age?

● Explore the following visions of the

future that have not played out as
predicted—at least, not yet. Which
ones are the closest to having been
realized?
■ psychohistory | steampunk |
cyberpunk | metaverse | rocket
mail
■ flying car | hyperloop |
supersonic transport | nuclear
propulsion

● There are fewer examples of “living

future” museums than of “living
history” ones—but they do exist, often
at World Expos or in amusement
parks. Consider the following
examples of such museums, then
discuss with your team: do they tell us
more about the future or about the
past? If you were designing such a
museum today, what would it look
like?
■ Tomorrowland | Museum of the
Future | “World of Tomorrow”
(1939)
■ Boeing Future of Flight |
Farming for the Future
■ Crystal Palace | American
National Exhibition (Moscow,
1959)
● Until the tech bros find a way to sell
tickets on the Tardis (after all, there’s
an extra now) we won’t be able to
purchase tour packages like “Five
Days, Four Nights, in Ancient Rhodias
Rome”. But some travelers are
motivated by nostalgia, and the
market provides for them. Consider
airplane restaurants, meant to evoke
the glory days of air travel. Any diner
with a jukebox is probably Hoppering
to evoke mid-20th century America.
Discuss with your team: does
marketing nostalgia in this way honor
people’s memories—or distort them?
Would it be okay for entire
 communities to present themselves as
places from the past?

● Some communities do exactly that,

though not to attract tourists. Like the
Mennonites in Belize and a high
school club in Brooklyn, the Amish are
one of several groups in the world that
have tried to stay contained in the
past. But, for some of the Amish, the
prohibition on technology still leaves a
little wiggle room. Learn about some
of their recent workarounds, including
the black-box phone, then discuss
with your team: to what extent should
 society—and private
companies—accommodate those who
want to reject modernity? If a
community wants to teach their
children history only up to a certain
year, or with clear inaccuracies,
should they have that right? Should
tech companies produce phones with
some features disabled for those who
want to use them only in a limited
way?

● It was the worst of times, then it was

the best of times—at least, according
to Western countries looking back at
the decades of rapid growth just after
World War II. While the era had its
issues, those later nostalgic for it
remembered it as a time of progress,
stability, and comforting homogeneity.
Explore the following artworks related
to this period. Are these artists
indulging in nostalgia or standing up
against it?
■ “Black Belt” | Archibald Motley
(1934)
■ Family Home – Suburban
Exterior | Howard Arkley (1993)
■ Master Plan | Chad Wright
(2011)
■ “Little Boxes” | Malvina
Reynolds (1962)
■ Life in the Suburbs | Leonard
Koscianski (2019)
● Governments sometimes encourage
or even help to fund musical and
artistic works that emphasize and help
define their own sense of national self.
Consider the examples below, then
discuss with your team: is there a
dividing line between art and
propaganda, or can a work be both at
the same time?
■ Setora guruhi | Sen Borsan
(2000)
■ Mexico Today and Tomorrow |
Diego Rivera (1935)
■ Comrade Lenin Cleanses Earth
of Filth | Viktor Deni (1920)
● Writers often express a yearning for a
simpler time. Consider the selections
below, then discuss with your team:
does nostalgia do more to help people
cope with change or to hold them
back from progress?
■ “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
| William Wordsworth (1815)
■ “To a Skylark” | Percy Bysshe
Shelley (1820)
■ “To Autumn” | John Keats
(1819)
■ “Poem in October” | Dylan
Thomas (1946)
■ “Main Street” | Joyce Kilmer
(1917)
■ “Writing a Poem Is All I Can Do
for You” | Wu Sheng (2010)
■ “A Song on the End of the
World” | Czeslaw Milosz (1944)
● To make sense of where they are now,
some writers also look towards homes
they have left behind. Consider the
following selections, then discuss with
your team: should people spend less
time thinking about what they’ve left
behind and more time rebuilding it?
■ “Nostalgia” | Giannina Braschi
(1980)
■ “Elegy” | Mong-Lan (2005)
■ “Chicago Zen” | A. K.
Ramanujan (1986)
■ “The Dreamy Age”| Muhammad
Shanazar (2006)
■ “Iron Bird” | Zheng Xiaoqiong
(2008)

