BOOKS WRITERS - The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast

How can we design and adapt for the uncertainties of the 21st century? How do emotions shape our decisions and the way we design the world around us?

Scott Doorley is the Creative Director at Stanford's d. school and coauthor of Make Space: How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration. He teaches design communication and his work has been featured in museums and in publications such as Architecture + Urbanism and The New York Times. Carissa Carter is the Academic Director at Stanford's d. school and author of The Secret Language of Maps: How to Tell Visual Stories with Data. She teaches courses on emerging technologies and data visualization and received Fast Company Innovation and Core 77 awards for her work on designing with machine learning and blockchain. Together, they coauthored Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future.

Today, someone is putting the finishing touches on a machine-­ learning algorithm that will change the way you relate to your family. Someone is trying to design a way to communicate with animals in their own language. Someone is designing a gene that alters bacteria to turn your poop bright blue when it’s time to see the doctor. Someone is cleaning up the mess someone else left behind seventy years ago yesterday. Today, someone just had an idea that will end up saving one thing while it harms another…

To be a maker in this moment—­ to be a human today—­ is to collaborate with the world. It is to create and be created, to work and be worked on, to make and be made. To be human is to tinker, create, fix, care, and bring new things into the world. It is to design. You—­ yes, you!—­ might design products or policy, services or sermons, production lines or preschool programs. You might run a business, make art, or participate in passing out meals to the poor. You may write code or pour concrete, lobby for endangered species legislation or craft cocktails. Wherever you fit in, you are part of shaping the world. This is design work.

– Assembling Tomorrow
A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

You both teach at universities at a time when educational silos are in flux. Young people are living in this kind of giant laboratory of possibilities, innovation, inspiration, and experimentation, and things around us are changing so fast. The rapid advances of AI are challenging many norms, and Assembling Tomorrow really helps us put this into context. It's playful, imaginative, and thought-provoking, and it inspired me to consider: What’s the future that I want to live in? And how I can be a part of that design process? So, what made you write Assembling Tomorrow at this moment in time?

CARISSA CARTER

This moment feels really overwhelming. Like we're overwhelmed with the technology, our climate's on the fritz, and it can feel really unsettling. Yet at the same time, as people that craft learning experiences, we know how much agency each of us has as individuals. And so we wanted to write the book to call attention to the complexity and the feeling of overwhelm of this moment and then also to share things that anybody can do to launch ourselves into that better future.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

How important are emotions in the design process? And what are the emotional impacts of design?

SCOTT DOORLEY

So if you look at the internet and the creation of the internet, the idea was to move information quickly. And that has been great, but there have been a lot of things where they didn't take into account the fact that, well, there are people attached to all that information, and those people are experiencing emotions. The things that we're designing are actually exciting and aggravating our emotions. So you take something like social media, which is really about the speedy spread of information. And what you see is it also brought along with it teen depression and body image issues. It also led to political polarization.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Carissa, you teach data visualization. How important is this in helping us understand, adapt and take action on climate change?

CARTER

One thing to know is that every single climate visualization that we see out in the world, whether that is a map of rising temperatures around the country or the globe or rising sea levels or wildfires, all of that has design decisions behind it. I am also with you that we need to get more people understanding the impacts of their own actions on climate change and being aware of what's happening to the planet. So one is to be able to interpret that work and really interrogate it for what it is. To be able to read any infographic and what we call deconstruct it, understand what emotions it is evoking in you, your gut reaction, why those are happening, and literally what the designer has done to make you feel that way. Literacy in reading infographics is one piece. And to give you very specific examples, in one of the classes that I teach and co-teach with a geoscientist, Kate Maher, and an infographic designer, Catherine Madden, we have students visualize what is known as the climate swerve. So this idea that humans, and the idea that we can't have agency over shifting climate, was coined the climate swerve by Jay Lifton a number of years ago. That concept is one that the more that we have people sourcing what the information is and how to present it, we feel gets that climate literacy in our brains and gets that message across. You can see it in really interesting ways. For example, we have students visualize climate anxiety and where it is cropping up, overlaid with where people should feel anxious about climate. We have even had a student group that visualized the themes of major Marvel movies throughout the past 20 plus years. They looked at what those themes were and how they changed and how some of the themes have started to be much more climate-related, kind of showing how these topics are ingrained in popular culture too.

Speculative Legislation: Preparing for the Future

DOORLEY

We have an assumption that technological innovation outpaces government regulation. That's a very well-founded assumption because that's how it goes. It's always been that way. However, I think we need to start thinking differently, and we should be able to imagine that we can create legislation that precedes the impacts of the things we're creating. If we see a potential effect coming, we should be able to put in a sort of preemptive law to address it prior to the effect actually happening, which we do in a lot of ways. There are tons of examples of that, but I think the pace of legislation needs to accelerate so that it can really grapple with the pace of technological innovation. But then if you do that, you have to be ready for the fact that the legislation might be off. It's speculative, it's anticipatory, and you're not necessarily going to get it right. I think we also need to build in mechanisms into the laws that make them responsive and changeable. So let's have speculative legislation. We'll put a law out there, a regulation that's speculative, but let's have built-in checks that are constantly checking if this is working the way we wanted it to, and it needs to be easy to change if it's not. Which is also not built into the system. We need to be able to imagine things working in ways in which we aren't used to them working. One, I think, is legislation being quick and responsive when generally it's sort of slow and hard to change. That's one thing that I think could really help.

CARTER

Scott and I like to kick around imaginative ideas for types of legislation. One idea is like a 'look both ways' technology where, let's say, we have a big new social media technology that's about to be launched, and AI and all sorts of algorithms that would fit within that bucket. Is there a moment where there's a trial period with technologies like that, where we have some ideas as to how they might need to be governed? We could put those in place and then use that, say, two-year period of time when that technology is learning how it's going to actually work once it's in place. We both look historically and see how similar technologies have affected our world. What should we be looking for in terms of the effects it might have both on our individual persons and our societies? Also, sort of look forward, do some visioning as to what might come to pass 10, 20, 30 years down the road.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

One of the things you write about are understanding the intangibles.

CARTER

Understanding the intangibles is really about knowing the forces that are coming together that are making this moment feel quite unsettling. These include the fact that everything is interconnected and flows between each other and the feelings that you were talking about before, as well as our human propensity to make stories and come up with narratives to connect ideas, whether they exist or not. Human characteristics and actionables are like: what are ways to notice those forces that are happening, to see the unseen so that each one of us can be more aware of what's happening and build the world for the better.

The Concept of Umwelt: Perception and Reality

DOORLEY

The way our brains work is not really indicative of how the world works. There's a reason for that. Us being able to pay attention to certain things and ignore others allows us to navigate, but it shouldn't be mistaken for an understanding of our holistic view of the world. There's a concept that we talk about in the book called the umwelt. The idea of an umwelt is what your senses can take in, and different species have different senses. As an example, cockroaches sense movement in ways that we don't. Butterflies can see infrared light, and we can't. Butterflies can actually taste with their feet, which is kind of an amazing thing, and I'm kind of glad that we don't. The point is that even through our senses, my understanding of a situation is going to be different from your understanding of the situation. The way I think of a story of what happens is going to be different from the way you thought of a story. There's a man named Gregory Bateson (author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind), who was an environmentalist, and he talks about how most of the problems in the world are actually a problem between the way people think and how the world works. They are not the same thing. The way we understand the world and how the world actually works is just not mapped perfectly. That kind of leads to problems because we don't know exactly what we're doing in the world. We can't see all the repercussions of the things we create until later on.

AI and the Future: Opportunities and Concerns

One silver lining about the technologies we're creating is that technologies like AI could be used to help us with this issue, with the fact that our mental models aren't exactly in line with how the world works. AI is actually very good at predicting and modeling outcomes. It could be used to understand climate change better so that we're able to understand it in a way that allows us to act. It could also help us predict the impacts of the things that we're making. So there's a bit of a silver lining in here, even though it can feel scary to be in a situation where your mental model and how the world works are not in line.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

As you reflect on AI, how do you feel it's going to change the future of education, the future of work, the way we communicate with ourselves, and our imaginations? We have been living in a digital smog for a long time, now combined with the manic pace of AI. So as our technologies change, how is it changing our sense of self?

CARISSA CARTER

Well, one is it's absolutely going to change us. I think the sooner that we can be very proactive, the better. I don't know if I want to be changed, and I think a lot of people are feeling that too. But it is going to change us, so it's not going to help to pretend like it's not happening. But we can all be proactive in noticing the changes it's having on us, on our children, on our planet, from every scale—from that large system-wide energy footprint scale all the way down to the minuscule. Maybe I won't even call it minuscule, but I worry that AI is changing my thoughts and can control my thoughts, and that used to sound really far-fetched and now seems sort of middle of the road. I guarantee in a year's time that will sound like a very normal concern. Social listening is very sophisticated. All of the data in the websites that we visit, the data trails that we leave out in the world, are tracking us—our locations, our behaviors, and our habits such that there are many sites out there that can predict exactly what we're thinking and feeling and feed us advertising content or things that aren't even advertising content that can change what our next behaviors are.

I think that's getting more and more sophisticated. We have already seen our political elections affected by mass attacks on our social media. When that comes down to our individual agency and behavior, I think that's something we do need to be concerned about. The way that we as individuals can combat it is to be aware that it's happening. Really start to notice the unnoticed, and I still feel optimistic amongst this concern.

When we are prototyping new design ideas with students, we love this mantra that the prototype should never be more resolved than the idea. So if you want to make a new chair and you're concerned with how much space it should take up, you make that thing out of cardboard so that you just get an idea of space. You don't make it at its final beautiful wood and leather resolution because then you're going to be looking at whether this texture feels right. You're not going to be thinking about the amount of space it's taking up. But with AI, you're right. The manicness, the hallucinations, when they appear exactly the same as something that we are used to as just a representation of search, etc., that's confusing. That is confusing to our brains, and if you're working quickly, you can miss it.

The Media Landscape: Protecting Our Imagination

DOORLEY

You mentioned digital smog, Mia, and something Carissa and I have been talking about lately is as you move from the industrial era to the media era, the landscape of what we're working with changes. In a media landscape, the environment is not just the trees and the water and the air. It's actually our minds—our emotions, our feelings, our mental models, and our imagination. So our brains are kind of the environment in which all these new media updates and designs are playing out. Where does pollution show up? Pollution shows up in political polarization, it shows up in difficulties with mental health. We need to think of our imagination in the media space as a public resource that needs to be protected. Our collective imagination, the sum total of our individual imaginations and how they affect each other, is really important to start thinking about with a conservation mindset. This is kind of a silent spring moment of the media era.

Creativity, Innovation and the Importance of a Holistic Design Process

DOORLEY

When you're thinking about a creative field or just bringing creativity to whatever field you have, creativity is often about finding the hidden thing, finding the thing that nobody else is seeing and taking it to reality. Don't think that make believe or imagination or weird ideas are not worth it. I had some mentors in my life that allowed me to understand how you should take make believe seriously, because if you go down this kind of wild path, you find something beyond what's going on, and eventually the world is going to normalize it and integrate it. Otherwise, it just won't work. So don't worry about being out there. We need people to be thinking beyond what is toward what could be. I think that's number one. The second thing is that the way you do things is as important as the things you do. It's not just about the product; it's about how you do it because how you do it actually has more repercussions sometimes than the product. You might create a great product, but if everyone working on it is angry and the people you're trying to serve aren't excited about it or they've been taken advantage of to make it come into the world, that leaves more bad stuff that's harder to see but has an equal or bigger impact. Just how you make it is as important as what you make.

