not saying anything new, but if these folks actually believed in genAI writing, they’d disclose it, tout it, and build their own audiences elsewhere and leave others be. hiding and sneaking it to markets who want no part of it doesn’t prove you’re good at writing. just proves you’re good at fraud.
There’s a way of talking about math education in the United States that I’m not a big fan of. But I don’t want to write a post that says, “here’s a vibe I don’t like, trust me it’s influential,” that seems kindof lame.
Then I took a course sponsored by the Colorado Department of Education and it is a perfect encapsulation of this thing I dislike, so now I’m going to write about it.1
The course is titled “Powerful Practice: Evidence-Informed Math Teaching.” It’s the kind of course lots of teachers, including me, take to meet professional development requirements or move up on the salary scale. The course goal:
After successfully completing this course you will employ evidence-informed instructional routines in your classroom that support accelerated learning in mathematics for all students, especially those furthest from opportunity (multilingual learners, students with disabilities, students of color, and students experiencing poverty).
I’m a fan of evidence. I would like to accelerate learning. Sign me up.
There's a lot I agree with in the course. It has solid sections on multilingual learners, connecting multiple representations, and alternatives to keyword strategies for word problems. Good stuff! Like any PD I have some disagreements, but overall it's thoughtful and research-informed.
Here’s the part I don’t like. It honestly feels sneaky, like a sleight of hand. It’s not about any of the content in the course. It’s about what’s missing.
In the whole course, which is worth 25 hours of professional development, there is close to nothing about practice.
Here is the closest I could find to a statement that practice plays an important role in math learning:
While students likely need practice, the emphasis here is not drill and kill or timed repetition of math facts. Instead, we want to help students see patterns and identify pen-and-paper and mental strategies to perform calculations accurately and efficiently.
There’s a passing acknowledgment that practice is maybe necessary, and then equivocation. Don’t “drill and kill” (a phrase which is not defined anywhere in the course). Help students see patterns. Identify strategies.
Look, drill and kill is a real phenomenon. When students are asked to practice too much too soon, or when practice is excessively repetitive, that’s bad. And yes, I am in favor of having students see patterns and identify different strategies to solve problems.
But I am also unequivocally in favor of practice in math class. After learning something new, students should solve some similar problems to move that learning into long-term memory. Beyond my personal opinion, this course claimed to be “evidence-informed.” It is not possible for an honest person to read the evidence on math learning and not come to the conclusion that practice plays a critical role. If I were in charge, I would include multiple modules on structuring effective practice. Worked examples, fading supports, retrieval, interleaving, spacing? Among 14 modules, close to nothing. The attitude here seems to be that practice is something that’s grudgingly accepted as necessary, but not to be talked about.2
Practice is hard to get right. We should be talking about it! Why is practice important? Where does it happen in the learning sequence? What are some common pitfalls? There’s so much to talk about!
This is a vibe I get from lots of other places in the math world. I was on a curriculum adoption committee a few years ago. None of the curricula emphasized their approach to practice. They all had supports for multilingual learners, multiple representations, and routines for word problems. Good stuff! Keep all of that. But it was obvious that practice was an afterthought. Practice wasn’t mentioned in the marketing materials. The practice problems got too hard too quickly, or skipped important problem types, or were lazily written with too much repetition.
Similarly, if you attend a conference run by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, you’ll get the same message. Sessions on every hip and cool approach to math learning you can imagine...except practice, which will come up here and there but not in featured sessions, avoided by the vast majority of presenters.
If practice was being done well in typical math classrooms this would be fine. But it’s not! Go talk to teachers. They’ll tell you that the curriculum doesn’t provide enough practice. That they struggle to find good practice resources. That they can’t agree with their colleagues about how much practice is necessary, or even basic questions like whether most practice should happen in class or for homework, or digital vs paper and pencil.
One more thing that drives me crazy. The quote from above is in a section on balancing procedural fluency and conceptual understanding. And I get it, I think procedural fluency and conceptual understanding both play an important role in math learning. But they’ve become these two pillars of math education in a way that I think is counterproductive. In some circles you can’t talk about practice without talking about procedural fluency, then debating whether fluency means fast and accurate or also flexible, and the role of timing, and which standards call for fluency, and whether conceptual understanding has to come first.
Look, some of you are overthinking this. Practice is important because practice is how humans learn things, and math is no different. Don’t let all the fancy theory distract from the idea that, after learning something new, a bit of practice and repetition is exactly what humans need to retain what they have learned.