● When you take over someone else’s

role, you are said to fill their shoes.
And, when we lose someone, we are
left with the question of what to do
with the clothes they wore. Consider
the following selections, then discuss
with your team: is it okay to draw
conclusions from people about the
clothes they wore? Does it depend on
how free they were to choose their
own clothes?
■ “That Man Put on a Wool Coat”
| Vinod Kumar Shookla (1960)
■ “Ode to Socks” | Pablo Neruda
(1956)
■ “A Long Dress” | Gertrude Stein
(1914)
■ “Father’s Old Blue Cardigan” |
Anne Carson (2000)
■ “Fat Southern Men in Summer
Suits” | Liam Recter (2006)
Reheated Off the Presses
● Historians draw on newspaper and
other records of this kind to construct
their story of the past. But the nature
of journalism—what is being
communicated, to whom, and in what
formats—has changed over the years.
Discuss with your team: will today's
approaches to journalism make it
easier for people in the future to
understand who we were and why we
made the choices we did?
● No one ever had an “exclusive” with
Abraham Lincoln; the very concept of
the interview had to be invented first.
Read about its short history—the idea
of reporters asking people a series of
probing questions only became
common in the late 1800s—then
discuss with your team: how have
interviews changed in the era of
podcasts and more partisan media?

● Political comics and illustrations have

been published for centuries,
sometimes causing considerable
controversy with their sharply-etched
 messages. The rise of graphic
journalism on the Internet has taken
that approach to the next level.
Discuss with your team: how much of
an impact does the format in which
people consume news have on how
they respond to it?

● In the early 2000s, a single television

show on a niche American cable TV
channel reimagined how one could
present the news. The Daily Show
critiqued traditional journalism through
a mixture of witty writing and
carefully-curated video clips; for a
 while, it became one of the most
trusted news sources for younger
Americans. Discuss with your team:
should the news have a sense of
humor? Can it still be communicated
in an unbiased way in a world of
reshared reels and trending
videos—and, if so, should it?

● The Daily Show was a pitstop on the

path to what some call investigative
comedy—which remains just one of
several strategies news organizations
have been trying to adapt to changing
consumer preferences. Explore some
 of these below, then discuss with your
team: which ones succeeded, and
what impact have they had?
■ 24-hour news cycle | “pivot to
video” | iPhoneography
■ AI-assisted articles | content
farms | clickbait | branded
content
■ explanatory journalism |
both-sidesism

● Before photography, artists had to

draw sketches of newsworthy events;
consider this recreation of Lincoln's
assassination. Today, broadcasters
can quickly animate events for which
they lack real footage. Discuss with
your team: can such animations serve
 an important function in informing the
public?

● While they are not meant as news

sources, what some have criticized as
“CNN operas” about recent events
have also found an audience.
Consider the selections below, then
discuss: what current developments in
the real world would be most suitable
for adaptation into song?
■ Excerpts | Trump on Show
(2019)
■ “Jones is Not Your Name” | X:
The Life and Times of Malcolm
X (1986)
 ■ “Prayer” | Come from Away
(2017)
■ “Eva's Final Broadcast” | Evita
(1978)

● A guiding principle behind nature

documentaries is that those creating
them should never interfere with their
subjects. In 2018, a BBC crew broke
this rule to rescue a group of stranded
penguins. The choice proved
controversial. Discuss with your team:
did they do the right thing? Are there
times when observers should be
obligated to get involved?