How can we design and adapt for the uncertainties of the 21st century? How do emotions shape our decisions and the way we design the world around us?

Scott Doorley is the Creative Director at Stanford's d. school and coauthor of Make Space: How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration. He teaches design communication and his work has been featured in museums and in publications such as Architecture + Urbanism and The New York Times. Carissa Carter is the Academic Director at Stanford's d. school and author of The Secret Language of Maps: How to Tell Visual Stories with Data. She teaches courses on emerging technologies and data visualization and received Fast Company Innovation and Core 77 awards for her work on designing with machine learning and blockchain. Together, they coauthored Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future.

Today, someone is putting the finishing touches on a machine-­ learning algorithm that will change the way you relate to your family. Someone is trying to design a way to communicate with animals in their own language. Someone is designing a gene that alters bacteria to turn your poop bright blue when it’s time to see the doctor. Someone is cleaning up the mess someone else left behind seventy years ago yesterday. Today, someone just had an idea that will end up saving one thing while it harms another…

To be a maker in this moment—­ to be a human today—­ is to collaborate with the world. It is to create and be created, to work and be worked on, to make and be made. To be human is to tinker, create, fix, care, and bring new things into the world. It is to design. You—­ yes, you!—­ might design products or policy, services or sermons, production lines or preschool programs. You might run a business, make art, or participate in passing out meals to the poor. You may write code or pour concrete, lobby for endangered species legislation or craft cocktails. Wherever you fit in, you are part of shaping the world. This is design work.

– Assembling Tomorrow
A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

You both teach at universities at a time when educational silos are in flux. Young people are living in this kind of giant laboratory of possibilities, innovation, inspiration, and experimentation, and things around us are changing so fast. The rapid advances of AI are challenging many norms, and Assembling Tomorrow really helps us put this into context. It's playful, imaginative, and thought-provoking, and it inspired me to consider: What’s the future that I want to live in? And how I can be a part of that design process? So, what made you write Assembling Tomorrow at this moment in time?

CARISSA CARTER

This moment feels really overwhelming. Like we're overwhelmed with the technology, our climate's on the fritz, and it can feel really unsettling. Yet at the same time, as people that craft learning experiences, we know how much agency each of us has as individuals. And so we wanted to write the book to call attention to the complexity and the feeling of overwhelm of this moment and then also to share things that anybody can do to launch ourselves into that better future.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

How important are emotions in the design process? And what are the emotional impacts of design?

SCOTT DOORLEY

So if you look at the internet and the creation of the internet, the idea was to move information quickly. And that has been great, but there have been a lot of things where they didn't take into account the fact that, well, there are people attached to all that information, and those people are experiencing emotions. The things that we're designing are actually exciting and aggravating our emotions. So you take something like social media, which is really about the speedy spread of information. And what you see is it also brought along with it teen depression and body image issues. It also led to political polarization.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Carissa, you teach data visualization. How important is this in helping us understand, adapt and take action on climate change?

CARTER

One thing to know is that every single climate visualization that we see out in the world, whether that is a map of rising temperatures around the country or the globe or rising sea levels or wildfires, all of that has design decisions behind it. I am also with you that we need to get more people understanding the impacts of their own actions on climate change and being aware of what's happening to the planet. So one is to be able to interpret that work and really interrogate it for what it is. To be able to read any infographic and what we call deconstruct it, understand what emotions it is evoking in you, your gut reaction, why those are happening, and literally what the designer has done to make you feel that way. Literacy in reading infographics is one piece. And to give you very specific examples, in one of the classes that I teach and co-teach with a geoscientist, Kate Maher, and an infographic designer, Catherine Madden, we have students visualize what is known as the climate swerve. So this idea that humans, and the idea that we can't have agency over shifting climate, was coined the climate swerve by Jay Lifton a number of years ago. That concept is one that the more that we have people sourcing what the information is and how to present it, we feel gets that climate literacy in our brains and gets that message across. You can see it in really interesting ways. For example, we have students visualize climate anxiety and where it is cropping up, overlaid with where people should feel anxious about climate. We have even had a student group that visualized the themes of major Marvel movies throughout the past 20 plus years. They looked at what those themes were and how they changed and how some of the themes have started to be much more climate-related, kind of showing how these topics are ingrained in popular culture too.

Speculative Legislation: Preparing for the Future

DOORLEY

We have an assumption that technological innovation outpaces government regulation. That's a very well-founded assumption because that's how it goes. It's always been that way. However, I think we need to start thinking differently, and we should be able to imagine that we can create legislation that precedes the impacts of the things we're creating. If we see a potential effect coming, we should be able to put in a sort of preemptive law to address it prior to the effect actually happening, which we do in a lot of ways. There are tons of examples of that, but I think the pace of legislation needs to accelerate so that it can really grapple with the pace of technological innovation. But then if you do that, you have to be ready for the fact that the legislation might be off. It's speculative, it's anticipatory, and you're not necessarily going to get it right. I think we also need to build in mechanisms into the laws that make them responsive and changeable. So let's have speculative legislation. We'll put a law out there, a regulation that's speculative, but let's have built-in checks that are constantly checking if this is working the way we wanted it to, and it needs to be easy to change if it's not. Which is also not built into the system. We need to be able to imagine things working in ways in which we aren't used to them working. One, I think, is legislation being quick and responsive when generally it's sort of slow and hard to change. That's one thing that I think could really help.

CARTER

Scott and I like to kick around imaginative ideas for types of legislation. One idea is like a 'look both ways' technology where, let's say, we have a big new social media technology that's about to be launched, and AI and all sorts of algorithms that would fit within that bucket. Is there a moment where there's a trial period with technologies like that, where we have some ideas as to how they might need to be governed? We could put those in place and then use that, say, two-year period of time when that technology is learning how it's going to actually work once it's in place. We both look historically and see how similar technologies have affected our world. What should we be looking for in terms of the effects it might have both on our individual persons and our societies? Also, sort of look forward, do some visioning as to what might come to pass 10, 20, 30 years down the road.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

One of the things you write about are understanding the intangibles.

CARTER

Understanding the intangibles is really about knowing the forces that are coming together that are making this moment feel quite unsettling. These include the fact that everything is interconnected and flows between each other and the feelings that you were talking about before, as well as our human propensity to make stories and come up with narratives to connect ideas, whether they exist or not. Human characteristics and actionables are like: what are ways to notice those forces that are happening, to see the unseen so that each one of us can be more aware of what's happening and build the world for the better.

The Concept of Umwelt: Perception and Reality

DOORLEY

The way our brains work is not really indicative of how the world works. There's a reason for that. Us being able to pay attention to certain things and ignore others allows us to navigate, but it shouldn't be mistaken for an understanding of our holistic view of the world. There's a concept that we talk about in the book called the umwelt. The idea of an umwelt is what your senses can take in, and different species have different senses. As an example, cockroaches sense movement in ways that we don't. Butterflies can see infrared light, and we can't. Butterflies can actually taste with their feet, which is kind of an amazing thing, and I'm kind of glad that we don't. The point is that even through our senses, my understanding of a situation is going to be different from your understanding of the situation. The way I think of a story of what happens is going to be different from the way you thought of a story. There's a man named Gregory Bateson (author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind), who was an environmentalist, and he talks about how most of the problems in the world are actually a problem between the way people think and how the world works. They are not the same thing. The way we understand the world and how the world actually works is just not mapped perfectly. That kind of leads to problems because we don't know exactly what we're doing in the world. We can't see all the repercussions of the things we create until later on.

AI and the Future: Opportunities and Concerns

One silver lining about the technologies we're creating is that technologies like AI could be used to help us with this issue, with the fact that our mental models aren't exactly in line with how the world works. AI is actually very good at predicting and modeling outcomes. It could be used to understand climate change better so that we're able to understand it in a way that allows us to act. It could also help us predict the impacts of the things that we're making. So there's a bit of a silver lining in here, even though it can feel scary to be in a situation where your mental model and how the world works are not in line.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

As you reflect on AI, how do you feel it's going to change the future of education, the future of work, the way we communicate with ourselves, and our imaginations? We have been living in a digital smog for a long time, now combined with the manic pace of AI. So as our technologies change, how is it changing our sense of self?

CARISSA CARTER

Well, one is it's absolutely going to change us. I think the sooner that we can be very proactive, the better. I don't know if I want to be changed, and I think a lot of people are feeling that too. But it is going to change us, so it's not going to help to pretend like it's not happening. But we can all be proactive in noticing the changes it's having on us, on our children, on our planet, from every scale—from that large system-wide energy footprint scale all the way down to the minuscule. Maybe I won't even call it minuscule, but I worry that AI is changing my thoughts and can control my thoughts, and that used to sound really far-fetched and now seems sort of middle of the road. I guarantee in a year's time that will sound like a very normal concern. Social listening is very sophisticated. All of the data in the websites that we visit, the data trails that we leave out in the world, are tracking us—our locations, our behaviors, and our habits such that there are many sites out there that can predict exactly what we're thinking and feeling and feed us advertising content or things that aren't even advertising content that can change what our next behaviors are.

I think that's getting more and more sophisticated. We have already seen our political elections affected by mass attacks on our social media. When that comes down to our individual agency and behavior, I think that's something we do need to be concerned about. The way that we as individuals can combat it is to be aware that it's happening. Really start to notice the unnoticed, and I still feel optimistic amongst this concern.

When we are prototyping new design ideas with students, we love this mantra that the prototype should never be more resolved than the idea. So if you want to make a new chair and you're concerned with how much space it should take up, you make that thing out of cardboard so that you just get an idea of space. You don't make it at its final beautiful wood and leather resolution because then you're going to be looking at whether this texture feels right. You're not going to be thinking about the amount of space it's taking up. But with AI, you're right. The manicness, the hallucinations, when they appear exactly the same as something that we are used to as just a representation of search, etc., that's confusing. That is confusing to our brains, and if you're working quickly, you can miss it.

The Media Landscape: Protecting Our Imagination

DOORLEY

You mentioned digital smog, Mia, and something Carissa and I have been talking about lately is as you move from the industrial era to the media era, the landscape of what we're working with changes. In a media landscape, the environment is not just the trees and the water and the air. It's actually our minds—our emotions, our feelings, our mental models, and our imagination. So our brains are kind of the environment in which all these new media updates and designs are playing out. Where does pollution show up? Pollution shows up in political polarization, it shows up in difficulties with mental health. We need to think of our imagination in the media space as a public resource that needs to be protected. Our collective imagination, the sum total of our individual imaginations and how they affect each other, is really important to start thinking about with a conservation mindset. This is kind of a silent spring moment of the media era.

Creativity, Innovation and the Importance of a Holistic Design Process

DOORLEY

When you're thinking about a creative field or just bringing creativity to whatever field you have, creativity is often about finding the hidden thing, finding the thing that nobody else is seeing and taking it to reality. Don't think that make believe or imagination or weird ideas are not worth it. I had some mentors in my life that allowed me to understand how you should take make believe seriously, because if you go down this kind of wild path, you find something beyond what's going on, and eventually the world is going to normalize it and integrate it. Otherwise, it just won't work. So don't worry about being out there. We need people to be thinking beyond what is toward what could be. I think that's number one. The second thing is that the way you do things is as important as the things you do. It's not just about the product; it's about how you do it because how you do it actually has more repercussions sometimes than the product. You might create a great product, but if everyone working on it is angry and the people you're trying to serve aren't excited about it or they've been taken advantage of to make it come into the world, that leaves more bad stuff that's harder to see but has an equal or bigger impact. Just how you make it is as important as what you make.

