Our third print issue features Catherine Lacey on worthless pictures; Elif Batuman on Miranda July; Chris Kraus on girlhood; the drawings of Daniel Johnston; poems by Ariana Reines and Eileen Myles; and dispatches on undersea rifts, baby-making on Mars, and climbing Stone Mountain. 

The following essay was first published in the catalog that accompanies the exhibition,

Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body

, at the Museum of the Moving Image, which runs until January 3, 2027. The book is available for purchase at 

You are lying half naked on an exam table in a darkened room, covered in crinkly, thin paper that provides a scrim of sterility and a nod toward modesty. Your bladder is uncomfortably full. The sonographer, fully clothed, sits at a computer monitor right next to you. She doesn’t make eye contact while she snaps on her latex gloves and explains what’s required: Please relax, it will make it easier to insert the wand. You try to be friendly, make a joke about her having “the most interesting job.” You can’t tell if she smiles behind her surgical mask. She tears open a red foil packet and extracts a Trojan condom, which she expertly rolls down the shaft of the probe. She squeezes a clear gel onto the tip with one hand, then gently pushes it past your labia and into your vagina. The goopy gel is cold, slimy, ectoplasmic, and then you feel the probe hit your cervix. You become aware of the cavity inside you and are suddenly attuned to its flexibility. You can feel your swollen uterus gently pop against your lower pelvic wall. The technician, never taking her eyes off the screen, uses her hand to push on your abdomen to get your organs closer to the transducer; it feels like you are being rearranged.

Sound waves map your interior: frequencies higher than what a human can hear echo and bounce off your insides, then back to the probe. Their pathways are translated into electrical signals. You think about a paper you wrote in college about echolocation in dolphins and bats. As the transducer explores, an abstract 2-D image appears on the computer screen. It looks like a solar system, a universe of anechoic areas, circular structures with an echogenic brim, a coronal cross section of a phantom. You study the sonographer, try to read her body language for an indication of positive or negative results. What does she see in the image?

She says once upon a time there will be a torso, once upon a time there will be lungs. This smudgy area, right here. Here is the beautiful heart. The two white lines are the spine. The white line of the femur. He’s saying hello! He’s yawning. Gray, white, and black patches float in a wedge-shaped beam of light. Measurements click with plus signs, landmarks of dotted lines. Following legislative orders, she speaks the language of viability as she scans for the unviable, narrating personhood on a bet. You look harder; you can’t distinguish the echoes of the machine from the echoes of the fetus. “What one sees depends on how one looks.” Your mind’s eye fails to fill the flat image with the fullness of human flesh.

Once the procedure is complete, the sonographer leaves the room to show the results to the doctor. You reach for your phone and take a picture of the screen just as she returns. She looks at you directly for the first time and tells you pictures are not allowed. Why is the image of your inside not yours for the taking?

You decide to take your business elsewhere. Just off the highway, there’s a fetal imaging center called Avatar, Inc., that promises exceptional 3-D and 4-D fetal keepsake images for a reasonable price. You lie on a white orthopedic bed, and you invite your friends to sit on the sectional sofa provided. Everyone has a good view of the fetal payload as it is projected onto a big screen. For the classic package, you get two black-and-white photos of the fetus with “lifelike,” baby-face, AI-enhanced imaging downloaded directly to your phone. For a slightly higher price you can get four photos, a gender determination, and a 10-minute video of your ultrasound set to music. There are also gold and platinum packages, as well as add-on options like a heartbeat buddy and a gender-reveal confetti cannon. No cold abstractions that require interpretive narration here. You can see a full-on baby with your own eyes, ready to get going once he leaves the fetal hotel room that is your body. He’s calling for room service right now. He’s ordering a turkey dinner. He’s drinking a bit too much and starting to bust stuff up. It’s a man’s world, baby!

The technician, never taking her eyes off the screen, uses her hand to push on your abdomen to get your organs closer to the transducer; it feels like you are being rearranged. 

In 1884, a pregnant woman in Northampton, Massachusetts, slipped and fell on a public road, which led to her having a miscarriage. In 

, lawyers argued that the town’s negligence had killed the fetus and that damages should be paid to the fetus’s next of kin, its mother. In his majority opinion, then state court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. determined that no such claim could be made because the child was part of the mother while in her womb and thus could not be treated as a separate entity. The mother and child were intimately entwined such that the fetus could not have a juridical existence. This understanding held for over 60 years.

After the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, scientists worked to find a way to see into the dark oceanic depths to aid in safer navigation around icebergs. During World War I, French physicist Paul Langevin invented the hydrophone, which used ultrasonic waves to locate German submarines; this technique of listening to sound echoes to “see” what was inaccessible to the human eye eventually led to the invention of sonar, but also to the invention of the medical ultrasound. Early experiments in the field used equipment borrowed from military installations.

In 1946, a Washington, D.C., District Court case (

) set a new precedent for the juridical life of the fetus. It was determined that an unborn child could now sue for injuries in the womb owing to medical malpractice. Justice Matthew Francis McGuire determined that Justice Holmes’s 1884 decision was based on a legal fiction and that “the law is presumed to keep pace with the sciences and medical science certainly has made progress since 1884.”

Technological developments in ultrasound imaging picked up steam in the late 1950s. Douglass Howry’s sonogram laboratory experiments—which required patients to sit uncomfortably in a tub of water—produced pictures, but they were grainy and difficult to interpret. A few years later, after using ultrasound to measure the diameter of a fetal head, Ian Donald helped invent the first 2-D ultrasound scanner, the Diasonograph. It was bulky and difficult to maneuver, but it produced the best images yet and in real time. Donald was a passionate antiabortionist, however, and was the first to pair ultrasound visuals with personifying narration to dissuade women from getting abortions. This subjective captioning of an abstracted image in the name of objective science—this determination that the image represents life itself—is at the foundation of antiabortion legislation today.

 declared that the word “person,” as used in the 14th Amendment, did not apply to the unborn. One week after the Supreme Court’s decision, the Human Life Amendment—which aimed to give the fetus equal rights from the moment of conception—was proposed in Congress; when it finally reached the floor for a vote in 1983, it failed.

Starting in the 1980s, as ultrasound technology became more portable and affordable, showing images of fetuses became a standard and ritualized practice of prenatal care. Invasive transducers that could be inserted into body cavities were also newly on the scene. As the technology advanced, legal arguments for the rights of the fetus grew louder and states began to pass their own restrictive fetal laws. While the body of the fetus came into focus, the body of the mother became less protected; her body became an incubator, another piece of equipment. Fetal homicide laws, originally written to protect pregnant women from violence, were reinterpreted to criminalize women for the loss of their own pregnancies and to indirectly establish fetal personhood. As of 2024, 38 states have passed fetal homicide laws.

She says once upon a time there will be a torso, once upon a time there will be lungs. This smudgy area, right here. Here is the beautiful heart. The two white lines are the spine. The white line of the femur. He’s saying hello! He’s yawning. 

Since the 1990s, required ultrasounds have become a key tool in antiabortion legislation—even though there is no medical benefit to having one before the second trimester. According to the Guttmacher Institute, as of 2025, in 27 states abortion providers must suggest to the patient that she look at the image while a compulsory ultrasound is being performed, six states mandate that providers must show and describe the image during the procedure, and 13 states require information on ultrasound services be provided to women seeking to end their pregnancies. The technology allows for the valuing of the image of the fetus above the body of the mother.

The first real-time ultrasound scanner with a 3-D/4-D option was brought online in 2000; though it produces the same information that a 2-D scanner provides, it is easier to use, and the enhanced images don’t require a trained sonographer to interpret them. It is understood that the primary utility of this technology is to make the fetus look more human. With the idea that this may foster a stronger maternal connection to the growing fetus, antiabortionists also see it as a tool that can lead women seeking to end their pregnancies to change their mind, even though studies have proved that viewing their ultrasound images has no effect on women who already are certain about their decision. In a 2014 study led by obstetrician-gynecologist Mary Gatter of over 15,000 women given ultrasounds as part of compulsory so-called abortion care, 99 percent of the pregnancies still ended in abortion, whether the women opted to look at the ultrasound images or not.

