The end of an era came to my house this past weekend. I finally gave away my 1993 set of Encyclopædia Britannica. It was gathering dust on a bookcase, and my three kids hadn’t opened a volume in more than 10 years. So I finally gave in to the Declutter Police, boxed them up, and put them on the porch to give away on the Buy Nothing app, where you can connect with people for neighborhood giveaways.

I gave them away and asked for nothing for a few reasons.

First, after researching where I could donate them, I learned that libraries and schools generally don’t take them. They take up too much room, and older ones are outdated. While most knowledge prior to 1993 has remained intact, back then, Pluto was still a planet, and a number of independent countries didn’t exist then (Serbia, Montenegro, South Sudan, to name a few).

Second, for many years, I’ve gone on eBay to follow people trying to sell their sets for up to $299, and they never move. My mother-in-law still has a set from 1953, and you’d think it might be a collector’s item, but even that version doesn’t get any interested parties willing to pay.

But mostly, I was fine giving it away because I never paid for it myself. I got it for free.

My first job out of college was working for Britannica. Back then, if you stayed there for a while, you’d get a free set every five years. I was there for nine-and-a-half years, so I was very close to getting a second set.

Several years later, in 2010, Britannica literally stopped the presses and halted its print edition. Their flagship product is now available only online. (I worked on their earliest online editions while there.) Though it has been more than a quarter century since I worked there, I still subscribe to their online edition, perhaps out of a sense of loyalty or reminiscence, despite so much free information available online. (Even Wikipedia was originally based on an old, public-domain version of Britannica when it first started.) But as we know, there is so much non-authoritative, unvetted information poisoning the world right now—not to mention deliberate lies, misinformation, and obfuscations—that having a trusted source is vital now more than ever.

But one thing that I’ll miss about combing through the Britannica set is the serendipity of learning. When you look something up in a printed encyclopedia—”starting with the index!” as the company’s Indexing Department always insisted—you’d go to a page to find what you’re looking for, and across the page you’d find a photo of an exotic city, an odd-looking animal, a map of an unfamiliar part of the world, or countless other things that you weren’t looking for, and then, suddenly, you knew about them. Knowledge wasn’t just a place you landed on—it was a river that took you in all sorts of different directions.

For the geeked-out kid who loved to read, this was a godsend for them and their parents, almost a kind of built-in babysitting. Kids could sit for hours just discovering knowledge. I suppose this was a source of entertainment before television came along.

Nowadays, in addition to kids being sidetracked by social media, knowledge has become an environment where you focus on one specific subject, look up and learn what you need to know, and then you’re done. Why be sidetracked by stuff you’re not looking for? Who needs to waste that time when there are silly AI videos of people dancing badly on TikTok?

You can, of course, go to a library to retain this sense of serendipitous learning. But online, the closest thing I can find is the “I’m feeling lucky” button on Google’s home page, which returns a random set of search results. Apparently, only 1% of users click on it, resulting in a huge loss of revenue. (Ah, let us cry for the poor trillion-dollar company.) And who goes to the Google home page anymore when you can search in your browser bar? I went there just now, and unsurprisingly, I saw that they’ve replaced the “lucky” button with one that rotates “trendy,” “playful,” “artistic,” “fun,” and surely many more. Maybe “trendy” or “fun” cut their losses.

Just as specialization took over universities decades ago and replaced the idea of being a well-rounded person (and good citizen) with majors and concentrations, now we’ve moved from specialized knowledge to need-to-know knowledge. Anything can be looked up instantly just by talking to Google, Siri, and other chatbots and search engines. AI has given us generative answers that go beyond search results to explanations. The next step may be more widespread use of wearables like glasses, where we can see our answers, have them explained via videos against a backdrop of the real world, and even be taken places with VR walkthroughs. And then, further down the line, all of this could be injected into our brains.