What is love? How do the relationships we have early in our lives affect us for years to come?

Meaghan Oppenheimer is a screenwriter, executive producer, and showrunner who tells stories driven by flawed, deeply human characters and the relationships between them. She’s behind Hulu’s drama series Tell Me Lies, starring Grace Van Patten and Jackson White and adapted from Carola Lovering’s novel of the same name. Her earlier projects include the 2015 film We Are Your Friends, starring Zac Efron as a passionate young DJ, and the 2018 drama series Queen America, set in Oppenheimer’s hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma and starring Catherine Zeta-Jones. Season 2 of Tell Me Lies will premiere September 4th on Hulu. Oppenheimer is also currently developing the upcoming Hulu show Second Wife, to star Tom Ellis and Emma Roberts.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

For those who haven't seen season one of Tell Me Lies, just give us a little bit of background on Lucy and Stephen and their circle of friends. 

MEAGHAN OPPENHEIMER

Tell Me Lies really is about obsessive love and the ramifications of the things that we do to ourselves and to other people when we allow ourselves to get completely lost inside of another person. It’s also a coming of age story about people who are experiencing sexual awakenings and love, or what they think is love, for the first time. You have Lucy, a college freshman who is   sort of emotionally stunted because of a few things in her life, and she meets Stephen, who is a very charming narcissist, who has a lot of his own issues. So the show is about her getting completely entangled in this obsession with him, and the way that it pulls her further and further away from herself, and causes her to really undermine her own happiness and throw away any power that she has. She ends up betraying a lot of friendships; the rest of the cast make up their college friends.

Season one is definitely more of a love story than season two is. I keep saying season one is  the love story, season two is sort of a war story. It’s about these college kids who are making these choices that in the moment seem very mundane, but have much bigger consequences later on. Often when people write or make movies about romances with young adults, I think they are very flippant about it and don't take it seriously. But I think that those friendships and romantic relationships are some of the most important ones because they really set the stage for the rest of our lives. If your first relationship is incredibly toxic and damaging, it can take you years to  figure out that that's not normal, and that that's not actually how relationships are meant to be.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You weave stories so well that your audience can imagine themselves into these situations they have never experienced themselves. What does your writing and creative process look like?

MEAGHAN OPPENHEIMER

There’s a lot of sitting alone in a room and just thinking about crazy ideas. I spend a lot of time just listening to music and coming up with stories. I think with this show, there's an element where I’ve found our audience really wants to be shocked. I also found this when we were writing the first season; you hand things in to the Hulu executives and the 20th executives and  people really liked to be completely surprised and completely shocked. And so it sort of became this game of, how can we do something that lives in the real world - that is believable enough that it could have happened or has happened to people we know - but then turn it up a notch so it really catches people off guard. It’s been fun to try to put things in the show that people don't see coming. It's hard to do that nowadays.

But for the most part, I just always try to think about, who is this character? What do they want?  Thinking about what a character wants is always the first drive, because everything we do comes from something we want, whether we're telling the truth or lying, whether it's conscious or subconscious. If you just try to think about, ‘what does this character want, and what are they willing to do to get it?’ then you can let the plot unfold organically. 

I acted as a kid, and it definitely was what taught me how to write, because I was always reading scripts and reading plays. I learned a lot about what actually feels realistic to say and what doesn't. I think a mistake that a lot of writers make is they don't say any of the words out loud, and so when someone actually says it out loud, you realize, these words don't even fit in my mouth. Certain sentences literally feel awkward and you realize no one would ever speak this way. And so as I'm writing, I'm definitely quietly whispering everything to myself, not acting it out, but just making sure it feels like it can flow, and that it won't be too difficult for an actor to actually say. I'm not always trying to get into the mind of each character, I'm not stepping into their psyche, but with all of them I’m thinking, what do I relate to about this character? And if I don't relate to them, who do I know that feels similar, and what would that person do? So I always have to draw on my own experiences, or people that I know. I pretty much always do. I write about relationships and love and family, and while the stories are not autobiographical, the emotions are. Pretty much all the emotions that are in Tell Me Lies are things that I have felt before to different degrees. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

What is it like writing for actors you know, like Grace Van Patten and Jackson White in Tell Me Lies, who are also in a relationship in real life, and your husband Tom Ellis? How much are you drawing on different things you've learned about these actors along the way - their energies and what they bring to a project - so that you can write to their strengths?

MEAGHAN OPPENHEIMER

The whole Tell Me Lies cast, they're all my friends, I know them all. I know their real lives, and I have to put that completely to the side when I'm writing. I have to be very, very disciplined about not mixing those two in my mind and not confusing what Grace would do and what Lucy would do, because they're so different. But with that said, I think once you start working with a character or with an actor, writing their dialogue, you know what the actor's voice sounds like and what their mannerisms are and the tone of their voice. You know how it will sound in their mouth. So writing towards the strengths of different actors, I think, is something you have to learn how to do. I loved the first season, but that’s why I do think the second season is much better. Knowing who these characters were and knowing what everyone's strengths were was very helpful, like knowing with Grace that she's able to say so much without saying anything. Her face is just so expressive. There were times where I would get a note like, can you explain this moment more? And I’d say, you'll be able to see it on Grace's face. It's nice knowing you have an actor like that.

On Nurturing Education and the Importance of the Arts

English and theater were always the subjects I gravitated towards, and history, because history is just one big story. I had a teacher named Gary Sweeney at Holland Hall, who is one of the most impactful people I've met. He gave me a love of theater that I didn't have before, and showed me texts and plays that I never would have come across as a teenager in Tulsa. 

I had a great education, but I think there was also a structure that could be very rigid. There was so much that I stressed over as a kid that didn't end up mattering; the hours of homework or the stakes around a math test or a science quiz. And I think there are schools now that are  changing it, but I do wish there was a way to educate young people without giving them the anxieties of an adult, and allowing them to still be kids without this feeling of, if I fail this test, my entire life is going to be over, because it’s not. I have a nine-month-old baby, and we talk a lot about when we put her in school, trying to find a more alternative education where she is able to learn what she needs to learn, but also to love learning, not just putting in hours for hours’ sake.

In terms of educating people about art and teaching art, I worked with girls who were at a home, many of them were orphans, and they had really been taught to not take up space and to be quiet and inwards. Watching the way that they blossomed by doing performance - the way it teaches you to be loud and use your voice and take up space - they didn’t want to become actors or playwrights, but it was just incredibly liberating for them. I can't imagine what I would be like if I hadn't been involved in some level of art as a kid, because I think it taught me how to find my voice and also understand people who are very different from me.

Storytelling is the most important thing in my life. I think it's how we learn about ourselves. I think it's how we learn to empathize with other people. We can't experience everything someone is, everyone in the world is going through, but we can read a book about it and open our brains up to a different corner of the human experience that we would never have contact with in our  day-to-day lives. Building empathy is one of the most important outcomes of art.

Recently, twenty-three lecturers in the highly successful Creative Writing program at Stanford were summoned to a Zoom meeting where they were first praised, and then summarily fired. One of the most surprising aspects of this purge is the fact that it was carried out not by top-tier university administrators, but by tenure-track faculty in the program. It was they who decided to brutally terminate their colleagues. On this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu speaks with two of the lecturers who have been told they will leave Stanford in nine months, and one of their students, a published novelist. They explain the devastating nature of this act and share statistics and histories that show this was not at all necessary.  Expediency for senior faculty trumped the survival of a carefully developed and nurtured community of creative writers.

Sarah Frisch is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and current Lecturer in Stanford's Creative Writing Program. Her work has been published in The Paris Review, the VQR, and The New England Review. She’s won a Pushcart Prize and an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant for fiction and has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Washington University in St. Louis.

Malavika Kannan is a queer fiction writer who graduated from Stanford University in 2024 with a minor in Creative Writing, where she served as the Creative Writing peer advisor. Her work appears in Washington Post, Teen Vogue, and elsewhere and her YA novel was published by Little & Brown in 2023. From the Chappell-Lougee and Major Grants to the IDA fellowship and the Honors in the Arts program, Malavika feels thankful for the many opportunities at Stanford to nurture her craft and all the people who supported her. Malavika feels very grateful to her mentor Nina Schloesser Tarano, a Jones Lecturer, for all her support.

Nina Schloesser Tárano was born and grew up in Guatemala City. She received her MFA from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Fence and The New Inquiry Magazine. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction 2010-2012, and has been a lecturer in the Stanford Creative Writing Program since 2012.

Speaking Out of Place, which carries on the spirit of Palumbo-Liu’s book of the same title, argues against the notion that we are voiceless and powerless, and that we need politicians and pundits and experts to speak for us.

Judith Butler on Speaking Out of Place:

“In this work we see how every critical analysis of homelessness, displacement, internment, violence, and exploitation is countered by emergent and intensifying social movements that move beyond national borders to the ideal of a planetary alliance. As an activist and a scholar, Palumbo-Liu shows us what vigilance means in these times.  This book takes us through the wretched landscape of our world to the ideals of social transformation, calling for a place, the planet, where collective passions can bring about a true and radical democracy.”

David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He has written widely on issues of literary criticism and theory, culture and society, race, ethnicity and indigeneity, human rights, and environmental justice. His books include The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age, and Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Al Jazeera, Jacobin, Truthout, and other venues.
Twitter/X @palumboliu
Apple Podcasts · Spotify · Website · Instagram

How can journalism make people care and bring about solutions? What role does storytelling play in shining a light on injustice and crises and creating a catalyst for change?

Nicholas D. Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer-winning journalist and Op-ed columnist for The New York Times, where he was previously bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo. Kristof is a regular CNN contributor and has covered, among many other events and crises, the Tiananmen Square protests, the Darfur genocide, the Yemeni civil war, and the U.S. opioid crisis. He is the author of the memoir Chasing Hope, A Reporter's Life, and coauthor, with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, of five previous books: Tightrope, A Path Appears, Half the Sky, Thunder from the East, and China Wakes.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

You've been to 170 countries, and in your book Chasing Hope, you've written on the value of witnessing the world's atrocities, neglected conflicts, human rights abuses, and how you then turn these into stories that will call on people to act. How do you find your way into a story?

NICHOLAS KRISTOF

So the backdrop of Chasing Hope came when I was trying to cover the Darfur genocide in the early 2000s. I was making these trips and reporting on the horrific massacres, and it just felt as if these columns were just disappearing without a ripple. At the same time in New York City, all of Manhattan was up in arms about these two hawks that had been pushed out of an apartment building where they had a nest because the building didn't like their bird droppings. And I thought, “how is it that I can't generate the same outrage people feel for these two homeless hawks for hundreds of thousands of people? What's wrong with my writing? Why can't I connect with people on these issues?” So that led me to the work of what makes us care. And one of those lessons is that it's an emotional process—an emotional connection not a rational one—you have to tell stories about individuals. I'm always going out to find not just an individual story, but the most compelling story—somebody that people can relate to. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

And I wonder what role growing up in a small town (Yamhill, Oregon) played in the kind of journalist you’ve become? You get to know almost everyone in the town, I imagine, and you can see behind their stories in a way and all sectors of society that we might not get in big cities where we have this tunnel vision and stick with our groups?

