Introductory Questions
Rip Van Winkle slept for twenty years, Steve Rogers for seventy, Aang for a hundred—in each case, with remarkably little impact on their health. (Rip Van Winke did grow some facial hair.) Imagine that you went through something similar and woke up in the year 2120 (albeit with neither superpowers nor supercharged follicles.) How quickly do you think you’d notice you were in the future? Would beds feel different? Would chairs be strange shapes? Would there be funky new food in the fridge? Would there still be a Global Round in Bangkok? Outside your home, would you encounter a strange new society or one roughly like our own? Or would you encounter no society at all, just a picturesque (and probably terrifying) post-apocalyptic landscape?
WSC 2025 kicks off by pulling us out of nostalgia and igniting a new future of possibilities. The feeling of time traveling and adjusting to a new environment is a common dilemma presented in many movies and books. Inevitably, the characters also find it challenging to cope with radical changes on the surface and also in the evolving values of humanity. However, invariably, they find that some things never change and stay true to themselves.
"Rip Van Winkle" is a short story by the American author Washington Irving, first published in 1819. It follows a Dutch-American villager in colonial America named Rip Van Winkle who meets mysterious Dutchmen, imbibes their strong liquor and falls deeply asleep in the Catskill Mountains (near southeastern New York). He awakes 20 years later to a very changed world, having missed the American Revolution.
The story of "Rip Van Winkle" itself is widely thought to have been based on Johann Karl Christoph Nachtigal's German folktale "Peter Klaus", which is a shorter story set in a German village, where herder Peter Klaus searches for a lost goat. He finds some men drinking in the woods and after drinking some of their "mysterious wine", falls asleep. When he wakes up, 20 years have passed.
Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, under which a person traveling at near light speed would experience only the passage of a few years but would return to find centuries had passed on Earth, provides a broad new scope to express essentially the same literary theme.
Steven Rogers is Captain America in the popular series Avengers, who fell into a deep sleep and survived being frozen due to the super soldier serum running through his veins. Even though he survived, but the theme is what's the price of immortality and can he survive and find meaning in the new world without his family and loved ones.
On the other hand, Anime character Aang from Avatar: The Last Airbender from fell asleep for 100 years because he was frozen in a sphere of ice through a combination of airbending and waterbending. The Avatar State kept him alive, albeit not fully conscious, in the iceberg while the war raged on. He was discovered and freed by two teenage siblings from the Southern Water Tribe, Katara and her brother, Sokka. So, would any of you be up for cryonics (frozen so you can be resurrected in the future)?
“Slice of life” is more than a film genre: research everyday life in the years 1825 and 1925 to learn more about how much things changed between those two years and between 1925 and now. Has the rate of change in your community slowed down or sped up–or does it depend on what you’re looking at?
Slice of life means themes that involve mundane experiences in art and entertainment. In theater, slice of life refers to naturalism, while in literary perspective, it is a narrative technique in which a seemingly arbitrary sequence of events in a character's life is presented, often lacking plot development, conflict, and exposition, as well as often having an open ending. They have become a staple in the film industry, highlighting character development over fancy plot or special effects. They reflect the reality that viewers live that contributes to a sense of familiarity and relatability.
One of the icons of slice of life movies is the film "Boyhood" by Richard Linklater, showcasing a boy’s growth over 12 years. Acted by Academy Award winners Ethan Hawke (father) and Patricia Arquette (mother) and two young child actors, it films a month each summer and tells the story of their family's changes (divorce, abuse, puberty, remarriage, education) and the children's growth and acceptance of themselves. It is one of the most touching yet ordinary films that I have seen.
This is a list of some of the most mundane but inspiring movies of all time and many have won Academy Awards for best acting and original script. Providing you just a one line summary, and hopefully it inspires you to watch a few with your teammates.
15. Boyhood (2014)
In Boyhood, Ellar Coltrane plays the boy in question. Named Mason, we meet him at age six and follow him through childhood and into his college days. He lives a fairly standard life that's filled with the usual trials, like divorced parents and awkward teen years.
14. Drive (2011)
Drive is more of an experience than a traditional cinematic story. Ryan Gosling stars as a brooding man of few words, who has a good heart and even better style. Known only as "Driver," Gosling splits his time between building cars and driving them for getaways and he falls for his neighbor.
