WSC

• Would your life be more different if you had been born in the same place 30 years ago, or in another country 3000 kilometers away?
• The "now" is a single moment in time, but the past is very large. Should we spend more time learning about the parts of the past that affect us today?
• How should we divide the past into smaller units when we think about it?
• What historical dates are worth remembering in specific detail, and which ones are best left vague?
• The Soviet leader Vladmir Lenin once wrote that "there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks in which decades happen." If so, do you think people are aware of the kind of time they are living in—and what kind of time are we living in now?
• Has the Internet affected how quickly history happens? How about how quickly the present becomes history?
• Does it matter how the world came to be what it is, or should we focus more on what it is right now? In other words, does the past matter, or would we be better off pretending it never happened?
• If you wanted to learn about a time in the past, would you rather read a book, visit a museum, watch a documentary, chat with an AI reconstruction of someone alive back then, or explore an old architectural site?
• How much will global climate change require us to rethink everyday institutions such as schools and workplaces?
• Are there are other developments—other than an alien invasion—that might have impacts on the same scale?
• The phrase "there's no time like the present" is usually meant as a counter to procrastination. Do something now, not later. Finish this outline today, not in 2025. Taking it more literally, however: is the present really a unique point in history? If so, does it make it harder for us to understand what the past was like?
• "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it" is a phrase those who study history like to repeat, but is it possible that those who do study history are doomed to absorb the things we like least about it? Put another way: does knowing more about the past limit or enhance our ability to reimagine the present?
• If you walked out of your home without knowing you'd accidentally time traveled into the past, how long would it take you to realize what had happened? What if they had sent you back ten years, or thirty, or a hundred? Discuss with your team: how far into the past would you need to be to realize instantly that you were in a different era?
• Serif


  A small line or stroke attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol
• Sans serif