KRISTOF

Growing up in a tiny town very much affected my journalism and how I see the world, in the sense that it always felt to me that national media establishments neglect small towns like mine, people like those around me, and the issues that concern us. An example is addiction—we've got more than 100,000 people a year dying from overdoses, including many of my old friends, and I don't think that America has come to terms with that adequately. When we try to cover what is happening in other countries, we go to the capital, talk to officials, and typically talk to university educated men who speak English, but that's a pretty tiny slice. That has encouraged me to talk to other people to understand what is happening more broadly.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

And you talk about the personal emotional stories, and I wonder how do you protect yourself emotionally—how do you keep your empathy in check, skepticism, critical thinking or neutrality, in these emotionally charged situations when you might be meeting warlords or covering human trafficking and witnessing these terrors? You begin Chasing Hope going down in a small plane in the heart of the Congo Civil War. With so much going on, how do you remain clear minded in those situations and also, journalistically, how do you develop that courage and strength? 

KRISTOF

In writing Chasing Hope, I self diagnosed myself with a mild case of PTSD. It's probably parallel to an emergency room physician who is surrounded by trauma victims, but you have to create some distance from that pain just to get through the day. Where my armor breaks down is in particular where children are involved or where somebody that I am close to, such as my interpreter, has been in jeopardy and I fear that I’ll put somebody at risk. Every now and then unexpectedly, I’ll interview somebody and find myself completely tearing up.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

And I'm just wondering about all the places that you've been. What are some of those things that still haunt you?

KRISTOF

June 4th, 1989 Tiananmen Square in China is certainly high on that list. I was the Beijing bureau chief of The New York Times and had covered the Tiananmen democracy movement. It had seemed so full of hope, but that terrible night, I heard that the troops were busting through student lines and headed toward Tiananmen. I rode my bike and got to Tiananmen Square a little bit before the troops did. And then they arrived and opened fire on the crowd that I was in. I was terrified. To watch a modern army turn weapons of war on unarmed protesters—that changes you. Frankly, at first, I was a little bit disdainful of some of the less educated protesters at Tiananmen, and I wrote periodically that although they say they're for democracy, they can't define the kind of democracy they're in favor of. That night, though, it was those uneducated workers and peasants who were driving their rickshaws out whenever there was a pause in the firing to pick up bodies of kids who'd been killed or injured, who blocked the troops. One bus driver saw troops coming in trucks, so he parked his bus across the road to keep the trucks away and turned off the engine. Then when the officer pointed his firearm at him and demanded he move the bus, he just hurled the keys into the high grass. People like that might not have been able to define democracy, but they were willing to risk their lives for it. And I think there's a lot we can learn from the courage and commitment of people like that whom I witnessed in June 1989.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Yes, that coverage was so moving, and so were those other books that you've co-authored with your wife, Sheryl WuDunn, China Wakes, Thunder from the East, Half the Sky, among others. And you were the first married couple to jointly receive a Pulitzer for journalism. How do you work together to jointly tell a story?

KRISTOF

It's funny because people always ask that question, and there's a little bit of a hint of how do you guys write books together and stay married? We also have three kids, and the truth is that if you can raise kids together and stay married, a book is a piece of cake. It really is. And you know, you put a manuscript down at night. It stays down. A manuscript can't play you off each other. At the end of the day, if you screw up on a manuscript, it's only a manuscript. It's not like screwing up on a kid. More seriously, it helped to have Sheryl and me working on these things together.

China, after Tiananmen, was a somewhat dispiriting time. We were tailed a lot. We dealt with really tough ethical decisions, and it really helped to have somebody who was engaged in this business who understood the risks. We could talk through some of these questions about what our moral responsibilities were to our sources and to our readers.

When we wrote Half the Sky about empowering women around the world, if it had been just a woman writing that book, it would have been marginalized as just a woman's issue. And it would have been weird if it had been just a man writing it, but I think a man and a woman addressing gender inequity together underscores that this is an issue that affects all of us, whatever our sex. And that we all have to get to work to try to address it. So, it's been a wonderful partnership.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

You also describe your early posting as New York Times bureau chief in Hong Kong during a kind of golden age of print journalism where you had more time to explore, whereas now, with the attention economy and clickbait, so much has changed. What are your reflections on the future of journalism?

KRISTOF

Traditionally, newspapers were often monopolies or oligopolies, and so they were making money and perfectly fine being committed to covering important things that readers weren't terribly interested in. That business model has collapsed for local journalism around the country. We're losing an average of two and a half newspapers each week around the country, and we've lost more newspaper journalists than we have coal miners over the last decade. In terms of national,international coverage, The New York Times still has a good business model. The Washington Post has a business model in the sense that Jeff Bezos has a large checkbook. The Wall Street Journal is doing okay, but the news weeklies are collapsing, and television is struggling. There are still reporters covering the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza, but you don't have many reporters covering what's probably the world's biggest humanitarian crisis right now—the famine in Sudan. It's just like how Yemen wasn't getting much coverage when it was the biggest crisis. I think that's fundamentally because it's expensive and dangerous to cover those kinds of international stories, and there's not much of an audience for it. Once, I did back-to-back columns about the Yemen humanitarian crisis and Brett Kavanaugh when he was nominated for the Supreme Court. The Kavanaugh piece—I could whip off in a few hours, while the Yemen piece resulted from an expensive, dangerous trip to Yemen. But the Kavanaugh piece got seven times as many page views, so you can understand why an executive producer wouldn't want to send a camera crew to Yemen when they can just put a Democrat and a Republican in a studio together and have them yell at each other.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Your writing has inspired Bill and Melinda Gates to focus their philanthropy on global health. Robert DeVecchi, the former president of the International Rescue Committee, said your coverage of the genocide in Darfur saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Considering the changing face of journalism, how can we continue to be a catalyst for positive change?

KRISTOF

I hope that we come up with a solid business model for journalism. I'm actually planning a trip to Sudan right now and it will probably lose money for The Times, but they're willing to send me to cover pieces that maybe only my mother and wife will read. We need a better business model for journalism as a whole. I think that there may be ways for journalists to partner with aid groups and think tanks around the world to cover crises.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Your parents were educators, and you've also created mentorship programs where you've taken young journalists on the road with you to help bring them along that pathway toward journalism. You've been an outspoken advocate for education reform. What are your reflections on education, and how can we improve our education models to prepare people not just for the jobs of the 21st but to be more engaged global citizens?

KRISTOF

If you look over the last 500 years or so, the best metric to predict where society will be in 30 or 50 years, the best metric is simply education today. One reason I think the U.S. is the world's largest and most successful economy today is that, beginning in the 19th century and through about 1970, the U.S. led the world in mass education. And what matters is not so much elite education. Britain had Eton, Oxford, and Cambridge, and it had better elite education, but it wasn't great at mass education. And the U.S. really was. We were the first country to have almost universal literacy, male and female. We were the first country to have widespread high school attendance and the first country to have significant college attendance. And then, beginning in about the 1970s, we lost that lead. And now, there are many countries that are way ahead of us. I think back to my old classmates who are now dead, and I think: What were adults thinking in the 1970s that they let them drop out? And yet, I think today: What are adults thinking in 2024 when they let one in seven American kids today drop out of high school and let so many emerge from the school system not literate, not numerate, completely unprepared for the 21st century?

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Yes. And for somebody who's always gone out into the world, who's derived their knowledge from one-on-one to understanding what it is in the world, what are your reflections on how AI is changing the way we communicate with ourselves, our imagination, and journalism itself? How can we prepare everyone, especially young people, for these uncertain futures?

KRISTOF

There have been some alarming experiments that show AI arguments are better at persuading people than humans are at persuading people. I think that's partly because humans tend to make the arguments that we ourselves find most persuasive. For example, a liberal will make the arguments that will appeal to liberals, but the person you're probably trying to persuade is somebody in the center. We're just not good at putting ourselves in other people's shoes. That's something I try very hard to do in the column, but I often fall short. And with AI, I think people are going to become more vulnerable to being manipulated. I think we're at risk of being manipulated by our own cognitive biases and the tendency to reach out for information sources that will confirm our prejudices. Years ago, the theorist Nicholas Negroponte wrote that the internet was going to bring a product he called the Daily Me—basically information perfectly targeted to our own brains—and that's kind of what we've gotten now. A conservative will get conservative sources that show how awful Democrats are and will have information that buttresses that point of view, while liberals will get the liberal version of that. So, I think we have to try to understand those cognitive biases and understand the degree to which we are all vulnerable to being fooled by selection bias. I'd like to see high schools, in particular, have more information training and media literacy programs so that younger people can learn that there are some news sources that are a little better than others and that just because you see something on Facebook doesn't make it true. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Exactly. There's checks and balances, so it is important to understand fake news, misinformation, and disinformation. You said your experience in China helped you have a certain respect for the mechanisms of capitalism, even though it doesn't work perfectly, and it hasn't worked perfectly in terms of how we are stewards of the planet. This you've seen from your travels around the world, these decisions that cause ecological degradation because we're not seeing further down the line to the future. I know that maintaining ecological balance is important for you. You have practical working knowledge since you were raised on a farm and to this day you and your family run a 25-acre farm in Yamhill, Oregon. What, in your view, is holding us back from moving forward on environmental issues?

KRISTOF

I think that the problem is a classic economic problem of tragedy of the commons—the fact that any one country is going to benefit if other countries reduce carbon emissions but is going to suffer when it itself does means there's always a tendency to want other countries to lead the way. Since the industrial revolution began, the US point of view is that we can't get anywhere unless India and China reduce carbon emissions, while India and China say if you look over the last one hundred years, the US is the one who put out all the carbon, and we're just finally getting a little bit richer and you want to cut us off at the knees.

There are arguments to be made on both sides, but the fundamental impediment is that 10 years ago, it just seemed really hard to see how we were going to get out of climate change and disastrous consequences, but right now, if you squint a little bit, you can maybe see a path through this period where we reduce carbon emissions enough to figure out how to navigate our way to a future in which things work and we pay a price, but one that is manageable. Green energy is becoming much cheaper because of a revolution in battery technology, and now there are possibilities for a field-like energy generated by waves or fusion nuclear power to remove carbon from the air with direct air capture. We're not sure that these will work, but they may, and they would really be revolutionary. China is an interesting example of a country that has made remarkable progress on electrification and battery technology. It is still pushing out a ton of carbon, but it has done this for practical reasons—it understands that those are key technologies for the future and whoever figures out how to get electric vehicles done right, whoever figures out how to get battery technology right, the world is going to benefit from their progress in battery technology, just as the world has benefited by having solar panels made in China go up all over the world.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

You know, we're so glad that Chasing Hope allows us to understand some of these backstories that make or don't make the cut when you're writing an article, but how do you narrow that down when there's so many fascinating details to what would be the most poignant to bring across the essence of the story?

KRISTOF

That's the perpetual challenge of storytelling. It's what Homer was wrestling with 800 years ago and what we wrestle with today. But I think one of the lessons of storytelling is that you pick the elements that will move a reader. In my case, I'm trying to get people to care about a crisis in ways that may bring solutions to it. And that's also how I deal with the terror and the fear to find a sense of purpose in what I do. It's incredibly heartbreaking to see some of the things and hear some of the stories, but at the end of the day, it feels like–inconsistently here and there–you can shine a light on problems, and by shining that light, you actually make a difference.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

And as you think about the future, those teachers who have been important to you, and the importance of storytelling, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?

