Sometimes you have to escape your problems in order to solve them

Last fall, I went to a small TED gathering in Paris to give a talk, and now it’s online! It’s about how escapist stories offer us a new perspective on the real world, and help us engage with our communities. I draw connections between cosplay, green infrastructure, science fiction, and public transit – and offer a message about how pleasure in stories can lead to real-world change. Plus, there’s goblincore. (Just watch it – you’ll see!)

In many ways, it’s an antidote to the problems I tackle in my forthcoming book Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. Though the book deals with the damage caused by culture wars and propaganda, it also looks forward to a future where we use stories to guide us in the direction of community care and repair of the public sphere. My point is that stories can be weaponized, but we can also consciously and deliberately issue a ceasefire. Psychological disarmament is possible, and escapist stories help us imagine what that would look like.

Did you know?? I’ll be on tour this June, so come see me! Also, even more excitingly, if you pre-order Stories Are Weapons, you can win this amazing patch (U.S. only). Just fill out the form here with your proof of purchase, and you’ll get the book and the swag on June 4! Pre-ordering the book really helps, so I hope you’ll consider it!

Though I was nervous, I had a surprising amount of fun doing the talk. Mostly that’s because I discovered that the TED team is full of drama school nerds who love to build sets, coordinate the perfect shot, and put on a great show. At its best, TED uses the tools of theater to educate the public. Given that schools are under fire (and underfunded) in the United States, it was nice to be part of a group with the means and desire to support learning from diverse perspectives.

Best of all, while I was in Paris I discovered that the Catacombs are not, as I had always thought, a touristic stunt. They were a major public works project in the 18th and 19th centuries, funded by the post-revolutionary government to deal with dual catastrophes hitting Paris at the same time: overcrowded cemeteries and collapsing houses due to abandoned mines under the city. 

Apparently people had been digging up minerals and stone for centuries on the outskirts of Paris. As the city spread, these unmapped tunnels would sometimes collapse under the weight of new development. Houses would fall into sinkholes, killing and injuring tons of people. Meanwhile, the city’s cemeteries for the poor were filled to overflowing. Literally. As paupers’ bodies were buried in churchyards, more earth would be heaped up in these tiny spaces – often located next to markets – leading to huge mounds of stinky soil full of rotting corpses and mixed-up bones from the past thousand years.

So the French government decided to kill two birds with one stone, as it were. They employed municipal workers to map the city’s abandoned mines, preventing people from building on top of the most precarious ones. And while they were there, those workers would fill them with the unclaimed bones of millions of poor people. So the cemeteries were emptied, and the mines were filled. A perfect urban rejuvenation project!

Over time, some workers chose to make morbidly pretty patterns out of the bones, piling them up in zig-zags or heart shapes, with skulls artfully placed between layers of femurs like some ultra-goth layer cake. And then in the death-obsessed nineteenth century, the Catacombs became a music venue and spooky attraction. As I admired the weirdness, I imagined the place full of nineteenth century romantic poetry fiends, all tricked out in black, carrying candles and getting emo about Beethoven.

It’s a good reminder that urban renewal projects take many strange forms, and that you should always map your underground mines.

Recommendations

We just posted a new episode of Our Opinions Are Correct, where Charlie Jane and I discuss how dystopian surveillance scifi is now our daily reality. Plus we have a great interview with Wole Talabi, whose terrific new collection Convergence Problems just came out. He writes incredible science fiction that blends seamlessly with African storytelling and satire.

I am watching a truly strange and delightful show from Netflix Thailand called Ready, Set, Love. It’s a seemingly impossible mix of The Bachelor, Squid Game, and Y the Last Man. That’s right — it’s a dystopian, post-genderdemic future where the only remaining men in Thailand are essentially like K-pop stars with giant fandoms. They live in a government-protected facility, and women compete on a reality TV show to marry them. Somehow it manages to be cute, romantic, and completely dystopian at the same time. Definitely check it out.

I’ve been listening to the Globe & Mail’s podcast The Decibel, which gives you a 20-minute dose of interesting Canadian-centric news every day. A recent episode on hydrogen-fueled freight trains being developed in Alberta is particularly awesome.