FEMINISM WOMEN'S ISSUES - The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast

What ignites curiosity in humans? How does our brain select things we need to know and ignore what isn’t essential? How does our perception shape what we know about the world?

Dr. Jacqueline Gottlieb is a Professor of Neuroscience and Principal Investigator at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. Dr. Gottlieb studies the mechanisms that underlie the brain's higher cognitive functions, including decision making, memory, and attention. Her interest is in how the brain gathers the evidence it needs—and ignores what it doesn’t—during everyday tasks and during special states such as curiosity.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Tell us about your journey. What drew you to neuroscience? As you learned more about the complexities of the human mind and how thoughts shape our actions, what led you to focus on the neural mechanisms of attention and curiosity?

JACQUELINE GOTTLIEB

I came to neuroscience from a humanistic perspective. I was very interested to find out who we are. What do we know? What do we think we know? Why do we think we know certain things? How do we see things? How do we perceive them? 

Then I discovered that I was amazed by the precise way that cognitive neuroscience can measure these elusive mental functions, such as attention or memory. You know, it's something that happens in our heads, and it's very fleeting, yet there are experimental methods to really pinpoint them. And slowly I zeroed in on eye movements as this incredible marker of internal cognition. So, if you want to know what somebody is interested in or thinking about or what information they're processing? Eye movements are by no means a perfect marker. It's a very noisy marker, but it's one of the closest ones we have as an index. So why do eye movements tell us about what we think and what we find interesting? Ultimately, the question behind curiosity is what things we find interesting in our environment. The way I think about eye movements is that they really are trained in some largely subconscious process.

I liken eye movements to how we learn to control our skeletal movements. So, how do you learn? How do you stand up right now? How do you sit? How does your body maintain its posture? It's an enormously complicated process. The tens of muscles are controlled in very precise balance, but you're entirely unaware of this. So–and I think that we see similar things–when people do tasks like if you prepare tea or if when you drive, people have very, very consistent patterns of eye movements that are very exquisitely coordinated with what they do with their body. Very reproducible, very consistent. You can also see that they are learned.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

One thing that I really loved hearing from you is that curiosity is the most important thing about our behavior and our brain function. And I love hearing that because sometimes I feel my mind is like a butterfly, too curious about everything, and there's just so much to learn and not enough time. So it's nice to hear that curiosity is valorized, although as you identify, it may sometimes seem like general curiosity does not have a direct purpose. Why do you think this is, and why do you feel curiosity has been often neglected by neuroscience?

GOTTLIEB

That's a very interesting question, and I think there are good reasons for it. As scientists, we like to be reductionists, right? Brain and behavior are hugely complicated questions, and so we simplify them to study them in the lab. Our field has pursued two major traditions: one is the Cognitivist tradition, so people like William James and many others are really fascinated by mental operations. Things like attention, memory, mental imagery, or language. People study the capacities. What is it that we can do? What are the limits? How many items can we memorize? How, for how long? And so on and so forth. 

The other half of our field studies decision-making and motivated behavior. That is, what do we like? What do we want? How hard are we willing to work for something we want? And those two fields have really split. So the, so the decision making, half of our field was dominated by behaviorism, founded by B. F. Skinner, and their feeling was, well, all this mental stuff is a bit elusive, and I don't know how to measure it, and it feels like magic and hocus pocus.

But here's what I can do. I can take a rat and put it in a simple cage, and I can make the rat very hungry and give it a lever that delivers food and another that delivers nothing. With this, I will tell you precisely how many times the rat will press the food lever as a function of time. It's just a stimulus-response agent, and it's all about motivation and rewards. That field has gotten very far and has described a number of phenomena, but what happens is that these traditions have continued each one on its track. They have become separate from each other. We have a big social divide among the researchers who pursue these questions. We're now at a point where each field is developed enough that there is nowhere else to go unless you combine the two. Curiosity is precisely the intersection of those things. It has to do with the desire for information. 

I need to know how I process information, what it is, and whether I want it. That's precisely curiosity. The time has come to unify these, and it's a huge undertaking because we're talking on each side of the cognitivist and behaviorist traditions. You have hundreds of scientists working on each side; they each have their ideas, and they each have been educated in their traditions. And linking them is going to take several decades, I think, to have a good integration. It's just starting. 

This truly has been an explosion of research. When I started thinking about this question, I could barely find anybody who was interested in it. We didn't even know how to begin to ask the question. How do you even formulate that? That is precisely the gap between those two fields because we need to understand how we process information, understand the task, and cognitively represent the situation. Then, we need to understand what you are motivated to do about that situation, in this case, with your eyes.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

So what have you learned? I know that you've mainly studied humans and non-human primates, but what have you learned then from general animal communication?

GOTTLIEB

The way I tend to think about eye movements in general is in terms of a question and answer. I think about the act of making an eye movement like a question that you pose to the world, and you answer that question for yourself by looking at someone. 

For example, when you look at a weather forecast, you have partial reliability of information. And then, you combine how uncertain you were to begin with the new information and weigh them by the reliability. If you think the reliability of your source is low, then you're not going to listen to it that much. But if you think the reliability is high, you should listen to it more. And then you update your beliefs. The problem is that knowing these probabilities while making decisions is extremely difficult. What the probabilities are that we're talking about and what our questions are are extremely difficult. And mathematical theory doesn't tell you that. So, to really understand the questions that an individual has at a moment in time, you have to understand the entire individual, what they know, and what they care about. And I wanted to say that because you talked about social communication, I think that eye movements, in particular, really have two functions. One is answering our questions, like I said, gathering visual information, but the other question is in social signaling. In a social context, eye movements can signal your intentions and, in a sense, act on other social beings. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I want to go back to this element of focus and attention. We're talking about AI, and it's been on a lot of our mindset relation to focus when we're bombarded by so much information, devices, distractions, and sleeplessness. It's affecting our ability to do our jobs, be reflective, and be present in the moment. How do you feel we can protect ourselves and our children from the distractions of having their brains rewired by their devices, apps, and technology? Is our brain equipped to deal with our modern world? How do we better fortify it for this kind of onslaught, which wasn't around even ten years ago?

GOTTLIEB

Those are very important questions. I think that our brain is equipped to deal with the onslaught because we have an onslaught of information the moment we open our eyes. We evolved to deal with an onslaught of information, and we are masters at focusing and ignoring vast amounts of information. Now, AI in this digital age is a relatively new stream of information, which is man-made, so we make it more salient.  So, yes, it's harder to ignore it, but people can learn to ignore it, and indeed, it's a learning process. I think it will also require learning how to teach our children. I mean, we're raising generations of kids who will take AI and the digital world as a given. To them, it will be no different than a chair and a table were to us. So they will learn to not be so distracted by chairs and tables.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You're in New York City, so what do you feel about the effects of urbanization on people living in close proximity to cities with its added distractions, and how that may affect their curiosity, attention, imagination, memory, and focus?

GOTTLIEB

People adapt; our brains are very hierarchically organized. At the highest level of the hierarchy are our wants and values. What do I need? We all need to eat, have social contact, and be safe. That's the highest level of the hierarchy. Then you have your values, right? What are your social values and moral values? And then you have your long-term knowledge. What do you know about the world? That determines how you interpret everything around you. So, what do you know about the world? What more do you want to know? What are your competencies? What do you know how to do? So those levels really control what information you're seeking at the moment by moment. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You've spoken about the misperception that many people have about scientists. In contrast with artists, people feel that scientists are very rigid people who are not very creative, and in truth, creativity is crucial, as crucial in science as it is in art. So, how do you personally tap into your creativity and curiosity to imagine while still adhering to the rules of science?

