A ball drops; some scholars open red envelopes while others dip apple bits in honey.

Different
cultures around the world celebrate the new year differently and at different times, but all of
them are marking the forward march of the calendar. Yet the fact that there are so many ways to
split one year from the next suggests these divisions are ultimately arbitrary. Are they? Explore
the reasons behind each of them, then discuss with your team: should we stop celebrating New
Year’s as a holiday? When would be the best time of year for people to take stock of the past and
think about the future? “Captain’s log,” says whoever is captaining the Enterprise. “Stardate…”
Star Trek’s stardates are based on a calendar meant to be used around the galaxy. Consider the
different calendars and related listed below, then discuss with your team: does it make sense to
restart the calendar periodically, perhaps when a new leader takes over? Or would such changes
risk angering people—as when the English allegedly rioted over the loss of eleven days as part of
a calendar transition in 1752? Julian | Gregorian | Islamic | Japanese | Korean Rumi | Hindu |
Nepali | Mayan | Solar | Lunar A storytelling trope is that high school seniors know nothing will
ever be the same again for them and their friends. (The trope is accurate.) The same weight can
apply to entire countries and calendars. In 1996, aware the millennium was ending, American
president Bill Clinton hoped to deliver an Inaugural Address for the ages. Reviewing it can
provide insight into how people in the 1990s were reimagining their world. “Ten years ago,” he
said, “the Internet was the mystical province of physicists; today, it is a commonplace
encyclopedia for millions of schoolchildren.” No mention of e-commerce, nor a whisper of
social media. Then, evoking the academic Francis Fukayama’s theory of the end of history, he
adds, “The world is no longer divided into two hostile camps… For the very first time in history,
more people on this planet live under democracy than dictatorship.” Review more of his speech,
then discuss with your team: does it sound like one that a political leader could deliver today?
Were the 1990s an important period of transition in your own country as well? Explore the
following selections from the 90s—multiple 90s, in this case—then discuss with your team: do
they reflect periods in which the world was in transition more than songs from other decades
before and after—or would that be reading too much into them? “After the Ball” | Charles Harris
(1892) “Freedom! 90” | George Michael (1990) “Losing My Religion” | REM (1991) “Brændt” |
Lis Sørensen (1993) “Pink Flamingo” | Alyona Sviridova (1994) “Black Hole Sun” |
Soundgarden (1994) “Singing in My Sleep” | Semisonic (1998) “I Saved the World Today” |
Eurythmics (1999)

For a long time, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was also the Tomb of the Misplaced King:
after Richard III fell in battle in 1485, it took centuries to locate his corpse. In 2012, a team of
archaeologists finally unearthed it under a parking lot. Forensic analysis revealed details that had
been lost to history, including a severely twisted spine—a condition we now call scoliosis—that
he couldn’t have possibly hidden from those around him. In 2022, researchers unearthed an
ancient Buddhist temple in Pakistan, and, a few years before that, possibly the fastest human in
history. Discuss with your team: do these smaller details about the past affect how we see the
world today? If we had discovered from Richard III's DNA that he was a woman in disguise,
would that change our view of him or of his role in history? The above questions are more than
academic; they force us to reevaluate choices made in the present. In 2024, the Globe Theatre in
London staged a new production of Shakespeare’s Richard III, casting a woman with an
untwisted spine in the title role. Some people protested that the production needed an actor who
shared Richard III’s now-known physical ailment. Discuss with your team: to what extent does
an actor need to share lived experiences with the character they are portraying? It doesn’t always
take a volcano: the Roman ruins at Ostia Antika offer a look back into history similar to what
most people seek out in Pompeii, even if they were preserved less perfectly. Where would you
go in your country for the most authentic peek at how the world used to be? Discuss with your
team: if an OpenAI project destroyed all life on Earth but left our cities intact, what would a
future anthropologist conclude about human civilization? How much would their conclusions
vary depending on what city they visited? These days, Indiana Jones would be piloting a drone.
New technologies have allowed archaeologists to reimagine the archaeological method with a
lighter footprint. Consider the Girsu Project’s discovery of an ancient palace, then discuss with
your team: what aspects of your own country’s history would benefit from being re-explored
using drones, AI, and other recent advances? Jurassic Park, Godzilla, and The Land Before Time
have all depicted dinousars as giant scaly lizards—but more recent research has suggested they
didn’t look like that at all; it appears they were less Komodo dragon and more Qatari falcon. If
so, the T. rex in Jurassic Park should have been a thing with animatronic feathers. The field of
paleoart aims to visualize past creatures as accurately as possible despite the limited evidence. If
a future paleoartist tried to reconstruct the world of 2024 using incomplete information, what
would they get wrong? Would they be stumped by fossil evidence of dogs wearing sweaters?
