For more than 30 years, Michiko Kakutani reviewed books for The New York Times, earning not just the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism but the gratitude of the novelists she exuberantly praised and the enmity of some, such as Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, whose less impressive late work she filleted as expertly as a fishmonger. She shunned the literary-party circuit (for years her phone number was listed under a fictitious name in the white pages), but for those lucky enough to know her, she is generous, thoughtful, and extremely funny.
In her latest book, The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider, Kakutani explores how we arrived at such a surreal moment in our history, where truth and fantasy are embroiled in a death match and technology offers as much peril as promise. The Great Wave connects the dots in ways that are smart, penetrating, and surprising.
JIM KELLY: You use Katsushika Hokusai’s print The Great Wave as a metaphor for the rapid disruptions that now threaten society. As you point out, sweeping change is not necessarily bad, but today I can’t help but look at the shape of the wave itself as a Donald Trump comb-over. What accounts for his durable popularity, and how much sleep do you lose about his possible re-election?
MICHIKO KAKUTANI: Donald Trump’s comb-over—yikes! Now I’ll never be able to look at that image the same way!
Trump got elected in 2016 by using a toxic combination of con-man sales maneuvers (learned during his days in real estate) and demagogic techniques employed by generations of autocrats and strongmen, who shamelessly appeal to people’s fears and anger. The financial meltdown of 2008 helped make the United States—and other liberal democracies across the world—susceptible to extremist populist rhetoric: many members of the working and middle classes never fully recovered from that economic tsunami, which increased inequalities and fueled mistrust of governments and elites. At the same time, rapid technological change was magnifying people’s sense of insecurity even as social media was isolating them in ever narrower filter bubbles, where extremist views and incendiary invective thrived. A perfect petri dish for Trump’s politics of hatred and rage.
The impact that Trump has already had on America and the world is incredibly alarming. He has mainstreamed racist epithets and contempt for the rule of law, promoted violent discord and division, sidelined facts and the idea of truth, all the while subverting faith in democratic institutions—from a free press to an independent judiciary to our electoral system and the peaceful transfer of power.
Abroad, he has undermined America’s reputation—assailing NATO and longtime allies, while praising autocratic leaders like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Viktor Orbán.
A second term would likely be even more damaging, and a genuine threat to democracy in America as we know it. So-called “grown-ups” in the first term (like James Mattis and H. R. McMaster) would be replaced by enablers and loyalists intent on serving Trump, not the Constitution. Already, Trump associates have been drafting plans to increase presidential power the day he assumes office. Those plans include asserting more White House control over the Justice Department, thereby abolishing post-Watergate norms of D.O.J. independence; the removal of protections for civil servants (which would make it easier to fire career government employees); and the possible deployment of federal troops within the United States—to police the southern border or crack down on protesters.
The year 2016 was “a perfect petri dish for Trump’s politics of hatred and rage.”
J.K.: You point out that we have been here before, especially in the 1930s, when the Great Depression, the rise of Hitler, and the horrors of Stalinism darkened the world. You do not have to fully subscribe to the great-man theory of history to largely credit Franklin Roosevelt with saving us from collapse. Are the challenges facing us today, most notably climate change, far too complex for a charismatic leader to move us in the right direction?
M.K.: With his inclusive vision of the world and his own gift for connecting with people, Pope Francis has demonstrated that one individual can shake up an ancient institution and lay the groundwork for substantive change. He has advocated for the decentralization of power in the church, condemned economic injustice, and called for a concerted focus on the needs of the marginalized and disenfranchised.
But in today’s interconnected but very fragmented world, it’s hard to imagine any one leader single-handedly turning the tide on our biggest crises. Indeed, problems like climate change require cooperative efforts that cross national and regional borders. Technology for clean energy needs to be shared, and wealthier nations will need to help developing countries move toward a low-carbon economy.
J.K.: You devote much of the book to technology and its effects on our culture and politics, and I share your dismay that on a daily basis it is making us stupider and more distracted, and on a larger canvas threatens to turn our world into what you call a “sci-fi dystopia,” thanks to artificial intelligence. To borrow from Donald Rumsfeld’s famous quote about what we know and don’t know, A.I. is an “unknown unknown.” I do not see any way in which we can make A.I. accountable to humans. Do you?
