Time, Now

Booker-nominated author Claire Messud makes a timely, impassioned argument for the importance of narrative in the age of digital overwhelm.

A writing professor asks her students to share a childhood memory. They are stranded: all they can recall are family videos, photos resurfaced by an algorithm—moments already framed before they became memories at all.

For the last one hundred years, technology has shaped not only how we communicate but how we experience time itself. But today the amassing of big data, the speed of problem solving, and the ubiquity of smartphones and AI threaten to upend our relationship to space and time. The past returns to us only in curated feeds and automatic reminders: an unceasing, untethered stream of content. Might we, in retaking control of our narrative threads, regain agency over our hours, our days, and the stories of our lives?

Claire Messud’s urgent manifesto argues that we must recapture our futures from the digital forces that consume us, and reclaim what makes us most human.