What Would They Think?

What would Hammurabi think of a contract for a child, signed by three adults and governed by the law of a state that has never written one — now argued in four jurisdictions, none of which agree? He answered this in...

What would Xerxes make of a war in which the largest military ever assembled has spent five months failing to reopen thirty-three kilometres of water, held shut by a country whose leadership it killed in the first...

What would Adam Smith think of a world where the thing he said we were actually chasing — not the money, not the house, but the sensation of being looked at — got detached from the money, made into a product, and sold...

What would Aristophanes think of a world where the oldest complaint there is — that the young are soft, silent, and ruined by their own cleverness — has become an industry, with bestsellers, national legislation, and a...

What would Thomas Aquinas think of a world where one American adult in nine has bought their way out of hunger — the oldest appetite there is, switched off weekly by injection, marketed as health, resented as cheating...

What would Alfred Hitchcock think of a world where the most gripping thing in your earbuds is a real murder — a stranger's last hour, withheld and doled out and scored, pressed play on by millions for the pleasure of...

What would Marcel Duchamp think of a world where the hardest thing to own is a picture anyone can copy for free — a JPEG, right-click-saved a million times, yet trading for tens of millions because one instance of it...

<p>What would Marie Antoinette think of a world where a person can be destroyed before lunch — by a sentence they never spoke, a clip cut from its meaning, an image that was never real — and millions will believe it...

What would Marie Antoinette think of a world where a person can be destroyed before lunch — by a sentence they never spoke, a clip cut from its meaning, an image that was never real — and millions will believe it...

<p>What would Cleopatra think of a world where the face is the job — where millions paint and edit and inject not to take a throne but to be seen taking the trouble, and the proof is a face four million filters have...

What would Cleopatra think of a world where the face is the job — where millions paint and edit and inject not to take a throne but to be seen taking the trouble, and the proof is a face four million filters have...

<p>What would Marco Polo think of a world where the journey is the job — where millions cross the earth not to see it but to be seen having seen it, and the proof is a photograph of a thing four million phones have...

What would Marco Polo think of a world where the journey is the job — where millions cross the earth not to see it but to be seen having seen it, and the proof is a photograph of a thing four million phones have already...

<p>What would Cecil Rhodes think of a world where the hardest money on earth is a thing that doesn't exist — no metal, no vault — trading for tens of thousands of dollars, mined by machines that burn the power of small...

<p>What would Gandhi think of a world where a single family's wedding runs for the better part of a year and costs, by estimates no one will confirm, hundreds of millions of dollars — staged in his own country, on the...