GOTTLIEB

This is my favorite thing about science–that you can be creative. I absolutely think that science has to be just as a creative art. It's just that we have different ways of generating and answering questions. 

If you ask somebody, what is curiosity? The answer you'll probably get most frequently would be the desire to know. But I think that a much better answer is the desire to ask questions. And these are very different. If you've just mapped out your living room, you've got to say, okay, now I need something new. I need some uncertainty. I need to go outside, even though it might be scary. I need to expose myself to that uncertainty in order to learn. And then once you learn, once you've gone out to your yard and you've learned that yard, you say, okay, well, now I know my backyard. Now, I need to expose myself to uncertainty again to learn something new. So, curiosity is the desire to ask the question in order to learn.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

How much do you feel that memory influences our imagination? I know you also study memory, and I'm interested in intergenerational trauma and how this affects our decision-making processes. I ask because I just came out of a conversation with a journalist and foreign correspondent for the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof. He's written about 170 countries, and he was telling me about having mild PTSD from all the things he's witnessed. So, how do you feel that being born in Israel and its collective memory has influenced your curiosity, memory, and the way you view the world?

GOTTLIEB

I mentioned the cognitivists and behaviorists–all the neuroscientists–who think of information as being given to you bottom up. Again, as if signals come from the outside. But then you realize that this is impossible, that the outside world is way too infinite. Instead, what happens is your brain sort of builds yourself: you build through all your life experiences, episodic and semantic memories: that is your knowledge bank, and that is what generates your curiosities.

You asked how growing up in Israel influenced where I am. I think that the way it influenced where I am– it's interesting– it's being in between. My dad was Jewish and my mother was a Christian, an Orthodox Romanian.  So I was, in that sense, born confused. I never belonged to any group. I always felt like I was in between two camps, between two significant traditions. I was born in Romania, and I was educated in a Romanian, European way, more Christian than Jewish. Then we moved to Israel, and that was a big culture shock. I was exposed to more Judaism and the Israeli reality, which was very different from where I grew up. I think that's how it shaped me. I'm not a tribal person, for better or for worse. 

One of the most fundamental values I learned from my dad is tolerance and open-mindedness. You have to take every person at face value.  This is what I think has the most profound influence on me. I'm always open-minded, and I always want to look at both sides. And this is why I think I sensed this social divide coming to psychology and neuroscience. I noticed that many of my colleagues were perfectly happy to stay in their lane, stay in their tribe, and as long as their tribe agrees, you're happy, and you never need to get outside of that. But I'm someone who needs to get outside the tribe. I mean, I map out the borders of my tribe and the way I was taught to think, but then I'm like, wait a second, there's a lot more out there. I need to go out. And I don't want to see competition. I have a tendency to bring things together. That's funny. I never quite thought about this in the context of my life, but I guess that's what shaped the way that I think the most.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

What role do you believe that neuroscience can play in understanding and motivating behavioral change for a sustainable future?

GOTTLIEB

One of the most important things that neuroscientists can propose is people's reactions to uncertainty. Information is actually all about uncertainty. Some people are more willing to embrace uncertainty, especially if they can learn from it. Other people would do anything to protect themselves from uncertainty, so this is part of the echo chamber phenomenon.

It's like saying that maybe what this other person is saying has a grain of truth to it, but it's just so hard for me to think about it that I'd rather ignore it. I'd rather stay in my safe space. So, people differ. There are emotional and cognitive reactions, and I think that this is where our thinking and our emotions are very closely intertwined in how we deal with uncertainty.

So we've all experienced this sense of awe at the vastness of things in nature, and I think that is a beautiful sense. You're in awe at the vastness things that go beyond your capabilities, also capabilities of understanding and capabilities of knowledge. So I look at it as kind of a form of extreme uncertainty that is not threatening. We can relax. It's pleasurable and inspiring. So, maybe if we can remember the sense of awe that we have with certain things, we can help ourselves when, when we have uncertainties (climate change) that are threatening, maybe that's something that we can use to calm us down. About dealing with climate change, people do adjust, and I think we should enable, so far as policy comes about, a lot of policy has to be geared towards allowing people to adapt. Let's say you think that sea level will rise in a particular area. Well, you can build a bigger dam, right? Or, you can build bigger walls. So, the more resources people have, the more efficient they will be in adapting to whatever comes their way.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

What has been important to you on this journey in pursuit of knowledge and in your creative exploration of the sciences? As you reflect on education, the future, and those teachers who inspired you and made you believe in yourself, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember? 

GOTTLIEB

I would exhort young people to keep an open mind. One thing that I try to teach my students is, for example, when you read a paper or hear somebody talk about their experiment, try to think about what is not there. Try to bring yourself in, pay a lot of attention, all your resources consumed by understanding what the person says, but see if you can take a mental step back and look at what they say from a slightly different perspective. Look for the contradictions. And don't be afraid of the contradictions because those are the fertile ground for making progress. Right? So, look for the contradictions. Contradictions are good for scientists. If you find them, the more glaring they are, the more progress you can make by trying to resolve them.

What ignites curiosity in humans? How does our brain select things we need to know and ignore what isn’t essential? How does our perception shape what we know about the world?

Dr. Jacqueline Gottlieb is a Professor of Neuroscience and Principal Investigator at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. Dr. Gottlieb studies the mechanisms that underlie the brain's higher cognitive functions, including decision making, memory, and attention. Her interest is in how the brain gathers the evidence it needs—and ignores what it doesn’t—during everyday tasks and during special states such as curiosity.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Tell us about your journey. What drew you to neuroscience? As you learned more about the complexities of the human mind and how thoughts shape our actions, what led you to focus on the neural mechanisms of attention and curiosity?

JACQUELINE GOTTLIEB

I came to neuroscience from a humanistic perspective. I was very interested to find out who we are. What do we know? What do we think we know? Why do we think we know certain things? How do we see things? How do we perceive them? 

Then I discovered that I was amazed by the precise way that cognitive neuroscience can measure these elusive mental functions, such as attention or memory. You know, it's something that happens in our heads, and it's very fleeting, yet there are experimental methods to really pinpoint them. And slowly I zeroed in on eye movements as this incredible marker of internal cognition. So, if you want to know what somebody is interested in or thinking about or what information they're processing? Eye movements are by no means a perfect marker. It's a very noisy marker, but it's one of the closest ones we have as an index. So why do eye movements tell us about what we think and what we find interesting? Ultimately, the question behind curiosity is what things we find interesting in our environment. The way I think about eye movements is that they really are trained in some largely subconscious process.

I liken eye movements to how we learn to control our skeletal movements. So, how do you learn? How do you stand up right now? How do you sit? How does your body maintain its posture? It's an enormously complicated process. The tens of muscles are controlled in very precise balance, but you're entirely unaware of this. So–and I think that we see similar things–when people do tasks like if you prepare tea or if when you drive, people have very, very consistent patterns of eye movements that are very exquisitely coordinated with what they do with their body. Very reproducible, very consistent. You can also see that they are learned.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

One thing that I really loved hearing from you is that curiosity is the most important thing about our behavior and our brain function. And I love hearing that because sometimes I feel my mind is like a butterfly, too curious about everything, and there's just so much to learn and not enough time. So it's nice to hear that curiosity is valorized, although as you identify, it may sometimes seem like general curiosity does not have a direct purpose. Why do you think this is, and why do you feel curiosity has been often neglected by neuroscience?

