I sat down at a conference room round table and gnawed on an undercooked chicken quarter, looking around at my fellow VIPs, or as the conference’s master of ceremonies, Ryan “RPG” Golembeske, called us, the Bigfoot Mafia. Most of the other attendees were of retirement age. Their hats, tattoos, and car bumpers in the parking lot indicated that many were former military, police, and/or proud gun owners. Many were Trump supporters—beseeching fellow motorists to, as one bumper sticker read, MAKE THE FOREST GREAT AGAIN, a catchphrase which had been written out over an image of a Bigfoot on a turquoise background in the pines, rocking a pompadour. The sticker was a small oval on the larger spare wheel cover of a mid-aughts Chinook Concourse RV. Above it and below it, in Inspirational Quote Font, was the phrase “Once upon a time … is Now!” The couple who owned the RV cemented their identities with a big homemade TRUCKERS FOR TRUMP window decal next to a large handicap sticker. As a thirty-six-year-old progressive, I was an outlier in this crowd. But, like many, I was a believer.
My son, who is at pains to tell you that he is not five but five and three-quarters, is obsessed with the future. He draws pictures of crystalline cityscapes crisscrossed by “hyperloops” and flying cars; in the future, he says, scientists will “wreck down” our house to build a skyscraper, and robots will take the place of police officers. He’s certain about all this but uncertain when it will happen. Last year, he thought the future might arrive in 2024; he’s now considering 2025, or even later. “What if it takes them a really long time to build the future?” he asked me the other night, with a concerned look. “What if it takes until I’m an old man?” (I winced to hear him say those words.) “Or what if I die”—he mimed a kind of heart attack—“and I miss it?” I did my best and told him that he will definitely see at least some of “the future,” as he pictures it, when he grows up.
The truth, of course, is that we’re ignorant about the future. Who will win the election in November? Will we lose our jobs because of A.I.? Will the planet boil or merely simmer? What will skyscrapers, or smartphones, or schools look like in thirty years? We’re not in the dark about these questions; we can make educated guesses or predictions. But there’s an odd way in which, the more informed our speculations become, the more they serve to highlight what we don’t know. “The knowledge we possess determines the degree of specificity of the ignorance we recognize,” the philosopher Daniel DeNicola writes, in his book “Understanding Ignorance.” The more you know, the more precisely you can say what you don’t.
In January, UC Davis announced the results of Chin’s research: Of the tens of thousands of Chinese restaurants serving food in America, the Fongs’ unsung little diner is the oldest one continuously operating in California, and probably in the U.S. The Fongs suddenly found themselves in possession of an important piece of American history, which had been sitting in plain sight in a farm town 20 miles north of Sacramento.
The media rushed to cover the story, and hordes of new customers followed. The Woodland City Council issued a proclamation, which included testimonials from council members about their favorite dishes. And instead of retiring, Paul and Nancy were working twice as hard.
You need it when you drive. You need it when you’re looking for that new shop in the mall. You really need your surgeon to have it when they operate on your kidney. The ability to imagine and manipulate three-dimensional objects in the mind, also known as spatial reasoning, is at the base of many key tasks in our daily lives. But how do we do it?
If you thought it must involve actual images of the objects in your head, you’re in good company. Until recently, the majority of the neuroscience community believed the same. Yet a recent paper by Lachlan Kay, Rebecca Keogh, and Joel Pearson at the University of New South Wales suggests the opposite: Mental pictures are entirely optional—and, in certain cases, they might even be harmful.
Someone Like Us starts out like a mystery novel but becomes, in the end, something more like a ghost story: a meditation on the ways we can be part of a place yet simultaneously separate from it. It is the kind of book Mamush’s father says he plans to write one day: a paean to the beauty and hardship present in his native Ethiopia, but also alive and present in every corner of the United States. “When I am finished,” he tells Mamush, “no one will believe a country can be so rich and so poor at the same time.”