In 2020, an Oklahoma criminal court held that a viable fetus that is injured can be considered a “victim” of child neglect or abuse, seemingly overturning the 1884 

case. Meanwhile, legislators at both the federal and the state levels continue to fight to extend constitutional rights to fetuses and embryos from the moment of conception. Heartbeat laws restrict abortion to the first six weeks of pregnancy, speciously claiming that after six weeks a fetal heartbeat can be detected. In fact, at six weeks the fetal heart has not yet formed; the fluttering beats are the pulsing of cells vibrating toward cardiac development, which is completed by the tenth week. To access evidence of the beginnings of cardiac activity before six weeks requires a vaginal ultrasound (rather than an abdominal one), a requirement some states, like Wyoming, have mandated prior to an abortion in order to misleadingly prove fetal personhood. Critics have likened the requirement of this invasive procedure to state rape. Of note is that in the 

 in 2022, the Supreme Court justices were silent on the issue of fetal personhood.

, a short film about medical imaging, ends with narrator Paul Vaughan speculating a future where:

As we see more, we will come to consider our bodies in a different way. Perhaps as a dynamic system, rather than a static one. And as our understanding changes, our concepts of what we are will be changed, just as they were changed by the first men who looked, the first explorers of the human body.

Vaughan muses on how these groundbreaking technologies enable the medical gaze to look into the obscure interiorities of patients without cutting them open, affording a revolutionary way of seeing that will transform how we understand ourselves as humans.

Several centuries before the first ultrasound image flickered onto darkened glass, St. Thomas Aquinas observed in 

 that the human body, far from a static object, is a dynamic composite of matter and form, and as such it is a process, a substance in transformation. Bodies are perpetually in the process of becoming. As new cells regenerate to replace old ones as they die, the body is constantly unmade and remade. What happens, then, when it is possible to “see” inside of oneself, to bear witness to the self’s interiority, a self that is in a continual process of becoming? Lying next to the dark crystal, you can watch as the sonic eye sends out its waves blindly, penetrating your barricaded cage of flesh and bone.

The sonic eye emits high-frequency sound waves that ripple out to envelop and bounce off the folds and crevices of organs, of the self’s interior, collecting data that are relayed back to the software for translation, first as a binary code of zeros and ones, then as an image that can be perceived by the human eye. The waves erode our imaginings. All those stories that we humans tell ourselves about who we are—that we are solid, that we are static, that we are our 

, whole, impervious, and singular—come into question. To imagine that we are a multitude is an existential impossibility. The realization flickers into focus on the computer screen: We are meat. We are not, in the words of Aquinas, “a soul as a body.” We are only a body. The shock of obliteration is a feeling not unlike ice crystallizing in your veins—as when you helplessly witness the meat and bloody viscera explode from 

 officer Kane’s abdomen, his insides burst open by a phallus dentata fetus in the iconic scene in 

. The self’s humanity, the self’s certainty of the body being more than mere meat, of the self being a person with a soul, shattered into smithereens by the sonic eye. Something inside of you assumes an agency that overtakes your own humanity, your own personhood, and erupts from your interior to snuff you out: the ultrasonic portrait of your fetus.

It seems that now, from the vantage point of a post-

, ultrasound-mandates-that-legislate-the-forced-looking-at-fetal-images timeline, Western medical and political knowledge of the interiority of our bodies is dominated by the visual sense. Since (at least) the European Renaissance, sight has been valorized as the only human sense that confirms reality, that makes abstractions concrete and objective; sight is considered to have a unique access to the truth, above all the other sensory modalities that humans use to come into contact with the world. To see is to have and to hold power.

The technical ability to envision the process of becoming a human with the aid of the transvaginal ultrasound wand brings the sonic eye into the eye of the political storm. Although it enrolls the unseeing senses of touch and hearing while it probes and measures, it ultimately produces a distilled image, a 2-D (or 3-D or 4-D) visualization that flattens and erases the fullness of the living body. The already living life becomes just a means to visualize the life that could be—an organization of tissues in the process of becoming human, which are ideologically and potently crafted by the ultrasound into a fetal superperson.

While the body of the fetus came into focus, the body of the mother became less protected; her body became an incubator, another piece of equipment. 

When does one become a person? Does someone become a person because of a law or a technology? In our ultrasound era, personhood, you could say, is determined strictly through the visual sense: the sonic eye narrows the scope of humanity to a pinpoint of pixelated light and data visualization. The mother, a splayed-out specimen prodded by a biocompatible plastic probe, is a data-producing vessel for fetal life.

Yet, one might say that personhood is a social construct of place and time, defined by the net of social relations that catches a child. For the ancient Romans, for instance, personhood started at nine days after birth, when the newborn was presented to the baby’s familial relations beyond their parents. For the Wari, a culture indigenous to the Amazon Basin, personhood is slowly acquired over years, and it is embedded in social flows that can make or undo one’s status as a person over a lifetime. Personhood is only possible in a knot of social bonds that bind the person into kinship networks with other humans.

Or one could point to the haptic, the sense of touch and feeling, to locate the beginnings of personhood. For many who experience pregnancy, the developing fetus begins moving its limbs and torso sometime in the second trimester; this movement is called the “quickening.” In medieval Europe, Church authorities recognized the quickening as the crucial moment during pregnancy when the soul enters the body, which inaugurates personhood. The private sensation of the fetus fluttering against the sides of the uterine walls at around 16 weeks is what alerts the mother that she is in the company of another being. It is a sensation—a feeling of another's presence in your own body—that creates the bonding. Only she can access that deep-inside feeling of the quickening; no one and nothing else can. The vision of the sonic eye in the first trimester is just a projection of life, a conjecture, an avatar.

How to overthrow the tyranny of the sonic eye, the dehumanization of the medical subject through the fetal image? How to break the screen, tear off the gloves, and welcome her back into the mess of the tactile human netting? Maybe the first step is to recenter women’s experiences of their bodies; how their insides feel. Perhaps we must use our bare hands to smash the lenses, to destroy the regime of the sonic eye and replace it with touch. ♦

Mary F. E. Ebeling is a professor of sociology and an affiliate faculty member in the Center for Science, technology and Society at Drexel University. She is the author of 

Afterlives of Data: Life and Debt Under Capitalist Surveillance

Healthcare and Big Data: Digital Specters and Phantom Objects


Jena Osman is a poet. She is the author of 

ser-fk-raster

The Sonic Eye

Ben Lerner Speaks to the Dead

Entropy Plot

It may happen in 10 years. It may happen in one year. It may have already happened in a secret corporate or government facility. But whatever the timeline, a cataclysm is almost certainly coming. Someday soon, quantum computers will likely become powerful and stable enough to decrypt most of the documents and communications that have relied on encrypted security protocols for decades, including intimate chats, medical records, banking credentials, and state secrets.

The scenario unfolds as follows: One day, decades of your private digital life will be rendered public information, without your knowledge or consent. First, a handful of wealthy states and big tech companies will have access to your data. Then, as quantum computers become cheaper and your decrypted data gets repackaged and sold, other commercial interests will join in on the feast. Ultimately, given the ubiquity of datafied global networks, there’s no telling how many people will have access to your secrets. It’s easy to imagine a world a decade or two from now in which they’re simply available to anyone, in searchable public archives as easy to find as your birthday or a photo of your face. And, unless you’re a corporate executive, federal policymaker, or cybersecurity professional, it’s likely that nobody will have bothered to warn you about it.

