Themes 2024

• 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?

• 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?

• 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 team: 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?

• “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?

• 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?

• 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)

• 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 | Endurance (1912)

    • 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?

• 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?

  • • Timkat 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?

• 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)

• 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

• 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?

• 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)

• 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?

• 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?

• 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 | multi-level marketing

    • 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?

• 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?

      1. 1. Quibi | Life at Sea Cruise | LuckIn Coffee

         2. 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?

      1. 1. reverse engineering | file sharing | jailbreaking

         2. ad blocking | fansubbing | aftermarket ink cartridges

         3. DeCSS | AACS | Hackintosh | youtube-dl

• 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)