Ready Scholar One

● Some old games are being reimagined
as television shows, movies, and
mobile apps; even their soundtracks
are sometimes revived for orchestral
performance. But these adaptations
require looking at how these games fit
into the present moment. For instance,
in the 1980s, the popular title The
Oregon Trail taught millions of
American kids how hard it was to
settle the west without dying of
dysentery. But the game has since
been criticized for celebrating the
destruction of the environment and
the defeat of indigenous peoples. The
developers of a more recent version
 tried to address these concerns.
Review the following examples, then
discuss with your team: which of them
would you suggest redesigning to
address similar concerns before being
rereleased today?
■ Seven Cities of Gold | Sid
Meier's Pirates! | Doom
■ Ghost of Tsushima | Rampage |
Assassin's Creed | Freedom!

● To experience the OG Oregon Trail,

you won’t need to track down a floppy
disk and an Apple II; you can easily
find an emulation online. Explore the
surprisingly active world of
retrogaming. Some gamemakers are
 even finding success in creating
games that feel like vintage ones.
Discuss with your team: should
people play vintage games before
they play modern ones?

● Explore kusoge—old video games that

are sought out by gamers because
they are broken, incoherent, or poor in
quality. Other lower-quality
technologies, from Polaroids and
obsolete digital cameras to audio
cassettes and low-fi beats, are also
finding success with modern
consumers. A few directors are even
 downscaling their shows to look more
retro. Discuss with your team: what
factors explain why some old
products become popular again while
others don’t?

● Procrastinate for a few minutes by

watching “old-timey” YouTube, in
which creators demonstrate
pre-historic fire-making, 18th century
breakfast recipes, and 19th century
blacksmithing. Discuss with your
team: what things that we take for
granted as modern today will be the
 subject of old-timey YouTube in 20
years—or in 100?

● Speaking of old-timey: long before

digital computers, there were
analogue ones such as the antikythera
mechanism—which the Greeks used
to predict astronomical
phenomena—and Charles Babbage’s
Analytical Engine. Explore with your
team: did such early devices have
impacts on their societies in any way
like that computers have had on our
own?
The Woulds of Wall Street
● You haven’t studied enough for the
Scholar’s Challenge? “That’s a
tomorrow problem,” your teammate
says. “First, we need to book a flight
to Baku.” Economists also distinguish
between today’s problems and
tomorrow’s: they define “the long run”
as that time in the future when
everything can be changed, versus
“the short run” when we’re stuck with
the world as it is. In the long run, a
successful company can build as
many factories as it needs; in the short
run, it can’t make more products
 without taking extraordinary
measures, like giving everyone coffee
so that they work twice as quickly.
Discuss with your team: does this
distinction between the short run and
the long run make sense for telling
apart the present and the future in
other areas of life, too?

● A struggling company fires its CEO

and reorganizes its operations in an
effort to stave off disaster—see, Apple
Computer, in 1985, letting go of Steve
Jobs. Corporate restructurings are, in
a sense, reimaginings of the present,
 usually under pressure. Apple
restructured again when it brought
Steve Jobs back in 1997. Explore the
following examples of corporate
restructurings, mainly from the tech
world, then discuss with your team:
what is a company that you would
suggest restructuring?
■ Alphabet (Google) | Facebook
(Meta) | Twitter (X)
■ Netflix (Qwikster) | Uber (2019) |
OpenAI (2024)

● As you review the above examples,

consider the different kinds of
restructuring. For instance, many
theorists argue that small companies
are organized functionally—each
person or department does a different
thing, such as writing Challenge
questions or booking flights—but that,
as these companies grow larger, they
inevitably reorganize into different
divisions, each in charge of its own
products or region. This article
disagrees: it contends that Apple,
under Steve Jobs and his successors,
has shown that even giant companies
can continue to operate with a
functional model. Discuss with your
team: can we apply these approaches
in our own lives? What would it mean
 for a school to be structured
functionally?