We’re either hurtling or inching toward that future, depending on who you ask. In 2024, researchers at Shanghai University published a paper demonstrating success using quantum computers to break elements of 

 encryption, both longstanding backbones of secure digital communications, including web browsing, private email, secure chat, cryptocurrency, and VPN internet traffic.

News headlines proclaimed that the Chinese computer scientists had broken “military-grade” encryption tools, raising alarms about the potentially calamitous implications for cybersecurity and geopolitics. But other commentators pushed back on these claims, arguing that their accomplishment was little more than a proof of concept, and merely an incremental step in a long process that could take years or even decades to become a threat. RSA Security, the company behind RSA standards, rushed to reassure the millions of customers who rely upon their encryption, pointing out that quantum computers were still barely in the early stages of development, and catastrophe was still a long way off.

In the year or so since then, things have accelerated. For one thing, computer scientists at Google published research showing that “quantum computers may crack RSA encryption” with only 5 percent of the processing power than previously anticipated. For another, quantum processing power is growing far faster than many had hoped or feared. At the time of writing, for instance, the latest record was set by Caltech researchers, who created a quantum computer six times as big and 10 times as stable as the previous record set last year.

Computer security professionals have seen this threat coming for years. It’s been called many things. In our book, 

, we used the commonly-invoked term “the quantum cliff.” Others, such as a recent 

 article, call it “Q-Day.” Snarkier folks—especially those who still think it might be a tempest in a teapot—refer to it as “Y2Q,” a snide reference to the furor over the “Y2K bug” in 2000, which turned out to be a massive anticlimax (thanks in part to all the systems engineers who saw it coming and took adequate steps to prevent it).

From a technical standpoint, the quantum cliff is actually a much thornier problem than Y2K, because there’s no “patch” that can be applied to fix it, and the number of affected systems is colossally larger and more diverse. There are new, quantum-resilient encryption protocols, but because encryption standards aren’t forward-compatible, there’s no path to protecting everything that was previously encrypted under long-held standards like RSA and AES. And there’s currently no easy way to upgrade all of the computer and networking systems that currently serve as the infrastructure for global modern life.

Without any clear means of prevention, we are left with only the option of preparation. Yet, while governments and corporations have spent much of the last decade planning and strategizing for a post-quantum cliff future, the rest of us have been left in the dark.

To the extent that the media have covered the quantum cliff at all, the coming cataclysm tends to be treated as a cybersecurity or national security story. To be sure, these are pressing concerns, and the potential for economic, political, or even military disaster is very real. However, we shouldn’t ignore the equally transformative widespread social and cultural consequences for everyday people.

Privacy and secrecy are integral to the way we live our lives, and essential to our independence and autonomy as members of a democracy. Having our private lives exposed to our families, our neighbors, and our employers could be disastrous at the human scale, potentially destroying relationships, communities, and careers. Without any clear guidance from the tech sector or the government, it’s clear that the public at large will have to fend for ourselves if we want to avoid the worst-case scenario.

In order to understand why the quantum cliff is such a big deal, it’s important to understand some of the core technologies at work—beginning with quantum computers. A normal digital computer, like the one we used to write this article, and the one you may be reading it on, uses a microprocessor, which is basically a wafer of silicon with billions of minuscule transistors embedded in it. Each transistor is a tiny on/off switch, which either allows electrical signals to flow through it or blocks them. In the binary language of computer code, an open switch counts as a “1,” while a closed switch counts as a “0,” and the combination of ones and zeros is used to represent and process data. For instance, in ASCII, the standard system used to encode letters like the ones in this sentence, a capital F is rendered as 01000110. That’s known as an “eight-bit code” because there are eight ones and zeros required to store the information.

One of the reasons digital computers are powerful is because each transistor you add to a chip increases its computing power exponentially, by powers of two. One bit can appear in two different permutations (on or off), while two bits offer four permutations, three bits offer eight, and so on; when scaled up to billions of bits, the number of permutations is measured as two to the power of billions. (Even though modern encryption systems typically use only 2,048-bit processing algorithms, 2

 is still such an incredibly large number that mathematicians in most contexts consider it functionally indistinguishable from infinity.)

Having our private lives exposed to our families, our neighbors, and our employers could be disastrous at the human scale, potentially destroying relationships, communities, and careers. 

But quantum computers put digital computers to shame. Instead of tiny transistors, the elements of a quantum processor are energetic particles, such as electrons or photons, bound together through the “superposition” and “entanglement” that characterize quantum physics at subatomic scales. These particles are held in place by lasers or electromagnetic fields. Each particle acts as a “qubit” (a quantum bit), which can represent a one, a zero, or a superposition of one and zero at the same time.

This means that quantum computers calculate numbers based on powers of three rather than two, as digital computers do. While this may seem like a trivial difference, relying on powers of three means that quantum computers can represent very large numbers in a much more efficient way, and can therefore theoretically process information exponentially faster than digital computers. For instance, a 1,000-qubit computer does about the same amount of calculation as a digital computer with 10

 transistors on its circuit board (the fastest processor in existence today only has about 10

The ability for a single processor to perform calculations faster than all of the digital computers in the world put together—gazillions of times over—is what makes quantum computers such a serious threat to cybersecurity. Encryption is essentially just really difficult math.

RSA, for example, uses an “asymmetric” model in which there are two different secret keys: one public key for 

 (you’d use this to send us a secret email) and one private key for 

 (we’d use this to read the secret email). The public key is created by taking two really large prime numbers, multiplying them together, and then subjecting the product to a bunch of other mathematical operations. The private key comes from additional mathematical gymnastics applied to the same prime numbers, calculations that are fantastically tricky to reverse engineer.

The only way to break this kind of encryption is to figure out the original prime numbers. Even the fastest digital computers are phenomenally bad at this, and it would take millions of years of nonstop number crunching for your laptop to find the answer. Even accounting for 

, which has accurately predicted that digital computers would double in power each 18 months for the past 60 years, it would still take centuries to develop a computer fast enough to crack RSA. That’s why it’s still in use, decades after its invention.

But if there’s a quantum computing equivalent to Moore’s Law, and speeds triple every year or two (a benchmark that’s been beaten consistently over the past decade), breaking an RSA-encrypted file could, within the foreseeable future, take mere days, hours, or even milliseconds.

You might be thinking, Okay, that sounds pretty bad. But surely 

 secrets aren’t really in any danger, right? For one thing, nobody cares about little old me. Big tech companies and shadowy government intelligence operations are much more likely to target high-value secrets, like spaceship engine plans, nuclear codes, and the algorithms underpinning Bitcoin. And for another thing, even if they wanted to hack my private chats with my most recent Tinder date, they’d have to find them first, by stealing my phone or breaking into the dating app server. There’s no way it would be worth the hassle.

Those are very reassuring thoughts. Unfortunately, they’re dead wrong. The truth is that big tech companies and shadowy government intelligence operations probably 

 your private chats with your Tinder date, and they’re holding onto them, waiting for the day they’ve got a computer strong enough to decode them—a widely recognized strategy called “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later.”

There are three reasons for this—two technical and one economic. First, your private chats might be sitting on your phone or on a secure server somewhere, but in order to get from your phone to your date’s and back, they had to travel over the “open internet,” the same quasi-public communications infrastructure used for everything from email to Zoom calls to your fitness tracker. The open internet is a universally accessible network, which means a relatively central node can “see” online traffic from all over the world and is able to capture and store that traffic with the click of a button. What currently keeps your communications secret is that they’re encrypted before they’re sent and decrypted when they reach their intended location. Aanyone who intercepts and downloads them can see only a garbled version, not your actual messages—at least until they have the means to decrypt them.