You can read more about the course here. While the course was funded by the Colorado Department of Education, the content itself was designed and delivered by TNTP. I don’t know much about TNTP but subjectively it is very similar to the type of PD delivered by the established math organizations in the US. The course was free, but required a login — I think Colorado was paying TNTP for every signup.
One more example in the course is another section on procedural fluency that talks about students coming up with their own strategies, discussing math problems, connecting representations, and then finally the idea that maybe they should practice — but they should practice “why a procedure works and when to use that procedure.”
Sure, all of that is fine, but students should also just practice. Solve some problems. Don’t be afraid of a little repetition. See how students do. If they need more practice, give them more practice.
I love Lionel Messi. My brother and I grew up with him as a sort of demigod flitting across our televisions, video game consoles, recess scrimmages, and daydreams. I also love reading essays about Lionel Messi: it’s nice to see your feelings reflected in someone else’s mind, especially if they’re expressed in words better than the ones you would’ve chosen.
Messi is playing in the World Cup final on Sunday — it is likely the last major game of his career. So, feeling nostalgic, I was excited to see this piece published in the New York Times.
A Guest Essay written by a sports writer and poet about the legacy of Lionel Messi? Shove it directly into my eyes. What does Rowan Ricardo Phillips want to tell me about La Pulga?
Huh. His style seems so familiar . . .
If you’re skimming, the metaphor almost makes sense, maybe? But you’d expect something more coherent from an author whose work has been longlisted for the National Book Award.
Ah. There it is.
Surely, you see now what the editors of the most important newspaper in the world missed. Here’s the score from Pangram for the first half of the article. If you’re unfamiliar, Pangram is the only reliable way to check if something is written by AI. It preferentially assumes that words were written by humans. False positives are a bigger problem than false negatives, according to its philosophy. So if Pangram says that a piece is written by or with AI, then it almost definitely was.
But you don’t really need Pangram to tell what Phillips is doing. His essay abounds with tripartite structures, fuzzy metaphors about quietness and concealment, and big paragraph breaks that set up quips so blasé you might as well just douse your phone screen in tapioca.
Maybe I’m overestimating how obvious the cues are if you don’t spend lots of time reading words generated through linear algebra. But come on — who writes like THIS about Messi’s sudden retirement from the national team?
How moving. No interest in writing about the Argentines who burned Messi’s jersey in the streets, his empty stare as he announced his retirement to the world, or the subsequent nationwide exhortations for him to return (including one from his future teammate, a then-15-year-old Enzo Fernández)? Evidently not. He said he was finished . . . and then . . .
Bravo, Rowan.
In principle, I’m actually not opposed to AI-generated journalism. Major outlets publish lots of articles that ChatGPT could write already: for instance, the standard “New study says X, and it means Y” content that passes for most of modern science writing. I don’t care whether humans take charge of articles that mainly exist to transport information — the job of the author, in these cases, is spiritually akin to the job of an old-timey telephone operator. In the next ten years, perhaps much sooner, even the esteemed Gray Lady will automate those segments of her production.
But as Sasha Chapin has discussed, information transfer is not the only reason for us to write, or even the most important reason! Long-form text is not an efficient way to move information from one brain to another: that is not the medium’s comparative advantage. Instead, text is near-optimal for mind-merging. There is no other medium equally good (for now) at simulating someone else’s experiences in your head. We write to share our souls; we read to receive the souls of others.
Of course, I often do read for the sake of transferring information. But increasingly, I rely on AIs to generate the text — you can ask follow-up questions, ask for different analogies, create questions to test your knowledge, and so on. In that writerly province, they are already as good as or better than most human beings.
So if I clicked on an article announcing the results of a new scientific study and then realized it was written by ChatGPT, I wouldn’t care. I want all societal functions executed as well as possible. If AI executes some of them better, great. I can live with that, just as I can live with the fact that we no longer have telephone operators.
But I didn’t click on this essay about Lionel Messi so I could learn something new. I know everything about his career — there is simply no statistic, factoid, or anecdote the NYT could publish about him that I haven’t already memorized and debated with my brother. I clicked on the essay because I wanted to experience Messi through the eyes of another human being, one who (being a poet and award-winning author) should be uniquely equipped to scaffold that simulation. Even when we reach the point where AI writing can bring us to tears, an essay about the shared joy of watching great athletes will still need a human author.