Perhaps someone then, or now, can find a way to inject some serendipity into this process. Instead of Claude asking me whether I’d like to dig into a subject further and go down a rabbit hole on a certain question, it might end with the equivalent of a random “did you know?” response. Rather than give us more of what we want, it could provide us with the opposite of what we want from time to time, something to broaden our knowledge and give us something else to talk about.

Until then, I’m going to make the occasional online pilgrimage to Britannica.com and ask the chatbot to give me a random piece of knowledge. Here’s the one it gave me today:

The Great Wall of China was constructed to fortify China’s northern border. It has been the site of numerous battles and skirmishes throughout history, including conflicts with the Xiongnu during the Qin dynasty, the Khitans during the Song dynasty, and the Mongols during the Ming dynasty.

Would you like to explore more about the history of the Great Wall of China or perhaps another topic?

No, give me something totally unrelated. That’s how I expand my knowledge.

I’m not an expert on cultism, but I do know how to conduct basic research, which is more than I can say for people who believe Ivermectin is a cure for COVID-19 or that vaccines cause autism, both of which have been unsubstantiated claims during Trump’s two terms.

Cult researchers generally regard Robert Lifton’s theories on “Thought Reform” as a framework for defining a cult. Another is Steven Hassan’s BITE Model, which stands for “Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional control. I’m listing just a few of their shared definitions below, along with examples of how Trumpism and the MAGA movement correspond to each quality.

But first, I should point out that many people voted for Trump because they disliked the alternatives, because they thought he would help their economic situation, or for some other reason it suited their logic, though the logic might escape many of us. We should separate these people from those who think Trump can do no wrong. There are many people now who have awakened to the idea that they were sold a bill of goods. The cult qualities that I outline here refer to the many millions of Americans who would follow Trump off a cliff.

1. An Absolute, Unquestionable Leader — A central, often charismatic figure whose authority is treated as infallible. You simply can’t question anything they do.

You can find these people continuing to follow Trump even after he has done a complete 180 on the issues he campaigned on.

• He was going to keep us out of foreign wars, but now they’re behind him in attacking Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and anywhere else he wants to go.

• We need to rid Iran of nuclear weapons, even though Trump said he rid them of such weapons last year.

• He said he could keep gas prices down and that Biden was to blame for them going up (as though a president controls pricing on anything), but now that his unplanned war has hurt gas prices and they’re up again, that’s okay, because we’re ridding Iran of nuclear weapons, after we rid them of them last year.

Trump even went so far as to portray himself as Jesus in a recent drawing that he posted, and Reverend Franklin Graham defended him. (My favorite part of the painting is the war planes in the background, which is totally what I think of when I think of Jesus.)

2. Us vs. Them Mentality — A sharp division between followers and the outside world, which is portrayed as dangerous, corrupt, or spiritually lost.

You see this mentality in the vilification of so many groups:

• immigrants

• the LGBTQ+ community, particularly trans people

• college professors who teach black history, gender studies, feminism, climate change, and more

• colleges who allow the above subjects to be taught or who allow legitimate protests

• judges who rule against them

• lawyers who try to prosecute crimes by the administration or the party

• politicians in Trump’s own party who don’t toe the line

And that’s just a start. These actions are right out of the totalitarian playbook, dating back a very long time. Plato wrote about how dictators manufacture conflicts to distract people from the fact that their living conditions are horrible, made so by their leaders raping and pillaging the body politic.

3. Demand for Total Devotion — The group expects members to prioritize it above all else: family, career, personal goals, individual identity, and even their own ideals

Trump entered his second term requiring federal workers and job applicants to answer questions about how they would advance his priorities, and those who didn’t were largely pushed out of their jobs. Cabinet members were forced to sign loyalty oaths, and people who didn’t go along with Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election have no role in his administration.

4. Exploitation — Whether financial, sexual, emotional, or labor-based, cults typically exploit members for the benefit of the leadership or the group’s agenda.

Trump’s followers clearly have no concern about sexual exploitation, even after he was found guilty of rape in a civil court. They accused politicians on the left of pedophilia for years, but suddenly they’re silent about Trump’s name appearing more than 38,000 times in 5,300 documents in the Epstein files.