This leads us to the second technical factor: The price of data storage has fallen precipitously over the last seven decades, and continues to fall at an exponential rate. A terabyte of digital information storage, which was then an unthinkably large amount of data, cost $87.59 billion in 1956. By the year 2000, that figure had fallen to $6,120. Today, the cost has fallen another 99 percent to around $60, and popular tech blogs frequently offer consumer-friendly articles assessing whether a terabyte is “enough” information for a typical digital consumer to store their own files, such as photos, videos, and computer backups.

This, in turn, leads us to the economic factor underpinning the “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” strategy employed by big tech companies and governments. Even if they assume that 99.9 percent of the encrypted traffic they hoover up from the open internet is worthless to them, the cost of collecting and storing it over time is so cheap that it’s still economically worthwhile to save it all, because that remaining 0.1 percent of traffic will be so valuable once it’s decrypted with quantum computers that it outweighs the costs. Your private chats, which they’ll decrypt along with everything else they collect, will simply be a form of collateral reputational damage.

If this scenario sounds far-fetched, consider that data brokers, the shadowy companies that currently track your online and offline behaviors to repackage and sell the data to advertisers, government agencies, and others, already

do this. We know this, in part, because we interviewed the co-founder of location data seller Foursquare for 

 and he told us point-blank that “sometimes, it’s easier just to store more stuff than it is to take the risk of deleting stuff.”

Anyone with access to the internet would be able to request a thorough accounting of anyone else’s historical behavior, speech, health and medical records, finances, purchases, employment, travel, sex life, drug and alcohol use, religious observances, and even subtler patterns of our lives.

Similarly, we have good reason to believe that governments have been practicing “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” for decades, because it’s in their national security interests. When federal intelligence contractor Edward Snowden exfiltrated government secrets in 2013 and shared them with the world, one of the files he shared was related to an NSA program entitled “Penetrating Hard Targets,” dedicated to building a “cryptologically useful quantum computer.” Combined with the NSA’s other large-scale internet surveillance projects, this strongly suggests that decrypting secure communications on the open internet is one of the agency’s primary areas of research and development.

While mass warrantless surveillance by government agencies and intrusive tracking and targeting by commercial organizations are bad enough, there are other, less savory actors who may exploit the quantum cliff to do even more harmful (and less legal) things. Terrorists might use quantum decryption to infiltrate or disable energy grids, transportation networks, and other forms of critical infrastructure that haven’t yet adopted next-generation encryption standards. Industrial espionage could run rampant, enabling pirates to plunder long-held trade secrets and cutting-edge innovations. Blackmailers, stalkers, identity thieves, financial scammers, and abusive trolls—who already thrive on our publicly available data such as social media posts and commercial data broker profiles—will have a field day once our private, encrypted data is added to the mix.

Ultimately it’s possible, and perhaps even likely, that our decrypted data will eventually become publicly archived and searchable by anyone, in perpetuity. Combined with generative AI tools like ChatGPT, this means that anyone with access to the internet would be able to request a thorough accounting of anyone else’s historical behavior, speech, health and medical records, finances, purchases, employment, travel, sex life, drug and alcohol use, religious observances, and even subtler patterns of our lives (person X always drinks after going to church; person Y lies much more to their sister than to their brother).

Much ink and many pixels have been devoted over the past few decades to the “death of privacy,” but this is something else entirely. Think of it as the death of secrecy.

What can be done? Businesses and governments that have known about the quantum cliff for decades have had time to prepare, and thus offer some clues, if not much hope, for the rest of us.

While nobody has come up with a way to retroactively protect all the stuff previously encrypted by RSA and AES against future quantum decryption, there is a whole new set of “post-quantum cryptography” (PQC) protocols that can be used proactively to secure data now and in the future. Congress passed a law in 2018, entitled the National Quantum Initiative Act, that created a 

 dedicated to preparing for the potentially beneficial and harmful impacts of quantum computing. Among other things, that office has selected four PCQ algorithms as official standards to replace vulnerable forms of encryption.

Industries are working to adopt these new encryption algorithms. For instance, a consortium of major financial institutions developed an initiative called “Project Leap,” which aims to use PCQ in place of traditional encryption in payments and communications. But as most academic research and business journalism has emphasized, there’s only so much preparation that can be done. We can’t know when or how hard Q-Day will hit, and many of its potential threats to national security and business simply can’t be anticipated.

The rest of us are even less well-prepared. Most people have no idea that a lifetime of secrets is likely to be exposed at some point in the not-so-distant future, and neither government agencies nor the popular press are bothering to tell us about it, let alone advise us what to do. Meanwhile, we send digital payments, message loved ones, check health scans, stream pornography, and talk shit about our bosses in group chats—assured by the good folks at Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, PayPal, and elsewhere that their encrypted apps and networks protect our private lives.

How will things change when we find out we were wrong? How can we live in a society without secrets, or at least without the guarantee that they’ll remain secret? Every relationship, no matter how healthy, relies on a certain amount of secrecy. Think about it: You don’t really want to know whether your lover thinks you look good in that new sweater, or what your 16-year-old was actually up to when they said they were doing homework with a friend. And you definitely don’t want your boss to know what you were up to last spring when you said you were in bed with a cold.

We even thrive on keeping secrets from ourselves. Think about the sick feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you take a bad selfie, then hastily delete it before anyone else can see what’s on your screen. Imagine that same feeling, but in every aspect of your life, all the time. None of us would willingly grant others the power to comb through the digital minutiae of our lives, reassemble it all, and shove it back in our faces.

A culture without secrets would amplify a culture of paranoia, a culture of bullying, a culture of self-hatred. A culture in which, in addition to oppressing us based on our race, gender, age, sexuality, or level of physical ability, we’d each be targeted based on our idiosyncratic weaknesses and peculiarities. A culture in which every private action, utterance, and inclination could be harvested for profit, or exploited for power.

Just like governments and businesses, we need to prepare for this new reality. We can’t prevent it from happening, but we can start to make changes in the way we live our lives, so that with any luck, when Q-Day comes, it’ll seem like less of a cataclysm and more of an anti-climax.

What does that mean in practice? As with solving any problem, the first step is to acknowledge we have one. We need to talk about data, power, and surveillance the same way we do about climate change, or pandemics, or the economy—as matters of shared concern, with the rigor and nuance they demand. We must understand that the struggle over who has access to data is a ubiquitous and powerful aspect of our environment, one that we can’t easily escape and shouldn’t risk ignoring. It should be reflected across every facet of culture: in our everyday conversations, daily news articles, and sit-com plots.

Much ink and many pixels have been devoted over the past few decades to the “death of privacy,” but this is something else entirely. Think of it as the death of secrecy.


On the flip side, we also need to understand that the digital world we’ve constructed for ourselves is neither inevitable nor all-encompassing. Just because we can’t unplug from the network doesn’t mean that it controls or contains everything that matters. Hard drives fail. Websites crash. Whole power grids go down. Our datafied world is unstable and ever-changing, and that gives us a lot of collective power to shape its future, and a lot of freedom to carve out spaces of intimacy and secrecy beyond its limits.

Putting those two observations together, we need to understand that personal secrecy and data security aren’t the same thing. Just because a database tracks your sleep, your steps, your messages, and your transactions doesn’t mean it 

 you. Only other human beings can do that, and only once we let them into the secret places within us that data can’t reach. The more we can intuitively differentiate between these two concepts, the better we can exert real cultural and social power in a data-saturated world.

This will require letting go of some ingrained digital habits. We’ll need to get better at understanding that someone “liking” your post on social media isn’t the same as them liking you as a person, or that a personal achievement, whether climbing a mountain or getting a raise, can be just as satisfying even if it isn't recorded and shared. More broadly, we’ll need to psychologically distance our authentic selves from the digital puppets constructed from our data: our social media personas, our fitness-tracker profiles, even our bank balances and school grades. We’ll need to reinhabit our bodies, renew our relationships, and reinvest in our communities. It’s a tall order, to be sure, but it’s better to do it proactively, before Q-Day blows everything apart.