The entire purpose of such an article is to bring a few members of Homo sapiens together. This is a domain where AI shouldn’t trespass — not because it can’t write well enough (it can’t yet, but it will), but because the function of the writing literally cannot be fulfilled by artificial intelligence. Nevertheless, Phillips persisted.
“Thank you for your beautiful essay,” says one commenter. “Watching Messi play was like watching poetry in motion. And reading your words put that poetry in motion on paper. Thank you for sharing.” I imagine an old man tapping out his gratitude with two fingers. Maybe he sends the article to his grandchildren. Maybe the grandchildren, better versed in this new world, explain to him that he is communing with no one at all. The old man feels embarrassed. He tries to remember when it became so hard to tell real from fake, or when that even became a meaningful question.
Do the editors of the New York Times disagree with this analysis? I doubt it. They probably just haven’t figured out how to make sure they aren’t being deceived.
Which is a bit surprising, given this whole debacle, in which essays published in the paper’s “Modern Love” column (pieces about relationships, feelings, betrayals, and revelations — you know, human experiences) were clearly written by AI.
Not to mention the Times’ various articles and wacky games crusading against AI-written slop:
Perhaps the New York Times would like to avoid these situations in the future. I’ve heard that the editors take themselves pretty seriously. So, in case any of them happen to see this — here’s one simple way you can make sure you’re not scamming your readers into merging with matrix multiplication. It takes about ten seconds.
In 2019, before ChatGPT, Phillips wrote an essay about Messi called “They Think They Know You, Lionel Messi.” I read it in the Paris Review. It was beautiful. It made me feel like I knew him.
Forget the sale of the century. The auction house Sotheby’s has geared up for the sale of the epoch. On July 14 it opened live bidding on assorted fossils, but the pièce de résistance is lot 20, a rare 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton.
The specimen—dubbed Gus—is billed as one of the largest, most complete T. rexes ever found. Gus is expected to fetch up to $30 million and will go to the highest bidder, whether public museum or private collector. The latter have played an increasingly prominent role in buying fossils, with auction houses, according to paleontologists, contributing to the trend by building hype. But when private collectors swoop in and buy fossils at auction as luxury assets, those pieces of history are effectively lost to science.
By nearly all accounts, Gus is a big deal. In its description, Sotheby’s boasts that the specimen, which was discovered on a ranch in South Dakota, comprises “an incredible 183 fossil bone elements” making it “approximately 61% complete by bone count.” The fossil remains have been mounted in a custom steel armature along with replicas of the missing bones. The result is a reconstructed skeleton posed as if in hot pursuit, its mouth full of dagger teeth ready to tear into prey.
The American education establishment loves to rebrand. Home economics became family and consumer science, while vocational education is now career and technical education. Remedial education is now developmental coursework, economically disadvantaged students are at-risk or underserved, and English as a second language students are English language learners or emerging bilinguals. The new terms that replaced the old reflect educators’ evolving perspectives on these concepts.
One label, though, has refused to die: gifted. For decades, experts in and outside of gifted education have criticized the label as elitist, simplistic, and generally problematic. Yet, the term persists in schools, among scholars, and in popular culture.
In one sense, it does not matter what label one applies to accelerated academic programs and the students enrolled in them. The need for advanced programs remains because individual differences in aptitude lead some students to learn complex material better and faster than their peers, whether or not such students are called “gifted.” As Shakespeare wrote, “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
But many education scholars still find that the gifted label and the concept of “giftedness” runs contrary to psychological data and the reality of educating children. The contradictions are real.
Criticisms of the gifted label are not new. The most common response among experts who grapple with these criticisms is to advocate its elimination. But the label persists, even in the scholarly work of some of those who want to abolish it. I believe the label endures because it has some usefulness, and its critics’ true contention is with the concept of giftedness. However, this does not mean the education system must or should retain the gifted label forever.
“Giftedness” Is Dead
The critics rightfully point out that the gifted label implies that being gifted or not gifted is an either/or condition. No one ever says, “My child is partially gifted,” or “The school says my daughter is 80 percent gifted.” Categorizing children as gifted (or not) implies that there is a stark difference between gifted children and others. But such unequivocal divisions do not exist in the general population. As education scholars have pointed out, any given ability lies on a continuum, and dichotomies are artificially imposed. Children just below the cutoff to be labeled gifted differ little from those just above the cutoff.
