with Stephen Johnson • Thu 4 September, 2025
Hey Big Thinkers,
Life would be a tedious hell if we never traded realism for utility. A realistic video game would make your character sleep seven hours, answer spam phone calls, and sit in rush-hour traffic. The heroes in action movies would roll on the ground and scream in agony because you’re not meant to jump off buildings like that. And no more sending emojis to convey emotions: only photos of your facial reaction in real time.
We usually want things — our art, our models — to be useful, not perfectly realistic. The 16th-century cartographer Gerardus Mercator had that in mind when he created the Mercator projection, which most world maps still use today. The Mercator projection made navigation far easier because it turned the curved paths of Earth’s surface into straight lines for sailors.
But the map’s utility comes with a tradeoff: It greatly distorts the relative size of landmasses, showing, for example, Greenland and Africa as the same size, even though Africa is 14 times as large. Now, the African Union is calling for an update to the world map, arguing that more realism might bring practical benefits to the continent.
Read on,
Stephen
THE BIG CONTINENT
Africa wants its true size on the world map
The African Union’s gripe isn’t so much that the Mercator projection makes the continent look smaller (landmasses near the Equator appear relatively undistorted). Rather, it’s that the Mercator projection makes other landmasses look relatively big, such as the U.S., which appears four times bigger than its actual size. The Correct the Map campaign, which the African Union recently joined, argues that this distortion is not just about cartography but also “power and perception.” I don’t know whether world maps really shape world powers, but this Strange Maps article is a fascinating reminder that even our most familiar models can be wildly off from reality.
Fast Stats
1,000 light-years — The approximate distance to most of the brightest stars in our night sky.
430 million years — The first evidence of fire on Earth, when rising oxygen levels made combustion possible.
1936 — When computer scientist Alan Turing proved that no algorithm can always determine whether another algorithm will stop or run forever.
1 millimeter — The length of C. elegans, the tiny roundworm that became biology’s first fully sequenced genome and a foundational model organism
THE BIG SCARE
Why today’s publishers fear Goodreads more than government
In March, Bloom Books canceled the release of best-selling author Sophie Lark’s new romance novel, Sparrow and Vine. The decision came after some readers started an online campaign criticizing one of the book’s characters. The character was no Humbert Humbert or Patrick Bateman (not that Lolita or American Psycho should’ve been banned). She was instead “MAGA-coded” and said things that were casually racist, complained some readers. How did publishers come to bow to outrage campaigns? Why do readers think a fictional character’s dialogue necessarily represents the beliefs of the author? And what about the conservative right’s role in modern censorship? We spoke to Adam Szetela, author of That Book is Dangerous, to find out.
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THE BIG DEBATE
Will AI create more jobs than it replaces?
Judging from recent surveys of executives at major companies, AI could displace hundreds of millions of jobs worldwide in the near future. But now consider the rise of “multimodal AI” — models can ingest images, videos, speech, text, and sensor data. As these relatively early-stage models advance, is it worth reconsidering just how severely AI could impact the global workforce? That’s one thing James Barrat covers in this preview of his 2025 book The Intelligence Explosion: When AI Beats Humans at Everything.
(Editor’s note: The summary above was updated on September 4, 2025, to clarify the focus of Barrat’s book.)
Stephen Johnson is the managing editor at Big Think.
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Beautiful work.
Appreciate
Concerning the article on left-wing sensitivity censorship- the publishers are prioritizing profit over the inherent value of a piece of artwork/ literature. They could ignore the "sensitivity readers" and let the artwork stand on its own. It might, or might not threaten sales. Thinking that a single person's "lived experience" represents a whole identity group is ridiculous. Huckleberry Finn would never have gotten published and a whole host other great literature which is set in a time and a place, and from a perspective, but resonates with a diversity of readers all over the world a hundred years later. You read books because that person and/or characters have their own perspective, and so you widen your own perspective perhaps, or you see the world from other minds. What craziness my fellow progressives have wrought!