Seen from this perspective, the looming threat of the quantum cliff might even be seen as potentially liberating. Once upon a time, only certain powerful institutions had the ability to decide what was secret and what wasn’t (think of all the speculation around the JFK assassination or Area 51). From Cold War-era spycraft to twenty-first-century surveillance capitalism, secrecy has been weaponized as a form of social control, and our personal data have become the keys to the shackles that bind us. Governments and corporations know more about us than we know about them or one another, and as long as we believe in the absolute power of data, we remain under their thumbs. In a post-Q-Day world, however, secrecy will depend less on the power to restrict and shape the flow of information, and more on the power to create narratives (e.g. whether it’s ethically appropriate to “out” a public figure with a secret Grindr profile) and build coalitions (e.g. the #MeToo movement). Secrecy will become less technical and more cultural. We can have more agency in choosing what data matters, and when.

This leads us to our final point: In order to prepare for the quantum cliff, and for a world without technical secrecy, what we need most is to be kind to one another (this will be the subject of our next book, tentatively called 

). Despite the overwhelming toxicity of contemporary online culture, which is rife with doxxing, flame wars, and deepfakes, we still have many social mores in which we choose to ignore publicly available data in the interest of preserving each other’s dignity and the integrity of our relationships. Most of us don’t peep through our neighbors’ windows as we’re walking down the street. We don’t scroll through our coworkers’ emails when they’re away from their desks. And we don’t obsessively track our partners’ cell phones even if they’ve shared their location with us. We consider those kinds of behaviors, even though they’re technologically feasible, to be violations of unspoken social rules, or, to put it plainly, creepy.

We developed these unspoken social rules for ourselves, because nobody with power ever bothered to spell out how we should treat one another's data. So we extended some of our existing social norms into the digital sphere, carrying over expectations of basic decency, even as the platforms encouraged us to share more and more in an unregulated free-for-all. In the U.S., we still have no federal data privacy laws, both because big tech companies have lobbied against them, and because the wannabe authoritarians in our government have long fantasized about a total surveillance state. Our technology is not designed to keep our secrets very well, and our economic system rewards people for voluntarily relinquishing their own secrets and one another’s. And yet, most of us choose not to be creepy. Even without specialized expertise in data security or well-defined policy goals, we intuitively and collectively understand how to take care of ourselves and one another—and we limit our data collection and sharing as a basic duty of care.

We’ll need to do the same thing, on a grander scale, with the vastly larger and more sensitive volume of data that will be revealed after the quantum cliff. We may no longer be able to keep our secrets safe from others, but we can keep other people’s secrets safe from ourselves. It may sound like an impossibly steep climb, but history demonstrates that solutions to problems like these are always developed from the bottom up, not the top down.

If and when Q-Day arrives and those secrets are suddenly revealed, we can choose to ignore them. We can look away from our screens, and into one anothers’ eyes. We can finally free ourselves from the shackles of surveillance society, and choose to accept others based not on what the data unwittingly reveals about them, but rather on what parts of their lives and hearts they choose to share with us. Damn the data, we can choose to be kind. ♦

Aram Sinnreich is a musician, a professor of Communication Studies at American University in Washington, D.C., and the author of five books, most recently of 

The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in the Age of Algorithmic Surveillance

 (MIT Press, co-authored with Jesse Gilbert)


Jesse Gilbert is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the intersection of visual art, sound, and software design. He was the founding Chair of the Media Technology department at Woodbury University, and he has taught interactive software design at both CalArts and UC San Diego.

gen-mondwest

Over the Quantum Cliff

To celebrate the paperback launch of Robert Macfarlane’s

, we’re delighted to share the video from the book’s U.S. debut. The author sat down with PW Director of Publishing Joshua Jelly-Schapiro to discuss our relationship with water, and with life itself.

In this extraordinary work, Macfarlane explores a radical and urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in both imagination and law. Through three unforgettable journeys—from Ecuador’s cloud forests and mountain streams to India’s polluted creeks and lagoons and Canada’s wild rivers—he interweaves the story of a fragile chalk stream near his home in England, flowing through his own life and years. ♦

Robert Macfarlane Says Rivers Are Alive

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I’ve been making collages for close to 60 years, since I was a teenager. I guess you could say that collage-making has been my 

—Ingres, the painter, liked to exercise his unpainterly emotions by fiddling. For me, the work similarly provides another channel for my outsized ambitions. It also answers a permanent need. I had wanted to be an artist since I was a toddler, but I was colorblind and all thumbs. I couldn’t get my drawing to do what I wanted it to do. Collage was a way to make art while skirting my deficits. And collages were very hip in the late 1960s. I noticed Eve Babitz’s collages on the covers of rock albums, and the collages in 

by someone who called himself Sätty, and the use of collage by psychedelic poster artists such as Stanley Mouse. And I’d seen Max Ernst at the Museum of Modern Art and thought his collages of the 1920s were as hip as anything out there today. I had scissors, Elmer’s glue, and a sheaf of oaktag. My parents subscribed to 

 magazine, and someone had for some reason given us a lot of back issues of 

. I made one collage after another. All I can remember of them now is that at least two featured a mushroom cloud, a popular image at the time, and I was very proud to have followed the trend.

I went back to drawing not long after that, and didn’t resume collages until my first post-college job, at a large secondhand bookstore in lower Manhattan. Soon after I started there I was put in charge of the paperbacks, which meant that when the store acquired a library, I would be handed everything that wasn’t a hardcover book to judge and price. The result was a continual flood of collage materials, of every possible sort: magazines, newspapers, maps, posters, technical manuals, programs from the Folies Bergère, South Vietnamese government propaganda, disbound nineteenth-century geographies, entire stamp collections. Furthermore, I now had venues. Many of my friends had formed bands, and I started making collaged gig flyers for them—which also entailed going out and wheatpasting them furtively at night, but then you’d see your work in the streets. And in the run-up to a narrowly avoided strike, my bookstore colleagues and I started a zine, intended as a gripe sheet, that instead came to feature art and poetry. I put in my collages, as well as a collage-and-text series by my pseudonym, Dave Carluccio.

But I quit the bookstore and all the bands broke up and I no longer had a context for making collages, so I stopped, for decades, if begrudgingly. That didn’t prevent me from dragging my stock of materials from one apartment to another, and house to house. (I still have, and sometimes use, paper I acquired at the bookstore 50 years ago.) It was social media that finally brought me back. That and a book-exchange table that my local supermarket had for a while, where I found the damnedest things: German medical textbooks from the 20s, crudely illustrated Spanish pamphlets from the 30s, movie-star magazines from the ’40s. I deplore social media, of course, and the people who own these platforms, but Instagram is about pictures, my weakness, and gathers together many real-life friends. I am guaranteed an audience.

By now I have enough magazines to stock a midtown Manhattan newsstand in the 1950s. I favor imagery going back to the early years of the twentieth century and ending around the time of my birth, which was 1954. (When I was young, I had a theory that one’s clothing tastes were determined forever by the fashions one saw after leaving the womb.) I like a matte finish, and everything after that is too glossy. Also, a certain knowingness comes in; before the 1960s there was a prevailing innocence, visible in the faces in the crowd—as well as the terms in which they were pitched by commerce—that is now impossible to recapture. I also favor fading, foxing, water stains, scorch marks, rips, tears, all the blemishes that mark the distance between that time and our eyes. I grew up in postwar Europe, so before I ever saw movies or television or heard a pop song on the radio, it was magazines and movie posters—which were glossy and imposing until they were shredded and contemptible—which were the chief signifiers of the big world and its drama, that indefinable thing I wanted to escape to from an early age. 

