The earth is red like an apple
bobbing in a river, floating on a lake.
Twilight cannot make up its mind
if day or night is blue.
From a hilltop
the drilling and the trilling are one.
By moonlight a neighbor is on her roof
brandishing a cane.
Who shall arrange the stars
to set us straight?
Songbirds on a limb
delay their flights at dawn.
And over by the museum’s new wing
a Cézanne fruit bowl is drawing crowds.
The barren tree roots for ancient wisdoms
as the ocean knows what’s true.
The earth is red like an apple
left on the ground.
Carlos Eire arrived in Miami at age 11 in 1962, a refugee from Castro’s Cuba. Three years passed before his mother could join him, and he never saw his father again. This experience of dislocation profoundly shaped Eire’s work as a religious historian.
In his latest book, They Flew, Eire looks at early modern reports of miracles. Drawing on his own experience of moving between cultures and worldviews, he tries to imagine himself into the minds of those who claimed to have witnessed levitations, bilocations, and other impossible occurrences, and he asks what we can learn by taking these reports seriously. David Brooks talks with Eire about magic, empathy, and the past as a foreign country.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Brooks: This is a conversation about radical empathy. We live in a polarized age, often with people whose modes of consciousness are utterly alien to our own. We hear someone spew a conspiracy theory or utter an opinion that seems monstrous, and we think: How on earth can they think that way?
But being a good citizen in this sort of pluralistic society requires that kind of radical empathy. It means approaching those who are different with a willingness and an ability to stand in their standpoint, to enter into, at least a little, how they see the world.
My guest is Carlos Eire, who has been trained by life to excel at this. When he was a boy, he was airlifted out of Cuba by parents who wanted to get him away from Castro’s revolution. He worked his way through college, got a Ph.D. here at Yale, where he is now a professor of history and religious studies, and began a double-barreled career.
On the one hand, he entered into the minds of people living in the late Middle Ages, describing how they thought about death and demons. But alongside his academic work, Carlos also wrote two popular memoirs about his childhood, Waiting for Snow in Havana, which won a National Book Award, and Learning to Die in Miami.
We’re going to talk about his travels across worldviews. We’re going to spend the bulk of this time on Carlos’s recent book, They Flew. We’re going to look at the testimonies of 16th- and 17th-century religious figures who claimed they could levitate.
When I started reading the book, these claims seemed totally bonkers to me. But take the time to get inside their heads. Learn to see the world through alien eyes. I think you’ll find Carlos generously curious and gently wise. You may not leave this podcast thinking that humans can float into the ceiling, but I bet you’ll learn a few things about how to enter other people’s minds.
Carlos Eire, welcome to The Permanent Questions. Thanks so much for crossing New Haven to get here.
Carlos Eire: Thanks very much. Thank you very much for inviting me.
Brooks: Let me try to lay out what I was hoping to accomplish. I sort of see this as about empathy, about encountering people who are completely unlike yourself and trying to see the world from their point of view. This strikes me as a pretty necessary skill to have in a pluralistic society like ours.
I think for most of the time, we’ll talk about this book, They Flew, which is a history of the impossible and possibly the most audacious book I’ve ever read.
We’ll get to that, but let’s start with the leaving of Cuba. The simplest way to introduce your story is: Tell me about Operation Peter Pan.
Eire: Yes, it received that unfortunate name. It didn’t have a name for us who went through it. Between New Year’s Day 1961 and mid-October 1962, slightly over 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban children came to the US. The plan was always to reunite with our parents either there, if the dictatorship ended, or here.
It was well-organized chaos. There’s no other way to describe it. The 14,000 of us were sent to 48 different states eventually.
Brooks: And you were 11.
Eire: I was 11 when I left, and I left with my brother, who was 14. We went through a series of foster homes in Miami at first because we didn’t have family, not yet. And my first foster family—beautiful family, I consider them saints, Norma and Lou Chait—were Jewish, and I thought I had it made now because, at that age, I didn’t like going to church. But no, they forced me to go to church, and gave me money to put into the collection basket.
I learned English really fast because they had zero Spanish. So I ended up learning English and a few Yiddish words that I thought were English. I later discovered, when I moved to Bloomington, Illinois, that people didn’t understand what I was saying.
Long story with many ins and outs. My brother and I also ended up spending nine months in a home for juvenile delinquents because there was no other place for us. It was supposed to be temporary, but they kind of forgot about us.
Brooks: The regime was sending kids to the Soviet Union.
Eire: Yes. And it had happened before in Spain during the Civil War. There were so many Spanish immigrants in Cuba, including my grandparents, who had a vivid memory of kids who never returned. So panic set in. And also for any male over 18—military service.
Of course, these parents, my own included, it wouldn’t have crossed their minds that this would go on forever, that the regime would not collapse. That was a big surprise to everyone.
There’s no fixed statistic on how many children left whose parents were unable to leave. Mine were among them. My mom, it took her three and a half years to finally come to the US, and my father never made it out.
I never harbored ill feelings of any sort. Ever since day one, I have thanked my parents for making that choice. I know there are a few who couldn’t understand. But for me, it’s always been a sacrifice they made.
Brooks: There was a famous book written in the ’80s by a guy named David Lowenthal called The Past Is a Foreign Country. His argument is: We have to understand these people are different than us.
But his second point was that it’s not only that the past is a foreign country, but that our relationship to the past has changed. We think of it as a line. It’s moving forward; it’s not moving back. But in previous eras, you go to any art museum, they’re dressing Jesus in 16th-century garb. They’re mingling the eras. Time is going backward and forward. They have a different attitude.
So does that concept—the past is a foreign country—is that something that resonates with you, humbles you, different views of the past?
Eire: Yes. I mean, having that experience of getting off the plane at the Miami airport back in 1962, you know, experiencing all this. Definitely another country—I’m in another country. The past is a lot like that.
There are things that are difficult to understand about the past, especially cultural dimensions that no longer exist. What people could say, what people did and could do, and not only that—the worldview. The worldview above everything else, because that’s what I have focused on in all of my work as a historian is the cultural-religious dimension, the worldview that changed in the 16th century.
I did have, however, I thought, an advantage over my American colleagues when it came to studying the Protestant Reformation, which was the revolution. I understood it as a revolution. And I saw many things happening in the early years of the Protestant Reformation that to me seemed only slightly different from the present.
So it’s almost like I was a time traveler, right? And it was not a foreign country to me, for instance, to learn about the consistory in Calvin’s Geneva, which policed everyone’s behavior. I know what that’s like. And then when I went on to study the Spanish Inquisition, same thing. I’ve lived through this. People being ostracized for thinking incorrectly about some minor point—I’ve lived through that. That was not a foreign country to me.
But when it comes to big items like belief in miracles, belief in witches, belief in demonic possession, all the supernatural stuff, of course it’s changed tremendously, but not entirely. The paradoxical challenge every historian faces is that something might look very similar to you, but it ends up not being all that similar.
For instance, I spent a long time reading last wills and testaments from 16th-century Madrid. And I found one that I said, “Oh, they’re just like us.” This woman was bequeathing her little precious dog to so and so. But everyone was requesting hundreds of masses for their soul, sometimes thousands of masses. I even had a few last wills and testaments where the individual was listing as their only heir their soul.
