In 2019, Sally Rooney’s coming-of-age relationship novel, Normal People, easily made my top books of the year list. But at the time I only wrote a few sentences about why I found it so page-turning and powerful. Now only a year later, Lenny Abrahamson’s adaptation has debuted on Hulu, bringing a whole new audience to the story of Connell and Marianne.

Reading descriptions of either the book or the series, it’s not hard to imagine people jumping to the conclusion that this is a work of teen melodrama, and not for them. I should know: after seeing the trailers, I almost skipped the show DESPITE loving the book, because the marketing didn’t feel enough like the story I’d read and loved. On the surface, the series appeared exactly like the sort of schmaltzy romance the book did such a good job dissecting.

I’m pleased to report that the show, like the book, achieves something much more special. Something more complex and with greater depth than a will-they-or-won’t-they courtship drama. Though pretty quickly in, you find out they definitely will, then won’t, then will again, a lot, on and off for years. Which is more to the point of the project.

Sure, there’s a bit of that youthful tendency for the characters to think every setback is earth-shattering, or to make basic relationship mistakes that frustrate the more mature among us to no end. ( SWEET DANGLING CHAIN, CONNELL, JUST TELL HER WHAT YOU REALLY WANT.) But both the show and the book capture the unique intensity of first loves with such sensitivity, and then interrogates what t means to us so skillfully, that it becomes much more than a question of whether two characters get their happily ever after. Because as most of us know: they won’t. That’s not how life works. Rarely does a first great love become a lifelong one, even if at the time it feels like losing it means the end of the world.

What makes Normal People so smart and so powerful is that it’s not really about whether two people end up together. It’s more interested in how certain people — whether loves, or friends, or family (or that one asshole you’re not sure why anyone keeps inviting to parties, JAMIE) — these people leave their marks on us. They unlock something we’ve felt we had inside ourselves just waiting to be discovered, and they shape the people we eventually become.

It’s specifically not a love story for the ages, because these are Normal People. Normal People feel weird and misunderstood until finally someone sees us. Normal People fall in love for the first time (even if it’s not always romantic love), and they feel changed, even if that love doesn’t last, because it’s normal to screw it up. And in most cases, Normal People move on… past the loves and friendships lost, and toward an uncertain future, as best as they know how.

Who are the people that changed you the most, or set you on the course to who you are today?

What parts of who you are now would you attribute to those past relationships?

How might you be different if you’d never had those people in your life?

Two of this year’s biggest, shiniest, mind-bendiest sci-fi series, Alex Garland’s DEVS on Hulu, and Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s WESTWORLD season 3 for HBO, cover nearly identical themes, while sharing several plot devices.

Both tell stories of emotionally scarred billionaires with god complexes, who both run seemingly unstoppable tech companies, which both create giant evil supercomputers (though one is a pulsing sphere, the other a glowing cube). And who both use that limitless data processing power to make machines capable of predicting the future, in order to “fix” what they see as wrong with the world.

And yes, in both we follow defiant young women (though one is technically a robot) who refuse to buy in to the future these algorithms predict (while with the help of frequently confused male sidekicks), sacrifice themselves to destroy both the machines and their creators. 

Where they diverge are their respective takes on how predicting the future is achieved, and what doing so might mean for humanity.

Quick critical aside: They also diverge in quality and clarity. 

Though Westworld seems a lot more fun on the surface, what with the futuristic vehicles, gunfights, explosions, and super-robots doing cool martial arts, the show relies so much on surprises and reversals, it’s hard to know what’s ever really going on. 

What are these characters really trying to achieve? Are they succeeding or failing? What am I rooting for, exactly? Which makes Westworld hard to care about as a story, even if as a show it’s all very enjoyable to look at.  

Devs, on the other hand, takes a more moody, atmospheric tone I certainly wouldn’t call “fun”. It’s weird and gorgeous and unsettling; very stoic, and largely philosophical.

But despite its galaxy-brain core concept, it tells a clear story — where each characters’ actions make basic sense based on their desires at any given time — while untangling the show’s surprises clearly advances our understanding of the larger ideas the show wants to explore. 

If you only watch one for both aesthetic pleasure and discuss-ability: Devs is the clear winner.

OK, back to the discussion-worthy stuff.

Like the best sci-fi, both shows extrapolate out from real-world ideas. But as I said before, they depict different paths to how we arrive at these dystopian technologies.

In one, our prison is our own creation, in the other, it’s something we discover.

Westworld suggests that if we had enough people’s full behavioral data, we can basically know the course of the rest of their lives. From there, we can optimize society as a whole. 