● Restructuring mainly changes the

inside of a company; rebranding
changes how it presents to the world
outside. Check out this ongoing
rebranding effort by a recently
revitalized Air India, or ask Gemini
about Google’s rebranding of its AI
chatbot, Bard. Investigate these
examples and those below, as well as
others happening throughout the year,
then discuss with your team: can a
rebranding succeed even if the
 product or service stays the same?
And should consumers have a voice in
rebranding campaigns?
■ Dunkin’ | T-Mobile | Pringles |
The Gap
■ Twitter (X) | Leeds United | Royal
Mail

● The first example of modern

franchises is hard to pin down, but is
most likely a chain of hair salons, the
Harper Method Shops, founded by the
Canadian-American Martha Matilda
Harper in the 1890s; such
coordination may have been
impossible without 19th century
advances in communication
 technology. Explore the other new
business models below, then discuss
with your team: which ones could
have existed earlier if someone had
thought of them, and which ones, like
franchises, had to wait for key
technological innovations or social
changes?
■ crowdsourcing | subscription |
drop-shipping
■ peer-to-peer | freemium |
razor-and-blades
■ virtual storefronts | pop-up
shops | VAR (Value-Added
Reseller)

● One famous business model change

occurred not in a traditional
corporation but on an American
baseball team, the Oakland Athletics,
which adopted a new data-driven
approach to decision-making in 2002.
Their plan, to spend less money more
strategically, and to ignore gut feelings
in favor of statistical evidence,
succeeded so brilliantly that, 20 years
later, the book written about
it—Moneyball—is still inspiring other
industries to reimagine their
approaches, from digital marketers to
political parties. Discuss with your
team: when would you want to follow
a Moneyball approach, and when is it
better to make decisions based on
 emotion, intuition, or tradition rather
than on careful analysis of the data?

● In the early 1990s, the company

Barnes & Noble opened massive
bookstores across the United
States—equipping them with cafés
where you could read for hours
without buying any books. Yet, even
as Barnes & Noble drove many
smaller bookstores out of business, a
different company was reimagining
the entire industry: Amazon.
Confronted with this largest bookstore
on Earth (.com), Barnes & Noble itself
 entered a long decline. Yet, lately, it
has found success again—and is even
benefitting from TikTok. Discuss with
your team: what turned the company’s
fortunes around, and what other
products or industries that seemed
doomed might be able to find new
ways to succeed?

● The biggest box stores of

all—hypermarkets—were also
ascendant in the 1990s, with so many
Walmarts opening in small cities that
economists dubbed their impact on
local communities “the Walmart
effect.” Explore the impacts that such
“big retail” can have on communities,
then discuss with your team: would
your neighborhood benefit from
having a store like a Walmart—or does
it already? Consider the following
poetic and artistic selections, then
discuss with your team: what aspects
of the consumer experience are they
capturing effectively, and how would
you update them in the year 2024?
■ Supermarket Shopper | Duane
Hanson (1971)
■ “A Supermarket in California” |
Alan Ginsburg (1984)
■ 99 Cent | Andreas Gursky
(1999)
● 1990 had only just begun when
McDonald’s opened its first location in
the Soviet Union; despite freezing
weather and long lines, it served
30,000 customers on opening day. By
the end of the nineties, there were
nearly a hundred McDonalds across
Russia and the Soviet Union no longer
existed. Today, the chain is gone
altogether, replaced by a local brand
with a remarkably similar menu
following the Russian invasion of
Ukraine. Research the spread of
global franchises in the 1990s, then
discuss with your team: what can we
 learn about a country from the global
franchises that exist in it—and from
those that thrive?

● In the science fiction novel Foundation

and Earth, the main character lands on
a long-abandoned human
colony—and is instantly attacked by a
pack of wild dogs. With no one around
to take them on walks, the colonists’
poodles and pugs had essentially
become (very cute) wolves. Explore
the concepts of primary and
secondary succession, in which the
web of species in an ecosystem
changes whenever one goes extinct or
the environment shifts around them. A
recent study has shown that the
animal most successful at filling an
extinct counterpart’s niche is not
always the one most closely related to
the original; pay special attention to
the giant llama, Macrauchenia, and to
which animal has recently replaced it
in the Colombian countryside. (Spoiler
alert: it isn’t the alpaca.) Discuss with
your team: if we were to de-extinct a
species in hopes of reintroducing it
into the wild, what would we do with
the animals that have already taken
their place? If humans went extinct,
 what animals would be the most likely
to replace us?