GOTTLIEB

That's a very interesting question, and I think there are good reasons for it. As scientists, we like to be reductionists, right? Brain and behavior are hugely complicated questions, and so we simplify them to study them in the lab. Our field has pursued two major traditions: one is the Cognitivist tradition, so people like William James and many others are really fascinated by mental operations. Things like attention, memory, mental imagery, or language. People study the capacities. What is it that we can do? What are the limits? How many items can we memorize? How, for how long? And so on and so forth. 

The other half of our field studies decision-making and motivated behavior. That is, what do we like? What do we want? How hard are we willing to work for something we want? And those two fields have really split. So the, so the decision making, half of our field was dominated by behaviorism, founded by B. F. Skinner, and their feeling was, well, all this mental stuff is a bit elusive, and I don't know how to measure it, and it feels like magic and hocus pocus.

But here's what I can do. I can take a rat and put it in a simple cage, and I can make the rat very hungry and give it a lever that delivers food and another that delivers nothing. With this, I will tell you precisely how many times the rat will press the food lever as a function of time. It's just a stimulus-response agent, and it's all about motivation and rewards. That field has gotten very far and has described a number of phenomena, but what happens is that these traditions have continued each one on its track. They have become separate from each other. We have a big social divide among the researchers who pursue these questions. We're now at a point where each field is developed enough that there is nowhere else to go unless you combine the two. Curiosity is precisely the intersection of those things. It has to do with the desire for information. 

I need to know how I process information, what it is, and whether I want it. That's precisely curiosity. The time has come to unify these, and it's a huge undertaking because we're talking on each side of the cognitivist and behaviorist traditions. You have hundreds of scientists working on each side; they each have their ideas, and they each have been educated in their traditions. And linking them is going to take several decades, I think, to have a good integration. It's just starting. 

This truly has been an explosion of research. When I started thinking about this question, I could barely find anybody who was interested in it. We didn't even know how to begin to ask the question. How do you even formulate that? That is precisely the gap between those two fields because we need to understand how we process information, understand the task, and cognitively represent the situation. Then, we need to understand what you are motivated to do about that situation, in this case, with your eyes.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

So what have you learned? I know that you've mainly studied humans and non-human primates, but what have you learned then from general animal communication?

GOTTLIEB

The way I tend to think about eye movements in general is in terms of a question and answer. I think about the act of making an eye movement like a question that you pose to the world, and you answer that question for yourself by looking at someone. 

For example, when you look at a weather forecast, you have partial reliability of information. And then, you combine how uncertain you were to begin with the new information and weigh them by the reliability. If you think the reliability of your source is low, then you're not going to listen to it that much. But if you think the reliability is high, you should listen to it more. And then you update your beliefs. The problem is that knowing these probabilities while making decisions is extremely difficult. What the probabilities are that we're talking about and what our questions are are extremely difficult. And mathematical theory doesn't tell you that. So, to really understand the questions that an individual has at a moment in time, you have to understand the entire individual, what they know, and what they care about. And I wanted to say that because you talked about social communication, I think that eye movements, in particular, really have two functions. One is answering our questions, like I said, gathering visual information, but the other question is in social signaling. In a social context, eye movements can signal your intentions and, in a sense, act on other social beings. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I want to go back to this element of focus and attention. We're talking about AI, and it's been on a lot of our mindset relation to focus when we're bombarded by so much information, devices, distractions, and sleeplessness. It's affecting our ability to do our jobs, be reflective, and be present in the moment. How do you feel we can protect ourselves and our children from the distractions of having their brains rewired by their devices, apps, and technology? Is our brain equipped to deal with our modern world? How do we better fortify it for this kind of onslaught, which wasn't around even ten years ago?

GOTTLIEB

Those are very important questions. I think that our brain is equipped to deal with the onslaught because we have an onslaught of information the moment we open our eyes. We evolved to deal with an onslaught of information, and we are masters at focusing and ignoring vast amounts of information. Now, AI in this digital age is a relatively new stream of information, which is man-made, so we make it more salient.  So, yes, it's harder to ignore it, but people can learn to ignore it, and indeed, it's a learning process. I think it will also require learning how to teach our children. I mean, we're raising generations of kids who will take AI and the digital world as a given. To them, it will be no different than a chair and a table were to us. So they will learn to not be so distracted by chairs and tables.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You're in New York City, so what do you feel about the effects of urbanization on people living in close proximity to cities with its added distractions, and how that may affect their curiosity, attention, imagination, memory, and focus?

GOTTLIEB

People adapt; our brains are very hierarchically organized. At the highest level of the hierarchy are our wants and values. What do I need? We all need to eat, have social contact, and be safe. That's the highest level of the hierarchy. Then you have your values, right? What are your social values and moral values? And then you have your long-term knowledge. What do you know about the world? That determines how you interpret everything around you. So, what do you know about the world? What more do you want to know? What are your competencies? What do you know how to do? So those levels really control what information you're seeking at the moment by moment. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You've spoken about the misperception that many people have about scientists. In contrast with artists, people feel that scientists are very rigid people who are not very creative, and in truth, creativity is crucial, as crucial in science as it is in art. So, how do you personally tap into your creativity and curiosity to imagine while still adhering to the rules of science?

GOTTLIEB

This is my favorite thing about science–that you can be creative. I absolutely think that science has to be just as a creative art. It's just that we have different ways of generating and answering questions. 

If you ask somebody, what is curiosity? The answer you'll probably get most frequently would be the desire to know. But I think that a much better answer is the desire to ask questions. And these are very different. If you've just mapped out your living room, you've got to say, okay, now I need something new. I need some uncertainty. I need to go outside, even though it might be scary. I need to expose myself to that uncertainty in order to learn. And then once you learn, once you've gone out to your yard and you've learned that yard, you say, okay, well, now I know my backyard. Now, I need to expose myself to uncertainty again to learn something new. So, curiosity is the desire to ask the question in order to learn.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

How much do you feel that memory influences our imagination? I know you also study memory, and I'm interested in intergenerational trauma and how this affects our decision-making processes. I ask because I just came out of a conversation with a journalist and foreign correspondent for the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof. He's written about 170 countries, and he was telling me about having mild PTSD from all the things he's witnessed. So, how do you feel that being born in Israel and its collective memory has influenced your curiosity, memory, and the way you view the world?

GOTTLIEB

I mentioned the cognitivists and behaviorists–all the neuroscientists–who think of information as being given to you bottom up. Again, as if signals come from the outside. But then you realize that this is impossible, that the outside world is way too infinite. Instead, what happens is your brain sort of builds yourself: you build through all your life experiences, episodic and semantic memories: that is your knowledge bank, and that is what generates your curiosities.

You asked how growing up in Israel influenced where I am. I think that the way it influenced where I am– it's interesting– it's being in between. My dad was Jewish and my mother was a Christian, an Orthodox Romanian.  So I was, in that sense, born confused. I never belonged to any group. I always felt like I was in between two camps, between two significant traditions. I was born in Romania, and I was educated in a Romanian, European way, more Christian than Jewish. Then we moved to Israel, and that was a big culture shock. I was exposed to more Judaism and the Israeli reality, which was very different from where I grew up. I think that's how it shaped me. I'm not a tribal person, for better or for worse. 

One of the most fundamental values I learned from my dad is tolerance and open-mindedness. You have to take every person at face value.  This is what I think has the most profound influence on me. I'm always open-minded, and I always want to look at both sides. And this is why I think I sensed this social divide coming to psychology and neuroscience. I noticed that many of my colleagues were perfectly happy to stay in their lane, stay in their tribe, and as long as their tribe agrees, you're happy, and you never need to get outside of that. But I'm someone who needs to get outside the tribe. I mean, I map out the borders of my tribe and the way I was taught to think, but then I'm like, wait a second, there's a lot more out there. I need to go out. And I don't want to see competition. I have a tendency to bring things together. That's funny. I never quite thought about this in the context of my life, but I guess that's what shaped the way that I think the most.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

What role do you believe that neuroscience can play in understanding and motivating behavioral change for a sustainable future?

