When I taught short fiction writing, I used to quote writer Meg Wolitzer on the pleasures of the form. “You will find yourself in a place you didn’t know about before. A place where you didn’t expect to be.” The trick, I’d tell my students, is to make the reader curious. That was a decade ago, and curiosity seems to have fallen from fashion since.
AI encourages quick, unreliable answers, rather than deep dives and nuance. (Though at the same time, a White House culture of lies – such as Donald Trump’s recent claim that regime change has occurred in Iran – requires a deeper level of fact-checking.) AI also encourages surface-level, short-form entertainments, in a world where 36% of 18–24-year-olds get their news from TikTok.
This week, the world seems especially uncertain. New wars in Iran and Lebanon have joined those in Ukraine and Gaza – where there is currently a ceasefire. In Australia last month, the primary vote of far-right populist party One Nation was higher than the Coalition’s for the first time. Trump is fighting with the Pope. The one bright spot is autocrat Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary. And, of course, it’s all unfolding alongside accelerating climate catastrophe.