The same problem afflicts many diagnostic labels in clinical psychology. Depression, anxiety, and undesirable personality traits (for example, perfectionism and antisocial behavior) all sit on a continuum. Everyone displays these traits to some extent, with some people having very low levels, others very high, and most of us somewhere in between. When those characteristics reach a point where they interfere with a person’s functioning, psychologists label the person as having a disorder. Clinical psychologists have dealt with this reality by recognizing the existence of “subclinical” symptoms: mild symptoms that may cause some dysfunction but do not cross the line into a full-blown diagnosis.
The field of clinical psychology has standardized criteria and labels to help guide the process of diagnosis. Even though clinicians may not always completely agree on a diagnosis, classification systems such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and the International Classification of Diseases ensure that psychologists have a common understanding of which symptoms qualify a person for a diagnosis such as major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, or antisocial personality disorder.
By contrast, the field of gifted education lacks this kind of standardized guidance, even for its most basic label. The scholarly discipline is highly fragmented, and experts disagree over which of the dozens of definitions of giftedness should be preferred. Some of the definitions even contradict one another. Whereas some scholars view giftedness as a solely intellectual trait, others see it as including an emotional component. Some contend that giftedness is exclusively a matter of academic aptitude (usually assessed through standardized tests), while others argue that giftedness can include motivation and interest in a given subject. These fundamental disagreements make it impossible to recognize “subclinical” levels of giftedness.
Even when experts agree on a definition of giftedness, there is no inherent cutoff point at which someone warrants the label of gifted. With mental disorders, it is at least clear that dysfunctional and maladaptive behaviors require treatment. There is no such obvious point at which giftedness should be “treated.” In the United States, the percentage of children labeled as gifted varies widely across districts and states, sometimes in nonsensical ways, if giftedness is supposed to be an enduring personal trait. When I conducted a study of six Utah school districts, the district with far and away the highest percentage of children labeled as gifted also had the lowest academic performance. Most of the “gifted” children there would not be considered “gifted” if they moved to one of the other districts.
Likewise, no one in clinical psychology would recommend that their patient be reassessed for depression solely because they move to a new town; in gifted education, children are often re-evaluated to determine whether the child “really is” gifted by local standards after a move. Experts in gifted education call this phenomenon “geographic giftedness,” which discloses the fact that being gifted is not a fixed personal trait.
This comparison to clinical psychology reveals a crucial difference between “gifted” and diagnostic labels such as “depressed.” Whereas depression truly exists, giftedness does not. When the gifted label implies that a person has a psychological quality of giftedness, intractable problems arise. This is because giftedness is always defined or measured in relation to other traits or behaviors. For example, the U.S. federal government’s 1972 Marland Report—still influential today—defined gifted children as those who have high performance, achievement, and/or ability in at least one of six areas: (1) general intellectual ability (intelligence), (2) special academic aptitude, (3) creative or productive thinking, (4) leadership, (5) visual and performing arts, and (6) psychomotor ability (athletics or fine motor skills).
Note that the Marland Report always stated giftedness was manifested in specific domains, never on its own. In other words, giftedness has no independent existence. No one has ever defined giftedness without reference to other psychological or educational constructs. Giftedness is always a parasite that depends on other traits for its survival.
Instead, giftedness is defined in the Marland Report (and elsewhere) as high potential or performance in some particular domain. What is inside people’s heads are characteristics like intelligence, academic aptitude, creativity, leadership ability, artistic talent, and psychomotor ability. When someone scores highly on a measure of one of these characteristics, they receive the label gifted. In contrast, when a diagnosis is applied in clinical psychology, there is a recognition that the underlying trait (for example, anxiety) has independent existence. Giftedness itself is the source of the problems in the gifted label.
The Marland Report also exposes another flaw in the concept of giftedness: With so many ways to be gifted, how can one term apply to all of these domains? If the Marland Report is taken seriously, then a school’s math whiz, its star basketball player, and the lead actress in the school play should all be labeled as gifted, even though their talents and abilities are vastly different. While its advocates may see this understanding of giftedness as “inclusive” or “non-elitist,” a better term would be “incoherent.” It is not clear what is gained by applying the same label to these different abilities. Unsurprisingly, the field’s leading scholars are aware of this problem.