Now and then I’ll also dabble in nineteenth-century engravings, but the truth is that between them, Max Ernst and Bruce Conner sewed up that field once and for all. I am in thrall to the collage tradition. The earliest work I know hangs in my house, a long-ago wedding gift. Against a midnight-blue backing dotted with stars, a tangled web of foliage entwines various cavorting mythic figures, including two by William Blake and one by John Flaxman, strangely streaked here and there with long drops of blood. It is dated 1860 on the back and attributed to John Bingley Garland, described as “an English clergyman,” who was nothing of the sort. (An album of 43 of his collages, known as 

, was once owned by Evelyn Waugh.) And then, running along the walls of the gallery in my mind, are Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell and Valentine Hugo; Aleksandr Rodchenko and El Lissitzky and László Moholy-Nagy; Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield and Kurt Schwitters; Wallace Berman and 

; Gil J. Wolman and Jean-Louis Brau and Guy Debord; Joe Brainard and Robert Rauschenberg; Tadanori Yokoo; Jean-Michel Basquiat and Richard McGuire.

I think of my collages as posters, no matter what size they are. Since they are often dominated by a word or a phrase, they could be advertising imaginary movies or bands—or perhaps less tangible attractions. Simplicity is always the best bet, so I like to work with as few elements as possible: word, background, figure; I’ve made collages with only two ingredients. Much like writing, making collages involves drastically using up options: 50 percent with the first item, 25 percent the next, and so on. The ideal result is something tight, inexplicable, and inexplicably tight. I enjoy the challenge of making an object that can be consumed by the eyes with no thought involved, and at the same time introduce a thought that lies just on the edge of meaning, preserving maximum ambiguity. 

Lucy Sante is a Belgian-born American writer, critic, and artist whose forthcoming book is 

. The following essay was written to accompany her exhibition 

, which is on view at the American Academy of Arts and Letters from March 14 to July 3, 2026.

ser-scandia-stencil

Lucy Sante's Knots

All the Great Men of Science said so, if this rash young man went to live with the real King Kong, Africa’s monstrous mountain gorilla. Known the world over for its crazed chest‑beating and hooting, slavering scream, this ape was savagery incarnate, or worse: a creature—as the first Westerner to ever see one had warned—of that “hideous order, half man, half beast.” Fearing that not even bullets would stop the demon, Paul du Chaillu had ordered his men to load their flintlocks with ragged hunks of cast iron. None ever forgot the goliath’s dying groans, “full of brutishness” yet “terribly human.”

George Beals Schaller had read Du Chaillu’s account when he set off for the Belgian Congo in 1959. He knew that Carl Akeley, who had killed five gorillas to stuff for the American Museum of Natural History—pausing along the way to strangle an attacking leopard with his bare hands—had called any white man who got close to one without shooting “a plain darn fool.” He had listened to famed paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey argue with other “old Africa hands” over whether Schaller should wear armor or a disguise, what weapons he should carry, whether he would survive at all.

And then, without retinue or pith helmet, George went to the gorillas. Alone. When charged by a roaring silverback, he stood his ground. He couldn’t have shot the brute if he’d wanted to. Certain that it would change his bearing in ways the apes would sense, he had refused—then and forever after—to carry a gun.

What emboldened a 26‑year‑old graduate student to defy the scientific magi, in these jungles and for the rest of his life? How did he step free of the fear that has driven so much of human history, and into relationships no scientist had yet ventured, including with Earth’s most reviled creatures?

History offered scant precedent for approaching wild animals in Schaller’s utterly unguarded way. Most zoologists had until then studied only specimens on cold tables, or broken creatures in shackles or cages. C. R. Carpenter had observed free‑living howler monkeys in Panama and gibbons in Thailand, but even he soon retreated to the controlled environment of his rhesus macaque compound in Puerto Rico. Konrad Lorenz’s studies of animal behavior would win him the Nobel Prize, but he had met his feather-weight geese and jackdaws as near pets within the menagerie he made of his own home.

The animals Schaller would spend his life with were far bigger than any of those, and sometimes truly dangerous. But they could be known, he believed, only by entering their world. So he transformed scientific practice: committing months or years to winning the trust and acceptance of lions and tigers and bears, assimilating to their rhythms and rules, endeavoring to see the universe through their eyes.

Though risky for a young scientist, that meant breaking all prevailing norms. For much of the twentieth century, the natural sciences, extending a lineage that ran from Descartes to B. F. Skinner, had insisted on a “disinterested” stance toward creatures seen to be of a distinctly lower order: insensate automatons, animated only by reflex. For the serious scientist, they were data; by “twisting the lion’s tail” (in Bacon’s apocryphal phrase) the “objective” investigator could answer a question, test a hypothesis, advance his own grand theories.

Nature held out a path not to cold mastery but to communion, a stepping free of the self into something far larger and more powerful.

Schaller stood nearly alone in claiming a radically different conception of nature and science, this one descended from the nineteenth‑century Romantic understanding that the “expression of the emotions in man and animals,” as Darwin titled his final book, were variations on an evolutionary theme. If animals’ interior lives were closely akin to our own, empathy and intuition became critical instruments for understanding them, and lyricism for expressing their complexity. Nature held out a path not to cold mastery but to communion, a stepping free of the self into something far larger and more powerful.

Schaller’s quest to know these others would take him into six continents and a life of high drama and romance. Unmoored from his earliest days, he never quit moving, crashing into all the darkness and light the century had to offer, piling up enough brushes with death, transcendent encounters, and grand adventures to fill a dozen lives. Born in Berlin in 1933 to an ambitious young American socialite and a pliant diplomat working for Hitler, he survived aerial bombings, American soldiers’ rough searches, and a narrow escape from the Russian zone—fending for himself much of the time, evacuated again and again as the front closed in. Completing high school in Missouri as an enemy alien, then college in the territory of Alaska, he joined the expedition that gave birth to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, writing the trip report that ultimately helped sway Eisenhower. He stayed through the violence that erupted when Belgium abruptly left Congo, witnessing the tragedy that unfolds when desperate animals and desperate people collide, and taking mad risks to protect the gorillas. Again and again, for the sake of the giant panda or Marco Polo sheep, he navigated historic upheavals—from the aftermath of China’s Cultural Revolution to the flood of Kalashnikovs, Apache helicopters, and opium dealers unleashed in Afghanistan by its series of imperial wars.

Despite all the wrecked countries and tense borders, the informants, corrupt officials, and opportunistic expats, Schaller completed an astonishing run of first‑ever studies—of Indian tigers, Serengeti lions, Himalayan snow leopards, Brazilian jaguars, Chinese pandas, Gobi Desert wild camels, and the grand mountain goats, sheep, antelope, cats, and bears of the Tibetan Plateau, to which over 40 years he was granted a near‑unfettered access no other Westerner has ever had. As David Attenborough, one of his myriad acolytes, once said, “I thought he must sit back and think: What other impossible creature can I imagine that nobody else could get near?”

Coming of age just as air travel became commonplace, Schaller reached far more of the planet than Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, or any of the earlier generations of adventurer‑naturalists. And, in this age of specialization, likely more than any since. Focused by his thirties on the unprotected and unstudied expanses where most life on Earth remained, he walked thousands of miles alone or with local companions, often traversing landscapes outsiders had never seen.

In many of those places—Pakistan’s scorched deserts, Sichuan’s iced bamboo forests, Brazil’s sultry wetlands—he stayed, sometimes for years. Settling into leopard or panda time, he endured alongside them the shrapnel of sandstorms, freezing blizzards and blistering heat, hunger, thirst, leeches, and larvae that burrow under the skin—and also their wild freedom, griefs, and loves. On occasion, he traveled even across time. Driven to know what life was like when we ourselves were still wildlife, he once spent a week living as a hominid near the site of our African origins, reliant on tools of his own making and scavenging what he couldn’t kill.