Brooks: Oh, really?
Eire: Yes. And it sounds funny in English: The soul was the sole heir.
But honestly, yes. Including one, I said, “This is a totally different world.” One priest who put it into his will. He says, “I know my family’s going to object, but they never did anything for me. I did this all on my own. This is my money.” And then I thought, “Well, now I’m back in this world.”
So you get these mixed messages. It is very, very gratifying to find traces of human emotion like that lady willing her dog to her friend. It was a friend that she trusted.
Brooks: I read that in the Middle Ages, and your period is sort of in the late Middle Ages, the emotions were more on the surface. I don’t know if this is measurable. But when they were in joy, they were in ecstasy. When they were in despair—the emotional register was much more vivacious than ours.
Eire: It could be. Of course it depends on time and place and everything else that’s going on around people. But yes, I think that’s true.
There was a lot of violence. A student of mine ended up doing his dissertation on violence in 16th-century Spain, looking at a very small town where all the records survived. People were fighting, like physically fighting, all the time. Then I understood why I had so many wills from people who were on their deathbed with head injuries.
These emotions in the past, in one way, had to be dulled much more than with us.
For instance, executions were public. And it wasn’t a nice execution. It was usually people being beheaded or hung or tortured. People lived through this. We would think immediately: Well, everyone there watching this is going to be severely traumatized. And perhaps they were, right?
Brooks: They seem pretty happy in the accounts.
Eire: People are cheering and clapping. Another world, another country. Absolutely.
Brooks: This is one I’ve always wondered about. You’ve written about death, as you said. There’s an argument that you occasionally hear that so parents lost so many children that the loss of a child was not as emotionally crushing as it is for moderns. I sort of find that hard to believe.
Eire: I do too. I think that’s somebody in the present saying, “It must have been that way. They had to.” But no, I don’t think so.
We have plenty of evidence from diaries. There’s one diary that’s a tanner in Barcelona, 17th century, who lived through a plague in Barcelona. All his children died. And you can tell in the diary, it really hit him.
Also, bringing it to the present, he actually wrote in his diary that the one child who survived was his least favorite. And why did it have to be that way?
Brooks: There’s an argument that you raise in the book, though I don’t think you endorse it, that all these beliefs—whether in miracles, demonic possession, all that kind of stuff—it was functional for the period; it served some function.
You quote a historian, Keith Thomas: “Belief in magic and miracles was an absolute necessity in premodern times due to ‘a preoccupation with the explanation and relief of human misfortune.’” Life was so hazardous that believing in all this stuff was part of the way they handled the hazardousness of their lives.
Eire: And I think there’s truth in that, but I don’t think that’s all that’s going on. I was trained to be a functionalist. If there’s anything weird happening, anything supernatural happening, you just don’t go there. You bracket that. You don’t ask the question: Well, was this person really floating in the air or not? You analyze what function that belief served in that culture. But I have rebelled against my functionalist training.
Brooks: Yeah, I’ll say big time. We get now to They Flew, and I started this book—it’s really a story of testimonies about levitation and bilocation, which is a person saying they were in two places at once.
And I started this book with, I’m sure, the normal attitude you have encountered everywhere. One, people don’t levitate. It’s all a myth. And two, I’m not that interested. Why should I care about something that didn’t happen?
Then I start reading the book, and I’m reading the testimonies and entering that other world. My mind is blown. If I were talking to somebody and reading testimonies like this in a current U.S. court of law, I would think they were pretty compelling. So describe to us what those testimonies were like and what the circumstances were.
Eire: As a historian, I would’ve felt immensely uncomfortable arguing in any way that these things really happened if I didn’t have the right kind of testimonies. It’s all based on testimonies. Actually, for this time period that I work in, the early modern period, we have an advantage over the medieval period in that—especially in the Catholic world, the part of the world that remained Catholic—the process for identifying saints was made more rigorous in this time period.
So the canonization process, which involves several sets of inquests, interviewing the people who knew this person, they include a section on miracles. But every answer that anyone gives in that inquest is sworn testimony, and the penalty’s not just a fine or some time behind bars. It’s hell, for lying. Most of the testimonies—not most, in some cases just many—come from very, very religious people, even clerics and nuns. So are these people going to perjure themselves, if they believe in hell?
Brooks: These were not just unlettered people. Some of these testimonies are from the intellectual elite. And they’re saying, “Oh, so and so levitated.” Or they’re describing their own experiences, and there are tons of witnesses. I still don’t believe they levitated, but the testimony is …
Eire: Well, we’re faced with a conundrum, which can be explained away in various ways. I’ve read one analysis of Joseph of Cupertino, this flying friar, the guy who spent more time in the air than anyone else in history: He was an acrobat.He had trained his muscles so well, like a gymnast, that he could make these great leaps. But no, he was suspended in the air, for heaven’s sake.
And there are fakes. I have a whole section in the book about frauds, people who were caught faking all of this. Because as I said, it’s always been a case that people can fake these things. Magicians fake it all the time on stage. But faking it outdoors in the 16th or 17th century, that’s a little harder to do without ropes and pulleys or wires or anything. So we’re left with these testimonies, and what do we do with these testimonies? They are part of the past.
Almost every time I’ve spoken about this book in public, the question comes up. I’ve had other historians bring it up, and other historians who share my point of view that we should take these testimonies very seriously. There is definitely a correlation throughout history, including the present—the correlation between the matrix of belief that a culture has and the frequency with which these anomalous phenomena occur.
Brooks: What do you mean by that: “the matrix of belief”? What do you mean?
Eire: If, let’s say, belief in levitation specifically is prevalent in a culture, you’re going to get more levitations. If belief in levitations is laughed at, as it is in our culture, you’re gonna have fewer. The same goes for any miraculous event.
Brooks: I found the most compelling set of testimonies came from Teresa of Ávila. So could you tell us who she was and how she levitated?
Eire: Teresa of Ávila, 16th century, was a Carmelite nun who from her 40s on had continuous ecstatic religious experiences, mystical ecstasies.
Some of them involved levitation. She is one of the few levitators who has given us first-person accounts of what it feels like and what’s going on. So we have great detail on that from her end, from the personal end. Plus we have all these eyewitnesses, which were the nuns that she lived with and people who visited the convent, who testify to these incredible levitations.
And she actually resisted these levitations. That’s another curious twist in her story. She begged God to stop it. She came right out and said to God, “Why are you doing this? What purpose does this serve?” And they stopped. She tells us in her autobiography they stopped.
But that part of her autobiography she ended in 1562. The levitations came back again, with less frequency, but they came back again. She doesn’t write about it. She doesn’t complain about these. She’s complaining about the early ones.
Brooks: I think her testimony is not like, “Look at me and what I did.” Her testimony is just like, “Here’s what it felt like.”
I’m gonna read a few just so people get a sense: “At the highest point of rapture, one will neither see nor hear nor perceive. None of the soul’s faculties are able to perceive or know what is taking place.” So she’s describing that something goes blank. And then the resisting: “When I tried to resist these raptures, it seemed to me that I was being lifted up by a force beneath my feet so powerful that I know nothing to which I can compare it, for it came with much greater intensity than any other spiritual experience. I felt I was being torn to shreds, for it is a mighty struggle.”