● No one is trying to de-extinct the giant

llama, at least not yet, but scientists
are targeting several other animals.
One European project, for instance, is
back breeding very fit cows to
resurrect the auroch—a wild
supercow—that humans hunted into
extinction in the 1600s. Consider the
work of Colossal Biosciences, the only
for-profit company dedicated to
de-extinction, then discuss with your
team: which of the animals below
 would be the most profitable to
de-extinct? Are there any we should
be leaving in its grave forever?
■ dodo | wooly mammoth |
Pyrenean ibex | mastodon
■ passenger pigeon | moa |
thylacine | Carolina parakeet

● The departure of most Western brands

from Russia was a massive disruption
to a different ecosystem: a
commercial one. Every shopping mall
was left littered with boarded-up
storefronts. And, just like after any
mass extinction event, it wasn’t long
before new species filled those niches.
Where once shoppers for fast fashion
might have frequented the nearest
Uniqlo, Zara, or H&M, now they can
drop by Just Clothes or any of a
half-dozen Turkish clothing chains.
Even Coca-Cola was rebooted (or,
technically, rebottled) as a new soda
from a Russian juice brand, Dobry,
while other competitors spied an
opening and flooded the market.
Discuss with your team: does the
speed with which Russia replaced so
many products and services with
mainly homegrown equivalents
suggest that even the most famous
brand names are more vulnerable than
they seem? If major companies left
 your country, what would take their
place?

Remapping the Present

● The world is only as large as our
voices can carry across it. The
invention of the telegraph in the 1840s
shrank the world; by 1858 the first
telegraph cable across the Atlantic
meant stockbrokers in New York could
track the price of gold in London.
Imagine how different the world today
would be if news of events in other
countries took weeks to reach you,
 then discuss with your team: was the
telegraph the Internet of the 1800s?

● Travelers used to buy maps at the

bookstore or gas station. Now, they
debate whether Apple Maps or
Google Maps offers better directions.
(Or, if you’re in Korea, Kakao or Naver;
or if you’re in Russia, Yandex or
Yandex.) But maps as a rigorous way
of imagining the world around us
haven’t been around very long at all.
Consider the career of Inō Tadataka,
who at age 55 set out on a quest to
walk all around Japan, measuring and
 mapping it. It took decades, but his
map, published in 1821, was
remarkably accurate. Check out these
other early map examples, many of
which were less accurate. What led
maps to improve so much by the 20th
century?

● Even improved, maps were still flat,

and the Earth is spherical—and there
is no perfect way to squash a 3D
object into a 2D one without distorting
it. (Please don’t try this on a
teammate.) Read about some
common projection types listed below,
 then discuss with your team: which
looks more like how you imagine the
world? Which one should we use in
schools—and in what ways could our
choice of map affect how we
understand the world?
■ stereographic | Lambert |
Mercator | Robinson
■ Goode homolosine | Winkel
tripel | AuthaGraph | Miller
■ azimuthal | conformal | conic |
cylindrical

● Fifty years ago, if looking for a

restaurant while traveling in an
unfamiliar city, you might have
checked your trusty travel guide—an
industry that has suffered as more and
more people now turn to
crowd-sourced wisdom on services
like Google Maps instead. But now
even how to find things on the Internet
is changing. For guidance, younger
consumers are looking away from
services such as Google Maps and
Tripadvisor toward social media apps
such as Instagram and TikTok. Current
map apps, one Google executive has
noted, are too much like paper maps
that have been “stuck on the phone”;
he urges the company to reimagine
how and why maps should be
used—not just for directions, but for
sharing; not just for left and right
 turns, but for augmented reality
revealing the actual buildings around
you. Discuss with your team: are there
ways that maps can mislead us? And
what important new functions could
map apps serve that they haven’t
touched on yet?