KRISTOF

I think a lot of young people today are focused on what might be called résumé qualities. I was proud to be the youngest foreign correspondent at the Times and then youngest national correspondent, winning a Pulitzer, these kinds of things, but overtime, I came to see more importance and reward in finding a purpose, finding meaning, paying it forward, and giving back—the eulogy qualities, the kind of things people say when they remember you, not the résumé qualities. It's the importance of finding friends, emphasizing family, and doing things that give you that sense of fulfillment and meaning, keep you going, and give you a cause larger than yourself to hold on to. I, too, am not sure I got it at the beginning of my career, so I think it's maybe hard for young people to grasp, but that is the advice I would offer.

How can journalism make people care and bring about solutions? What role does storytelling play in shining a light on injustice and crises and creating a catalyst for change?

Nicholas D. Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer-winning journalist and Op-ed columnist for The New York Times, where he was previously bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo. Kristof is a regular CNN contributor and has covered, among many other events and crises, the Tiananmen Square protests, the Darfur genocide, the Yemeni civil war, and the U.S. opioid crisis. He is the author of the memoir Chasing Hope, A Reporter's Life, and coauthor, with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, of five previous books: Tightrope, A Path Appears, Half the Sky, Thunder from the East, and China Wakes.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

You've been to 170 countries, and in your book Chasing Hope, you've written on the value of witnessing the world's atrocities, neglected conflicts, human rights abuses, and how you then turn these into stories that will call on people to act. How do you find your way into a story?

NICHOLAS KRISTOF

So the backdrop of Chasing Hope came when I was trying to cover the Darfur genocide in the early 2000s. I was making these trips and reporting on the horrific massacres, and it just felt as if these columns were just disappearing without a ripple. At the same time in New York City, all of Manhattan was up in arms about these two hawks that had been pushed out of an apartment building where they had a nest because the building didn't like their bird droppings. And I thought, “how is it that I can't generate the same outrage people feel for these two homeless hawks for hundreds of thousands of people? What's wrong with my writing? Why can't I connect with people on these issues?” So that led me to the work of what makes us care. And one of those lessons is that it's an emotional process—an emotional connection not a rational one—you have to tell stories about individuals. I'm always going out to find not just an individual story, but the most compelling story—somebody that people can relate to. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

And I wonder what role growing up in a small town (Yamhill, Oregon) played in the kind of journalist you’ve become? You get to know almost everyone in the town, I imagine, and you can see behind their stories in a way and all sectors of society that we might not get in big cities where we have this tunnel vision and stick with our groups?

KRISTOF

Growing up in a tiny town very much affected my journalism and how I see the world, in the sense that it always felt to me that national media establishments neglect small towns like mine, people like those around me, and the issues that concern us. An example is addiction—we've got more than 100,000 people a year dying from overdoses, including many of my old friends, and I don't think that America has come to terms with that adequately. When we try to cover what is happening in other countries, we go to the capital, talk to officials, and typically talk to university educated men who speak English, but that's a pretty tiny slice. That has encouraged me to talk to other people to understand what is happening more broadly.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

And you talk about the personal emotional stories, and I wonder how do you protect yourself emotionally—how do you keep your empathy in check, skepticism, critical thinking or neutrality, in these emotionally charged situations when you might be meeting warlords or covering human trafficking and witnessing these terrors? You begin Chasing Hope going down in a small plane in the heart of the Congo Civil War. With so much going on, how do you remain clear minded in those situations and also, journalistically, how do you develop that courage and strength? 

KRISTOF

In writing Chasing Hope, I self diagnosed myself with a mild case of PTSD. It's probably parallel to an emergency room physician who is surrounded by trauma victims, but you have to create some distance from that pain just to get through the day. Where my armor breaks down is in particular where children are involved or where somebody that I am close to, such as my interpreter, has been in jeopardy and I fear that I’ll put somebody at risk. Every now and then unexpectedly, I’ll interview somebody and find myself completely tearing up.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

And I'm just wondering about all the places that you've been. What are some of those things that still haunt you?

KRISTOF

June 4th, 1989 Tiananmen Square in China is certainly high on that list. I was the Beijing bureau chief of The New York Times and had covered the Tiananmen democracy movement. It had seemed so full of hope, but that terrible night, I heard that the troops were busting through student lines and headed toward Tiananmen. I rode my bike and got to Tiananmen Square a little bit before the troops did. And then they arrived and opened fire on the crowd that I was in. I was terrified. To watch a modern army turn weapons of war on unarmed protesters—that changes you. Frankly, at first, I was a little bit disdainful of some of the less educated protesters at Tiananmen, and I wrote periodically that although they say they're for democracy, they can't define the kind of democracy they're in favor of. That night, though, it was those uneducated workers and peasants who were driving their rickshaws out whenever there was a pause in the firing to pick up bodies of kids who'd been killed or injured, who blocked the troops. One bus driver saw troops coming in trucks, so he parked his bus across the road to keep the trucks away and turned off the engine. Then when the officer pointed his firearm at him and demanded he move the bus, he just hurled the keys into the high grass. People like that might not have been able to define democracy, but they were willing to risk their lives for it. And I think there's a lot we can learn from the courage and commitment of people like that whom I witnessed in June 1989.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Yes, that coverage was so moving, and so were those other books that you've co-authored with your wife, Sheryl WuDunn, China Wakes, Thunder from the East, Half the Sky, among others. And you were the first married couple to jointly receive a Pulitzer for journalism. How do you work together to jointly tell a story?

KRISTOF

It's funny because people always ask that question, and there's a little bit of a hint of how do you guys write books together and stay married? We also have three kids, and the truth is that if you can raise kids together and stay married, a book is a piece of cake. It really is. And you know, you put a manuscript down at night. It stays down. A manuscript can't play you off each other. At the end of the day, if you screw up on a manuscript, it's only a manuscript. It's not like screwing up on a kid. More seriously, it helped to have Sheryl and me working on these things together.

China, after Tiananmen, was a somewhat dispiriting time. We were tailed a lot. We dealt with really tough ethical decisions, and it really helped to have somebody who was engaged in this business who understood the risks. We could talk through some of these questions about what our moral responsibilities were to our sources and to our readers.

When we wrote Half the Sky about empowering women around the world, if it had been just a woman writing that book, it would have been marginalized as just a woman's issue. And it would have been weird if it had been just a man writing it, but I think a man and a woman addressing gender inequity together underscores that this is an issue that affects all of us, whatever our sex. And that we all have to get to work to try to address it. So, it's been a wonderful partnership.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

You also describe your early posting as New York Times bureau chief in Hong Kong during a kind of golden age of print journalism where you had more time to explore, whereas now, with the attention economy and clickbait, so much has changed. What are your reflections on the future of journalism?

KRISTOF

Traditionally, newspapers were often monopolies or oligopolies, and so they were making money and perfectly fine being committed to covering important things that readers weren't terribly interested in. That business model has collapsed for local journalism around the country. We're losing an average of two and a half newspapers each week around the country, and we've lost more newspaper journalists than we have coal miners over the last decade. In terms of national,international coverage, The New York Times still has a good business model. The Washington Post has a business model in the sense that Jeff Bezos has a large checkbook. The Wall Street Journal is doing okay, but the news weeklies are collapsing, and television is struggling. There are still reporters covering the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza, but you don't have many reporters covering what's probably the world's biggest humanitarian crisis right now—the famine in Sudan. It's just like how Yemen wasn't getting much coverage when it was the biggest crisis. I think that's fundamentally because it's expensive and dangerous to cover those kinds of international stories, and there's not much of an audience for it. Once, I did back-to-back columns about the Yemen humanitarian crisis and Brett Kavanaugh when he was nominated for the Supreme Court. The Kavanaugh piece—I could whip off in a few hours, while the Yemen piece resulted from an expensive, dangerous trip to Yemen. But the Kavanaugh piece got seven times as many page views, so you can understand why an executive producer wouldn't want to send a camera crew to Yemen when they can just put a Democrat and a Republican in a studio together and have them yell at each other.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Your writing has inspired Bill and Melinda Gates to focus their philanthropy on global health. Robert DeVecchi, the former president of the International Rescue Committee, said your coverage of the genocide in Darfur saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Considering the changing face of journalism, how can we continue to be a catalyst for positive change?

KRISTOF

I hope that we come up with a solid business model for journalism. I'm actually planning a trip to Sudan right now and it will probably lose money for The Times, but they're willing to send me to cover pieces that maybe only my mother and wife will read. We need a better business model for journalism as a whole. I think that there may be ways for journalists to partner with aid groups and think tanks around the world to cover crises.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Your parents were educators, and you've also created mentorship programs where you've taken young journalists on the road with you to help bring them along that pathway toward journalism. You've been an outspoken advocate for education reform. What are your reflections on education, and how can we improve our education models to prepare people not just for the jobs of the 21st but to be more engaged global citizens?

KRISTOF

If you look over the last 500 years or so, the best metric to predict where society will be in 30 or 50 years, the best metric is simply education today. One reason I think the U.S. is the world's largest and most successful economy today is that, beginning in the 19th century and through about 1970, the U.S. led the world in mass education. And what matters is not so much elite education. Britain had Eton, Oxford, and Cambridge, and it had better elite education, but it wasn't great at mass education. And the U.S. really was. We were the first country to have almost universal literacy, male and female. We were the first country to have widespread high school attendance and the first country to have significant college attendance. And then, beginning in about the 1970s, we lost that lead. And now, there are many countries that are way ahead of us. I think back to my old classmates who are now dead, and I think: What were adults thinking in the 1970s that they let them drop out? And yet, I think today: What are adults thinking in 2024 when they let one in seven American kids today drop out of high school and let so many emerge from the school system not literate, not numerate, completely unprepared for the 21st century?

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Yes. And for somebody who's always gone out into the world, who's derived their knowledge from one-on-one to understanding what it is in the world, what are your reflections on how AI is changing the way we communicate with ourselves, our imagination, and journalism itself? How can we prepare everyone, especially young people, for these uncertain futures?

KRISTOF

There have been some alarming experiments that show AI arguments are better at persuading people than humans are at persuading people. I think that's partly because humans tend to make the arguments that we ourselves find most persuasive. For example, a liberal will make the arguments that will appeal to liberals, but the person you're probably trying to persuade is somebody in the center. We're just not good at putting ourselves in other people's shoes. That's something I try very hard to do in the column, but I often fall short. And with AI, I think people are going to become more vulnerable to being manipulated. I think we're at risk of being manipulated by our own cognitive biases and the tendency to reach out for information sources that will confirm our prejudices. Years ago, the theorist Nicholas Negroponte wrote that the internet was going to bring a product he called the Daily Me—basically information perfectly targeted to our own brains—and that's kind of what we've gotten now. A conservative will get conservative sources that show how awful Democrats are and will have information that buttresses that point of view, while liberals will get the liberal version of that. So, I think we have to try to understand those cognitive biases and understand the degree to which we are all vulnerable to being fooled by selection bias. I'd like to see high schools, in particular, have more information training and media literacy programs so that younger people can learn that there are some news sources that are a little better than others and that just because you see something on Facebook doesn't make it true. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Exactly. There's checks and balances, so it is important to understand fake news, misinformation, and disinformation. You said your experience in China helped you have a certain respect for the mechanisms of capitalism, even though it doesn't work perfectly, and it hasn't worked perfectly in terms of how we are stewards of the planet. This you've seen from your travels around the world, these decisions that cause ecological degradation because we're not seeing further down the line to the future. I know that maintaining ecological balance is important for you. You have practical working knowledge since you were raised on a farm and to this day you and your family run a 25-acre farm in Yamhill, Oregon. What, in your view, is holding us back from moving forward on environmental issues?