This isn’t too far past some shady experimentation Facebook has done, where they’ve shown “happy” or “angry” posts to different sets of people to measure the results. A little tweak here, a little tweak there, and eventually you get to control.

This is a man-made version of determinism, enabled by AI.

Devs on the other hand goes all the way down to the molecular level. This, too, is based on real physics. Essentially, if the entire universe is molecules reacting to one another, that’s no different for our bodies, or even our brains. It’s just one big wind-up toy playing out its course.

This is backed up by neuroscience which shows that, *technically*,  our bodies take an action nanoseconds before our brain “commands” them to. In fact, the feeling that we’ve made a decision may be just a thing we evolved to make sense of the world.

So according to Devs, we didn’t build a thing that took away free will. Because of the deterministic nature of the universe, we never had it to begin with. We finally just built a machine powerful enough to prove it — and show us what comes next.

So of course, it makes sense that these two versions of determinism lead each show to a different outcome, once people discover what these machines can do.

In Westworld, the populace riots against the tech giants imposing control. In Devs, the few characters who fully reckon with living out a pre-determined future gain a Zen-like calm, but also seem hollowed-out and lifeless.

But in both, our heroes are compelled to destroy this technology, even if it means their own end. Because they both see that life with this kind of power in the world may not be livable — whether we stop it from being true, or just decide to live in blissful ignorance of our pre-determined reality.

How would you as an individual, or we as a society, react to a truly, provably deterministic world?

How could we go on living normally once we know free will is an illusion?

If either of these technologies really existed, what, if anything, could be done to harness that power responsibly?

**note: most of these are intended to have a long “discussable shelf-life,” which I believe to be equally true here — but this one takes on added importance at this moment in particular.**

**additional note: because of this moment in time (and the time it’s afforded us), I’ve also started experimenting with a video format. Similar content either way. Please be kind, it’s early days yet.**

In this coronavirus-plagued spring of 2020, we find ourselves stuck at home with our roommates, family or partners in a way we never have before.  Meanwhile the media (from news outlets to advertisers) have all-too-eagerly tried to frame this moment as a heartwarming opportunity — to spend that time growing closer, if we use it right.

This reminded me of an episode from John Greene’s podcast, The Anthropocene Reviewed, where late last year, while discussing the merits and uses of the iPhone’s Notes app, he quotes something he had once jotted down in his phone: a the poet Donald Hall’s much more artful take on how we spend time with loved ones. Less a maximization strategy, than a reckoning with the reality of relationships.

“We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention.”

So in this time of being together, alone, for longer-than-usual stretches, it seemed like a good time to reflect on those Third Things, and decide which ones are better at deepening our relationships vs merely filling time.

What are the Third Things in your relationships?

Which are best at bringing you together,
and what makes them better than others?

How is our reliance on Third Things a positive
or negative reality of how we connect to each other?

I’ve listened to a few Dungeons and Dragons play-along podcasts (but sadly, still never tried it myself). I’ve definitely gone through my share of video game character creators, tinkering with my character’s strength’s and weaknesses. And I’m always fascinated by how I and others approach doling out points in the game to boost their avatar’s abilities.

Which naturally leads to a few personal, but revealing questions:

If you had, say, 10 points to boost your core skills (as seen in the image above), how would you dole them out?

Possibly more revealing: what do you think your base stats are right now (which, if using D&D starting character rules, would be between min 3 to max 18)?

Not normally something I’d click on (but this is the value of actual printed magazines, people!), this article on burgeoning communities of strict Catholics in The Atlantic contained this killer paragraph:

In some ways, these groups are merely practicing an extreme form of the insularity many Americans have already embraced. Deep-blue enclaves such as Berkeley and brownstone Brooklyn are similarly homogenous, sought out by people with a certain set of values and hopes for their children. But the rise of more radical self-sorting poses a challenge to America’s experiment in multicultural democracy, enshrined in the motto e pluribus unum—“Out of many, one.” The dream of a diverse society is replaced with one in which different groups coexist, but mostly try to stay out of one another’s way. The ongoing experiment in St. Marys suggests what might be gained by such a realignment—and what might be lost.

Hard when the shoe’s on the other foot, this one… but maybe neither is wrong and we just have to re-think what we really want out of life, community, social mobility, democracy, etc.

Is it inherently bad to want to live somewhere among people who share our values?

Is there a difference based on what those values are?

What do we lose if we all withdraw into enclaves like this? Or is it inevitable and we have to make peace with it?