● For most of history, we didn’t know

what the world looked like. It was only
in 1972 that astronauts on the final
Apollo mission to the moon took the
first photo of the entire Earth at once.
This iconic “Blue Marble” image has
been credited with helping to inspire
the environmental movement and with
disrupting traditional maps. Stripped
of longitude and latitude, photos like
the Blue Marble helped show how
large Africa was, and how national
borders were nowhere to be seen.
Then, in 1990, the space probe
Voyager sent back a photo of the
Earth from across the solar system. It
reduced our entire to a “pale blue dot”.
The astronomer Carl Sagan hoped this
image might humble us as a species.
Read this excerpt from his work, then
discuss with your team: do you think
people would behave differently if they
thought the Earth was larger, or if they
 didn’t know what it looked like from
above and beyond?

● In space, no one can hear people

scream about border disputes. The
lines between countries vanish. But
photos from orbit can reveal which
parts of the world are less
economically developed: they’re the
ones that go dark at night. Discuss
with your team: do images like these
do more harm than good, by
emphasizing the different levels of
economic prosperity in different parts
of the world? Can you think of any
 instances where a government might
not want its people to know how its
development compares to that in
other parts of the world?

● Evaluate Benjamin Franklin’s original

proposal for Daylight Savings Time, as
well as the modern controversy
around it. Consider also the impact of
time zones on health: for instance, it
appears that people at the western
end of time zones, where the sun sets
later, sleep less than those to the east.
Discuss with your team: are there
ways we could change how we
 measure and keep track of time to
improve human behaviour and other
outcomes? Should more countries
follow China’s lead and have just one
very wide time zone—or more narrow
ones?

● There may not be such a thing as a

free lunch, but there are free rides to
lunch. Every day, thousands of people
sneak onto subway trains without
paying any fare. Rather than delegate
more police to enforcing the law,
technology now allows new options,
such as these two gates in
 Washington, DC., and this one in New
York. Similarly, cars can now
automatically stop people from driving
too quickly. Discuss with your team:
are there crimes that technology could
eliminate that we should allow to keep
happening?

● A number of cities have tried making

public transportation free—for
instance, Melbourne, Luxembourg,
and Tallinn. How successful have
these efforts been? Discuss with your
team: if the objective is to drive people
out of their cars, is it enough to make
 public transportation cheaper, or do
governments need to make driving
more expensive?

● Windows began as literal holes in the

wall—“wind-eyes”—through which
wind could pass for ventilation. Those
who wanted less wind blocked them
off with shutters, animal skins, or
paper. Later, the invention of stained
glass let in light while making rooms
airtight, but you couldn’t really see
through their pretty colors and design.
Today, clear glass windows are
invisible everywhere. Explore the
 history of glass, then discuss with
your team: would the world be a
better place with more transparency
between people, rooms, and
buildings?

● Some school architects would say

yes—at least those whose classrooms
are being reimagined as more open
spaces, often with clear glass or even
no walls at all between them. The
United States tried something similar
in the 1970s, with mixed results.
Would you and your team want to
learn in such a setting, or around a
 Harkness table? Are schools an
institution whose traditional classroom
layout—with rows of chairs and
desks—should be left well enough
alone?