KRISTOF

I think that the problem is a classic economic problem of tragedy of the commons—the fact that any one country is going to benefit if other countries reduce carbon emissions but is going to suffer when it itself does means there's always a tendency to want other countries to lead the way. Since the industrial revolution began, the US point of view is that we can't get anywhere unless India and China reduce carbon emissions, while India and China say if you look over the last one hundred years, the US is the one who put out all the carbon, and we're just finally getting a little bit richer and you want to cut us off at the knees.

There are arguments to be made on both sides, but the fundamental impediment is that 10 years ago, it just seemed really hard to see how we were going to get out of climate change and disastrous consequences, but right now, if you squint a little bit, you can maybe see a path through this period where we reduce carbon emissions enough to figure out how to navigate our way to a future in which things work and we pay a price, but one that is manageable. Green energy is becoming much cheaper because of a revolution in battery technology, and now there are possibilities for a field-like energy generated by waves or fusion nuclear power to remove carbon from the air with direct air capture. We're not sure that these will work, but they may, and they would really be revolutionary. China is an interesting example of a country that has made remarkable progress on electrification and battery technology. It is still pushing out a ton of carbon, but it has done this for practical reasons—it understands that those are key technologies for the future and whoever figures out how to get electric vehicles done right, whoever figures out how to get battery technology right, the world is going to benefit from their progress in battery technology, just as the world has benefited by having solar panels made in China go up all over the world.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

You know, we're so glad that Chasing Hope allows us to understand some of these backstories that make or don't make the cut when you're writing an article, but how do you narrow that down when there's so many fascinating details to what would be the most poignant to bring across the essence of the story?

KRISTOF

That's the perpetual challenge of storytelling. It's what Homer was wrestling with 800 years ago and what we wrestle with today. But I think one of the lessons of storytelling is that you pick the elements that will move a reader. In my case, I'm trying to get people to care about a crisis in ways that may bring solutions to it. And that's also how I deal with the terror and the fear to find a sense of purpose in what I do. It's incredibly heartbreaking to see some of the things and hear some of the stories, but at the end of the day, it feels like–inconsistently here and there–you can shine a light on problems, and by shining that light, you actually make a difference.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

And as you think about the future, those teachers who have been important to you, and the importance of storytelling, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?

KRISTOF

I think a lot of young people today are focused on what might be called résumé qualities. I was proud to be the youngest foreign correspondent at the Times and then youngest national correspondent, winning a Pulitzer, these kinds of things, but overtime, I came to see more importance and reward in finding a purpose, finding meaning, paying it forward, and giving back—the eulogy qualities, the kind of things people say when they remember you, not the résumé qualities. It's the importance of finding friends, emphasizing family, and doing things that give you that sense of fulfillment and meaning, keep you going, and give you a cause larger than yourself to hold on to. I, too, am not sure I got it at the beginning of my career, so I think it's maybe hard for young people to grasp, but that is the advice I would offer.

Have we entered what Earth scientists call a “termination event,” and what can we do to avoid the worst outcomes? How can a spiritual connection to nature guide us toward better environmental stewardship? What can ancient wisdom teach us about living harmoniously with the Earth? How have wetlands become both crucial carbon sinks and colossal methane emitters in a warming world?

Euan Nisbet is an Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences at the Royal Holloway University of London. Specializing in methane and its impact on climate change, his research spans Arctic and Tropical Atmospheric Methane budgets. Nisbet led the MOYA project, focusing on global methane emissions using aircraft and ground-based field campaigns in Africa and South America. Born in Germany and raised in Africa, his field work has taken him around the world. He is the author of The Young Earth and Leaving Eden: To Protect and Manage the Earth.

I am a Christian and I have strong Muslim and Jewish friends as well as great respect for Hindu beliefs. I grew up in Southern Africa and I am well aware of the depth of some Indigenous beliefs. I think that having belief systems does give you a very different perspective sometimes. Now, in Christianity, the concept of the shepherd, human beings are here and this is our garden, our garden of Eden, but we have a responsibility. And if we choose to kick ourselves out of the garden, there are consequences. And that's precisely what we are doing. The garden is there, it's lovely, and we can manage it, and it's our job to manage it. We can manage it properly. We can respect it. It's for all creation, and it's very explicit that it involves all Creation. And that's a very fundamental biblical law that you have to respect all Creation. And if you don't do that, then the consequences—you’re basically throwing yourself out of the Garden of Eden.

Equatorial swamps are major methane emitters

Boreal wetlands like this, often made or enhanced by beaver dams, are very extensive and emit much methane in summer

How do the works of Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin continue to influence our understanding of nature, ecological interdependence, and the human experience? How does understanding history help us address current social and environmental issues. How can dialogues between the arts and sciences foster holistic, sustainable solutions to global crises?

Renée Bergland is a literary critic, historian of science, and educator. As a storyteller, Bergland connects the lives of historical figures to the problems of the present day. As an educator, she emphasizes the interdisciplinary connections between the sciences and humanities. A longtime professor at Simmons University, where she is the Program director of Literature and writing, Bergland has also researched and taught at institutions such as Dartmouth College, Harvard University, and MIT. Bergland’s past published titles include Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics and The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects. Her most recent book, Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science, was published in April of 2024. It explores Dickinson and Darwin’s shared enchanted view of the natural world in a time when poetry and natural philosophy, once freely intertwined, began to grow apart.

Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in December 1859. In the years that followed, he would often be at the center of public debate, subjected to bitter denunciations and  passionate advocacy. At times, his allies' misguided defenses of his ideas would be as excruciating as the condemnations. Darwin would try again and again to explain that the adaptation and change at the heart of natural selection could offer consolation and inspire hope. Darwin had hoped his ideas would be important in scientific circles, but he had never dreamed that they would have such a widespread impact. Indeed, he was startled by his sudden scientific fame. As it turned out, Few aspects of life or death remain untouched by Darwin's thought. His ideas were quickly woven into the fabric of the modern world. Across the Atlantic, Emily Dickinson's response to Darwin helped her to write the poetry that speaks to us today. Emily Dickinson loved a wild experiment just as much as Darwin, who was one generation ahead of her. Darwin's remarkable ideas about the natural world would influence her thought profoundly. She did not have the same impact on Darwin as he had on her. In fact, since she published almost nothing during her lifetime, her circle of influence was very small until after her death. But being in the next generation also conferred some benefits. Able to read Darwin, consider his ideas at leisure, and record her responses for posterity, Dickinson usually got the last word. In this account, I have taken the liberty of giving her the first word, too. For me, this book started with the puzzling realization that many of Dickinson's poems seemed profoundly Darwinian. Although she never mentioned Darwin by name in her poems. She rarely mentioned anyone by name in her poetry, so this absence did not rule him out of her important influences. She did name Darwin in two letters, which confirmed that she knew about his work. Still, there was not much to go on. She returned again and again to the topics that fascinated Darwin, but was that enough to demonstrate that she was responding to his thoughts? Did Dickinson write about Darwinian ideas simply because she was his contemporary? Did her writing seem to apply to Darwin merely because she was a great poet whose writings were almost universally applicable? Both explanations are valid as far as they go, but neither goes far enough. There is a stronger connection between Dickinson and Darwin than the proximity of history. Or the universality of literature. They both understood natural science and the natural world in ways that seem strange and somewhat surprising in the 21st century. Their 19th century attitudes to nature and the study of it are so different from ours that when we trace their stories, a vanished world begins to emerge. The more I consider these figures together, the more I feel their world and my world. come alive. Darwin and Dickinson illuminate each other. By reading them together, we can start to understand the interconnected relationships that animated 19th century poetry and science.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Many of us only think of Darwin’s work as being about survival of the fittest, and nature competing for limited resources, but you open this view up. You write about how Dickinson and Darwin refused to accept the separation of art and science. As you go through their writings, they're both talking about the awesome possibilities of the new sciences and at the same time striving to preserve the magic of nature. And today more than ever, we too need to reclaim these two discipline’s connections, and our shared sense of ecological wonder, especially as we're on the crest of the Anthropocene.

RENÉE BERGLAND

Yes, absolutely. Probably many geologists and stratigraphers would say that even Darwin and Dickinson both lived during the Anthropocene, that they lived during a time when human activity  had really started to change the planet. But I don't know that they lived during the self-conscious Anthropocene as we do now, where we're suddenly aware of it and we're like, “Oh, no, what have we done?” But they were fascinated, both of them, by human beings in the whole biosphere. 

The reason that people responded to Darwin as if he were theologically radical was because his vision of the great tree of life was not a ladder. It was not hierarchical at all. His metaphor of the tree has lots of intertwined branches and roots. There's not a single apex to a tree, and the way that Darwin described humans, they were not the top of the whole chain, the whole ladder. That was an insight that was upsetting to many people. It seemed humiliating for humans not to be the very best living creature. And that was one of the reasons that many people reacted negatively to Darwin. But for Dickinson, that idea was just liberating and exciting and fascinating, such that in many of her poems about the natural world, she blurs the human and the animal and the plant. One of the poems of Dickinson's that I think explains Darwin the best starts out, “There is a flower that bees prefer / and butterflies desire.” She's talking about the clover, and in that poem she describes the clover and the grass as kinsmen. They're related to each other, but they're contending, she says, for sod and sun. They are competing to see who can get the most soil, the most nutrients, but she calls them “sweet litigants for life.” And that interpretation of Darwinism, where they're sweet and they're struggling, but they're both actually litigants for life, they're both arguing for the biosphere and advocates—that takes us back to the first lines of the poem. “There's a flower that bees prefer / and butterflies desire.” The way that the clover and the grass compete is by trying to see who can be more beautiful, who can be more brightly colored, who can smell better, who can lure  more pollinators, more insects and birds and collaborate better with them, and have a better chance of  surviving. That is certainly a version of survival of the fittest, but it's not a dog eat dog violent version. It's a version where the way you get a generational advantage, and perhaps have more little clovers following in your footsteps, is by collaborating better, by making yourself more beautiful, more alluring, and more inviting, inviting pollinators to work with you. That's straight from Darwin. Darwin's very clear in On the Origin of Species that when he talks about the struggle for life, he's primarily talking about co-adaptation and collaboration between species that can learn to work together. He's the one who actually, as he explains the struggle for life,  says it's nothing like two dogs fighting over a bone. That's not what it is. But unfortunately, a lot of that co-adaptation language got lost in the popular imagination. And that's one of the reasons that turning to Dickinson can help us understand—because she so beautifully depicts a Darwinian world where, yes, there's death, but there's more than anything, there's life.

What can we learn from Germany's postwar transformation to help us address today's environmental and humanitarian crises? With the rise of populism, authoritarianism, and digital propaganda, how can history provide insights into the challenges of modern democracy?

Frank Trentmann is a Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and at the University of Helsinki. He is a prize-winning historian, having received awards such as the Whitfield Prize, Austrian Wissenschaftsbuch/Science Book Prize, Humboldt Prize for Research, and the 2023 Bochum Historians' Award. He has also been named a Moore Scholar at Caltech. He is the author of Empire of Things and Free Trade Nation. His latest book is Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942 to 2022, which explores Germany's transformation after the Second World War.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Up until now, you've been mostly a professor of global consumer culture, but you've notably written Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First. More recently, you've taken what some might think of as a swerve to examine the complexities of the moral remaking of Germany and how its people grappled with questions of guilt and identity in Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022. How did Out of the Darkness grow out of some of those ideas you'd reflected on in previous books? It's a very interesting span of history you take in, focusing on what you call the “awakening of conscience” in Germany. Other historians might choose 1945 as the period when it began to emerge out of darkness, but you chose 1942.