GOTTLIEB

One of the most important things that neuroscientists can propose is people's reactions to uncertainty. Information is actually all about uncertainty. Some people are more willing to embrace uncertainty, especially if they can learn from it. Other people would do anything to protect themselves from uncertainty, so this is part of the echo chamber phenomenon.

It's like saying that maybe what this other person is saying has a grain of truth to it, but it's just so hard for me to think about it that I'd rather ignore it. I'd rather stay in my safe space. So, people differ. There are emotional and cognitive reactions, and I think that this is where our thinking and our emotions are very closely intertwined in how we deal with uncertainty.

So we've all experienced this sense of awe at the vastness of things in nature, and I think that is a beautiful sense. You're in awe at the vastness things that go beyond your capabilities, also capabilities of understanding and capabilities of knowledge. So I look at it as kind of a form of extreme uncertainty that is not threatening. We can relax. It's pleasurable and inspiring. So, maybe if we can remember the sense of awe that we have with certain things, we can help ourselves when, when we have uncertainties (climate change) that are threatening, maybe that's something that we can use to calm us down. About dealing with climate change, people do adjust, and I think we should enable, so far as policy comes about, a lot of policy has to be geared towards allowing people to adapt. Let's say you think that sea level will rise in a particular area. Well, you can build a bigger dam, right? Or, you can build bigger walls. So, the more resources people have, the more efficient they will be in adapting to whatever comes their way.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

What has been important to you on this journey in pursuit of knowledge and in your creative exploration of the sciences? As you reflect on education, the future, and those teachers who inspired you and made you believe in yourself, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember? 

GOTTLIEB

I would exhort young people to keep an open mind. One thing that I try to teach my students is, for example, when you read a paper or hear somebody talk about their experiment, try to think about what is not there. Try to bring yourself in, pay a lot of attention, all your resources consumed by understanding what the person says, but see if you can take a mental step back and look at what they say from a slightly different perspective. Look for the contradictions. And don't be afraid of the contradictions because those are the fertile ground for making progress. Right? So, look for the contradictions. Contradictions are good for scientists. If you find them, the more glaring they are, the more progress you can make by trying to resolve them.

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.

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.

For our snap episode on the snap elections in the UK and France, Professor David Palumbo-Liu and Azeezah Kanji talk with eminent decolonial scholar activists, Françoise Vergès in France and Priyamvala Gopal in the UK. Following the defeat of right wing parties in both countries in the polls, we discuss what's changed with the elections, what hasn't changed, and what should movements, activists, and organizers be focusing on.

FRANÇOISE VERGÈS

I would say what we can celebrate is the incredible mobilization of the young people. They went everywhere, they knocked on the door, they mobilized. It was an incredible movement, so that they will go first to vote, but second that they will understand why it was important to vote. This was an incredible, incredible mobilization. So that was extraordinary because it showed real mobilization and an understanding that the National Rally was a real threat. We knew that if they came to power, the first people who would be targeted would be people of color, and that was absolutely clear.

PRIYAMVADA GOPAL

France is perhaps the more interesting election, but in terms of the UK, I think really one can only celebrate the smashing of conservative rule after 13, 14 years. That said, I think we are effectively celebrating a negative, that a government that has been shambolic now for at least six, seven years, much of it very harsh on the poor, on people of color, on migrants, that, that regime has come to an end.
I'm not that sure that I would celebrate what has come in its place. Now, I understand that we are in the so-called honeymoon period and that we should give the current dispensation time to prove itself. But by its own admission, it doesn't plan to change a whole lot in policy terms. It doesn't plan a radical break from what we've had. Cliché though it is, we really have just shifted from Team A to Team B of the neoliberal dispensation. It's not going to be hard to be more competent than the government of the last few years.

Priyamvada Gopal is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge and Professorial Fellow, Churchill College. Her present interests are in the literatures, politics, and cultures of empire, colonialism and decolonisation. She has related interests in the novel, South Asian literature, and postcolonial cultures.  Her published work includes Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (Routledge, 2005),  After Iraq: Reframing Postcolonial Studies (Special issue of New Formations co-edited with Neil Lazarus), The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration (Oxford University Press, 2009) and, most recently, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (Verso, 2019) which was shortlisted for the British Academy Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and the Bread and Roses Prize. Her writing has also appeared in The Hindu, Outlook India, India Today, The Independent, Prospect Magazine, The New Statesman, The Guardian, Al-Jazeera English (AJE) and The Nation (USA). She is working on a new project called Decolonization: the Life and Times of an Idea which examines a range of thinkers, contexts and struggles across the Global South.

Françoise Vergès is a writer and decolonial antiracist feminist activist. A Reunionnese, she received an education that ran counter to the French hegemonic school from her anticolonial communist and feminist parents and the members of their organisations. She received her Ph.D in Political Theory from Berkeley University in 1995. She remained an activist during these years, collaborated on Isaac Julien’s film "Black Skin, White Masks » and published in feminist and theory journals. She has taught at Sussex University and Goldsmiths College and has been a visiting professor at different universities. She has never held a teaching position in France but created the Chair Global South(s) at Collège d’études mondiales where she held workshops on different topics (2014-2018). She was president of the National Committee for the History and Remembrance of Slavery (2009-2012), was a co-founder of Decolonize the Arts (2015-2020), the director of the scientific and cultural programme for a museum project in Reunion Island (2004-2010, a project killed by the State and the local conservatives). She is the convener and curator of L’Atelier a collective and collaborative seminar/public performance with activist and artists of color. Recent publications include: Programme de désordre absolu. Décoloniser le musée (2023), A Feminist Theory of Violence (2021), De la violence coloniale dans l’espace public (2021), The Wombs of Women. Capital, Race, Feminism (2021), A Decolonial Feminism (2020).

*

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

As Surrealism turns 100, what can it teach us about the importance of dreaming and creating a better society? Will we wake up from the consumerist dream sold to us by capitalism and how would that change our ideas of utopia?

S. D. Chrostowska is professor of humanities at York University, Canada. She is the author of several books, among them Permission, The Eyelid, A Cage for Every Child, and, most recently, Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics. Her essays have appeared in such venues as Public Culture, Telos, Boundary 2, and The Hedgehog Review. She also coedits the French surrealist review Alcheringa and is curator of the 19th International Exhibition of Surrealism, Marvellous Utopia, which runs from July to September 2024 in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, France.

S. D. CHROSTOWSKA

Utopia and the Age of Survival was really an axiological intervention, a reminder of certain values that unite the left. In the book, I focus on two things: Utopia as a myth -- not as a political myth, but as a social myth, in the sense that it goes beyond politics -- and I also communicate my preference for utopias that are not state-based. I use the term “body utopias,” because they’re really anchored in the individual rather than the collective. They arise from individual bodily needs, desires, and how the two interact. From there, they also take into account our individual differences.

Utopias really began as and are anchored in myths; of the golden age, of paradise, and, more recently, of revolution. Utopia is a speculative myth of where society is headed. I think that left-wing thought and socialism -- within which we find anarchism -- can be united around this idea. On the other hand, of course, capitalism also uses utopia, and refers back to ulterior myths to put our critical capacity to sleep. In our capitalistic culture, utopia is used to sell a vision of a better body, a better society, and a better future for the “techno-utopian” crowd. The earlier myth is Thomas More’s city of Utopia; More is the originator of modern Utopianism as we know it, this idea of a utopian island reserved for just some. With my book, I try to take back the term of utopia, and to also rehabilitate a bit this idea of myth, which has been tarnished by 20th century ideologies. I try to do this in order to find the broadest possible common ground for left-wing thinking.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

We as a society have been talking about utopia for a long time, but what does it actually look like to put that into action?