As for financial exploitation…would you like to buy a $59 Trump Bible? (It’s made in China, BTW.) A $249 bottle of Victory 45-47 Cologne? Those are such a deal compared with the $100,000 made-in-Switzerland Trump Golden Tourbillon Watch and the $11,000 “American Eagle” Signed Guitar. A president who sells anything is in clear violation of the Emoluments Clause, but his followers just shrug off his use of the office to enrich himself.

5. Fear-Based Compliance — Leaving or questioning the group is met with severe consequences — shunning, shaming, and even spiritual threats.

If GOP members say anything bad about Trump, he automatically backs another candidate to “primary” them. Just in recent weeks, he did so against Senator Bill Cassidy in Louisiana (who voted for convicting Trump for his 2021 impeachment) and Representative Thomas Massie (who voted against Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill). Ben Raffensperger, Georgia’s Secretary of State, was defeated in a primary because he wouldn’t “find votes” in Trump’s call to him during the 2020 elections. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who has criticized Trump in the past, said in April 2025, “we are all afraid” and “retaliation is real.”

As for spiritual threats, Trump has often described Democrats as “evil.” As Jesus, he would obviously know.

When people accuse others of blind allegiance, they often say they are “drinking the Kool-Aid.” Like most cliches, many people have forgotten or never learned where the phrase came from: it was the 1978 massacre in Jonestown, Guyana, where Jim Jones, a cult leader, convinced over 900 members of his Peoples Temple Cult to drink a cyanide-based fruit drink.

I fear this is where we are now with Trumpism. The Kool-Aid might not contain actual poison, but blind allegiance to Trump is forcing millions of Americans to vote against their interests, to hand over their prosperity to his greed, and to hate others because he says so.

So yeah, Trumpism is a cult.

The conventional wisdom is that the Democrats lost the 2024 election because they went too far on DEI and leaned into “wokeness.” While there may be a grain of truth to it, I don’t believe it’s the whole story.

First, people vote largely on economic matters. As Ronald Reagan famously asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Second, Kamala Harris, at best, did not have the time to prepare for a national campaign, and at worst, she was just a mediocre candidate. But where wokeness is concerned, it’s not that wokeness itself doomed the Democrats. It’s that they let Trump and the Republicans control the narrative. In other words, they failed to make the case for standing up for marginalized people.

When you’re in a war, particularly a war where moral and civil rights are concerned, you don’t yield ground to your enemy. You do everything to turn the tide and rally people to your cause. In this sense, the Democrats have wimped out in the worst way. They wimped out on standing up for people, even when they knew they were in the right.

And now, some so-called liberal politicians and talking heads are ceding even more ground on wokeness. There’s Bill Maher, complaining about how DEI went too far. There’s Bill Maher interviewing Gavin Newsom, who agrees with him, despite his many years of supporting the LGBTQ+ community. Gavin Newsom is a presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, and so he is positioning himself to appeal to a broader base. He is exactly the type of candidate who measures everything he says and does via polling. He is so slippery that oil would trip over him.

What Maher, Newsom, and others like them fail to realize is that they are providing cover to the enemies of wokeism, and I don’t use the term “enemy” lightly. All over the country, state and local governments in red states are passing anti-trans bills that limit the rights of trans people. They are telling universities and colleges what they can and cannot teach, including Black history, feminism, and other studies pertaining to marginalized communities. In short, they are taking away people’s rights and bending the arc of justice toward something Orwellian. We used to point to the Soviet Union and other dictatorships as contrary to our values because they told their universities what they could and could not teach. Now, here in America, it’s suddenly fine to do so.

We should be able to have a reasonable discussion on the nuances of some of these issues. We should be able to ask ourselves whether minors should be able to go through transitions without their parents’ approval, whether trans women should play in women’s sports, and whether acknowledging the racism of our founding fathers means we should rename all the schools named after them (or after Lincoln, which seems crazy). All of these are legitimate questions, but I refuse to engage anyone on these topics if they believe that trans people do not deserve equal protection under the law, that universities should not teach certain things that offend them, or that we are in some sort of post-racist society.