FRANK TRENTMANN

The bridge between Out of the Darkness and my previous work, which looked at the transformation of consumer culture in the world, is morality. One thing that became clear in writing Empire of Things was that there's virtually no time or place in history where consumption isn't heavily moralized. Our lifestyle is treated as a mirror of our virtue and sins. And in the course of modern history, there's been a remarkable moral shift in the way that consumption used to be seen as something that led you astray or undermined authority, status, gender roles, and wasted money, to a source of growth, a source of self, fashioning the way we create our own identity. In the last few years, the environmental crisis has led to new questions about whether consumption is good or bad. And in 2015, during the refugee crisis when Germany took in almost a million refugees, morality became a very powerful way in which Germans talked about themselves as humanitarian world champions, as one politician called it. I realized that there's many other topics from family, work, to saving the environment, and of course, with regard to the German responsibility for the Holocaust and the war of extermination where German public discourse is heavily moralistic, so I became interested in charting that historical process.

And why did I start in the middle of the Second World War? The reason for that is that 1945 in Europe isn't really in a proper sense a sharp break. The German people enter peace with a number of preoccupations, values, fears, assumptions which have been created in the course of the Second World War. And there's a big moral turmoil that is spreading, beginning in the winter of 1942, 1943, the time period we now call the Holocaust. A growing number of Germans started asking themselves troubling questions about their own possible responsibility for the plight that they were now being exposed to. So I choose this as an opening partly because it allows the reader to get into the heads of Germans at the time who don't know yet that the war is lost.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

It's a powerful entry point that helps us understand. Of course from there you bring us all the way up to 2022. And when you talk about family in your book, it's kind of an expansive sense of family, like being part of this greater Mother Earth or the acts of compassion towards refugees, but I was surprised to read, as you cite, that over 50 percent of the population in Germany have been helping refugees in a quite hands-on in a way that I don't think you would see in other countries. So whatever the legacy of guilt or shame, which is so complex, the post-war transformation has been remarkable in that way. And yet, it's complicated. Do you feel Germany has come to terms with its past and moved on? We see now the rise of right-wing groups throughout Europe, the entry of the far-right Alternative for Germany into Parliament in 2017, and, of course, more recently, the wake of unrest in England and Northern Ireland with anti-immigration protests. So, this is not an old narrative. Its roots are buried deep, but they sprout up shoots every so often.

TRENTMANN 

Yes, it's not a finished story. You have, in addition to the truly impressive number who were welcoming refugees or helping them in active ways, a sizable minority that does not want to have refugees that are openly skeptical or even hostile, sometimes violently, towards migrants or asylum seekers. You have a rise of populism that is disproportionately high in East Germany, the former communist GDR. Germany was divided and then reunified, so it continues to have serious regional divides up to the present. The first difference the partition of Germany left behind is memory culture. The West German state in 1949 saw itself constitutionally as the rightful successor of the German empire before it, and that included taking on responsibility for debts accumulated, so the Federal Republic introduced major reparations for Jewish victims of the Holocaust. East Germany was radically different. In their minds, they were a radically new state with no obligations towards all the evil that Nazi Germany had committed in the past, so East Germany paid no reparations or compensation to Jews. So when 1990 happened, and the two parts reunified. We have a lack of coherence in collective memory, which remains present to this day. I think there was a certain naivety in many German circles, which assumed that the moment you have an official memory culture, in which the responsibility for the Holocaust is a central source of what it means to be German, problems such as racism will just go away. So many commentators and politicians were deeply confused last autumn after the Hamas attacks on Israel on the 7th of October, when suddenly, you had more or less complete silence in the German population, no show of empathy, no mass demonstrations, a steep rise of anti-semitic attacks. And I think that commemoration, public memory, and public history are all very good and important but do not automatically translate into everyday life and people's attitudes towards German Jews in their midst or towards foreigners.And I think that was the mistake—the belief that once you reform collective memory and draw attention and remember the terrible things previous German generations had done, in the present, people living in Germany would all become wonderfully tolerant people. It's not that simple.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Indeed, you can, with the benefit of hindsight, reform collective memory. But when these moral questions arise in real time and current events are just happening too quickly, we don't always see it. I was wondering if you could talk to us a bit more about Neo-Nazism in Germany and the significance of this strand of Neo-Naziism, given Germany's legacy and history. Additionally, your book discusses how Germany became a major supporter of Israel. Do you think that Germany's past has affected its present-day stance on Israel's actions in Gaza? And do you believe that Germany's history has impacted how Germany has treated people protesting Israel's actions? Have any of these more recent events caused you to reconsider or reflect on any of the conclusions you came to in Out of the Darkness? 

TRENTMANN 

The populist party Alternative for Germany includes some spokespeople and members who have been, by the courts, defined as having fascist leanings. That doesn't mean all populists are Nazis, but Neo-Nazis exist, and they need to be taken seriously. Where do they come from? For a long time, historians and politicians worked with this assumption that since West Germany confronted the past, people woke up and right-wing Neo-Nazi leanings were becoming extinguished, so if you look at older accounts regarding extremists that endanger the Federal Republic, they tended to be written about the left, such as the Baader Meinhof group or the Red Army Faction. But since the resurgence of Neo-Nazi and right-wing attacks on foreigners, asylum seekers, shootings, murder, and so forth, people have revisited the 1970s and 1980s and come to recognize that current fascist groups didn’t come out of nowhere. There were army sort of paramilitary groups in the 1970s and 1980s; a neo-Nazi party, which was founded in the late 60s, and did fairly well in some local elections; Neo-Nazi activists have existed for some time; and a lot of people who have now moved to the populist groups, used to vote for the Christian Democrats which had right-wing values and attitudes. On Israel and Germany, what we've seen is a very robust and persistent attitude by the German government which is firmly standing side by side with Israel, with policies very careful not to issue any criticism of Israeli military strategies. And on the other hand, a majority of the population is either openly critical of the measures and military actions used or thinks Germany should just turn its back on the Middle East and live without concerning themselves too much with international affairs, so Germany is really divided on the question of what to do in the conflict in the Middle East.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Yes. And going back to your previous book Empire of Things, you cover how we became a world of consumers and the rise of our material world, examining the global challenges and our relentless pursuit of more from waste and debt to stress and inequality. It just leads me to ask what you feel about the real price of our consumer culture habits, which actually I feel helps fuel modern slavery. 

TRENTMANN 

Consumption is a tricky business. We've moved ourselves into a situation where on the one hand, we now recognize that possessions are an important source of identity. Most of us believe people should have the right to choose the kind of lifestyle they want to have; on the other hand, we have the environmental costs of that lifestyle, which is causing havoc with our planet and, ultimately, with our lives. And so we're caught in a social-political acceptance of the freedom to choose and a growing awareness that the world is heading towards environmental disaster and taking us down with it. We haven't found a way of resolving that ambivalence. Climate activists, economists, and so forth have come up with solutions from zero growth to simple living, but as a historian who's followed the rise of and transformation of consumption over 600 years, I can assure you that it's too simple to try and demonize consumption and hope that by just drawing attention to environmental problems, people will somehow reform themselves. I think we have to take seriously that in the course of modernity, consumption has become deeply embedded culturally, socially, politically in our lives.Just waving an alarmist poster will not shock us out of the kind of lifestyle that has become normal for us. People tend to equate consumption with individual choice and motivation or desire. But from an environmental point of view, a huge amount of our hyper-consumption lifestyle is not organized or conducted through individual choice. They're social habits. These days, people have a shower as a matter of habit. Some people have two or three showers a day. And then they get to their leisure activities or their work with a car if they have one. They're used to driving, and that's a habit. So lots of things that cause damage are habitual forms of consumption. Those are not driven by individual choice but because our cities have been planned in a particular way—state and other authorities have built highways, car manufacturers get certain subsidies. There's an infrastructure of gas stations and electric charging points. And so if you want to tackle environmental consequences, perhaps a more effective way would be to intervene, try to disrupt those habits and plan cities and mobility in different ways that are environmentally friendlier. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Indeed, that illusion of choice is so interesting. Of course, you point to the fact that we, as individuals, do not always make the best choices. I mean, we do sometimes need to be guided or sometimes regarded in ways that are not always good for the welfare of us individually or for the planet. And when we think about AI, which is becoming a new mass surveillance system, it's a new Great Game for powerful multinationals to embed their products and systems and influence our choices. So it's something we have to reflect on a lot. Even if we feel like we have that illusion of choice, who's really making the choices?

TRENTMANN 

Yes. When I finished the book in 2016, artificial intelligence already existed, but wasn't much of a topic. The jury is still out on how AI will play out. Some people pin their hope on AI to give straggling Western economies a huge productivity boost they would urgently need. And that point leads back very well to what we talked about earlier with populism. One thing we've seen, and Germany is a good test case for that, is how democratic habits and understandings we've built up from a different era do not necessarily work for generations that are more reliant on social media where there could be outside manipulation, whether by autocracies or AI. What you really need among education reformers is a new democratic skill set and communication tools that teach young students and citizens how to evaluate information, distinguish between fake news and what's not fake news, to be on their guard, and develop critical media and consumption skills that are fit for our much more digital world. There's a lot that needs to be done. In Germany, you have debates and worries about interference with elections or the posting of fake news, and Germany is a country where lots of people don't use digital communication at all. So you have a dual shock on the one hand, being well behind with digital culture and digital communication. On the other hand, a rapidly evolving technological scene generates more fake news and more potential for surveillance.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Yes, that’s interesting, and it makes me think again about East and West Germany. And seeing your involvement with museums, I wonder, what are your reflections on the importance of the arts and the humanities, and how do you feel museums can stay relevant and do a better job of expanding access while meeting community needs? And finally, as you think about the future and make sense of history in order to create a better tomorrow, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember? 

TRENTMANN 

Museums have seen funds being cut, so they had to be innovative, not just in terms of finding sponsorship money, but in how to make their collections more attractive to more people. Going back to New Labor in Britain, museums and other cultural institutions were tasked to become more socially engaged and open to groups normally underrepresented, so they've done, I would say, a pretty good job, given the constraints of Brexit, where before Brexit, British museums would often work together with other museums in the EU, but now, that’s a serious challenge because of visa rules and objects needing to be specially arranged. So even though we've seen a certain regionalism or growing provincialism, and that's very sad. I think museums continue to be very important. And well, I would like young people to resist the stories they hear from school teachers or career advisors, or sometimes even from their own parents, especially if they're being urged to move into particular subjects in engineering or the natural sciences. I think history is tremendously important. All the contemporary topics we’ve talked about—environmental crisis, Gaza, the war in Ukraine—all of those don't make sense if you don't have a sense of history. History and the humanities in the United Kingdom, as in the United States, have come under huge pressure. We've seen falling student numbers, and that's a real shame because history continues to be a source of intellectual inspiration and curiosity that not only makes us wiser and more reflective but also creates the dynamism and creativity we need to confront our present and future challenges. I hope that among the young generations, there will be people inspired by history, people that have the ambition to research and write about the past.

What can we learn from Germany's postwar transformation to help us address today's environmental and humanitarian crises? With the rise of populism, authoritarianism, and digital propaganda, how can history provide insights into the challenges of modern democracy?