CHROSTOWSKA

I like to think of utopianism as “effective social daydreaming” -- the expression “effective dreaming” comes from Ursula Le Guin's novel The Lathe of Heaven. My novella, The Eyelid, is where I first put some of these ideas into images -- ideas which later I developed in Utopia and the Age of Survival. I like the definition of effective social daydreaming because utopia is associated with consciously imagining societies, but I also want to bring daydreaming back to dreaming, because our night dreams are wish fulfillments. In The Eyelid, I explored night dreams and their utopian potential. But going back to effective social daydreaming -- utopian ideas are embodied in our actions. The 19th century French liberal Lamartine said utopias are often only premature truths. Another way of putting it is that what is imaginary tends to become real -- that’s a quote from the founder of Surrealism, André Breton. We daydream of a better world, and this could be a very vague daydream. The idea of utopianism that I'm putting forward in the book is not a detailed, orderly, rational model of the city utopia. It’s this free floating, desirous model of the body utopia, which is unfinished and imperfect. It's always in transformation. These dreams and daydreams that we have are guiding our actions, influencing our day-to-day behavior if we let them. Our imagination is always involved in creating reality. The opposition between the two, reality and the imaginary, is not a stark one; they're porous.

The Techno-utopian Dream of AI

There’s the existing AI and the dream of artificial general intelligence that is aligned with our values and will make our lives better. Certainly, the techno-utopian dream is that it will lead us towards utopia. It is the means of organizing human collectivities, human societies, in a way that would reconcile all the variables, all the things that we can't reconcile because we don't have enough of a fine-grained understanding of how people interact, the different motivations of their psychologies and of societies, of groups of people. Of course, that's another kind of psychology that we're talking about. So I think the dream of AI is a utopian dream that stands correcting, but it is itself being corrected by those who are the curators of that technology. Now you asked me about the changing role of artists in this landscape. I would say, first of all, that I'm for virtuosity. And this makes me think of AI and a higher level AI, it would be virtuous before it becomes super intelligence.

Surrealism as a Framework for Utopia

In recent years, I’ve turned to Surrealism. I found in it something like a mirror of aspects of my sensibility, and a history with which I remain in dialogue. Most people mistake Surrealism for an aesthetic movement, but Surrealism's emphasis is on the unconscious workings of thought. I find it a very important piece of the puzzle of what attitude we should take in order to live in a more “utopianizing” fashion, as I call it in my book. We can daydream of a better society, one that includes not just us or our family, but everyone, because a utopia worthy of the name today is universal, it's all-inclusive. So surrealism is not just an aesthetics, it's also an ethics, and that ethics is utopian. It's an impulse to refashion one’s life, to create a world, and to transform the world into a desirable one. We want the imagination to be empowered. I talk about Surrealism in the book, but it has since taken on even greater importance in my day to day life. I am actively involved in the French Surrealist Movement in an effort to keep it alive, and to remind the public that it is still very much an international movement staying true to its principles. I've co-curated a major exhibition of Surrealism, reflecting on the 100 years since the Manifesto of Surrealism, so I'm very much in this moment where I'm trying to explain to the public the value of this movement.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Tell us a little bit about your upbringing in Poland at the end of the Cold War, and how that shaped your visions of utopia in the modern age.

CHROSTOWSKA

I grew up in Poland in the 80s and the very early 90s. I left when I was 19, and I also spent a couple of years in the States. As a child and adolescent, I had a taste of both worlds; I experienced the cultural contrast between the West and the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe. I was in the US when Chernobyl happened, and the West left an indelible impression on me. I was first amazed by the sheer abundance of commodity culture; that constant stimulation of the desire for the bigger and the better contributed in more ways than I can even name to the education of my sensibility. There also was the freedom of expression that, even though I was very young, I felt to be different from what I was used to in Poland. This was a brief period [of my life], but it was very important. And then, in 1989, we had the first parliamentary elections in Poland, and we were the first country to do so in the Eastern Bloc. It was the end of the so-called communist era, and my family rejoiced because they supported the Solidarity movement and they distributed samizdat literature. My aunt was a librarian, and she would show me this clandestine literature. I understood the fear of surveillance, the regime of fear that the adults around me lived through, and the breath of fresh air when the elections happened and the transition began. And in 1990, my father took me to Berlin, and this was as the Wall was coming down, demolished with bulldozers and hammers and pickaxes by ordinary people in the street. I thought this was very symbolic. Witnessing these two very rapid transitions made me think that change, even in apparently prohibitive circumstances, remained a real possibility. Maybe that's what made me a natural candidate for utopian thinking, for embracing utopian thought.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

How do you reconcile visions of utopia with living in harmony with our planet, especially considering that the concept of utopia implies a man-made design or a return to an original equilibrium with a pristine nature that may no longer exist?

CHROSTOWSKA

I think that we should not be under any illusion that we can return to some pristine Earth. We have to do the best we can with the Earth that we have inherited for our generation and for those of our children, but we should not, therefore, say, well, it's all lost. Species are becoming extinct as never before. We should not become pessimists because there is no other alternative, because we've been robbed of this idea of pristine nature.

I think nature has not been pristine. People speak about the Anthropocene. I don't quite like this term, but the idea that humans have been transforming nature and have been altering it, adulterating it, something to put into perspective this nostalgia for pristine nature. And utopianism actually goes hand in hand with nostalgia, in the sense that nostalgic longings have long fed into utopian imaginaries, right? I mentioned the myth of the Golden Age. This was something that used to exist, the Golden Age, right? Or paradise, an idea of nature, again, pure nature in harmony with human beings. These nostalgic imaginaries that feed into and can reactivate utopian thinking in our day. We should by no means let go of an idea of pristine nature. And I also don't think – just to return to this idea of species extinction – I don't think that the de-extinction efforts are particularly utopian, even though they may seem this way. How do we compensate for the material loss of biodiversity? I think no amount of technological ingenuity will actually fulfill this desire for a return to the pristine nature that we have lost. 

Reflections for the Next Generation

I'd like young people not to limit their world to content they can find on the internet. I think that's a real danger. Many of my students say, “well, I haven't thought about this. I haven't read this because I didn't find it online for free.” I want them to remember that not all knowledge is digitized, that much remains elusive to the nets of the internet even in its effort to make knowledge accessible on one platform, to create this kind of enormous encyclopedia. And in this quest, we also reduce the past to the present. The past is more virtually present in our lives than for any other generation, because it's available online in the form of textual and audiovisual archives. This proximity actually affects the past's pastness. The appearance of distance is lost in the digital reproduction, whether it's paintings, or archival documents, or photographs. I think it's erroneous to think that everything that is extant from the past is at our fingertips and that we don't have to go out and look for it. So what I would like to pass on is curiosity; curiosity about the past shouldn't stop at the digital. It's tempting to think that all the answers are already there online because it's so vast, this web we are spinning, but that’s not the case.

As Surrealism turns 100, what can it teach us about the importance of dreaming and creating a better society? Will we wake up from the consumerist dream sold to us by capitalism and how would that change our ideas of utopia?