Like devotees across centuries, Schaller embraced the mortifications of the flesh and extreme tests inflicted by these pilgrimages—from abandonment in a whiteout at 17,000 feet to venomous snakes in malarial jungles. He came to know many kinds of emptiness and aloneness.

All was made bearable by his love, from age 19 to the end of his life, for the slight, acerbic, ever‑undaunted Kay Morgan. It was she who kept their sons from toddling into the tiger ravine, she who ran after the pet baby warthog and bottle‑fed their rescued lion cub, searched out vegetables to stave off the boys’ rickets, shepherded them through middle school in Lahore while their father vanished for months into Asia’s highest mountains. Though she loved wildness as much as he, she paid her own high price for his commitment, superseding all others, to the largest idea of family.

Like the Horatii swearing their oath to Rome as wives and children wept, Schaller’s code of honor seemed of another age. Those asked to describe him often reached for archaic phrases. He was a “pillar” in the world, a man of “sterling character” and deep humility, a companion one would entrust with one’s life. He was not without powerful internal drives—the explorer’s to be first, the scientist’s to know and name, the artist’s to faithfully convey, the missionary’s to save. But his own psychology never much interested him, far less, certainly, than the mystery of these other beings. Much of his power lay in all he didn’t need: not wealth, nor fame, nor even adulation—at least from humans. Lacking (as his younger son put it) the “selfie emotions,” he steadfastly refused whatever might steal his time or dispirit him, including solipsism.

Instead, it was to the world that he brought his attention, as intense and devout as prayer. His patience and openness were the very opposite of the shallow, inflamed voyeurism we call our attention economy, so bent on searching out all the ways we are not “them.” What kept Schaller going through decades of acute danger and misery, political chaos and heartbreak, was an urge few beyond children or poets remember: to climb inside the other’s skin, to live unalienated in the manner of a bird or caribou. To be recognized as someone others needn’t fear.

If ultimately on a spiritual quest, Schaller had an immeasurable impact on the world. It’s hard to find a wildlife biologist on any continent untouched by “the most important animal researcher in the twentieth century,” as admirers from Attenborough to Michael Crichton have called him. It was Schaller who guided Jane Goodall in the first months of her chimp study. It was his work that Dian Fossey took up a decade later: She learned from him how to use noseprints to identify individuals and even worked with his tracker Sanwekwe, though she never forgot Mary Leakey’s withering dismissal: “‘So you’re the girl who’s going to out‑Schaller Schaller.’ It was an intimidating thought to carry with me.” The first chapter of her memoir, 

, is titled “In the Mountain Meadow of Carl Akeley and George Schaller”; in the film version, after Fossey (Sigourney Weaver) has fled headlong down the mountain pursued by a roaring male, the character based on Sanwekwe (John Omirah Miluwi) asks her, “What does Schaller’s book say when a gorilla charges?” It says, she answers, “Never run.”

Schaller’s nearly two dozen books, the finest of which zoologist Desmond Morris, author of 

, ranked with the works of Darwin, Lorenz, and W. H. Auden, inspired many: Robert Sapolsky became a primatologist after reading 

; E. O. Wilson drew heavily on Schaller’s gorilla and lion studies in Sociobiology. His exacting methods—which included a “micro‑documentation [of the] frequency, weight, section count and position excreted of the creature’s faeces” that one admirer called “astonishing”—set the standard for all who followed, and cemented the enduring value of his studies. Half a century later, his monographs on gorillas, tigers, and lions are still relied upon by scientists and conservationists as their bible.

Most fundamental was his remaking, or recovery, of our understanding of animal consciousness. In the way that tunnels now give wild animals safe passage under highways, Schaller carried older, even ancient, values safely through the arid wastelands of modern science. His vivid rendering of these creatures—their singular personalities, memories, aspirations, friendships, and rivalries—laid the ground for generations of scientists who followed. Emulating his methods, they have reached across to elephants, octopuses, owls, hawks, crows, wolves, and myriad others, taking as given his insights on those beings’ complex societies, communication, and minds. His influence reverberated far beyond science, marking some of the most important cultural artifacts of the past half century. Schaller is the “GS” who led Peter Matthiessen in search of the snow leopard. Director Stanley Kubrick based the Dawn of Man sequence that opens 

 on his gorilla work, and Crichton wrote him into the sequel to 

, offered to a diffident young scientist as an exemplar, a renegade who proved expert after expert to be “wrong . . . just wrong.”

His impact on the global political landscape was just as profound. From his walks across continents, he grasped before others, and more comprehensively, the radical changes unfolding in even the remotest places. Over seven decades he saw the before and after, crossing terrain largely unaltered since the Pleistocene, but also lands once vibrating with millions of animals now emptied of life. Witnessing firsthand our modern Great Dying, he led his peers in turning from pure science to learning what animals need to survive, setting in motion what in the 1970s would become the new field of conservation biology. And despite a reserve that borders on the hermetic, he proved masterful at diplomacy—persuading governments to protect parks in China, Afghanistan, and a half dozen other countries that together span more than 200,000 square miles, an area bigger than France. Were it not for Schaller, we would likely have no mountain gorillas, no wild pandas. As 

 author Eric W. Sanderson put it: “George saved more nature than anyone, ever.”

That accomplishment depended on yet another, if far slower, transformation. When Schaller began his work in the Belgian Congo, conservation was still infected with ideas of the white man’s burden. The men in London and Brussels who ruled the fate of most of the world’s wild animals asserted the same authority over the people who lived alongside those animals. They were “Naturvölker” to be managed, or intrusions on Eden to be cleared away.

Perhaps opened up by his rebellion against the scientific establishment to other kinds of knowledge, Schaller was able, stepwise, to see more. From the Gwich’in in Alaska and Batwa in Congo he learned how deeply people with millennia of tenure know the animals and land. In India he saw that tigers would be safe only if their human neighbors were too; in Nepal, that villagers and wild sheep depended on the same forests and grasslands, and were equally doomed if the trees and grasses were stripped by loggers or overgrazing. Though it would take decades, he would come to see in China and Afghanistan that it had to be the local communities who shaped and enforced protections, because it was right, and because it was the only way they’d endure.

As George grew into these insights, he helped pull the world along with him, leading a process still underway of decolonizing conservation. As head for many decades of global field science at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the nation’s longest‑running wildlife conservation organization and the first to hire field scientists, he advanced community‑led conservation and nourished what he counts as his most important legacy: three generations of Indian, Chinese, Brazilian, Rwandan, and Afghani scientists, many of them women, creating new possibilities in their home countries for animals and humans together.

Though he is a magnificent writer, winning many honors including a National Book Award, Schaller always counted himself a “biographer of animals.” Far from the “awful lot of ‘I’” that characterizes much nature writing, he offered only sparing glimpses of himself. Subsumed in these other beings’ lives, the existential crises he wrestled with were theirs. He had practical reasons, too, for his self‑effacement: In places like China, he was often most effective when least visible.

Having turned down many biographers, he submitted to my scrutiny only late in life, hoping (it seems) to leave one more useful bit of himself behind. Because I had spent half my life working in conservation, for the U.S. Forest Service and Environmental Defense Fund, and written in previous books about the challenges and synergies in reconciling human and nonhuman lives, he thought I could be trusted, he later told me, to be true to the complexities.

Over the course of nearly six years, George and Kay allowed me to spend many days in their New Hampshire home, interviewing them individually and together and wading through family albums, letters, diaries, and crates of slides, fossils, horns, and other treasures. George often loomed about as I worked, answering any scientific questions precisely, even ones he’d not considered for half a century. Twice, we traveled together. In early 2020 we went to India where, more than 50 years after his landmark study of tigers, acolytes traveled many days and nights to meet him, and locals still sought his guidance on how to resolve life‑or‑death conflicts between humans and wildlife—pressed into closer proximity there than anywhere else on Earth. Though I saw how ill at ease he was in the throngs jamming India’s streets and airports, he clearly loved animal teemings, content to watch for hours as sambar, wild pigs, chital, and finally a tiger wandered through the maidan. A second trip to the U.S.–Mexico borderlands in summer 2024 found him still intent at 91 to understand how the border wall had doomed Arizona’s historic population of jaguars, and how Mexican and American scientists were working together to recover them.