When someone like Gavin Newsom, who is leading in the very early polls for his party’s nomination, yields ground on these issues, he is empowering the enemies not of wokeness but of our democratic ideals. And that’s what a real candidate needs to point out.

When someone complains about DEI, the first thing you should do is ask them to spell it out. Diversity: isn’t that something that has made this melting-pot country great? Equity: everybody gets a fair chance and is treated equally–is that really something we should turn our backs on? Inclusion: hell, we teach our kids about it in kindergarten!

A real candidate would turn the tide on this issue, and that real candidate is not Gavin Newsom, and it sure isn’t Kamala Harris, because she failed to do so in 2024. A real candidate would make the case for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, because those words align with our national ideals. In other words, a real candidate would stand up for people, all people, period. Maybe if the left elevated such turn-the-tide candidates and made the case, they could recapture people who understand that if you come after some people, you can come after any people, and they might capture people who have stayed out of elections precisely because they don’t see a Democratic Party standing up for them.

But also, and more to the point, a real candidate would point out that all of these cultural issues are a distraction. It’s the oldest trick in the book, something even Plato wrote about in The Republic: it is the mark of a dictator to inflame people’s passions on wedge issues and divide them, so that nobody will notice them accumulating power and wealth at the expense of the people. A real candidate would ask, what has a trans person, a Black history professor, or a feminist ever done to take your job away, raise the price of gas and groceries, and enrich themselves at your expense?

This is how you turn the tide on “wokeness.” Maybe it needs a rebrand to “fairness.” But either way, you fight the fight because it means standing up for people, because it’s the right thing to do. You don’t cede ground on taking people’s rights away. If Democrats can’t make the case on standing up for people, while MAGA Republicans divide people and dupe them into believing they stand for people, then Democrats deserve to lose.

Fight back, and get rid of the Newsoms.

10 minutes later: the right blames the left, without knowing anything about the shooter or his politics.

The next day or two: it is revealed that the shooter either had no party affiliation or was on the right after all.

Same day: right-wing media ignores that fact and highlights unsubstantiated or irrelevant claims that the shooter is trans, supportive of trans people, and/or (for the sake of RFK Jr.) on the autism spectrum.

Next day: right-wing media start saying the shooting is proof that the left has anger and violence problems, ignoring evidence from a libertarian research group’s findings:

Same day: the right decries that social media is full of left-wing people who say they wanted the victim dead, ignoring the surges in death threats for politicians on the left, largely as a result of Trump’s false claims that Barack wasn’t a citizen and committed treason.

Same day and every day going forward: the right continues to offer only thoughts and prayers about shootings of any kind while continuing to get A ratings from the NRA.

Same day: at least one murder of a child or teenager takes place somewhere in a poor neighborhood in the U.S. and is completely ignored by right-wing AND left-wing media.

Every day in the future, the U.S. will have twice as many guns per 100 people as the next country. Oh, and that’s 125 guns per 100 people, so an average of more than one gun per person. (The nuts with 100s of guns spoil the curve.) As for some of the most populous nations (according to the World Population Review):

• Pakistan: 22.6 per hundred

• Brazil: 8.3 per hundred

• India: 5.3 per hundred

• China: 3.6 per hundred

• Nigeria: 3.2 per hundred

Every day in the future: the right will blame gun violence on everything but access to guns.

Sometime in the future: rinse, repeat—this will all happen again.

No? Neither have I.

One person’s laughter is another person’s shoulder shrug. We’re not all wired to laugh at the same things. My friends tell me I’m funny, and I like to think I am, but they’re my friends. It’s not like I’m doing open mic at the ComedyPlex when I post a bad pun on Facebook. I can think of very few ways that I’ve put myself out there publicly to get a laugh out of someone.