S. D. Chrostowska is professor of humanities at York University, Canada. She is the author of several books, among them Permission, The Eyelid, A Cage for Every Child, and, most recently, Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics. Her essays have appeared in such venues as Public Culture, Telos, Boundary 2, and The Hedgehog Review. She also coedits the French surrealist review Alcheringa and is curator of the 19th International Exhibition of Surrealism, Marvellous Utopia, which runs from July to September 2024 in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, France.

S. D. CHROSTOWSKA

Utopia and the Age of Survival was really an axiological intervention, a reminder of certain values that unite the left. In the book, I focus on two things: Utopia as a myth -- not as a political myth, but as a social myth, in the sense that it goes beyond politics -- and I also communicate my preference for utopias that are not state-based. I use the term “body utopias,” because they’re really anchored in the individual rather than the collective. They arise from individual bodily needs, desires, and how the two interact. From there, they also take into account our individual differences.

Utopias really began as and are anchored in myths; of the golden age, of paradise, and, more recently, of revolution. Utopia is a speculative myth of where society is headed. I think that left-wing thought and socialism -- within which we find anarchism -- can be united around this idea. On the other hand, of course, capitalism also uses utopia, and refers back to ulterior myths to put our critical capacity to sleep. In our capitalistic culture, utopia is used to sell a vision of a better body, a better society, and a better future for the “techno-utopian” crowd. The earlier myth is Thomas More’s city of Utopia; More is the originator of modern Utopianism as we know it, this idea of a utopian island reserved for just some. With my book, I try to take back the term of utopia, and to also rehabilitate a bit this idea of myth, which has been tarnished by 20th century ideologies. I try to do this in order to find the broadest possible common ground for left-wing thinking.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

We as a society have been talking about utopia for a long time, but what does it actually look like to put that into action?

CHROSTOWSKA

I like to think of utopianism as “effective social daydreaming” -- the expression “effective dreaming” comes from Ursula Le Guin's novel The Lathe of Heaven. My novella, The Eyelid, is where I first put some of these ideas into images -- ideas which later I developed in Utopia and the Age of Survival. I like the definition of effective social daydreaming because utopia is associated with consciously imagining societies, but I also want to bring daydreaming back to dreaming, because our night dreams are wish fulfillments. In The Eyelid, I explored night dreams and their utopian potential. But going back to effective social daydreaming -- utopian ideas are embodied in our actions. The 19th century French liberal Lamartine said utopias are often only premature truths. Another way of putting it is that what is imaginary tends to become real -- that’s a quote from the founder of Surrealism, André Breton. We daydream of a better world, and this could be a very vague daydream. The idea of utopianism that I'm putting forward in the book is not a detailed, orderly, rational model of the city utopia. It’s this free floating, desirous model of the body utopia, which is unfinished and imperfect. It's always in transformation. These dreams and daydreams that we have are guiding our actions, influencing our day-to-day behavior if we let them. Our imagination is always involved in creating reality. The opposition between the two, reality and the imaginary, is not a stark one; they're porous.

The Techno-utopian Dream of AI

There’s the existing AI and the dream of artificial general intelligence that is aligned with our values and will make our lives better. Certainly, the techno-utopian dream is that it will lead us towards utopia. It is the means of organizing human collectivities, human societies, in a way that would reconcile all the variables, all the things that we can't reconcile because we don't have enough of a fine-grained understanding of how people interact, the different motivations of their psychologies and of societies, of groups of people. Of course, that's another kind of psychology that we're talking about. So I think the dream of AI is a utopian dream that stands correcting, but it is itself being corrected by those who are the curators of that technology. Now you asked me about the changing role of artists in this landscape. I would say, first of all, that I'm for virtuosity. And this makes me think of AI and a higher level AI, it would be virtuous before it becomes super intelligence.

Surrealism as a Framework for Utopia

In recent years, I’ve turned to Surrealism. I found in it something like a mirror of aspects of my sensibility, and a history with which I remain in dialogue. Most people mistake Surrealism for an aesthetic movement, but Surrealism's emphasis is on the unconscious workings of thought. I find it a very important piece of the puzzle of what attitude we should take in order to live in a more “utopianizing” fashion, as I call it in my book. We can daydream of a better society, one that includes not just us or our family, but everyone, because a utopia worthy of the name today is universal, it's all-inclusive. So surrealism is not just an aesthetics, it's also an ethics, and that ethics is utopian. It's an impulse to refashion one’s life, to create a world, and to transform the world into a desirable one. We want the imagination to be empowered. I talk about Surrealism in the book, but it has since taken on even greater importance in my day to day life. I am actively involved in the French Surrealist Movement in an effort to keep it alive, and to remind the public that it is still very much an international movement staying true to its principles. I've co-curated a major exhibition of Surrealism, reflecting on the 100 years since the Manifesto of Surrealism, so I'm very much in this moment where I'm trying to explain to the public the value of this movement.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Tell us a little bit about your upbringing in Poland at the end of the Cold War, and how that shaped your visions of utopia in the modern age.

CHROSTOWSKA

I grew up in Poland in the 80s and the very early 90s. I left when I was 19, and I also spent a couple of years in the States. As a child and adolescent, I had a taste of both worlds; I experienced the cultural contrast between the West and the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe. I was in the US when Chernobyl happened, and the West left an indelible impression on me. I was first amazed by the sheer abundance of commodity culture; that constant stimulation of the desire for the bigger and the better contributed in more ways than I can even name to the education of my sensibility. There also was the freedom of expression that, even though I was very young, I felt to be different from what I was used to in Poland. This was a brief period [of my life], but it was very important. And then, in 1989, we had the first parliamentary elections in Poland, and we were the first country to do so in the Eastern Bloc. It was the end of the so-called communist era, and my family rejoiced because they supported the Solidarity movement and they distributed samizdat literature. My aunt was a librarian, and she would show me this clandestine literature. I understood the fear of surveillance, the regime of fear that the adults around me lived through, and the breath of fresh air when the elections happened and the transition began. And in 1990, my father took me to Berlin, and this was as the Wall was coming down, demolished with bulldozers and hammers and pickaxes by ordinary people in the street. I thought this was very symbolic. Witnessing these two very rapid transitions made me think that change, even in apparently prohibitive circumstances, remained a real possibility. Maybe that's what made me a natural candidate for utopian thinking, for embracing utopian thought.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

How do you reconcile visions of utopia with living in harmony with our planet, especially considering that the concept of utopia implies a man-made design or a return to an original equilibrium with a pristine nature that may no longer exist?

CHROSTOWSKA

I think that we should not be under any illusion that we can return to some pristine Earth. We have to do the best we can with the Earth that we have inherited for our generation and for those of our children, but we should not, therefore, say, well, it's all lost. Species are becoming extinct as never before. We should not become pessimists because there is no other alternative, because we've been robbed of this idea of pristine nature.

I think nature has not been pristine. People speak about the Anthropocene. I don't quite like this term, but the idea that humans have been transforming nature and have been altering it, adulterating it, something to put into perspective this nostalgia for pristine nature. And utopianism actually goes hand in hand with nostalgia, in the sense that nostalgic longings have long fed into utopian imaginaries, right? I mentioned the myth of the Golden Age. This was something that used to exist, the Golden Age, right? Or paradise, an idea of nature, again, pure nature in harmony with human beings. These nostalgic imaginaries that feed into and can reactivate utopian thinking in our day. We should by no means let go of an idea of pristine nature. And I also don't think – just to return to this idea of species extinction – I don't think that the de-extinction efforts are particularly utopian, even though they may seem this way. How do we compensate for the material loss of biodiversity? I think no amount of technological ingenuity will actually fulfill this desire for a return to the pristine nature that we have lost. 