So these are physically demanding, arduous things. And then she’s bothered because she’s turning into a little celebrity for floating around the rooms, and this is the last thing she wants. And so she said, “There was no way of avoiding them, even in public. And then the persecutions and the murmurings follow. Even though the soul wants to be free from fears, she is never free of them because so many people foist them on her.”
One day she’s frying eggs. She’s got a frying pan, she’s frying eggs, and suddenly she’s up in the ceiling. This of course is dangerous for her because the church could decide she’s demonically possessed, because levitation can either be a sign of your holiness or demonic possession. So this is a maximally perilous thing, and she does not wanna be talking about it. I think they force her.
Eire: She’s walking a tightrope every time she went up.
I have found some common threads linking all the levitators from this period who are eventually declared to be the genuine thing—that this is divine; this is not demonic. One of them is what Teresa describes, this cataleptic seizure, where you lose your senses, just vanish, and you don’t sense anything that’s going on around you, and then your body stiffens in whatever position. Sometimes these levitators go up, they’re praying on their knees, and they go up, and their knees are bent. And people actually try to unbend them, and they report that they can’t.
I had a conversation here at the Yale Divinity School some months ago with a neurologist about all this stuff. It’s a very interesting conversation because he pointed to this spot on his head, and he says, “I can tell you exactly where these nuns are having these experiences.” And yes, you can pathologize as much as you want. If it were just a person telling you, “I felt this,” then it would be entirely explained. No more questions asked.
But to have people say, “We saw this happen,” and to have it under oath, not just once but multiple times—then I think you need some other angle. You need to take this from another angle or another perspective and say that something is going on here that we, in our culture, none of us have been prepared to accept as a real possibility.
Brooks: One of the beauties of the book is your first job as a historian is not to judge. It’s just to witness. Just look. What are they talking about? How are they thinking about this? And that part is very admirable, but I’m trying to picture you working on this book, taking these testimonies seriously of levitation.
And I have found that the biggest bias in media, maybe in the academy too, is not a left or right bias. It’s: What do people at dinner parties that people like me go to talk about? And if you have a category outside what people like me talk about, you are rejected. So as you’re writing this book, taking this stuff seriously, you must have been aware a lot of people are gonna think you’re crazy.
Eire: Yes, but I’m used to that. And actually, back to the first part of our talk, I’m used to it because being in academia, for decades, if I could do it, I would hide the fact that I was Cuban from my colleagues. Because every time I said I was Cuban, I would get a little speech about how wonderful the revolution was. And if I said anything that was negative, all of a sudden, you’re not okay. You’re not okay. So I was used to that.
Also, any person who has a religious life of any kind, the dominant culture, it does not accept your way of living as normal with a capital N. So you get used to that after a while. But having people dislike what I have to say is something that I’m used to.
Brooks: You write at one point in They Flew: “Ask any historian why they write the kind of history they do, and if they are honest, they will tell you that when all is said and done, the history they write has everything to do with their life story, their yearnings, and their obsessions. This author is no different.”
What does that mean? How do I interpret your decision to go into late medieval history?
Eire: All my work as a historian has focused, in different ways, on the same subject, which is my obsession, which is, at bottom, the marrow of religion, as far as belief is concerned. There is some other dimension that is, for lack of a better term, more real than this, from which this dimension is derived.
Brooks: And are you testing that proposition, or are you convinced by primordial faith that this proposition is true, and you’re trying to see how it works out?
Eire: When I started out, and even now, I’ve had my ups and downs about that visceral kind of affirmation. That it’s not rational or purely intellectual. So that’s been constant, but it’s gone up and down. But the older I’ve become, the more that that has seemed very real to me.
But the fact is, yes, belief is different from knowledge that you acquire through normal cognitive processes. Which is another reason that—I’ve also been obsessed looking at the phenomenon of mysticism. It’s the ecstasies that drew me to this subject first. It’s the claim, the existential claim people make to have experienced something other, with a capital O.
Brooks: You can argue about whether people are flying up in the air, but there really are mystics. We all know people who have a mystical tongue or a mystical sense that I will never experience, but I know them and I see them, and I watch them.
Eire: It’s the same with, let’s say, a musical virtuoso or an athletic virtuoso. That’s what at this advanced age of mine I’ve come to realize—that gifts are unevenly spread. Religion is one of these. There are people who just are spiritually gifted.
And there are some who are spiritually blind and deaf, who just can’t even conceive of. I’ve often used this in my mysticism class, the believability of any mystic’s accounts of what it’s like to experience the divine. They all tell you the same thing, at least in the Christian tradition, but also in other religious traditions: “I can’t explain it to you.”
It’s like explaining color to a blind person. How do you go about explaining color? No, it’s just another perception, another way of perceiving. What I still find fascinating is when those experiences which go beyond normal cognition have some physical impact on the person having it.
Brooks: Yeah, I, I’ve seen friends who are—they’re moving, they’re kneeling. They’re not even thinking about it. They don’t know you were looking at them. They’re speaking sort of in tongues or some sort of other language. I don’t think it proves a belief in God, but it proves the existence of some sort of spiritual faculty that people have.
I wanted to talk about the context in which Teresa’s living and a lot of the people in this 16th-, 17th-century period. This is a moment when science is beginning to take off, and you get Descartes, and I suppose go a little later you get Newton. This is reason and science taking off.
Technology’s beginning to move up. It’s exactly this moment, as you make the point in the book, that these mystical experiences and these levitations begin to hit back.
And it could be that there’s just intense pressure. They’ve hit a civilizational fork in the road, and they’re either gonna go off in the rationalist direction, or they’re gonna stay the way they were. And the crass way to put it, which I don’t want to reduce it just to this, is if you’re a Carmelite nun, you think, “Okay, you guys got calculus. That’s impressive, but we fly around the room.”
Eire: I can’t argue against this way of looking at things. It makes sense, yes. I think it’s highly probable that you have this heightened sensibility toward the miraculous as a response not just to emerging science, but more immediately, at first, the Protestant Reformation, which is denying that all of these things are divine.
But then along comes the scientific revolution. And yes, it is a natural response that people focus more intensely on these things. And as I said before, there seems to be this very common linkage between the matrix of belief and the frequency of these things happening. That’s a very solid, very rational argument, but it doesn’t explain everything.
It just doesn’t. If in fact these things are happening and continued to happen, albeit with less frequency, you’re still dealing with a phenomenon.
As I have discovered lately, there’s a word now being used to describe human beings who claim to have encountered nonhuman intelligence, and that word is experiencer. That’s also used for mystics.
So in essence, a mystic telling you, “I understood the Trinity perfectly, but I can’t tell you” has the same trouble being believed as somebody who says, “This gray alien walked into my hotel room last night.”
Brooks: There’s a famous episode which is sort of this clash. Rene Descartes, he’s early 17th century, he is actually a believer, but he decides he’s gonna sweep away all this tradition and knowledge that’s built up, and he’s gonna start from scratch. He’s gonna use pure reason, just logical, follow one step after another, and he makes sure he’s shielded from emotion. God forbid he should love somebody. And he’s trying to build up the whole edifice of human knowledge.