  A font without the small lines or strokes at the ends of the main strokes of the letters
• Recently, the United States Department of State changed its own default font from Times New Roman to Calibri—20 years after first switching from Courier to Times New Roman. Each move sparked at least 36 points of controversy. Discuss with your team: should governments even have standardized fonts? If so, how should they pick them, and when should they change them?
• If all these fonts confuse you—or you just want to check whether a document (such as an alternative World Scholar's Cup outline) is a forgery—you could always hire a forensic font expert. Read about the kind of work such experts do, then discuss with your team: should some fonts be reserved for exclusive use by AIs and others for humans?
• If you found yourself at a supermarket in 1963, you wouldn't have been able to pay for anything at all until the clerk typed in the price of every item you wanted to buy, one at a time. Doing so quickly was a coveted skill: there was even a competition with prizes like free trips to Hawaii. The adoption of the barcode in the 1960s was a buzzkill for such price-inputting savants. Discuss with your team: what other technologies do we take for granted when we're at stores or shopping online? And do you support efforts to reimagine in-person shopping without any form of checkout at all?
• Just as barcodes transformed checkout, QR codes have changed many other everyday experiences, from debate tree distribution (sometimes) to accessing restaurant menus. But a change that seemed inevitable during the pandemic has run into resistance since. Discuss with your team: is this pushback a classic example of society resisting technological progress, only to eventually succumb? Are there any technologies that were supposed to change the world which were rejected and stayed rejected?
• Artists sometimes rethink what materials can even be used to make art. Consider the butter sculptures of Caroline Brooks, or the cassette tape sculptures of Erika Iris Simmons, in which the artist crafted portraits of famous musicians out of their own recordings. Discuss with your team: should more portraits be made of materials related to their subjects? Do works such as Dominique Blain's Missa —an assemblage of one hundred army boots—force us to reconsider old topics in new ways, or do they rely too much on novelty instead of skill?
• A scholar from New Zealand once revealed that her artistic talent also involved an unusual medium: she painted on pizza dough—with tomato sauce. (This approach works less well on existing paintings.) If she had been born 40,000 years ago—and to an egalitarian society with access to foreign fruits—she might have painted on cave walls instead. While tomato-based pigment wouldn't have survived to the modern era, some ancient cave art has. Consider recent efforts to reconstruct the earliest cave art, including this 35,000 year-old illustration of a babirusa deep in the Maros-Pangkep caves of Indonesia. Then, discuss with your team: were these early cave dwellers artists? Is there a difference between painting and documentation—or between drawing and doodling? Are Charles Darwin's surviving sketches of finches in the Galapagos fit to be called works of art?
• If it were a Starbucks, they'd just build another one across the street. It's harder to know what to do when a historical site is overcrowded. Some governments impose quotas, as Peru did in 2019 on visitors to the Incan city of Machu Picchu. Facing a similar situation when tourists swamped its Lascaux Caves to see the art on their walls, France built another one across the street. Is it misleading to present such recreations to tourists as worthwhile destinations? Does it matter whether the duplicates were made by human hands or a 3D printer, or how far they are from the original?
• Consider this proposal to build another Egyptian pyramid in Detroit or this second Eiffel Tower, named Eiffela by creator Phillipe Maindron. The world is full of such efforts: learn more about these other Eiffel tower replicas, including those in Texas, Pakistan, and China, then discuss with your team: what other historical landmark would you want to duplicate? Where would you put it, and would you make it exactly like the original or would you reimagine it in some way?
• Even if these sites weren't overcrowded—more Baku than Kuala Lumpur—they would still require us to travel to them. Not everyone has the means. But, at least in theory, far more people could visit reconstructions of them in virtual reality, or VR. (VR was the last trendy two-letter acronym before AI.) Explore the offerings of the Australian company Lithodomos, then discuss with your team: would you support this technology being used in classrooms? Should more real-world tourism be replaced with VR visits? Check out the following VR implementations at museums, then discuss with your team: are these VR interpretations of past works themselves new works of art?
• Artists have been experimenting with integrating VR directly into their work. Consider the pieces below, then discuss with your team: would they still have as much artistic value without the VR elements? How soon do you think AI will be integrated into art in the same way, or is this integration already happening?
• In 2023, when the Mauritshuis Museum in the Hague lent out one of its most famous works—Johannes Vermeer's The Girl with the Pearl Earring (1665)—it launched a competition, titled My Girl with a Pearl, for something to hang in its place. Over 3500 artists submitted their reimaginings of the original Vermeer. The winner was a lovely work titled A Girl with Glowing Earrings —which turned out to have been made using AI. The museum was criticized, even as the German-based artist Julian van Dieken behind it pointed out that he had been upfront about his methods. Discuss with your team: should museums be allowed to display art generated using AI tools?
• Sitting astride a gallant white steed in Jacques-Louis David's Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801) is purportedly Napoleon, but Napolean didn't want to pose for the work —despite having given David very specific instructions on what to paint. " Calme sur un cheval fougueux ," he requested. Calm on a fiery horse . For a model, David resorted to his own son—who stood calmly on a fiery ladder. To achieve more drama, he replaced the mule from Napoleon's actual journey (on a fair summer day) with a stallion (battling a blistering storm). The most accurate thing about the painting was the uniform. It had only been a year since the actual event happened; surely some people knew how inaccurate the work was, and his own face in it was bland and undetailed—but Napoleon reputably loved the finished product. "Nobody knows if the portraits of the great men resemble them [anyway]," the victorious general offered, by way of justification. Discuss with your team: was Napoleon right in recognizing that history would remember how David had portrayed him? You should also take a look at this piece by Paul Delaroche in 1853, which tried to reconstruct the past more accurately than it had been reimagined in the present—should an AI be used to transplant some of the details from this version into the original piece?
• Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) captures a key moment in America's founding myth: the future first president leading his men against on the British. As paintings go, it is iconic; it is also inaccurate. In 2011, Mort Kunstler reimagined the scene more realistically. Compare his take to Leutze's, then consider a version that critiques the myth behind all of it: Robert Colescott's " George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975). If you could print only one of these three works in a history textbook, which would you choose? Did Leutze's become the most iconic only because it was first?
• Explore some of the techniques used to reconstruct castles that have lost the battle with time, such as LED lights, 3D models, and VR — then discuss with your team: should they be rebuilt in real life instead?
• When rebuilding castles in real life, should we update them to reflect modern values such as sustainability, inclusiveness, and indoor plumbing? Consider the controversy in Japan over adding elevators to Nagoya Castle for guests experiencing limited mobility, then discuss with your team: at what point does rebuilding something become reimagining it? Attempts to restore the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris also raised similar questions. Should these rebuilt structures still be considered as UNESCO World Heritage Sites?
• Research the following castles and palaces that have found ways to open their doors to modern visitors, then discuss with your team: would their original residents have liked "what we've done with the place"? While most renovated castles and palaces are converted into hotels or museums, what else could be done with them? Should they be converted into low-cost housing for those in need?
• In medieval times London Bridge was a living bridge, serving not just as a river crossing but as the host of an entire community of shops and houses. Now it's just a song lyric and a thoroughfare. In New York, an old elevated rail line has been reborn as the popular High Line park; in Hong Kong and Athens, retired airports—with their massive footprints—are being redeveloped into entire neighborhoods. On a smaller scale, many urban rooftops are becoming organic farms and suburban parking lots solar farms. Discuss with your team: what other aspects of older infrastructure could be used in new ways with minimal changes?
• Consider the following works, then discuss with your team: should we respond differently to art that tries to imagine what could be, art that imagines what could never be, and art that shows us what we didn't realize already was?
• Some artists choose to reimagine popular brands and fictional characters in ways that shine a new light on them and on society. Consider the following works, then discuss with your team: should these artists be required to secure permission from—or even pay—the companies whose brands or characters they are borrowing? Does it depend on how widely the
• Blend the real with the imaginary. Consider the following works, then discuss with your team: should we respond differently to art that tries to imagine what could be, art that imagines what could never be, and art that shows us what we didn't realize already was?
• Works to consider