Reflections for the Next Generation

I'd like young people not to limit their world to content they can find on the internet. I think that's a real danger. Many of my students say, “well, I haven't thought about this. I haven't read this because I didn't find it online for free.” I want them to remember that not all knowledge is digitized, that much remains elusive to the nets of the internet even in its effort to make knowledge accessible on one platform, to create this kind of enormous encyclopedia. And in this quest, we also reduce the past to the present. The past is more virtually present in our lives than for any other generation, because it's available online in the form of textual and audiovisual archives. This proximity actually affects the past's pastness. The appearance of distance is lost in the digital reproduction, whether it's paintings, or archival documents, or photographs. I think it's erroneous to think that everything that is extant from the past is at our fingertips and that we don't have to go out and look for it. So what I would like to pass on is curiosity; curiosity about the past shouldn't stop at the digital. It's tempting to think that all the answers are already there online because it's so vast, this web we are spinning, but that’s not the case.

Can silence be painted? How can artists capture interior states, solitude, and the passing of time? How are the homes we live in a reflection of the people who inhabit them? How can we read a painting to piece together the life of the artist?

From 1 June to 13 July 2024, Hauser & Wirth presents Vilhelm Hammershøi: Silence in its new gallery location in Basel. This exhibition celebrates the renowned Danish artist, Vilhelm Hammershøi, for its first solo exhibition, and presents 16 works from private collections curated by art historian Felix Krämer.

Double Portrait of the Artist and His Wife, Seen through a Mirror. The Cottage Spurveskjul 1911
Oil on canvas
55 x 76 cm / 21 5/8 x 29 7/8 in

A painter of the 19th and early 20th century, Hammershøi is best known for his interior paintings. In the sixteen works featured for this exhibition, covering the artist’s career from 1883 to 1914, Hammershøi depicts empty interiors of his own home or shows household objects placed in unusual positions. In some, he portrays his wife Ida inhabiting these interiors, facing away from the viewers. Hammershøi also demonstrates his interest in photography in his early farmstead paintings through unique angles and the cropping of motifs, emphasizing qualities of these sceneries that often go unnoticed. In many of his work, Hammershøi utilizes a minimal palette of mostly grey, white, and brown to evoke melancholic and contemplative emotions. In addition, the stillness, disconnections, and lack of interactions amongst figures, objects, and spaces in his works position him as precursor to conceptual art. 

Krämer discusses arranging the artworks within the exhibition: “The beautiful thing working on Hammershøi is that the works talk to each other. They communicate. And there is no formula for doing the right hand, you have to be there, and you have to take your time, and the paintings will tell you where they go.”

In Hammershøi’s later works, which are also featured in the exhibition, the artist became more experimental with perspectives and composition, the change reveals his understanding of modernist apporaches, and inspires audiences with new insights of the artist and his career. 

Art historian and writer Florian Illies commented on Hammershøi's work: “One often forgets that Hammershøi, despite this self-restraint, was an artist who had traveled a lot…who knew the artists of his time. But its effect was completely different…He does the exact opposite to everyone else. And it is precisely this difference that makes him so special. This mystery is what makes him so compelling to us today.” Hammershøi’s works defy genre or movements, utilizing elements inspired by the Old Master in combination with his present, private sphere, and speak to contemporary viewers with timeless motifs, yet communicate profound meanings between themselves.

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Grace Notes
I first encountered Hammershøi's work by thinking about sound, not silence. Or perhaps I should say "the notes between the notes." Hammershøi's "Interior with Woman at Piano, Strandgade 30" was used for the cover of Bernard MacLaverty's novel Grace Notes. The book centers around the life of Catherine McKenna, a music teacher and composer living in Scotland as she experiences postpartum depression. We enter into Catherine's interior world as she prepares for her father's funeral and has troubling visions of her recently born daughter, Anna. Music and the act of composition helps her rise above her depression and the restrictions imposed on her by the Catholic Church and her family. She begins to compose a master symphony and the novel ends with a live radio broadcast of her music.

The power of art to help us understand and overcome crises is a theme of that novel. What I appreciate in Hammershoi's work is his capacity to communicate calm reflection and solitude, not crises. But then again, we never know. Other people will always remain a mystery. We can only imagine what goes on in their minds, and Hammershøi's interiors hint at something unspoken.

As much as he depicts his wife Ida's world, his paintings are also a kind of biography or self-portrait. After all, we are not so much the skin we inhabit. As the writer Neil Gaiman told me, "We are not our faces." What is essential in the artist is not the lines on their face but their imagination, what they see, feel, think, and love. I rarely look at myself in the mirror. Who I am is what I see, and life moves at such an accelerated pace these days that sometimes we're sleepwalking through our lives.

Love is a kind of noticing.

Hammershøi has also given us a self-portrait by sharing the years he has spent in his homes in the old mercantile quarter of Copenhagen and painting what he has seen and loved.

Above all the gift that Hammershøi gives is showing that seeing can be a kind of meditation and take on an almost spiritual dimension. For meditation can happen anywhere. Alone in nature, as Caspar David Friedrich at the edge of a cliff contemplating the vast beyond in "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog." Or in these small interior moments looking upon the back of the head of the woman you love. The fall of light upon a wall - seemingly mundane scenes but somehow the paintings vibrate with life and meaning. I stop in my tracks and without ever seeing her face, I can feel the air she breathes and imagine the dreams that take shape behind her closed eyes. I can almost hear the soft tick of the grandfather clock, the slow metronome sway of hours passing, that suspension of time in that precious absence of work as experienced on Sunday afternoons in homes all around the world.

Or not.

Reflect on how crowded our world is today. With technology, distraction, and the amount of data being collected and stored doubling every two years, how often do we experience true stillness, serenity, and the chance to be alone with our thoughts?

Interior with a Writing Desk 1900
Oil on canvas
47 x 48 cm / 18/2 x 18 7/8 in
Photo: Annik Wetter Photographie

By giving us the grace notes of his life, Hammershøi invites us to reflect on our own lives and see them anew. Take a moment. Breathe. Close your eyes. Now open them.

What beauty in your life will you notice today?

– MIA FUNK

How can we free ourselves from fear and social barriers to live more fulfilling and meaningful lives? What does it take to overcome trauma and turn it into triumph, and failure into reinvention? How can we shine a light on the marginalized and misunderstood to create social change that transforms the lives of women?

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is an Oscar and Emmy award-winning Canadian-Pakistani filmmaker whose work highlights extraordinary women and their stories. She earned her first Academy Award in 2012 for her documentary Saving Face, about the Pakistani women targeted by brutal acid attacks. Today, Obaid-Chinoy is the first female film director to have won two Oscars by the age of 37. In 2023, it was announced that Obaid-Chinoy will direct the next Star Wars film starring Daisy Ridley. Her most recent project, co-directed alongside Trish Dalton, is the new documentary Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge, about the trailblazing Belgian fashion designer who invented the wrap dress 50 years ago. The film had its world premiere as the opening night selection at the 2024 Tribeca Festival on June 5th and premiered on June 25th on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally. A product of Obaid-Chinoy's incredibly talented female filmmaking team, Woman in Charge provides an intimate look into Diane von Furstenberg’s life and accomplishments and chronicles the trajectory of her signature dress from an innovative fashion statement to a powerful symbol of feminism.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You tell the story of Diane von Fürstenberg: Woman in Charge, and it's truly fascinating because it's not just one story but many. It encompasses 50 years since the creation of the wrap dress. It’s the story of Diane, but it’s also her mother’s history as a Holocaust survivor and how she instilled in Diane resilience, imagination, and drive. You tell so many layered interesting stories, 1950s and 60s in Europe, 1970s in America in the era of sexual freedom and the hedonistic New York scene. It's the story of a businesswoman, a princess, a marriage, reinvention, and a dress that became a symbol of women's empowerment and liberation. In the way that Diane Von Furstenberg created a timeless dress that became a symbol of freedom for women worldwide, you present us with the beautiful life of a single working mother, allowing us to see ourselves in her vulnerabilities and struggles, inspiring us to chart our own path and find our voice on the journey to becoming women in charge. With all these intricate stories, how did you find your way into her story?