And at exactly the same time, this other guy in France, Blaise Pascal, takes a look at what Descartes is doing and immediately hates him. Blaise Pascal is no random humanist. He was one of the greatest mathematicians to ever live. He was a technologist. He built a sort of early calculating machine. He was a scientist. He studied vacuums. So he had scientific rigor on his side, and he was saying, “I’m not against Descartes’s reason, but I have many other forms of knowledge that I use to understand the world.” The “spirit of genius” and the “spirit of finesse,” I think he called it.
And he famously said, “The heart has reasons that reason knows not of.” And so he’s saying to Descartes, “You’re taking away other ways of knowing.” And I think the clinching argument—it’s so amazing he understood this right away. We’re at this civilizational fork in the road. He says the problem with rationalism is not its admiration for reason, but its failure to recognize any other kind of knowledge. He’s saying, “You’re amputating me.” He’s talking out of his own experience of how he has studied the world.
Eire: Plus he had a mystical experience.
Brooks: Famously at the Night of Fire.
Eire: Sewn into the lining of his coat: God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers. This distinction being made between these two forms of cognition.
I’m so glad you brought up Pascal because he’s a contemporary. But there’s so many. When you’re dealing with the past—again, a different country—you find anomalous synchronicities all the time.
One of the witnesses to St. Joseph of Cupertino’s levitations was a Saxon prince, Johann Friedrich of Saxony. And not just any Saxony, the Saxony that Luther had been part of. For some reason, he’s in Italy, and nobody has figured out what he was doing there. But he sees Joseph of Cupertino up in the air and he converts to Catholicism.
Johann Friedrich. Oh my God. This is the same man who hired Leibniz as his librarian. Did he and Leibniz ever meet in the hallway, so to speak? And to talk about these things?
A little thought experiment that I engage in my book: Yes, Newton and Joseph Cupertino walked the Earth, the same time. What if Newton had taken time off and done the grand tour and run into Joseph Cupertino?
They could have. Yes, but they didn’t. They just didn’t. And Newton spent much of his later life trying to figure out the law of prophecy.
Brooks: So we’re talking about this crucial time in Western history at least, where science is moving, and faith is moving in a different way. It seems to me you could look over periods of scientific advance—faith rises to respond. And so the period I know best is the late 19th century, the Industrial Revolution.
You’ve got these machines. In the late 19th century, Henry Adams, who was in the same family as John Quincy Adams and John Adams, he goes to a bunch of world fairs. And he sees what they were obsessed with in the Chicago World’s Fair. He writes a chapter in his book, which is more famous than the rest of—well, the book’s pretty famous too, called The Education of Henry Adams—but the chapter is called “The Dynamo and the Virgin.”
The Virgin, he says—different eras in time have different power sources. And in the 13th century, the Virgin was a tremendous power source in Europe, and we get all these cathedrals that they were wanting to buy ’cause the Virgin was their power source.
And he says, “That’s going away.” And he writes in that chapter—humans have a tendency to worship power sources, and people are gonna start worshiping machines. It’s not clear what he thinks about it, but at the exact same moment, there are a lot of other people, or roughly in that industrial period, who really mined it.
And then the part I hadn’t clued in until reading your book, ’cause you mentioned this, at exactly this moment, late 19th century, a lot of the world goes gaga over seances. People you wouldn’t expect, like Arthur Conan Doyle, the founder of Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Rational. You mention Abraham Lincoln’s wife. A lot of serious people were sitting around doing seances and Ouija boards and stuff like that.
Eire: And that’s kind of the tip of the iceberg because this is the same period that gives us the Latter-day Saints, the Millerites, and eventually the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Theosophy, which becomes immensely popular.
Brooks: Explain what that is.
Eire: Theosophy is a blend of Western occult mysticism with basically Hinduism and Buddhism. And it was enormously popular, here in the United States, but also throughout the world. The American Theosophical Society, which for a while was based in Philadelphia, sent missionaries all around the world.
I learned this from a dissertation I read back when I was at the University of Virginia. Otherwise, I would not have found this fact, which I find fascinating: The two most successful missions that the American Theosophical Society had were Brazil and Cuba. But they’re also immensely popular throughout Europe. Anyway, the list could be longer of all these other things.
Arthur Conan Doyle came here to New Haven during his American tour and spoke at Woolsey Hall.
Brooks: Which is the big hall here on campus.
Eire: Yes. The big auditorium. On spirit photography. And it was packed. Standing room only. This spiritualism only intensifies during and right after the First World War.
Brooks: That makes sense because there’s so many dead people.
Eire: Especially all the dead young people, and parents desperate to come to terms with this. The Society for Psychic Studies is established in London in the late 19th century. There’s such a long list of other things that emerge at this very same time, occultism and everything else. This is because, as I see it—Pascal’s complaint, which is personal, can have a social and cultural dimension to it.
When you take away belief in something that has ultimate meaning in another dimension other than this—because everybody’s body will give out on them and they will die, right? When you take that away—for lack of a better term, and I hate this term, disenchantment—you disenchant the world, the world will try to re-enchant itself.
And it always does so, or often does so in very weird ways. Sometimes in very, very bad ways. The French Revolution. The Bolshevik Revolution. The Third Reich. If you look at those three, they are aggressive attempts to re-enchant the world differently. They have religious symbols. They have feasts. They have holidays. They have rituals. You name it, but the ultimate thing is the revolution.
Brooks: The Marxist revolutions also laid claim to science too,though they were clearly secular religions.
Eire: But they still have the trappings of a religion and require belief in an orthodoxy. And in some kind of apocalyptic future, right?
Brooks: This brings me to today. So we’re in the world of AI now, and tech, and Elon Musk, and if you go to the Silicon Valley, they also have a kind of religion.
They worship a god, which is intelligence. They believe in sin, which is inefficiency. They believe in moral progress, which is optimization. They believe in eternal life, which is transhumanism. You can download your brain on a computer and live forever. And so they’ve got it all going on, even though they would deny that they are religious, but it looks very much like a religion serving assertive existential longings.
Eire: And given human instinct, that seems to be part of human history, that whenever something or someone comes along that seems to have immense power, or a combination of immense intelligence and immense power, people will venerate this.
That’s one of the threats of AI that doesn’t get much attention, but what I think is a real possibility is that if, in fact, we get artificial intelligence, which by the way, can also be called nonhuman intelligence—if we got one that’s super intelligent enough, of course you’re going to have people who will not only use it, but have their whole lives directed by it.
Brooks: You mentioned something that stuck in my head from a few minutes ago: that you don’t like the word disenchantment. Why is that?
Eire: It’s sprinkled with fairy dust. The word in English enchantment has too much of an emotional baggage attached to it. It’s got an emotional dimension to it.
But what happens when you take religion away is not disenchantment, not in that sense. It’s something much more aggressive. And what you lose is not emotion. What you lose is precisely, as Pascal complained, this other dimension. So that’s why I don’t like it.
And especially too, I have personal reasons to complain because the subject I’ve been working on throughout my entire career falls into the category of disenchantment of the world. But all the definitions of enchantment or disenchantment that have been thrown at me—some of them ridiculous. For instance, may he rest in peace, Robert Scribner, a historian of the same time period, who said, “Protestants really didn’t disenchant the world, because they still had rituals.” I said, “What do you mean? Is that your sole criterion for enchantment or disenchantment? Of course people are going to have rituals. Government have rituals, right?”