M.K.: Is it too late to stop A.I. from developing unforeseen abilities that will make it impervious to human control? Too late to pull the plug on HAL 9000, as the astronaut Dave did in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Developments in A.I. are progressing at an astonishing pace—a pace only exceeded, it seems, by the ever multiplying consequences of its emerging abilities. Since the release of ChatGPT, in late 2022, technology experts have been pointing to a panoply of potential dangers: A.I.’s ability to churn out deepfakes that will flood an already truth-challenged world with industrial volumes of misinformation; its effect on the job market, as more and more companies outsource work to chatbots; the technology’s propensity to “hallucinate,” giving users incorrect answers to questions; and other unanticipated behavior learned from the vast amounts of data it ingests and analyzes.
“I no longer believe that the biggest problem with these A.I. models is their propensity for factual errors,” the New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose wrote after testing Microsoft’s new A.I.-powered Bing search engine, which, he discovered, has a brooding alter ego named Sydney. “Instead, I worry that the technology will learn how to influence human users, sometimes persuading them to act in destructive and harmful ways, and perhaps eventually grow capable of carrying out its own dangerous acts.”
Despite such warnings—as well as warnings from pioneers in the field like Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called godfather of A.I.—big tech companies like Google and Microsoft have speeded up their development of artificial-intelligence products in a race to dominate the hottest new sector in technology. This race, according to current and former employees, has led to companies taking more and more risks—releasing to the public technology that even its own developers do not yet fully understand. It’s a scenario that sounds like an unsettling mash-up of Frankenstein and Jurassic Park—except it’s not fiction, it’s real life.
“Is it too late … to pull the plug on HAL 9000, as the astronaut Dave did in 2001: A Space Odyssey?”
J.K.: What I find most confounding in these times is that some of the world’s actors seem to be acting without even the pretense of any clear endgame. Say Putin defeats Ukraine. What has he gained, besides a ruinous war for his own people and the subjugation of a country that will forever be in revolt against his control? And in killing so many innocent Jews last October, Hamas has invited a response that has already destroyed so much of Gaza, has killed thousands of Palestinians, and ensured the destruction of most if not all of its current leadership. Obviously, leaders have miscalculated before, but these actions seem especially shortsighted and deranged. Let me suggest that this recklessness is a particular product of our increasingly impulsive and irrational times.
M.K.: Yes, those moves by Putin and Hamas are heinous acts, leading to the deaths of countless civilians and the destruction of entire communities, and at the same time deeply irrational decisions in which ego and nihilism utterly trumped common sense and the long-term future of their people. And because of 24-7 media coverage, we are all seeing this unfold in real time.
But there have been horribly perverse and misguided decisions throughout history—the result, in some cases, of a tyrant’s malice and impulsivity; in others, the result of a failure to carefully weigh pros and cons and to listen to dissenting opinions. In all too many cases, these leaders also doubled down on their original crimes and miscalculations, refusing to change course even as human costs snowballed.
Mao’s Great Leap Forward—which involved the herding of villagers into huge people’s communes, where they were subjected to cruel Communist Party dictates and forced labor—led to the deaths of an estimated 45 million people. Napoleon and Hitler both invaded Russia—with calamitous results for their own armies. Vietnam and Iraq both proved to be long, toxic wars for the United States, which inflicted incalculable suffering on those countries and diminished America’s own standing on the world stage.
J.K.: You end on an optimistic note, and it is telling that you and President Joe Biden both find solace in Heaney’s play The Cure at Troy, which includes the lines “But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme.” Tell me, please, that you really believe that will happen again, as it has before in history.
M.K.: Seamus Heaney has said he was only able, in 1990, to envision a time when “hope and history rhyme” because of “the extraordinary events” of the previous year, which saw “the Berlin Wall come down, and the philosopher-president come to power in Czechoslovakia, and the Romanian tyranny crumble.”