Investigate the following major archaeological and paleontological discoveries. What
circumstances and strategies allowed us to discover them, and what impact have they had on our
understanding of history and the present day? Discuss with your team: can you imagine a
discovery that would dramatically change the modern world? Rosetta Stone | Taposiris Magna
Stele | Borobudur | Petra | Sutton Hoo Aztec Calendar Stone | Ocomtún | Montevideo Maru |
HMS Endurance Lucy and Ardi (fossils) | Java Man | Taung Child Oldowan tool kit |
Paranthropus robustus | Tujiaaspis vividus Consider the use of AI to win the Vesuvius Challenge
by translating ancient scrolls—and the idea of applying the same approach to papyri damaged at
Herculaneum. Is it worth spending this many resources to read ancient documents with little
modern-day significance? What exactly are we looking for? Voice-dubbing and subtitles are the
two main ways that audiences can enjoy works in other languages. But neither is ideal: voice
dubbing can be low in quality and out-of-sync, taking people out of the performance, and
subtitles can be untrue to the original text while also taking away from the experience of hearing
and reacting to words one at a time. Now, AI can dub footage with simulations of the original
speaker’s actual voice in a different language, and as closely in sync to the movements of their
lips as possible. Check out this demonstration, then discuss with your team: will such AI-enabled
translation lead to more works being produced in more languages? Would you want to use it in
your personal life? When the Library of Alexandria burned down, it meant the loss of countless
documents that had never been converted into PDFs. The collection at the House of Wisdom was
destroyed when the Mongols swept by. Explore some of the largest libraries in the world today,
then discuss with your team: would we notice if they disappeared? After the fall of the Soviet
Union, statues of Josef Stalin and other heroes of the regime were quickly pulled down—but
now many are on display at Moscow’s Muzeon Park of Arts. Discuss with your team: when
monuments of past regimes are deemed unacceptable, should they be melted down, displayed in
a new location, or put in storage? Are there some historical artifacts unfit to be shown at all in
the modern world, even as examples of what could possibly go wrong?

Suppose a single drop of blood were enough to test you for a host of diseases; you could learn if
you had lupus with less pain than from a papercut. That was the marketing pitch of the company
Theranos; now the founder is in jail for fraud. The electric vehicle company Nikola (whose last
name was already taken) promised zero-emission trucks but demonstrated prototypes that had
zero functionality; now the founder is on his way to jail—for fraud. Although vaporware and
business scams have existed for decades, examples today seem more creative and egregious than
ever. Explore those below and discuss with your team: what did they have in common? Was it
mainly their charismatic leaders that led so many people to believe in them? Quibi | Life at Sea
Cruise | LuckIn Coffee Nikola | Bitconnect | FTX Cryptocurrencies and other decentralized
money tools have helped criminals scheme up new ways to conduct rug pulls, pump and dumps,
and Ponzi schemes. These are clear financial crimes in traditional markets, but when they are
taken online, regulators can struggle to keep up. Discuss with your team: who should be
prosecuting crimes on new platforms or in a virtual world? You may also want to explore how
these questions are resolved in the air and in outer space. With tools like ChatGPT and Gemini,
you could easily generate a fake term paper, or college essay, or World Scholar’s Cup outline.
Discuss with your team: when, if ever, is it illegal to use AI-generated text—and when should it
be? Recent studies have also shown that services intended to spot AI-generated text can be
unfairly biased against non-native speakers. Should their use be discontinued? Depending on
where you live, if you have ever backed up your DVDs or had your phone repaired, you may
have broken the law without knowing it. Explore the following examples, and discuss with your
team: should they be legalized? If not, should we stop them from happening? reverse engineering
| file sharing | jailbreaking ad blocking | fansubbing | aftermarket ink cartridges DeCSS | AACS |
Hackintosh | youtube-dl

The world is only as large as our voices can carry across it. The invention of the telegraph in the
1840s shrank the world; by 1858 the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic meant stockbrokers
in New York could track the price of gold in London. Imagine how different the world today
would be if news of events in other countries took weeks to reach you, then discuss with your
team: was the telegraph the Internet of the 1800s? Travelers used to buy maps at the bookstore or
gas station. Now, they debate whether Apple Maps or Google Maps offers better directions. (Or,
if you’re in Korea, Kakao or Naver; or if you’re in Russia, Yandex or Yandex.) But maps as a
rigorous way of imagining the world around us haven’t been around very long at all. Consider
the career of Inō Tadataka, who at age 55 set out on a quest to walk all around Japan, measuring
and mapping it. It took decades, but his map, published in 1821, was remarkably accurate. Check
out these other early map examples, many of which were less accurate. What led maps to
improve so much by the 20th century? Even improved, maps were still flat, and the Earth is
spherical—and there is no perfect way to squash a 3D object into a 2D one without distorting it.