All these problems with the concept of giftedness illustrate how the study of giftedness entails reification, which is defined in the APA Dictionary of Psychology as “treating an abstraction, concept, or formulation as though it were a real object or material thing.” Scholars and educators would benefit from understanding that giftedness has no real existence and instead studying the underlying traits, abilities, and behaviors that have utility and value in education or society. Basing the label of gifted on a hypothesized underlying giftedness is incoherent and creates philosophical and scientific problems that scholars and educators have been unable to resolve.
In short, giftedness as a psychological construct is a phantom. The administrative label gifted has many of the same problems and also needs to go. But getting rid of these labels is not enough.
In the grand tradition of educational rebranding, I propose that educators and scholars replace “gifted” with the term “advanced.”
Long Live “Advanced” Learners!
The idea of giftedness as a scholarly topic arose out of the education system, and many of gifted education’s scholars and practitioners work in the context of that system. Seeing giftedness as a psychological construct causes problems, but understanding the practice of gifted education reveals a valid need for the label of advanced.
The fundamental premise of gifted or advanced education programs is the same philosophy that underpins special education. Both sets of services arise from a perceived mismatch between a child’s aptitudes or needs and the classroom lessons aimed at the typically developing student. As a result, the child requires accommodations or adjustments to learn productively in the school environment. Educational psychologists have long recognized the similarities between special education and advanced education, and they understandably see both services as natural products of individual differences in learning speed and cognitive ability.
If some students will receive special services and other students will not, it is necessary to distinguish between those two groups of students. This is where the advanced label becomes useful. Teachers, administrators, policymakers, and others need to know which children have a mismatch between their abilities and the instruction offered in a typical classroom. Without that knowledge, it is not clear to whom schools should provide an accelerated alternative.
Recognizing this need for a label solves many problems. First, it resolves the reification problem that “giftedness” produces. If the term “advanced” merely signifies that a child qualifies for special services, then advanced does not imply that the student has a condition or trait that exists independently. Likewise, a child being labeled as advanced implies they are ready for more complex material, but it does not imply that this readiness is innate or that the child is part of a special subtype of the student population. This label also does not suggest that the child will necessarily remain advanced permanently. Perhaps the state of being advanced persists for a given child, or maybe their peers eventually catch up and the mismatch between the advanced child’s needs and the standard classroom is eliminated.
Understanding advanced as meaning “eligible for services” also accommodates the heterogeneity of abilities among advanced students. Depending on the local definition of advanced and available program offerings, advanced educational services can take the form of full-time special classes, part-day enrichment experiences, Advanced Placement and dual enrollment classes, the International Baccalaureate program, accelerated classes in each subject, experiences in all the performing and visual arts, magnet schools, leadership opportunities, full and partial grade skipping, and more. Treating the advanced label as qualification for services does not imply that students enrolled in these different programs are similar—beyond the fact that their needs are not met in the typical classroom. The label simply means, “These children qualify for the services that our school is able to offer.”
That understanding of the advanced label also solves the problem of geographic giftedness. If a child who participates in an advanced program in one town moves to a new location that offers different services—or that has different standards for qualifying for the same services—then of course she or he is no longer advanced, in the sense that the child no longer qualifies for services. The standards and the environment have changed, not the child, which is why the child loses the advanced label when they are no longer out of sync with their new classmates or the local curriculum.
The only downside with understanding “advanced” as merely referring to eligibility for services is that it makes the label tautological. But at least a tautological definition is internally consistent and avoids the problems that arise from reification and interpreting giftedness as a psychological condition.
Consequences of Killing Giftedness
Dispensing with giftedness in favor of an advanced label clearly confers philosophical and theoretical advantages as well as administrative benefits in school systems—but it also has practical consequences. First, this understanding of the advanced label means that there can be no gifted or advanced adults. If the advanced label is only applied during K–12 schooling when students receive services from their local school district, then there is no need to label adults as advanced, let alone gifted. Even if an adult test-taker obtained the maximum score on an IQ test, they would not be considered advanced, because there are no special education services for them to receive.
The second practical consequence arises from the philosophy behind selecting children for advanced academic programs. When giftedness is considered part of a child’s inherent psychology, the goal is to “identify” the gifted. As a result, gifted education scholars and policymakers often fuss over false positives (the incorrect labeling of children as gifted when they “really” are not) and false negatives (overlooking children who “really are gifted”). This is why one group of authors said that “determining who is and who is not identified as gifted is a fraught subject.”