One of those ways is the famed caption contest in The New Yorker. For the uninformed and non-snooty, The New Yorker runs a weekly caption contest where they publish a cartoon and invite readers to create a funny caption for it. Readers vote on the top three finalists for a final vote. The top-rated one is the winner. Sometimes, I say begrudgingly, it is even funny.

I made it to the top three over 10 years ago, and lost, and I hadn’t played at all in the intervening years until just a few months ago.

After striking out a few times, I thought: Why am I bothering to create original content? As every content creator knows, nobody does that anymore. They enter prompts in ChatGPT or another AI platform, and their content is magically spat out, search-engine-optimized, formatted for HTML, chrome-wheel fuel-injected, and ready for posting.

So, if this is how content is generated in the age of AI, is it possible that AI could win The New Yorker caption contest?

I decided to turn this into an experiment, because if AI could win or even make it to the top three, I first had to determine whether AI is funnier than I am. (And to clarify: funnier to humans, because who knows what these platforms talk about when they get together and plan our destruction.)

Here was my plan: submit my own captions for two contests in a row, see if any make it to the top three, and then submit a third created by AI. If the good readers of The New Yorker selected me in one (or both) of the first two rounds, I’d still submit an AI version as a test, but my AI prompts would have a lot more rap-like dissing to them. (“Your move, Claude. Nobody listens to techno!”) If they selected AI but not me, I would feel bad for a short time, but eventually I would understand that it had access to the sum of all human knowledge, which is mostly hilarious. If we both failed to capture the attention of editors and readers at The New Yorker, it would be a wash.

Here are the results.

Week 1

This one was a toughie, and I have to admit, I didn’t give it my A game with this clunker:

“You asked me to go for a walk. I didn’t know it would be a waddle.”

I knew in advance that I wasn’t going to make it, and I was right. No top three for me.

Week 2

I felt a lot more confident this time around, but I thought others would surely spot the same point of entry, so I hit it with a one-two punch. Maybe it was too much?

“Sometimes I feel like there’s a big hole at the center of my life, and I’m just frittering away.”

The finalists came around, and the big hole turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So now the question was whether AI could go where my jokes had not gone before. Was it up for the task?

Week 3

I have to admit that this one was a toughie. It’s difficult to tell what the hell is going on in this cartoon, which, admittedly, would not make it unique among New Yorker cartoons.

I threw this at Claude, the platform I’ve been preferring lately.

“They said the neighborhood had good schools. They didn’t mention the recitals.”

For me, that was a combination of a tiny smirk and a “meh.” I didn’t feel particularly threatened. I could grin and bear it.

Giving AI the benefit of the doubt, I remembered the many times I asked a question on different platforms and received wildly different answers. Could Google Gemini do any better?

“It’s a nice change of pace, but I still think the bird feeder was cheaper.”

Mon dieu! First I 😳’d, then I 🤦🏻‍♂️’d. What bird feeder? Where’s the joke? You’d think a large language model would understand a non-sequitur.

On to Microsoft CoPilot:

“He’s great, but once you hire him, he never leaves.”

Ugh. That’s about as funny as Bill Gates.

Should I try with one last round on ChatGPT, the granddaddy of AI? I’d been trying to avoid the platform, as their ties to defense spending have troubled me of late. (Actually, it’s because I’ve felt my prompts were not being taken seriously, such as “Rewrite the opening paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities as told by Snoop Dogg.”)

Copy and paste. Go for it, OpenAI.

“I guess the noise ordinance doesn’t cover woodwinds.”

Meh.

I submitted Claude’s version, confident that it was a draw. And indeed I was correct. AI didn’t bring its AI game, and it was not better at humor than I am. But it was no worse, either. I would have to be satisfied with the outcome, but at least I’m better at not threatening humanity with extinction, so I have that going for me.

My next test: can AI be more self-deprecating than I am? I’m rooting for Gemini to win by pointing to the bird feeder joke. “Oy, what was I processing?” Now that’s a good prompt.

Note: all cartoons Copyright 2026 The New Yorker.