  • A Reversible Anthropomorphic Portrait of a Man Composed of Fruit | Giuseppe Arcimboldo
  • Aerial Rotating House | Albert Robida (1883)
  • Late Visitors to Pompeii | Carel Wilink (1931)
  • Our Lady of the Iguanas | Graciela Iturbide (1979)
  • The Strolling Saint | Pedro Meyer (1991)
  • The Romantic Dollarscape | Pedro Alvarez (2003)
  • Weirdos of Another Universe | Avery Gibbs (2023)
• Some artists choose to reimagine popular brands and fictional characters in ways that shine a new light on them and on society. Consider the following works, then discuss with your team: should these artists be required to secure permission from—or even pay—the companies whose brands or characters they are borrowing? Does it depend on how widely the work is distributed, or whether the work is positive or negative?
• Works to consider


  • Campbell's Soup Cans | Andy Warhol (1962)
  • Liberation of Aunt Jemima & Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Cocktail | Betye Saar (1973)
  • Kawsbob | Kaws (2010)
  • Charlie Brown Firestarter | Banksy (2010)
  • Life, Miracle Whip and Premium | Brendan O'Connell (2013)
• A smart fridge that could order more yogurt from the market for you when your supply runs low: the Internet of things (IoT) devices promised to revolutionize our daily live, from thermostats that learn when you're home to umbrellas that check the weather forecast before you leave home. But we are now more than a decade into the IoT revolution, and it has mostly filled our houses with useless gadgets that are privacy and security risks and frequently turn into e-waste. Discuss with your team: what went wrong? Do people simply not want their homes full of IoT devices, or is this a technology whose time has just not yet come?
• You can't read records that don't exist, just as you can't listen to music that was never recorded. Learn about the world's earliest record-keeping, usually credited to the Sumerians or the Egyptians. Compare their early forms of writing—cuneiform and hieroglyphics—then discuss: would there be advantages to living in a world where no one keeps written track of anything? Be sure to investigate the following strategies that early civilizations used to record their histories. What were their limitations, and can we learn from any of them today?