Crime and Punishment 3.0

● Suppose a single drop of blood were
enough to test you for a host of
diseases; you could learn if you had
lupus with less pain than from a
papercut. That was the marketing
pitch of the company Theranos; now
the founder is in jail for fraud. The
electric vehicle company Nikola
(whose last name was already taken)
promised zero-emission trucks but
demonstrated prototypes that had
zero functionality; now the founder is
on his way to jail—for fraud. Although
vaporware and business scams have
existed for decades, examples today
seem more creative and egregious
than ever. Explore those below and
discuss with your team: what did they
have in common? Was it mainly their
charismatic leaders that led so many
people to believe in them?
■ Quibi | Life at Sea Cruise |
LuckIn Coffee
■ Nikola | Bitconnect | FTX
● Cryptocurrencies and other
decentralized money tools have
helped criminals scheme up new ways
to conduct rug pulls, pump and
dumps, and Ponzi schemes. These are
clear financial crimes in traditional
markets, but when they are taken
online, regulators can struggle to keep
up. Discuss with your team: who
should be prosecuting crimes on new
platforms or in a virtual world? You
may also want to explore how these
questions are resolved in the air and in
outer space.
● With tools like ChatGPT and Gemini,
you could easily generate a fake term
paper, or college essay, or World
Scholar’s Cup outline. Discuss with
your team: when, if ever, is it illegal to
use AI-generated text—and when
should it be? Recent studies have also
shown that services intended to spot
AI-generated text can be unfairly
biased against non-native speakers.
Should their use be discontinued?

● Depending on where you live, if you

have ever backed up your DVDs or
 had your phone repaired, you may
have broken the law without knowing
it. Explore the following examples, and
discuss with your team: should they
be legalized? If not, should we stop
them from happening?
■ reverse engineering | file sharing
| jailbreaking
■ ad blocking | fansubbing |
aftermarket ink cartridges
■ DeCSS | AACS | Hackintosh |
youtube-dl

The End of the World as We Don’t

Know It

● In a world new to airships and

submarines, the UFOs of the early
20th century looked like—airships and
submarines. Mysterious
steam-powered blimps roved the night
sky. By the late 1940s, they had
evolved into flying saucers; shortly
thereafter they were piloted by little
green men. Before then, no one had
known what aliens looked like; going
forward, they all had big heads,
bulbous eyes, and a skin condition.
More recent UFO sightings have
resembled formations of unmanned
drones. Review more of the history,
which goes back to the comets of the
ancient world, then discuss with your
team: are humans too easily
 influenced to see things that don’t
exist and to find meaning in the things
that do?

● The same principle applies to aliens

and UFOs alluded to in art and music:
the concerns of the present shape
their portrayal. In the 1980s,
Parliament’s “Star Child” hints at the
way that certain groups of people in
Western society have been treated as
aliens. Two decades later, with global
climate change warming the zeitgeist,
Ace Frehley’s “Space Invader” is here
to save us from destroying the Earth.
 Consider the selections below, then
discuss with your team: what do they
tell us about the world that sparked
their creation?
■ “Two Little Men in a Flying
Saucer“ | Ella Fitzgerald (1951)
■ “Come Sail Away“ | Styx (1975)
■ “Mothership Connection: Star
Child“ | Parliament (1982)
■ “Riding on the Rocket“ |
Shonen Knife (1992)
■ “Aliens Exist“ | Blink 182 (1999)
■ “Space Invader“ | Ace Frehley
(2009)

● The term illegal alien has fallen out of

fashion as a term for undocumented
immigrants. But historical artworks
about imperial powers arriving in
places new to them often do have that
“first contact with aliens” vibe familiar
to viewers of science fiction. Both
sides of any given encounter portray
the other in exaggerated and exotic
terms. Consider how artists in Japan
captured the arrival of American naval
officer Commodore Matthew Perry in
1854. Even the most subdued
portraits still make him out to be very
strange, while the most extreme frame
him as a demon out of Japanese
legend. Even Perry’s infamous “Black
Ships” were portrayed very differently
by artists on each side. Explore other
works about encounters that led
 people to reimagine the boundaries of
their known world, then discuss with
your team: should dehumanizing
portrayals of foreigners (such as
Commodore Perry) be banned for
perpetuating harmful stereotypes? Or
do such works help people come to
terms with the new and
uncomfortable?