Much of his power lay in all he didn’t need: not wealth, nor fame, nor even adulation—at least from humans.

Like all who spend time with him, I crashed into his world‑class taciturnity. Most people, when invited to talk about themselves, go on and on. George answered as tersely as possible, then stopped; there was no warming to the attention nor pleasure at the sound of his own voice. “Not easy to know,” Peter Matthiessen once said of him.

Silence is an obligatory habit for those who watch animals. But Schaller’s went further. Dropping again and again into new countries—32 in all—each infinitely complex in its history, social structures, and politics, he learned to listen, speaking on what he knew (ecology), quiet on all he recognized that even years in a country would not suffice to understand. Running deeper still was an awkwardness born of his perennially exiled and perilous childhood. Cat biologist Alan Rabinowitz, who overcame the isolation imposed by a childhood stutter by visiting the jaguars in the Bronx Zoo, saw in his mentor a familiar hesitancy. George himself saw that “animals tend to be shy because people have made them afraid” with our noise and menace, because he had been made shy that way too.

My task, in short, often mimicked Schaller’s: to peer into an opaque creature. I stumbled into a second, stranger parallel when George and his siblings put 70‑year‑old Bundesarchiv documents into my hands. Like my father, who had escaped from Germany in 1939 but returned in 1941 as an American spy, Schaller’s father spent the last years of the war in Bavaria, interrogating high‑ranking prisoners of war. Our fathers had the same job, that is, on opposite sides.

It was the Schallers’ openness, matched by their gift across generations for preserving artifacts, that ultimately made my biography possible. I was permitted to read a century of letters saved through war, exile, and many transcontinental moves; journals kept by Kay and the boys; “lost” materials including Schaller’s proposal to Pakistan’s Zulfikar Ali Bhutto for a national park; talismans saved by others, like his 1973 packing list for Peter Matthiessen. Colleagues and friends across 16 countries were just as generous with their vivid memories, dating as far back as the early 1960s.

Richest of all were the two daily field journals Schaller kept for 70 years—one for data, one narrative—recording in real time everything seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt by one of history’s most acute sensoria. It was through this writing, said colleague David Western (called Jonah, as he will be here), that “George thinks and reveals himself.” As the first to read the more than 20,000 pages, now archived at the Yale Peabody Museum, I found “that real poetry,” as Nabokov called it, “with which the live experience of these receptive, knowledgeable and chaste naturalists endowed their research.”

Yet even in these stunningly precise accounts, the intensity cannot be felt vicariously. It is only through presence, our own animal body, that one can know the peace of being allowed near a wild creature or of having it meet your gaze; the primal anxiety of standing alone in a boundless landscape, ill‑equipped with a human’s weak senses to know who else is alive nearby. That I share with Schaller a call to these other beings posed a paradoxical obstacle. It is hard to explain a love one can’t imagine being without, to describe this deepest antidote to loneliness offered by the more-than‑human world. ♦

Excerpted from HOMESICK FOR A WORLD UNKNOWN: THE LIFE OF GEORGE B. SCHALLER by Miriam Horn. Copyright © 2026 by Miriam Horn. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Miriam Horn is an author, environmental advocate, journalist and filmmaker. Her fourth book—

, from which the excerpt below is drawn—is the first full biography of wildlife biologist George Schaller.

mus-french-typewriter

He Saved More Nature than Anybody, Ever

This essay was originally written to be released with Meshell Ndegeocello’s acclaimed 2024 LP, 

No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin

(Blue Note). Ndegeocello has now moved on from performing Baldwin material. But we’re honored to publish this piece in homage to her work—and in anticipation of the great bassist’s 

concert at Pioneer Works on March 29, 2026

In the old days—in the way back times, way back in what the American author, James Baldwin, called "the old country," or the American South—folks carried their dead with them. Took those shadows and memories down roads and into attics, let them romp and breathe by riverbanks in Georgia, told them stories in Maryland, gossiped with them for a spell in Pensacola, and Washington, D.C. The point was you didn't let the dead stay dead: they were your legacy, and your voice, and in talking to, about, and through them, you learned how you sounded as well, where those multitude of voices sat in your own throat.

You can hear the voices the gone but not gone leave us with in Meshell Ndegeocello's altogether brilliant sonic theatre piece, 

, a work that contains a cavalcade of voices, sounds, and unique utterances around one subject: James Baldwin, whose centenary we celebrated in 2024. But is celebration really the word? In Ndegeocello's hands and hearing, Baldwin was always there, an astonishing presence whose voice—whose multitude of voices as novelist, playwright, poet, screenplay writer, and especially essayist—always talked to us, if we only listened.

Born and raised in Harlem, Baldwin's writing created a universe rooted in the real: the reality of his queerness, his race, the fecundity of his ever expanding mind and heart, and the reality of his ancestors, all the voices that came before and helped make his voice. These included Henry James, his mother Berdis Baldwin's comforting sound, the wrath, piety, and drama, in the King James Bible, gospel music, the critic Edmund Wilson —and, too, the songwriter Charles Albert Tindley. Tindley may not have been a direct influence on Baldwin. But you can hear his retroactive influence on the writer in Tindley's hymn, "Take Your Burden to the Lord and Leave it There," a hymn Baldwin, the boy preacher—he preached from the time he was 14; when he was 17, he stopped—might very well have sung on one of those Harlem Sundays, his white shirt stiff with starch and his heart beating out the rhythm as he clapped his hands, flashed a tambourine:

Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.
If you trust and never doubt, He will surely bring you out.
Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.

But where could Baldwin leave his burden? Raised in the Christian church by a preacher father who embraced Jesus but who could not love his adopted son, Baldwin competed for his father's attention by becoming a preacher, too, an authoritative role he used, in the end, to distance himself from the terrifying complications of his own blackness and maleness in a country that did not love either. One place he could hear his complexity—the complexity of his mind and heart—was in music. "It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a proactive sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story," Baldwin wrote in his 1951 essay, "Many Thousands Gone." He goes on:

It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear. As is the inevitable result of things unsaid, we find ourselves until today oppressed with a dangerous and reverberating silence; and the story is told, compulsively, in symbols and signs, in hieroglyphics; it is revealed in Negro speech and in that of the white majority and in their different frames of reference. The ways in which the Negro has affected the American psychology are betrayed in our popular culture and in our morality; in our estrangement from him is the depth of our estrangement from ourselves. We cannot ask: what do we really feel about him—such a question merely opens the gates on chaos. What we really feel about him is involved with all that we feel about everything, about everyone, about ourselves.

If music is unadulterated storytelling—the story that tells the truest story of us, and you, too—how do we make that music? What is the story we mean to tell through sound? In 

, which Ndegeocello and her magnificent colleagues Justin Hicks, Abe Rounds, Chris Bruce, Jebin Bruni, Julius Rodriguez, Jake Sherman, Kenita Miller, and Staceyann Chin worked on for eight years, we feel ourselves to be in the presence of a kind of inheritance: not only the words Baldwin left us, particularly when he published 

, his devastating report on the ways in which ideals of beauty and masculinity destroy as many lives as they hope to make, but how we, his audience, remade Baldwin, while taking some things away. Such as his queer body. His right to his sexuality and thus love. The intimacy that affects being. Did he sacrifice all that to be a voice—our voice? 

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Lucy Sante's Knots

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He Saved More Nature than Anybody, Ever

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Issue 03, Available Now

Issue 03, Available Now