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The problem with a focus on gifted identification is that it results in what I call the “treasure hunt model.” Identifying advanced learners turns into a hunt for the “truly” gifted. The problem is that, in reality, giftedness does not exist independently inside a child’s head. Therefore, there is no objective standard of giftedness that school officials can use to determine whether the children selected for a program are “really” gifted or not.
In contrast, if being advanced only refers to whether a student qualifies for advanced academic programs, then the entire concept of gifted identification no longer makes sense. The process should instead be called “program selection,” because it only entails choosing which students can enroll in a more challenging educational offering. The concept of program selection reduces anxiety over false positives and false negatives because advanced students are just a group who are judged to qualify for a particular academic program.
A third consequence of aligning the advanced label with program eligibility is that the standard way of providing special educational opportunities gets reversed. Traditionally, school personnel are first tasked with identifying or finding gifted children and then serving them with accelerated educational experiences through the appropriate gifted program. However, when labeling a child as advanced is a function of program fit, educational programs take on primary importance. This matters because no school district can offer every possible advanced learning opportunity; limitations of budgets, space, expertise, and personnel require every district to pick and choose which advanced programs to offer. When district personnel do not feel constrained to offer a traditional gifted program, it frees them to create a program that can flourish in the local context—which is then later filled with children selected to populate it. Some education experts already advocate for this program-first perspective.
Saving Education from “Giftedness”
In short, the gifted label has endured partly out of tradition but also because it remains useful in distinguishing students who qualify for advanced learning opportunities from those who do not. The problem is not with labelling per se, but rather with conceptions of “giftedness” that imply that it is an enduring quality inherent in a person’s mind. These conceptions fly in the face of psychological and educational reality.
The solution is to discard the ideas of “giftedness” and “being gifted” and to focus on challenging “advanced” learners. This will help the scholarly field of advanced education to shed its historical baggage and the incoherent philosophical underpinnings that have troubled scholars and administrators for decades. Thinking and speaking about “advanced” students in the context of specific learning opportunities solves semantic and scholarly problems that have had unfortunate practical implications for far too long.
It is time to let “giftedness” and the “gifted” label die the quiet death they deserve. The label “advanced,” properly understood as nothing more than a bus ticket to more complex coursework, can and should live on, unapologetically useful and finally free of philosophical baggage.
Russell T. Warne, formerly a psychology professor, is the chief scientist at Riot IQ and the creator of the Reasoning and Intelligence Online Test.
The post “Gifted” Is Dead. Long Live “Advanced” Learners! appeared first on Education Next.
If you’ve ever walked through a bookstore with an author by your side, you may have noticed something peculiar: writers don’t check out new books the way normal people do. Your average reader, when they pick up a book, will first inspect the cover, then they will read the synopsis, and finally they will glance at the author photo, cruelly appraising the hair and skin and posture of a subspecies of human (Homo scriptor) that largely prefers to remain out of sight. In other words, they will never actually open the book before they buy it. A writer, by contrast—wise to the Draperian deceptions of jacket copy—tends to open it to the first page, take a quick sip of its prose, and if they like it, then and only then will they endeavor to learn what the book is actually about.
Authors understand that every book is, in truth, two books. There is the book a writer writes, which is to say the actual words on the page, and then there is what I call its hologram—the shimmering, ethereal version of the book that the author must pitch to their publisher, and which their publisher then pitches to the public. Writers tend to find this process—reducing a complex, nuanced work of art down to a tidy cartoon version of itself—excruciating. But we are forced to do it, because no one can read a whole book before they buy it.
Put simply, people don’t buy books. They buy holograms, and they hope the book matches up.
Some of the great books throughout history have had a hard time finding a wide readership, at least at first, because they had a faulty hologram: The book itself is brilliant, but the title, the synopsis, even the cover image leave buyers cold. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass famously took six years before it reached the Times bestseller list, where it now resides more or less permanently. Some of my favorite novels—Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Norman Rush’s Mating, Toni Morrison’s Beloved—are ones I put off reading for years, simply because the title sounded fusty, even though the books themselves are anything but. Eventually, truly great books tend to outgrow their drab holograms and reach a wide audience, but it takes time, labor, and good luck.
Sometimes, the inverse is true: the book itself is drek, but the hologram is a work of art. I recently ran across a book called Infinite Jeffs, which is the reductio ad absurdum of this phenomenon. In it, the author replaces every word in the novel Infinite Jest with the word “Jeff”: the result is 776 pages filled with nothing but “Jeff jeff jeff jeff,” and so on. It isn’t a book any human alive will ever read from front to back, but as a hologram, it’s devilishly clever.
