author Aaron Santesso

Literary theorist Associate Professor Aaron Santesso with Georgia Tech notes that “nostalgia is a practice of forgetting.” While musicologist Ellen Koskoff similarly spotlights that nostalgia “allows for a blurring, or even erasure, of unpleasant or painful memories and a resulting re- construction of a rosier past.

At the small public high school where I teach, the COWs — computers on wheels — are herded in a room lined with wicker post-and-rail fences and fake grass. Our campus is tucked in the woods, with the county library on one side. We have one of the only working school planetariums in the state. A single ...

Most dystopian authors cheat their way around this problem, ignoring huge swathes of the population to get the volume of information down to garden-hose levels. Huxley lops off “eight ninths” of the populace through eugenics. Orwell imagines the proles—85 percent of Oceania—to be politically neutered ...