So it’s a very weak word. I wish there were a better word that people agreed on. This fuzzy word started to be used in 1930, when Talcott Parsons translated Max Weber and his phrase “Entzauberung der Welt,” with the word zauber right in the middle, which means “magic” in German.
And he was very clear throughout several of his texts—he meant magic.
Brooks: So you mentioned Max Weber. He wrote this process of rationalization, which led, I think in one translation, to what we call the “iron cage,” which is where we humans are stuck in this iron cage. And as a result, people’s spiritual lives shrivel, and in his words they become, I think it was, “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.”
And I think that’s real. I live in Washington. I’m surrounded by specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.
Eire: His word for that was Entzauberung, not disenchantment.
Brooks: Okay. And what, how would you translate that?
Eire:Zauber is “magic.”
Brooks: I see.
Eire: Right? Which he also said in one sentence, that Entzauberung means taking away magie, M-A-G-I-E, which was the learned German word for magic. What he meant was that there’s no transcendent other dimension.
And he also spoke of prophets. The only way that the world can be enchanted again is through prophets. And by prophets, he meant something like mystics, who actually have a real existential connection to something larger that can then convince other people that there’s more to life than this table and this microphone.
He also spoke of the choices that people are left in this—let’s stay with disenchantment—disenchanted world. The choices that people are left with, it’s basically kind of a polytheism. Where you have to choose between different gods.
It goes back to this insight that is a constant throughout the Christian tradition, this realization that human beings have an innate need for meaning. And that meaning has to be ultimate, not just proximate. It has to be ultimate. So we do our damnedest to make it up. Or as Pascal said, we do our damnedest to keep ourselves distracted so that we don’t look at the abyss that lies just a few feet away.
Brooks: I think that distraction’s a key point. You can go through life not thinking about this stuff.
There are two things that seem to be going on. I have a friend and former New York Times colleague, Ross Douthat, who argued that as society secularizes, you don’t get atheism; you get the strangest religions you can think of. There’s a book by a woman named Tara Isabella Burton called Strange Rites, where she details all these new religions that are popping up as people try to find some meaning somewhere. And this reminds me, I hadn’t made the connection to that 19th-century upstate New York—
Eire: The burned-over district.
Brooks: —when all these new religions were popping up all over the place. But then I think there’s other things going on, which is there really is a dis—well, I don’t wanna use that word; you’ll reach across the table and punch me—but there is a materialistic mentality that is definitely more prevalent today than in the 17th century.
And I think that’s sad. So I guess my question for you is: When you’re writing all this stuff, are you partly motivated by a disquiet with the present?
Eire: Oh, definitely. Most definitely. Yes. I’m very disquieted, and I’ve been disquieted for quite some time, since childhood. But my present baggage, let’s put it that way, has to do with the way in which one can be so easily silenced or ridiculed for merely suggesting that something else should be taken seriously. That’s enough to put you in the category of an alien abductee.
David Brooks: The book came out, I think, in ’23. How has the reaction response been, both from the professional historical community and from the wider public?
Eire: Well, the professional historical community is so slow. Our book reviews sometimes take two to three years. So I have yet to see very many reviews in professional journals.
But in other venues, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. There’ve been a couple of nasty book reviews.
I expected them. One of them with a beautiful sentence: “This is a deeply unserious book.”
Brooks: That’s a compliment where I come from.
Eire: Another reviewer found it necessary, for whatever reason, to bring up the fact that I was Cuban, and therefore I’m credulous and very fond of magical realism.
Brooks: You’re Gabriel García Márquez.
Eire: Yes, I am, like all Latin Americans. Yeah. You know, we’re all a little ...
Brooks: That’s why we love you. Now I have two final topics. One is, and I wanted to ask you about this—you say there’s a supernatural mentality and there’s a material mentality. But you introduce this concept that there’s also a third way of believing in the middle there, which you say is a “vast polymorphous, variegated middle between these two extreme poles, abounding in myriad attitudes and convictions.”
As a natural temperamental moderate, that sounds good to me.
Eire: And I think that’s basically my position. When you’re faced with unknowns, what do you do? How do you make up your mind?
I just thought of this, and your question prompted this to appear—I take the same attitude to quantum entanglement and the Big Bang that I do to these phenomena.
Until I see somebody up in the air and say, “Yes, I’m seeing this,” I can’t say I’ve experienced it, in the same way that you can say about any kind of religious experience, “Yes, I have experienced this.” I’ve been to many religious services where I have been so transported, I guess is a good way to put it. I’m not there in the room. I mean, I know I’m there, but I’m not there.
And some of them have been very odd moments too. In houses of worship other than Catholic. It’s happened. That’s one thing. But seeing somebody up in the air, though.
But quantum entanglement, what do you do with this? And what do you do with the latest images from the Webb telescope telling us that the Big Bang may be something else?
Brooks: The scientists who I know, whom I admire, some of them are just arrogantly dismissive of all spiritual experience. I say, “Well, you explain how consciousness emerged from the brain, then I’ll take your arrogance as somewhat earned. Or you explain what happened before the Big Bang. You can’t do that. You explain quantum entanglement.”
You can’t explain any of this stuff. The existence of the universe and consciousness, which is our primary ways to understand the world, if you can’t explain these two things—these are the two biggest things in our world.
Eire: If I were younger, I think this is the area I would dive into next. All this work that’s being done on mind and consciousness, which is, in fact, a connecting point, a nexus, very natural nexus, religion and science. But I have so much reading to do. Can’t do it now.
Brooks: So many years have been wasted trying to solve the consciousness problem.
Okay, the final question. All of our conversation has been leading up to one question: Did they fly?
Eire: Yes.
And I don’t mean to put any qualifiers on this. I’m willing to take that testimony as one would in a court of law, although there’s no physical evidence. That’s the one difference. There’s no murder weapon, let’s say. But let me put it this way: I think it’s highly, highly likely, especially since we have reports.
What I find very annoying, though, extremely annoying, is that cameras and film have been in existence for well over a century.
Brooks: That’s the obvious rejoinder to your belief. What’s your answer?
Eire: Right. Where is it? Where is it?
Some television show tried to trick me, said, “We have film of somebody levitating. Would you watch it?”
They were doing this live. And, yeah, it was obvious this person was spinning on a highwire. I said, “Well, you’re not showing what’s at the other end here. Is there another tree or another pole?” They said, “Yeah, we didn’t wanna tell you ahead of time. We just wanted your reaction.”
Brooks: I must say, I still am not quite there where you are, but I’m struck by how much in our popular culture, how much flying there is. Superman is flying. Harry Potter is flying on his broom. There’s a lot of flying. Look, we accept this so easily when we think it’s a superhero story or fiction.
Eire: Well, we have maglev trains. It’s not like this is physically impossible. You can actually physically levitate small frogs with sound waves.
Brooks: Oh really?
Eire: Yes, that’s been done.
Brooks: It’s very unpleasant for the frogs.
Eire: Well, coins—everybody has seen coins levitate. But you can take a little tiny frog, and with acoustic, levitation can take place.
So it’s not physiologically or physically impossible. One of my early talks on the subject long, long before the book came out, there was a doctor in the audience. I always love the first question because it’s always the most troublesome: Did these people have a lot of iron in their diets, by the way?