Readers are swiftly losing any regard for the line between hologram and book, between map and territory.
It is no secret that publishing is currently experiencing a crisis. One genre of books—“serious nonfiction,” or, more colloquially, “dad books”—seem to be especially hard hit, as readers retreat en masse from the gnarly complexities of history into works of cozy fantasy. “The trend couldn’t be clearer,” the publisher Jonathan Karp told the Wall Street Journal. “This is a sea change and people should wake up and realize we’re living in a new world.”
The pat explanation for this shift is that people are just too busy, too broke, and too brain-melted to read serious books any more. On top of that, the wider media ecosystem is going through what is being called a “discoverability crisis.” Book review sections are evaporating; NPR has been eviscerated; and social media followings no longer seem to be reliably converting into book sales.
However, I suspect that the source of the problem is both stranger and deeper than that. I fear that readers are swiftly losing any regard for the line between hologram and book, between map and territory. The trouble is not that the publishing industry has failed to create compelling holograms in order to effectively market books; it’s that the holograms have become so effective that we are unconsciously training readers not to want to read. Instead of book reviews—which, by dint of their brevity, are forced to strike a balance between describing the book and giving it all away for free—holograms now reach readers in the form of podcast interviews, which chew over the contents of a given book for one or even two hours, sucking every morsel from its bones. Some authors even go a step further, agreeing to flay and anatomize their own books, breaking them down into a tidy list of “key insights” aimed at busy professionals. I recently performed one such act of ritual self-cannibalism, known (aptly) as a Book Bite, distilling a work that took me nine years to write into a listicle that takes mere minutes to consume. (Then, for good measure, I took that Book Bite and posted a nibble of it on my Instagram.)
Increasingly, and far more insidiously, holograms come in the form of AI. Amazon has instituted a feature called “Ask This Book,” which allows you to interrogate the app about the contents of the text, and then, if you so choose, skip reading it altogether. A few months ago, the author and podcaster Tyler Cowan launched his new book, The Marginal Revolution, onto his website, in full, along with an “integrated AI assistant” that pre-digests the prose for you, like a mother bird regurgitating food into the maw of her chicks. As of the time of this writing, almost four months after its publication, the text still contains a typo in its opening lines, suggesting to me that no one close to the author has even bothered to read it with care.
I recently embarked on a month-long book tour from Vancouver to Los Angeles. Along the way, I stopped off to meet up with friends and colleagues, some of whom I haven’t seen in years. What nearly everyone I spoke with told me, in one form or another, is that they are feeling the effects of a holographic crisis that extends far beyond the publishing industry. I spoke with a friend who, unable to find time to read whole books, has begun to run PDFs through an AI program that converts them into podcasts, complete with two chatty humanoid voices. I talked with a literary agent who said that her clients, fearing their book proposal will be read first by AI before it ever encounters human eyeballs, are tweaking their proposals to suit robotic tastes, much as magazines tailor their headlines to game social media algorithms. And I talked with a Hollywood producer who caught a studio exec pretending to have read a script, when it was clear he’d used AI to summarize it. (She knew this for a fact, because the LLM had mistaken the plotline of a novel within the script for the plot of the film itself.)
In Simulation and Simulacra, Jean Baudrillard famously explored the perils of living in a world of holograms. The book opens with an epigraph from Ecclesiastes: “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.” This, as any reader with a functioning brain cell left in their skull knows, is not an actual quote from the Bible. Baudrillard is playing a little textual prank on us, inserting the simulacrum of a quotation into a book about simulacra. But he is also, I think, making a deep, if deeply cynical, observation about the nature of truth itself.
Holograms are not a product of the digital or even the industrial age—people were creating them in biblical times as well, each time they spoke in concrete terms about the ineffable nature of the divine. There has always been a temptation to give up worrying over questions of falsity and authenticity, because isn’t everything a hologram, really, when you think about it? Baudrillard gave into that temptation so fully that he made an art out of it. But I refuse to, and I hope you do, too. Down that road, darkness lies.
Nearly every author and editor I know feels that our present holographic crisis is merely a wan prelude of what’s to come: a tsunami of texts wholly written by AI, flooding the earth with books without authors, holograms piled atop holograms, with no ground-truth beneath them. “A fool also multiplies words,” the author of Ecclesiastes warns. “At the beginning their words are folly; at the end they are wicked madness.”
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