Qin Shihuang, First Emperor of China, survived assassination attempts, constantly feared conspiracies, and insisted on secrecy in his movements to the extent of building walls and corridors to disguise them from public view—and to render them invisible to malign spirits. After years of military conquests and bloody massacres he had good reason to fear revenge from victims whose spirits would also continue to live after death and might lie in wait for him. His vision of a lasting dynasty was founded on personal immortality, so death was unthinkable; as a scholar of Chinese religious practices expressed it, writing of the emperor’s Han successors, “Holiness essentially meant the art of not dying.” In fact we know from the biography by Sima Qian that Qin Shihuang hated even hearing conversations about death, to the point that his officials were afraid of mentioning the very word. This obsession was something of a family tradition, for traces of it appear in all the chronicles and histories from the time of King Huiwen onward. Indeed from around 400 bc, a couple of generations before Huiwen, it was believed that some men had managed to liberate themselves from death and had achieved perpetual life. Such beliefs were obviously attractive to kings, and later an emperor, who wished to prolong their reigns.
We’d just emerged from a long and rather liquid dinner on a barge along the Taedong River, in the heart of North Korea’s showpiece capital of Pyongyang. Two waitresses had finished joining our English tour guide, Nick, in some more than boisterous karaoke numbers. Now, in the bus back to the hotel, one young local guide broke into a heartfelt rendition of “Danny Boy.” His charming and elegant colleague, Miss Peng — North Korea is no neophyte when it comes to trying to impress visitors — was talking about the pressures she faced as an unmarried woman of 26, white Chanel clip glinting in her hair. Another of our minders — there were four or five for the 14 of us, with a camera trained on our every move for what we were assured was a “souvenir video” — kept saying, “You think I’m a government spy. Don’t you?”
But I was back in North Korea because nowhere I’d seen raised such searching questions about what being human truly involves. Nowhere so unsettled my easy assumptions about what “reality” really is. The people around me clearly wept and bled and raged as I did; but what did it do to your human instincts to be told that you could be sentenced, perhaps to death, if you displayed a picture of your mother — or your granddaughter — in your home, instead of a photo of the Father of the Nation? Did being human really include not being permitted to leave your hometown, and not being allowed to say what you think?
I teach in a scruffy old building at a small state university in the middle of nowhere. Intro to Poetry takes place in B143, deep in the back end of the basement. The walls are cheaply paneled. No windows. The carpet is thin and stained. A tangle of broken chairs lie in a heap by the door. Fluorescent lights buzz. It’s the first day of class. Ten or twelve students sit silently texting. The clock says 2:20. It’s 12:25.
I hate to break it to parents who just sent their college-admission-minded progeny to the Tibetan Plateau to churn yak butter, but the smartest summer I ever spent was in secretarial school. This was back when I was 17, and it wasn’t grist for an essay about a transformative communion with people outside my clique. I wasn’t ripping the blinders from my eyes. I was typing — hour upon hour, day after day, with my shoulders back and my spine straight and my hands just so.
Once upon a time, a television show was delivered through the cathode-ray tube to American living rooms in orderly half-hour or hour-long bursts. Seasons began like clockwork in the fall and closed up shop in spring; in between was the deathly dull valley of reruns. Predictability ruled the production side as well. Writers spent long hours in airless rooms drumming up jokes or churning out cliff-hangers, but they knew exactly how long they would be there and what they were delivering. In our current age of peak TV, there are no certainties or standard formats anymore. A series can consist of 4 episodes or 24; it might broadcast weekly or stream online all at once in a giant, binge-ready bloc. Networks launch shows at any time of year. As the series in production swell in number, taking on a dizzying array of shapes and sizes, and as cable and streaming channels compete with the major networks for viewers’ attention, there’s also a new fluidity to the way shows are created. Traditional television practices—such as producing elaborate, pricey pilot episodes as the basis on which network executives decide what shows to put on the air—are being reconsidered.
“It’s the Wild West,” says screenwriter Evan Dickson, who’s developing a TV series alongside horror director David Bruckner. “I feel like the landscape changes from month to month.” The partners are currently running a three-week-long mini–writers’ room funded by a studio to “pressure test” eight episodes’ worth of story ideas and “see how they hold water.”
For the last couple of years I've been part of a group of researchers who are interested in where logic comes from. While formal, boolean logic is a human discovery*, all human languages appear to have methods for making logical statements. We can negate a statement ("No, I didn't eat your dessert while you were away"), quantify ("I ate all of the cookies"), and express conditionals ("if you finish early, you can join me outside.").** While boolean logic doesn't offer a good description of these connectives, natural language still has some logical properties. How does this come about? Because I study word learning, I like to think about logic and logical language as a word learning problem. What is the initial meaning that "no" gets mapped to? What about "and", "or", or "if"?