Maybe they were magnets in the room.
Brooks: That’s a lot of iron.
Eire: I said, “No, I don’t think so.” Yeah. I don’t think so.
Brooks: Carlos, I really appreciate your taking the time, and I really enjoyed our conversation.
Eire: Oh, my pleasure.
Brooks: I’m hoping that people come away with their mind expanded, but also come away with—when in life we encounter people whose political views, religious views, whatever views seem crazy to us, we pause and we say, “Where are you coming from? Let me try to see the world from your eyes.” And that strikes me as the essence of democracy.
Eire: It is, and it’s essential for survival.
Brooks: I thought one of the most interesting moments in my conversation with Carlos is when I asked him right at the end, “Did they fly?” And he flat out said, “Yes, they did.”
Think of the intellectual courage it takes to say that. A lot of people are going to think that’s ridiculous, but he’s a man of his convictions. He thinks supernatural realities are real.
He’s also a man who’s done the work. He spent the years in the archives reading all these testimonies, so he’s got some substance behind what he’s thinking.
I personally am not quite convinced. I think if human beings had the capacity to levitate, then we’d find one video of it, or somebody would be doing it today. But I believe that the people who described their levitation sincerely believed they were flying, just the way I might sincerely believe I’m driving down the New Jersey Turnpike. And how did they believe this? I don’t know. But I respect the fact that they did it.
When it comes to humans, variability is the rule. We’ve got a lot of different mindsets out there, and people hold sincere beliefs that seem bonkers to the rest of us, but are probably worthy of our respect.
Thanks so much for joining us for this week’s conversation with Carlos Eire.
The Permanent Questions is produced and edited by The Atlantic, in partnership with Yale University.
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It’s 4:26 a.m., and I’m walking around the house while my wife sleeps upstairs. I’m feeling disoriented and discombobulated, just as I have for months, since May, when AI came for math.
The leaves are ablaze here in Ithaca, fiery reds and oranges, and I saw them swirling around in my backyard yesterday, following the streamlines of an eddy described by the Navier-Stokes equations. You’ve heard of Navier-Stokes, right? By now you must have—in early September, OpenAI claimed to have solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem. An internal AI model unleashed about 10,000 agents that ran for 88 hours straight and gnawed on the old problem until it yielded.
I am a math professor, and my field is in crisis. Nobody in math is ever going to forget the year 2026. Unless this is really the end of the subject, and then nobody will remember anything about math anyway. Well, the machines will remember. But for them, this is something like day one.
I’ve been trying not to talk like this. It’s really discouraging for the graduate students and undergraduates, who have been dreaming of a life as a mathematician, or maybe a math professor—a life of solving puzzles, asking questions, working with friends who love math too, thinking about our sublime, transcendently beautiful subject that is so misunderstood. Meanwhile, the wider public is confused. Don’t mathematicians want their problems to be solved?
Yes and no.
For “applied” mathematicians like me—ones who look outward and take inspiration from nature and the real world, and who hope to use math to help improve science, medicine, business, engineering, and everyday life—AI may prove to be a boon, the latest tool that lets us see further and deeper, in the tradition of the telescope and the microscope. So yes, absolutely, some of us are excited to use it.
But for many “pure” mathematicians—those who look inward at math’s most theoretical aspects, at its inner beauty and structure, using human creativity, imagination, and logic—AI feels more ambiguous because machines can discover the truths we’re seeking, at the cost of robbing us of the struggle and joy of discovering them ourselves.
Pure math is the study of ideal patterns and structures: numbers and shapes, waves and vibrations, order and chaos, symmetry and infinity. There are no perfect circles in nature, only in our minds. Except—and this is eerie—the truths of mathematics also seem to exist outside of human minds. They inhabit a mysterious Platonic realm, casting shadows on our reality.
Our species has been playing this game for at least 4,000 years. It’s as much an expression of the human spirit as music and literature. If AI continues to bulldoze pure math, it’s going to crush the hopes of the young people who were dreaming of joining this tradition.
Everyone I know is reacting in their own way. Let me tell you three stories, about what we’re gaining and what we’re losing in the aftermath of the detonation of OpenAI’s biggest bomb yet on pure math—its October 6 report that close to 400 landmark open problems had been solved by its latest model. These were puzzles that had served as beacons in the darkness, calling and challenging and inspiring us for decades. On average, the model took just three hours’ worth of computation to dispose of each of them.
Earlier this month, I was heading for my weekly lunch with my pal Alex Townsend. He’s much younger than I am—he could be my son—and he thinks a lot about the future. With fortuitous timing, we recently finished writing a book about computers and math, and what happens when humanity makes a pact with the machine to start outsourcing our intelligence to something alien and voracious.
As we walked to lunch, Alex seemed agitated. Eyes open wider than normal. Gesticulating. Shouting. He said he had collected something like 200 important unsolved problems in his subfield, numerical linear algebra. Rather than let OpenAI or Anthropic get to them first, he decided to curate the problems himself, in the hope that all of his friends and colleagues could solve them on their own (possibly with the assistance of AI) before the big companies stomped on them.
This is how Alex is reacting to the crisis: embracing the technology and making it ours. Using it to extend the frontiers of math, pure and applied, and solve problems that really matter—problems in medicine and energy and climate, hard problems that AI will help us with. That’s the message of hope he wants to give to grad students. He says we need to clear all of the existing open problems—pull out all the Excaliburs—to pave the way to a new kind of mathematics, in which the most important human contributions will be asking good questions, developing theories, interpreting machine-generated proofs, finding new applications, deciding which problems matter, and enjoying one another’s company as we explore all of this together.
So how did his colleagues feel about his plan? Many were exhilarated, but some were furious. They saw him as a collaborator with everything bad about what’s happening now. They worry that he’s helping to destroy the pipeline for training young researchers, and that he’s encouraging the premature solution of problems that should have been reserved for students.
Alex believes that resisting AI is futile. He thinks we need to adapt, radically and rapidly. He told me he was releasing even more problems—600 long-standing problems across all of applied math—for people to solve, presumably with the help of AI, so that genuinely new work can begin.
Just the day before my lunch with Alex, the whole math department—faculty, staff, and students—at Cornell was called to a town-hall meeting. The meeting was meant to provide solace and support, and to address issues such as how to assess future job candidates, and what to expect of a Ph.D. student now that an AI can solve their dissertation problem and even write their thesis for them.
At one point, one of my pure-math colleagues stood up. Justin Moore, known for his work in logic and set theory—foundational subjects for the rest of mathematics—told us about a certain problem that he has long loved and has returned to often over the past 19 years. He said that he had bought a bottle of XO cognac in Luminy, outside Marseille, back in 2010. He planned to open the bottle when the problem was solved, and to invite others who worked on it to share in the celebration.
The problem had to do with something I couldn’t understand in the least—something about non-amenable groups and Thompson’s F. But it didn’t matter that it was impenetrable to many of us. He had been saving that bottle of cognac for a problem that had just been killed by a machine. It was just another trophy in OpenAI’s bag, one of hundreds, presented like severed rhino heads.
Someone asked him what he thought of the AI proof. Justin said he didn’t know. He hadn’t read the paper yet. He said he’d been “too busy.”