Frank Trentmann is a Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and at the University of Helsinki. He is a prize-winning historian, having received awards such as the Whitfield Prize, Austrian Wissenschaftsbuch/Science Book Prize, Humboldt Prize for Research, and the 2023 Bochum Historians' Award. He has also been named a Moore Scholar at Caltech. He is the author of Empire of Things and Free Trade Nation. His latest book is Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942 to 2022, which explores Germany's transformation after the Second World War.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Up until now, you've been mostly a professor of global consumer culture, but you've notably written Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First. More recently, you've taken what some might think of as a swerve to examine the complexities of the moral remaking of Germany and how its people grappled with questions of guilt and identity in Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022. How did Out of the Darkness grow out of some of those ideas you'd reflected on in previous books? It's a very interesting span of history you take in, focusing on what you call the “awakening of conscience” in Germany. Other historians might choose 1945 as the period when it began to emerge out of darkness, but you chose 1942.

FRANK TRENTMANN

The bridge between Out of the Darkness and my previous work, which looked at the transformation of consumer culture in the world, is morality. One thing that became clear in writing Empire of Things was that there's virtually no time or place in history where consumption isn't heavily moralized. Our lifestyle is treated as a mirror of our virtue and sins. And in the course of modern history, there's been a remarkable moral shift in the way that consumption used to be seen as something that led you astray or undermined authority, status, gender roles, and wasted money, to a source of growth, a source of self, fashioning the way we create our own identity. In the last few years, the environmental crisis has led to new questions about whether consumption is good or bad. And in 2015, during the refugee crisis when Germany took in almost a million refugees, morality became a very powerful way in which Germans talked about themselves as humanitarian world champions, as one politician called it. I realized that there's many other topics from family, work, to saving the environment, and of course, with regard to the German responsibility for the Holocaust and the war of extermination where German public discourse is heavily moralistic, so I became interested in charting that historical process.

And why did I start in the middle of the Second World War? The reason for that is that 1945 in Europe isn't really in a proper sense a sharp break. The German people enter peace with a number of preoccupations, values, fears, assumptions which have been created in the course of the Second World War. And there's a big moral turmoil that is spreading, beginning in the winter of 1942, 1943, the time period we now call the Holocaust. A growing number of Germans started asking themselves troubling questions about their own possible responsibility for the plight that they were now being exposed to. So I choose this as an opening partly because it allows the reader to get into the heads of Germans at the time who don't know yet that the war is lost.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

It's a powerful entry point that helps us understand. Of course from there you bring us all the way up to 2022. And when you talk about family in your book, it's kind of an expansive sense of family, like being part of this greater Mother Earth or the acts of compassion towards refugees, but I was surprised to read, as you cite, that over 50 percent of the population in Germany have been helping refugees in a quite hands-on in a way that I don't think you would see in other countries. So whatever the legacy of guilt or shame, which is so complex, the post-war transformation has been remarkable in that way. And yet, it's complicated. Do you feel Germany has come to terms with its past and moved on? We see now the rise of right-wing groups throughout Europe, the entry of the far-right Alternative for Germany into Parliament in 2017, and, of course, more recently, the wake of unrest in England and Northern Ireland with anti-immigration protests. So, this is not an old narrative. Its roots are buried deep, but they sprout up shoots every so often.

TRENTMANN 

Yes, it's not a finished story. You have, in addition to the truly impressive number who were welcoming refugees or helping them in active ways, a sizable minority that does not want to have refugees that are openly skeptical or even hostile, sometimes violently, towards migrants or asylum seekers. You have a rise of populism that is disproportionately high in East Germany, the former communist GDR. Germany was divided and then reunified, so it continues to have serious regional divides up to the present. The first difference the partition of Germany left behind is memory culture. The West German state in 1949 saw itself constitutionally as the rightful successor of the German empire before it, and that included taking on responsibility for debts accumulated, so the Federal Republic introduced major reparations for Jewish victims of the Holocaust. East Germany was radically different. In their minds, they were a radically new state with no obligations towards all the evil that Nazi Germany had committed in the past, so East Germany paid no reparations or compensation to Jews. So when 1990 happened, and the two parts reunified. We have a lack of coherence in collective memory, which remains present to this day. I think there was a certain naivety in many German circles, which assumed that the moment you have an official memory culture, in which the responsibility for the Holocaust is a central source of what it means to be German, problems such as racism will just go away. So many commentators and politicians were deeply confused last autumn after the Hamas attacks on Israel on the 7th of October, when suddenly, you had more or less complete silence in the German population, no show of empathy, no mass demonstrations, a steep rise of anti-semitic attacks. And I think that commemoration, public memory, and public history are all very good and important but do not automatically translate into everyday life and people's attitudes towards German Jews in their midst or towards foreigners.And I think that was the mistake—the belief that once you reform collective memory and draw attention and remember the terrible things previous German generations had done, in the present, people living in Germany would all become wonderfully tolerant people. It's not that simple.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Indeed, you can, with the benefit of hindsight, reform collective memory. But when these moral questions arise in real time and current events are just happening too quickly, we don't always see it. I was wondering if you could talk to us a bit more about Neo-Nazism in Germany and the significance of this strand of Neo-Naziism, given Germany's legacy and history. Additionally, your book discusses how Germany became a major supporter of Israel. Do you think that Germany's past has affected its present-day stance on Israel's actions in Gaza? And do you believe that Germany's history has impacted how Germany has treated people protesting Israel's actions? Have any of these more recent events caused you to reconsider or reflect on any of the conclusions you came to in Out of the Darkness? 

TRENTMANN 

The populist party Alternative for Germany includes some spokespeople and members who have been, by the courts, defined as having fascist leanings. That doesn't mean all populists are Nazis, but Neo-Nazis exist, and they need to be taken seriously. Where do they come from? For a long time, historians and politicians worked with this assumption that since West Germany confronted the past, people woke up and right-wing Neo-Nazi leanings were becoming extinguished, so if you look at older accounts regarding extremists that endanger the Federal Republic, they tended to be written about the left, such as the Baader Meinhof group or the Red Army Faction. But since the resurgence of Neo-Nazi and right-wing attacks on foreigners, asylum seekers, shootings, murder, and so forth, people have revisited the 1970s and 1980s and come to recognize that current fascist groups didn’t come out of nowhere. There were army sort of paramilitary groups in the 1970s and 1980s; a neo-Nazi party, which was founded in the late 60s, and did fairly well in some local elections; Neo-Nazi activists have existed for some time; and a lot of people who have now moved to the populist groups, used to vote for the Christian Democrats which had right-wing values and attitudes. On Israel and Germany, what we've seen is a very robust and persistent attitude by the German government which is firmly standing side by side with Israel, with policies very careful not to issue any criticism of Israeli military strategies. And on the other hand, a majority of the population is either openly critical of the measures and military actions used or thinks Germany should just turn its back on the Middle East and live without concerning themselves too much with international affairs, so Germany is really divided on the question of what to do in the conflict in the Middle East.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Yes. And going back to your previous book Empire of Things, you cover how we became a world of consumers and the rise of our material world, examining the global challenges and our relentless pursuit of more from waste and debt to stress and inequality. It just leads me to ask what you feel about the real price of our consumer culture habits, which actually I feel helps fuel modern slavery. 

TRENTMANN 

Consumption is a tricky business. We've moved ourselves into a situation where on the one hand, we now recognize that possessions are an important source of identity. Most of us believe people should have the right to choose the kind of lifestyle they want to have; on the other hand, we have the environmental costs of that lifestyle, which is causing havoc with our planet and, ultimately, with our lives. And so we're caught in a social-political acceptance of the freedom to choose and a growing awareness that the world is heading towards environmental disaster and taking us down with it. We haven't found a way of resolving that ambivalence. Climate activists, economists, and so forth have come up with solutions from zero growth to simple living, but as a historian who's followed the rise of and transformation of consumption over 600 years, I can assure you that it's too simple to try and demonize consumption and hope that by just drawing attention to environmental problems, people will somehow reform themselves. I think we have to take seriously that in the course of modernity, consumption has become deeply embedded culturally, socially, politically in our lives.Just waving an alarmist poster will not shock us out of the kind of lifestyle that has become normal for us. People tend to equate consumption with individual choice and motivation or desire. But from an environmental point of view, a huge amount of our hyper-consumption lifestyle is not organized or conducted through individual choice. They're social habits. These days, people have a shower as a matter of habit. Some people have two or three showers a day. And then they get to their leisure activities or their work with a car if they have one. They're used to driving, and that's a habit. So lots of things that cause damage are habitual forms of consumption. Those are not driven by individual choice but because our cities have been planned in a particular way—state and other authorities have built highways, car manufacturers get certain subsidies. There's an infrastructure of gas stations and electric charging points. And so if you want to tackle environmental consequences, perhaps a more effective way would be to intervene, try to disrupt those habits and plan cities and mobility in different ways that are environmentally friendlier. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Indeed, that illusion of choice is so interesting. Of course, you point to the fact that we, as individuals, do not always make the best choices. I mean, we do sometimes need to be guided or sometimes regarded in ways that are not always good for the welfare of us individually or for the planet. And when we think about AI, which is becoming a new mass surveillance system, it's a new Great Game for powerful multinationals to embed their products and systems and influence our choices. So it's something we have to reflect on a lot. Even if we feel like we have that illusion of choice, who's really making the choices?

TRENTMANN 

Yes. When I finished the book in 2016, artificial intelligence already existed, but wasn't much of a topic. The jury is still out on how AI will play out. Some people pin their hope on AI to give straggling Western economies a huge productivity boost they would urgently need. And that point leads back very well to what we talked about earlier with populism. One thing we've seen, and Germany is a good test case for that, is how democratic habits and understandings we've built up from a different era do not necessarily work for generations that are more reliant on social media where there could be outside manipulation, whether by autocracies or AI. What you really need among education reformers is a new democratic skill set and communication tools that teach young students and citizens how to evaluate information, distinguish between fake news and what's not fake news, to be on their guard, and develop critical media and consumption skills that are fit for our much more digital world. There's a lot that needs to be done. In Germany, you have debates and worries about interference with elections or the posting of fake news, and Germany is a country where lots of people don't use digital communication at all. So you have a dual shock on the one hand, being well behind with digital culture and digital communication. On the other hand, a rapidly evolving technological scene generates more fake news and more potential for surveillance.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Yes, that’s interesting, and it makes me think again about East and West Germany. And seeing your involvement with museums, I wonder, what are your reflections on the importance of the arts and the humanities, and how do you feel museums can stay relevant and do a better job of expanding access while meeting community needs? And finally, as you think about the future and make sense of history in order to create a better tomorrow, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember? 

TRENTMANN 

Museums have seen funds being cut, so they had to be innovative, not just in terms of finding sponsorship money, but in how to make their collections more attractive to more people. Going back to New Labor in Britain, museums and other cultural institutions were tasked to become more socially engaged and open to groups normally underrepresented, so they've done, I would say, a pretty good job, given the constraints of Brexit, where before Brexit, British museums would often work together with other museums in the EU, but now, that’s a serious challenge because of visa rules and objects needing to be specially arranged. So even though we've seen a certain regionalism or growing provincialism, and that's very sad. I think museums continue to be very important. And well, I would like young people to resist the stories they hear from school teachers or career advisors, or sometimes even from their own parents, especially if they're being urged to move into particular subjects in engineering or the natural sciences. I think history is tremendously important. All the contemporary topics we’ve talked about—environmental crisis, Gaza, the war in Ukraine—all of those don't make sense if you don't have a sense of history. History and the humanities in the United Kingdom, as in the United States, have come under huge pressure. We've seen falling student numbers, and that's a real shame because history continues to be a source of intellectual inspiration and curiosity that not only makes us wiser and more reflective but also creates the dynamism and creativity we need to confront our present and future challenges. I hope that among the young generations, there will be people inspired by history, people that have the ambition to research and write about the past.