SHARMEEN OBAID-CHINOY

As a filmmaker, I've always made films about extraordinary women whose lives are faced with extenuating circumstances who've had adversity thrown at them and who've risen to the occasion. And when I began to look at Diane's story, for me, Diane is a fashion designer, but she's so much more. Her central ethos is woman before fashion, and we felt it was very important to take that ethos and weave it into the spine of our film, and make it about the woman. 

The Making of Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge

From the first time we sat down with Diane, she's such a natural storyteller that she began at her birth, which was a triumph because her mother had come out of Auschwitz only 18 months before she was born. As we began to tell Diane's story, we realized that it was so intrinsically linked with the history, politics, culture of the world, whether it was Europe in the 1950s and 60s, or America in the 70s and 80s. We felt that while we were telling Diane's story, we also wanted to tell the bigger story of what was happening in the world at that time. And so you see that when you watch the film, there are many layers, whether it's graphics, or music, or archival footage, or photographs that we’ve used. Together, they weave a story of what it was like to live at that time. And that is a very conscious decision that Trish Dalton, my co-director, and I made when we were designing the film.

Towards the end of our filming, Diane took us on a walk, and as we walked through the woods, we ended up at a flat ground that had a stone wall around it. And Diane looked at me and said, “This is my resting place.” We knew that in telling Dan's story, we had a beginning, middle, and end, and that had been clearly defined by Diane herself. And that was the natural arc of the film that we chose to tell. 

Once Diane was ready to tell her story, we spent a lot of time talking with the camera off, and spending time with her, traveling with her, having meals with her and really peeling the onion to get to the heart of Diane. At its core, it is also a film about four generations of women. It's about Diane's mother, it's about Diane, it's about Diane's daughter, and her granddaughter. We wanted all those voices in the film, and her family was incredible in that they allowed us into the inner sanctum of their lives.

Trish and I were really spoiled for choice because Diane has, unlike so many other people, documented every single minute of her life. In the basement of her house, there is a long room that has all her diaries, photographs, videos, mementos, letters from her children, and scrapbooks. And so when we began telling this story, we really went deep into her personal archives. That is why the film is so rich; that is why you see Diane when she's two, three, four years old, you hear from her mother. That is why, as Diane goes on a journey from Europe to America, you go through her scrapbooks and you see her own personal journey and her children's journey. 

And I think in making this film, every single person who we called whose voice we wanted to include wanted to contribute. They wanted to say something about Diane, because she had left such a mark on their lives. Our producers’ jobs, Tracy and Fabiola, was to juggle those schedules. How do you juggle the schedule of secretary Hillary Clinton with Oprah Winfrey? How do you make sure that Anderson Cooper and Mark Jacobs, you know, in the filming time that we had, that we could put all of these people together? But Diane's friendships run deep with people, and people made sure to make time.

You know, she was a single mother, and I think that young single mothers watching this film will feel for Diane, especially single mothers who are trying to be entrepreneurs, and creating businesses, and trying to find their way into the world to be able to raise a family. To do that as an immigrant in a new country is challenging, and Diane shows you just how challenging it is. In making choices about living her life, in being with her children or expanding her business, there were sacrifices that were made, and those sacrifices are boldly put on the screen for viewers to watch.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You've told the stories of marginalized communities in Pakistan and women who have risen above their personal circumstances to highlight issues such as honor killings and acid attacks, or challenging stories in war zones, like children of the Taliban. As a storyteller, you’ve been at the front lines of trauma and injustice, and during this process, you've been threatened and harassed at times. How do you overcome your own fears and find the courage to ask those important questions and tell these important stories that are not often told?

OBAID-CHINOY

When I was young, I think empathy and the fact that I wanted to create characters, or tell the stories of people who had been on hero's journeys and who had been faced with extraordinary circumstances - that is something that has always driven me. The spine of the body of my work has been about the hero's journeys. And sometimes, when you are telling stories, and holding up a mirror, there are reverberations that take place. And I think that for me, the question is if I am bringing to screen the stories of people who will inspire others, move others to think about other people in a different light. If I feel like I've been able to do that, then I think the price to pay to tell those stories is worth it.

I realized very young and very early on in my career that film does more than just inform and inspire and entertain. It can move people into action, whether it's personal or collective action.  The first time I realized that was in 2006, when I did a film in the Philippines, which was about women who did not have access to contraceptives and were being forced into a life of constant pregnancies. The organization that I was profiling as part of that film used the film to lobby the local government to rethink its decisions. Suddenly, my film went from just being a film to  something bigger than that. And that's when I realized that there could be certain films that I create that could impact the lives of other people. 

In 2015, with A Girl in the River, I created a film that was about a young girl who had been shot by her father and her uncle because she had decided to get married on her own free will. They left her to die in a gunny sack in the river, and she survived. Sabah's story was deeply inspiring, because she wanted to send her father and uncle to jail, but in the end, she forgave them using a lacuna in the law. And when it was nominated for an Academy Award, we wrote a letter to the prime minister of Pakistan, and we used the film to educate and inform the government about the impact of the lacuna in that law, and how it was being misused. The film played a role in closing that and changing the law, which ensured that men who killed women in the name of honor would go to prison.

As a filmmaker, when I go into a project, I go in with a very open mind, because I'm there to learn and to understand the protagonist and their struggles. But as we're filming, we begin to piece together what the story is, what is the start of the story, what moves them, what are the pivotal moments in their life, and I think that we begin to put the building blocks off that. And then, towards the end of the filming, that's when we really realize what the arc of the story is. Oftentimes, it's not the arc that we originally envisioned it was going to be. As a filmmaker, I like to be surprised. I like to think that what I came into the film with has changed, because that's the real “aha moment” when you're a filmmaker.

On Embracing Technology and the Future Impact of AI on Film

I think it's very early for us to see how AI is going to impact us all, especially documentary filmmakers. And so I embrace technology, and I encourage everyone as filmmakers to do so. We're looking at how AI is facilitating filmmakers to tell stories, create more visual worlds. I think that right now we're in the play phase of AI, where there's a lot of new tools and you're playing in a sandbox with them to see how they will develop.

I don't think that AI has developed to the extent that it is in some way dramatically changing the film industry as we speak, but in the next two years, it will. We have yet to see how it will. As someone who creates films, I always experiment, and then I see what it is that I'd like to take from that technology as I move forward.

Reflections on Climate Change and Connecting with Mother Nature

My production company SOC Films, which works out of Pakistan, has created more than 15 short films about climate change in the region, and created a book for children to talk about climate change heroes. Pakistan is one of the top 10 countries in the world most affected by climate change. And so at the heart of everything that I do, climate change matters greatly to me because I have a personal connection to it.

I love to hike and I seek out mountains and quiet places where one can be in solitude with nature. I think that in the desire to expand and consume, we have really shaken the core of that connection that we have with Mother Earth — and I think that it's important. It's incumbent upon us to make sure that our children's generation and their children's generation have that same connection, where they can be in parts of the world where Mother Nature has been left to be in the state that it's meant to be in.