That astonished me. Too busy to look at a problem he had been dreaming about for 19 years? “I am genuinely busy and probably wouldn’t be able to get to reading a human’s proof immediately either,” he told me afterward, by email. “It does not help that AI does not write mathematics particularly well.”
He still planned to open the bottle, he said, “once a group of peers I trust all agree that the proof is correct, and once we collectively understand the proof.” But he added, “I have a feeling that the cognac tasting will feel more like a wake than a celebration.”
The object of our desire, as mathematicians, is a mixture of knowing and understanding. But pure and applied mathematicians don’t always see eye to eye on what AI portends for mathematics, because our communities attach different weights to the worth of knowing versus understanding.
Roughly speaking, applied mathematicians strive to discover both what’s true and, when possible, whyit’s true. We use rigorous math when we can, but we aren’t embarrassed to lean on physical intuition, computers, experiments, data, analogies—anything to get to the answer and make sense of it.
Pure math, on the other hand, is all about the why. Without the reasoning behind it, mere knowledge of the right answer—to a pure mathematician—feels shallow, frustrating, and incomplete. This fixation on understanding can be hard for the public to sympathize with. If an AI model correctly predicts that you’re at heightened risk of developing breast cancer in the next five years, should you care that it can’t explain why, and neither can your radiologist? When lives are at stake, understanding becomes less urgent than just knowing the answer.
Pure mathematicians agree, but this tension is not part of their work. As Curtis McMullen, a professor at Harvard and a Fields Medalist, said to me in a recent email after he heard me make a similar observation on NPR’s On Point: “Mathematics is not radiology. It is more like art or philosophy, and in fact, human understanding is what it is all about.”
Applied mathematicians want to understand math too, because it’s mysterious, and alluring, elusive, inchoate. We’re not even sure whether math is out there in the universe—because what does out there even mean in terms of abstract concepts that live in our imagination? But we chase math anyway, and sometimes it materializes, or reveals itself to us, and then, a century or two later, it miraculously gives us GPS, and lasers for eye surgery, and remote TV transmissions, and ultrasounds for pregnant women, and all of the songs and photographs in your pocket, compressed with fantastically ingenious mathematical algorithms that people have thought up.
But that defense of math is too easy, and anyway, that’s pure math that morphed into applied math. What about pure math that stays pure, the part of math that’s more like art or music or poetry, not yet of any real use to anyone, except that it makes life worth living for the people who love it? Isn’t that useful too?
At the town hall, a student named Aria Beaupré asked something like that. What’s the point? she wondered out loud. This is a bright young graduate student. Someone that age shouldn’t be asking that question, I thought. That’s for old people like me, looking back, not for young people like her, looking ahead. We were all reeling, too numb to make sense of what had just happened.
Since then, I think I’ve groped my way toward an answer. A couple of weeks ago, during a conversation with Rachel Abrams on The Daily, the New York Times podcast, I wandered off the topic of math and AI and onto the meaning of life. Before that conversation, I would have said that the point of it all is learning what’s true, even more so than understanding why.
Now I think the point, even for math professors, may be human connection. Among the hundreds of emails I received after the episode came out, one from an undergraduate moved me deeply. The student described many failures and tribulations, and a strict but inspiring teacher. “The very human things that you expressed, and that I’ve poured into this email, are not something that AI can achieve or experience,” the student wrote, and later added, “We give these ideas and concepts meanings, and we use math to connect with one another, and bring meaning to each other’s lives and experiences. AI can’t even begin to replicate this impact, and it never will.”
But is human connection really a sufficient justification for why anyone would devote themselves to math? I’m not sure it would satisfy pure mathematicians like Justin. The deeper question is whether mathematics is fundamentally a human enterprise, like art or sports, or whether it’s more like science, the study of objective truths that exist independently of us.
If mathematical truths exist outside of human minds, awaiting discovery by any intelligence powerful enough to pursue them, then AI’s achievements are surely something to rejoice about. Why should it matter who or what makes the discoveries? But if mathematics is a creative human endeavor—a way of exercising our ingenuity and sharing those experiences with other people—then something achingly precious may be lost when the machines take over and leave us behind.
“Even though my heart wants math to be like an Olympic sport going forward, I know that it’s a science,” Justin wrote recently. He finds himself torn between these competing conceptions of the subject we both love. “AI is separating those two things in an uncomfortable way and making us look in the mirror at ourselves.”
Perhaps the hardest part is that both conceptions of math can be true. Mathematical truths may exist outside of us, but the search for them has always taken us deep inside ourselves, to find the best that our minds can muster. Until now, discovery and the joy of discovering went hand in hand. Suddenly, AI is ripping them apart.
That’s why I’ve been losing sleep for months, and why Justin still hasn’t opened his bottle. Neither of us knows what comes next. Will there ever be a time for cognac again?
Lefkés, a mountain village on the Greek island of Paros, is named after white poplars that once surrounded it. Beyond a cluster of houses, a Byzantine footpath meanders toward the Aegean. According to village lore, the path is not visible from Paros’s shoreline to protect Lefkés from pirates.
In the late 1960s, my Uncle Stelios bought a dilapidated house in Lefkés and, with my father’s help, rebuilt it into a majestic dwelling. This place became our family haven.
Platon
Lefkés took to modernity late. Narrow streets, built centuries ago, honored human scale and could never be claimed by cars. Corners of buildings were rounded so that donkeys laden with fruits and vegetables could make sharp turns. I remember when electricity first lit up the streets, the day we first had running water, and when the only phone line was in the post office, which also served as the social club for the yiayias—matriarchs who listened to every call. Word would be passed from window to doorway until the entire community knew your business. One of these ladies was known as “Mrs. Postman.” She hand-delivered everyone’s letters after reading them first, carrying the open envelopes in her leather handbag. Years later, I would photograph her clutching this precious purse on her lap.
My father’s family had left Greece when he was a young boy, after World War II, fleeing a German concentration camp. When I was still a baby, my family moved back for my father’s work as an architect. I’d peer over his drafting table while he sketched street scenes and villagers in black ink. He never used gray—only uncompromising black and white. I’m still searching for the simplicity of my father’s eye—brightness and contrast.
I would emulate him and sketch the village elders, learning to study posture and character. In 1986, I discovered photography, and the camera became my sketchbook. I returned to Paros several times a year to practice. Over time, I photographed everyone—village elders, children, priests, fishermen, farmers, shopkeepers, and the last donkey man.
Uncle Stelios loved to help me find new subjects. We traveled across Paros and her small sister island, Antiparos, to find “good quality people,” as he would say. One of my first photographs is of an old man he knew called Pandelis, who was born around 1915, though he didn’t know his birthday or exact age. I took a picture of the back of his weather-beaten neck. I also took a portrait of him sitting inside his house. Three objects hung on the wall behind him: an empty picture frame, a pincushion storing needles that he used for repairing his work clothes, and a pack of AA batteries he had found on the beach. Pandelis had no idea what the batteries were for, but because the package had a hole in it, he assumed that it was an ornament, so he hung it on a hook for display.
Platon
Platon
Efthemios, Uncle Stelios’s closest companion, also helped me find more subjects for my portraits. I photographed his parents, and his daughter as a little girl, wearing a headscarf during a festival—then, decades later, his grandson in church among a group of altar boys.