Hopes that the fall of the Berlin Wall would lead to a new era in which liberal democracy triumphed across the world crashed up against the harsh realities of the 21st century. But looking back at history, we remember that the world has survived terrible tragedies in the past and eras more nerve-racking than our own. The United States survived the Civil War. Europe emerged from the devastation of two World Wars. Japan rebuilt after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“It’s a scenario that sounds like an unsettling mash-up of Frankenstein and Jurassic Park—except it’s not fiction, it’s real life.”
J.K.: On a happier note, you are a wonderful photographer, as your Instagram account (with more than 17,000 followers!) shows. How did you become interested in photography? And you seem to have a special fondness for birds, especially Flaco, the Eurasian eagle owl who escaped the Central Park Zoo last year and has been hooting his way around the neighborhood ever since. And you even co-authored a book with Bette Midler about the park’s formerly most famous winged creature, a rare mandarin duck. What is it about these birds that attracts you?
M.K.: I’ve loved taking pictures since college, when I took several photography classes and spent hours in a darkroom—the old, pre-digital days of Kodak Tri-X 400 film, and my favorite Agfa paper, Portriga Rapid. This was after a failed stint in art school in Paris, when I realized I would never be very good at painting or drawing: I had one drawing teacher who said if you could draw a button-down shirt collar, you could draw anything—which, in my experience, didn’t exactly prove true.
I’ve also loved animals and birds since childhood—I had myriad pets, belonged to a 4-H Club, and grew up reading books like Marguerite Henry and Wesley Dennis’s Misty of Chincoteague and Brighty of the Grand Canyon, Joy Adamson’s Born Free, Sterling North’s Rascal, and Sheila Burnford’s The Incredible Journey. Also: charming owl books like P. D. Eastman’s Sam and the Firefly and John Hollander’s Various Owls.
I’m not a serious birder—I can’t tell one type of warbler from another—but find real joy in seeing them in Central Park: such amazing reminders that in the midst of the city’s concrete grid, there is this magical green rectangle that provides a refuge for all these beautiful wild creatures.
As for owls, I’ve loved them for as long as I can remember: they are completely captivating birds, at once fierce and adorable, expressive and mysterious. And the owls—like Barry the Barred Owl and Geraldine the Great Horned Owl—who showed up in New York during Covid got many of us to leave our stuffy apartments and venture out into the restorative wilds of Central Park.
The story of Flaco the Eurasian eagle owl, who escaped from the Central Park Zoo after nearly 13 years of captivity, had a special resonance for many New Yorkers, recovering from the isolation of their own Covid confinement. People identified with the bird, who defied expectations and wrote a second act to his life, now hooting triumphantly from the top of rooftop water tanks and 20-story-high Emery Roth buildings—the very embodiment of freedom, resilience, and the possibility of renewal.
J.K.: You wrote such wonderful profiles early in your career, including pieces on Joan Didion, Saul Bellow, and my personal favorite, on Ingmar Bergman. Did you have a favorite subject, and do you miss writing profiles?
M.K.: Interviews with artists fascinated me because they provided an opportunity to talk with gifted people about the creative process—the formative events that led them to discover their vocation, the influences that helped shape their own artistic vision, and the actual nuts and bolts of their work—how they start work on a new project; how they develop, hone, or discard ideas; how they make later revisions.
This interviewing of artists probably helped me, later, as a critic—providing some insight into the artistic process. As a shy person, however, I also found this sort of reporting stressful—I’d worry about everything from the failure of the tape recorder to having a deer-in-the-headlights moment, to being allotted only a brief amount of time. In the case of Bergman, I had to travel to his home on the tiny Swedish island of Fårö—which, I recall, took almost an entire day, given problems with airplane connections through Stockholm—for an interview of only 45 minutes. He did relent a bit, but the interview was still under an hour.
J.K.: Finally, I will shamelessly steal a well-known question from your former employer’s Book Review and ask you the three people, living or dead, you would invite for dinner.
M.K.: So hard to name only three … I guess three of the human beings I’d like to invite would be Shakespeare (to learn more about the most remarkable writer in English literature), Mary Shelley (because Frankenstein was not only one of the most innovative novels in its time but also addressed ever more timely issues of scientific hubris and ambition), and Muhammad Ali (because … well, because he’s the Greatest).
Hoping that Flaco could also attend—he could perch on top of a dining-room bookcase or on the back of a chair.
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at AIR MAIL