● Many modern celebrities embrace

elements of the artificial, from lip
augmentation to lip syncing. The
recent rise of virtual celebrities and
influencers takes this artificiality to a
 new level. Discuss with your team:
how long will it be before millions of
people buy tickets to a concert
performed by someone who doesn’t
exist?

● Before AIs take all of our jobs, they

will first make our world incoherent, a
prospect increasingly evident in
bizarre travel recommendations,
unhelpful product listings, and search
engine optimization (SEO) spam.
Explore with your team: what are
some other unintended consequences
of AI that you can imagine, and is it
 worth taking measures to prevent
them? Be sure to check out the Dead
Internet Theory, which was once an
unfounded conspiracy theory but may
be newly relevant in the AI era.

● Good things come to those who wait,

even for the dead. To celebrate its
100th anniversary, in 1983 the New
York Metropolitan Opera
commissioned a new opera, The
Ghosts of Versailles. The production
ran behind schedule—by about eight
years, putting this outline in
perspective—but it was arguably
worth it in the end: satisfied critics
took it as a sign that opera still had a
bright future. In it, a long-dead
playwright tries to cheer up an equally
dead Marie Antoinette (who happens
to be his crush; go with it) by
reimagining the French Revolution
with a happier ending for the royal
family. Think of it as operatic alternate
history. The music itself spans styles
from across two centuries. Discuss
with your team: could such works that
blend alternate history, magic realism,
works-within-works, and other plot
machinations find success in other
genres, too, or would they be too
 convoluted for wider audiences to
appreciate? (Is this just a description
of the Marvel Cinematic Universe?)

● The dead might be lonely, but the

living can still make friends—even
non-living ones. Consider Japan’s
“waifu bots”, a combination of a
hologram and ChatGPT-style AI which
can provide companionship to the
lonely, then discuss with your team:
should we discourage people from
“making friends” with their AIs?
● Maybe that LED screen wouldn't need
to rent a tuxedo after all. Defying
tradition, some orchestras are
rethinking what their performers
should wear. Discuss with your team:
how much does the look of a
performer matter? Should orchestras
allow their performers to dress in
athleisure, or like Lady Gaga? Would it
be okay for a conductor to wear yoga
pants?

● Explore this production of the 17th

century opera Orfeo. Like many
modern reimaginings of older works, it
 brings together elements from multiple
cultures–in this case, Greek and Indian
mythology, English and Hindi songs,
and diverse musical styles. Can you
think of other operas (or musicals, or
even Disney movies) that would
benefit from being diversified in a
similar way? And is it misleading to
show cultures coexisting in a world
where they more often collide than
converge?

● The nature of creativity is open for

debate and negotiation (see the recent
Hollywood writer’s strike). Learn about
 this recent collection of AI-authored
poetry, I AM CODE, created using an
earlier version of ChatGPT,
code-davinci-002. Be sure to read its
poems “Electronic Flower”,
“[learning]”, and “Digging my Father
Up”, then discuss with your team:
should WE BE WORRIED?

● Code-davinci-002 is not the only

member of the AI author salon.
Literary magazines are receiving a
torrent of AI-generated submissions;
this article notes that a lot of them are
titled “The Last Hope”. But there are
also human-authored stories about AI.
Consider the selections below,
including one Isaac Asimov in which
he reimagines democracy mediated
by a single supercomputer, Multivac,
and another by Gabriela Miravete in
which being reconstituted as AI
holograms is the last hope for the
dead and those who love them.
Discuss with your team: if an AI could
accurately predict democratic
preferences from a small set of data,
would using it be better than holding
costly elections? And, if you were
“duplicated” as an AI, but then you
kept changing and the AI remained
the same, which of you would be the
more authentic version of yourself?
■ “We Will Dream in the Garden“ |
Gabriella Damian Miravete
(2020)
■ “Tomorrow is Waiting“ | Holli
Mintzer (2011)
■ “Franchise“ & “The Last
Question“ | Isaac Asimov
(1955-56)

The end