(Please don’t try this on a teammate.) Read about some common projection types listed below,
then discuss with your team: which looks more like how you imagine the world? Which one
should we use in schools—and in what ways could our choice of map affect how we understand
the world? stereographic | Lambert | Mercator | Robinson Goode homolosine | Winkel tripel |
AuthaGraph | Miller azimuthal | conformal | conic | cylindrical Fifty years ago, if looking for a
restaurant while traveling in an unfamiliar city, you might have checked your trusty travel guide
—an industry that has suffered as more and more people now turn to crowd-sourced wisdom on
services like Google Maps instead. But now even how to find things on the Internet is changing.
For guidance, younger consumers are looking away from services such as Google Maps and
Tripadvisor toward social media apps such as Instagram and TikTok. Current map apps, one
Google executive has noted, are too much like paper maps that have been “stuck on the phone”;
he urges the company to reimagine how and why maps should be used—not just for directions,
but for sharing; not just for left and right turns, but for augmented reality revealing the actual
buildings around you. Discuss with your team: are there ways that maps can mislead us? And
what important new functions could map apps serve that they haven’t touched on yet? For most
of history, we didn’t know what the world looked like. It was only in 1972 that astronauts on the
final Apollo mission to the moon took the first photo of the entire Earth at once. This iconic
“Blue Marble” image has been credited with helping to inspire the environmental movement and
with disrupting traditional maps. Stripped of longitude and latitude, photos like the Blue Marble
helped show how large Africa was, and how national borders were nowhere to be seen. Then, in
1990, the space probe Voyager sent back a photo of the Earth from across the solar system. It
reduced our entire to a “pale blue dot”. The astronomer Carl Sagan hoped this image might
humble us as a species. Read this excerpt from his work, then discuss with your team: do you
think people would behave differently if they thought the Earth was larger, or if they didn’t know
what it looked like from above and beyond? In space, no one can hear people scream about
border disputes. The lines between countries vanish. But photos from orbit can reveal which
parts of the world are less economically developed: they’re the ones that go dark at night.
Discuss with your team: do images like these do more harm than good, by emphasizing the
different levels of economic prosperity in different parts of the world? Can you think of any
instances where a government might not want its people to know how its development compares
to that in other parts of the world? Evaluate Benjamin Franklin’s original proposal for Daylight
Savings Time, as well as the modern controversy around it. Consider also the impact of time
zones on health: for instance, it appears that people at the western end of time zones, where the
sun sets later, sleep less than those to the east. Discuss with your team: are there ways we could
change how we measure and keep track of time to improve human behaviour and other
outcomes? Should more countries follow China’s lead and have just one very wide time zone—
or more narrow ones? There may not be such a thing as a free lunch, but there are free rides to
lunch. Every day, thousands of people sneak onto subway trains without paying any fare. Rather
than delegate more police to enforcing the law, technology now allows new options, such as
these two gates in Washington, DC., and this one in New York. Similarly, cars can now
automatically stop people from driving too quickly. Discuss with your team: are there crimes that
technology could eliminate that we should allow to keep happening? A number of cities have
tried making public transportation free—for instance, Melbourne, Luxembourg, and Tallinn.
How successful have these efforts been? Discuss with your team: if the objective is to drive
people out of their cars, is it enough to make public transportation cheaper, or do governments
need to make driving more expensive? Windows began as literal holes in the wall—“wind-
eyes”—through which wind could pass for ventilation. Those who wanted less wind blocked
them off with shutters, animal skins, or paper. Later, the invention of stained glass let in light
while making rooms airtight, but you couldn’t really see through their pretty colors and design.
Today, clear glass windows are invisible everywhere. Explore the history of glass, then discuss
with your team: would the world be a better place with more transparency between people,
rooms, and buildings? Some school architects would say yes—at least those whose classrooms
are being reimagined as more open spaces, often with clear glass or even no walls at all between
them. The United States tried something similar in the 1970s, with mixed results. Would you and
your team want to learn in such a setting, or around a Harkness table? Are schools an institution
whose traditional classroom layout—with rows of chairs and desks—should be left well enough
alone?