On a recent trip, I took my wife and my teenage children, armed with Super 8 cameras—as well as a producer and a videographer—to make a film about Paros. Monique, a ceramicist on the island, led us to a house where a woman named Katerina lived with her husband, known as “the tailor.” His sewing machine had repaired villagers’ clothes since World War II.
He had a noble face. Sadly, he was bedridden and had not left his house in years. He was overwhelmed with emotion as his small house filled with a young, appreciative film crew. I took a portrait of the two of them, Katerina’s head resting on his shoulder. She whispered, “There is no happy life. There are only happy moments.”
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A great movie soundtrack can be just as memorable as the film itself. A few notes might bring an entire scene rushing back, and an old song can find new life in the right movie. Below, six Atlantic staffers share their favorite film soundtracks of the 21st century.
One Battle After Another (streaming on HBO Max and Prime Video)
Beneath its cat-and-mouse tale about fascism and rebellion, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2025 Best Picture Oscar winner is a masterpiece of cadence. The story progresses in slow creeps and sudden, skittering leaps. Characters crash together and pull apart like excited molecules. The sizzling energy owes to an unusual process: Anderson hired the Radiohead multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood to compose music before shooting began and then edited Greenwood’s work. The soundtrack pairs percussive piano with drums hooked to robotic circuits to create backbeats as insistent and unsteady as hiccups. Twanging guitars and symphonic strings express unsettled, ugly-pretty chords. The effect is an astonishingly original reminder that social movements are but collections of individuals, each squiggling along their own trajectory.
— Spencer Kornhaber, staff writer
***
Darkest Hour (streaming on Apple TV and Prime Video)
I love soundtracks, but my favorites—Glory, Miller’s Crossing, Crimson Tide—are all at least 30 years old. I am a sucker for a John Williams march or an elegiac Thomas Newman moment, but when I consulted my playlist, I found that one soundtrack kept rising to the top: Darkest Hour,by Dario Marianelli (with piano by Víkingur Ólafsson). The movie follows Winston Churchill’s first days in office, in 1940, after France fell and Britain stood alone against the Nazis. The score alternates between piano meditations and orchestral flight; like Churchill, it is fussy and elegant, quiet and then bombastic. It conveys the tension and urgency in the man and the moment. The final track, “We Shall Fight,” plays over Churchill’s speech to Parliament in which he vows to never surrender to evil. It is a moving and uplifting piece, but also tragic: He knew the horrors that awaited, and he led Britain to its fate anyway.
— Tom Nichols, staff writer
***
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (streaming on HBO Max)
On the subject of movie music, much comes to mind. My single favorite piece of original movie music this century might be “The Alien,” Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow’s eerie composition for Annihilation; my favorite repurposed song might be Plumtree’s “Scott Pilgrim,” the lovey-dovey indie-rock namesake of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Jon Brion’s off-kilter bricolage for Punch-Drunk Love, the torch ballads of A Star Is Born, the uncut Daft Punk–ness of Tron: Legacy—all of this matters to me. However, play two seconds of “Concerning Hobbits,” and I’m back in the Shire, awaiting the appearance of a great wizard and hanging out with my vertically challenged friends. Howard Shore’s score for Fellowship, and for the rest of the Lord of the Rings series, is both transportive and formfitting, making Peter Jackson’s movie sound as epic as it looks.
— Jeremy Gordon, senior editor
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Shrek 2 (streaming on Peacock)
When I first watched Shrek 2, I was far more interested in the movie’s ridiculous fairy-tale antics than in the music. Years later, I’ve come to appreciate that the soundtrack is every bit as good as the movie itself. The song choices, including Counting Crows’ “Accidentally in Love” in the opening sequence, are absurdly perfect for a film about a green ogre meeting his in-laws. The soundtrack also features David Bowie, Nick Cave, and Tom Waits, but the undisputed highlight is Jennifer Saunders’s rendition of “Holding Out for a Hero” as the Fairy Godmother, which turns the climactic rescue scene into a musical spectacle that has no right to be as thrilling as it is. A villain belting out a Bonnie Tyler song while a giant gingerbread man storms a castle? As a kid, I thought it was the height of cinema. I may have outgrown some of my other childhood favorites, but I still think the Fairy Godmother deserves a Grammy.
— Rafaela Jinich, assistant editor
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Challengers (streaming on Paramount+ and Apple TV)
Ever need to outrun a serial killer, punch a bully, or fight a bear? Have I got the soundtrack for you! Nothing gets me going quite like Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s magnum opus, the soundtrack for Luca Guadagnino’s film Challengers. (To fans of their work for The Social Network—sorry, this one’s simply better!) The film makes the compelling argument that everything in life is about sex, except sex, which is about tennis. The pulsing, almost panic-inducing score draws on Berlin techno and ’90s rave music to heighten the anxiety of the film’s central love triangle. The frenzied sounds amplify the adrenaline that elite tennis players feel as they play (and sometimes kiss) each other. Listening to the climactic track, “Match Point,” one almost feels like the tennis ball being flung around the court. Whenever I need to crush a deadline or motivate myself to tackle a hard task, the Challengers soundtrack is my go-to. Plus, I once heard it played in a nightclub, and I haven’t been the same since.
— Madeleine Carlisle, staff writer
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Sicario (streaming on HBO Max and Hulu)
The Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s work in Sicario has been ripped off a million times. The beautifully foreboding noises he pioneered and perfected for Denis Villeneuve’s ultra-stylish, very violent feds-versus-cartels thriller—the subterranean bass groans, the trapped-in-the-birth-canal percussion, the tinnitus-like swarms of strings—are now part of the standard kit of horror-movie soundtracking: You can hear them, in degraded form, everywhere. But Jóhannsson, unlike his imitators, had other registers, other capacities: Sicario also features the elegiac “Desert Music,” which sounds less like the industrial metal nihilists Godflesh and more like, I don’t know, Bach. Something else Jóhannsson shared with Bach? I think he was probably a genius.
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, a crime thriller about an aging pickpocket who steals a valuable USB drive and becomes the target of a vengeful crime family (in theaters Friday)
Nocturne, a crime-drama series about a Pennsylvania detective who enlists his FBI-agent protégé to catch a serial killer (streaming Friday on Apple TV)
The Brightness, a novel by Chad Harbach about two young women who navigate friendship, love, and ambition as they face life-changing decisions in their 20s (out Tuesday)
Essay
Illustration by Marine Buffard
50 Unforgettable Love Stories
By The Atlantic Culture Desk
Centuries before bookstores had shelves labeled romance and fictional hockey players locked eyes across the ice, the love story, with all of its attendant joys and sorrows, was an organizing principle of life—and of literature. The sentiment that another person might “complete” us enchanted both Plato and Jerry Maguire, and the search for that someone, along with the desire to understand why it can hurt so bad, has animated fiction from the beginning. The list below is an effort to name those love stories: novels, of course, but also poetry, plays, and short stories—that we consider to be the most enduring. We asked a jury of scholars, librarians, critics, and authors across genres, as well as many colleagues, to name their favorite titles that were originally written in English. We thought of our own personal touchstones, deliberated over the choices, and emerged with a group of standouts: 50 titles you won’t soon forget.
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