13. Nomadland (2020)
A 2020 American drama film written, produced, edited and directed by Chloé Zhao. It stars Frances McDormand as a widow who leaves her life in Nevada after the factory she works closes down to drift around the United States in her van.
12. American Graffiti (1973)
This 1973 American coming-of-age comedy-drama film is directed by George Lucas, produced by Francis Ford Coppola (big names!) Set in Modesto, California, in 1962, the film is a study of the cruising and early rock 'n' roll cultures popular among Lucas' age group at that time. Through a series of vignettes, it tells the story of a group of teenagers and their adventures throughout a single night.
11. Tokyo Story (1953)
Upon release, it did not immediately gain international recognition and was considered "too Japanese", but it slowly grew a cult following. Directed by Yasujirō Ozu, it is about an aging couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their grown children.
10. Before Sunrise (1995)
This the first installment in the Before trilogy. In the film, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) meet on a Eurail train and disembark in Vienna to spend the night together. It is followed by Before Sunset and Before Midnight. Set and filmed in nine year intervals, the films chronicle their romantic relationship with mostly dialogue and monologue.
9. 20th Century Women (2016)
In 1979, 15-year-old Jamie Fields lives in Santa Barbara with his 55-year-old single mother, Dorothea, and their two tenants: Abbie Porter, a 24-year-old photographer being treated for cervical cancer, and William, a carpenter and mechanic.
8. Lady Bird (2017)
In the fall of 2002, Christine McPherson, who calls herself "Lady Bird", is a senior at a Catholic high school in Sacramento, California. Despite her family's financial struggles, she longs to attend a prestigious college in "a city with culture" on the East Coast. During a car ride, Lady Bird's mother Marion tells her she is ungrateful and her dreams are unrealistic. To prove a point, Lady Bird jumps from the moving car, breaking her arm.
7. Mid90s (2018)
The plot follows Stevie, a 13-year-old boy in 1990s Los Angeles. To escape a troubled home life, he begins spending time with an older group of skateboarders. Mid90s served as a passion project for Jonah Hill, who was inspired by his experiences growing up in Los Angeles in the 1990s.
6. Annie Hall (1977)
American satirical romantic comedy-drama film directed by Woody Allen. The film stars Allen as Alvy Singer, who tries to figure out the reasons for the failure of his relationship with the eponymous female lead, played by Diane Keaton in a role written specifically for her. It's about finding romance, dealing with loneliness and social expectations.
5. Five Easy Pieces (1970)
Probably the grittiest film on the list, it tells the story of surly oil rig worker Bobby Dupea (Nicholson), whose rootless blue-collar existence belies his privileged youth as a piano prodigy. When Bobby learns that his father is dying, he travels to his family home in Washington to visit him, taking along his uncouth girlfriend (Black).
4. The Breakfast Club (1985)
The film tells the story of five teenagers from different high school cliques who serve a Saturday detention overseen by their authoritarian vice principal. The students pass the time arguing, listening to music, and smoking marijuana, gradually opening up about their home lives and their reasons for being in detention.
3. Dazed and Confused (1993)
Directed by Richard Linklater, the film follows a variety of teenagers on the last day of school in Austin, Texas, in 1976. The film has no single protagonist or central conflict; rather, it follows interconnected plot threads among different social groups and characters, such as rising ninth graders undergoing hazing rituals, a football star's refusal to sign a clean living pledge for his coach, and various characters hanging out at a pool hall.
2. Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Call Me by Your Name chronicles the romantic relationship between 17-year-old Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver , a 24-year-old graduate-student assistant to Elio's father Samuel, an archaeology professor.
1. Lost in Translation (2003)
Bill Murray stars as Bob Harris, a fading American movie star who is having a midlife crisis when he travels to Tokyo to promote Suntory whisky. There, he befriends another disillusioned American named Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a young woman and recent college graduate. The film explores themes of alienation and disconnection against a backdrop of cultural displacement in Japan. It defies mainstream narrative conventions and is atypical in its depiction of romance.
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A hundred years is a long time. What if the same thing happened, but you woke up (like Rip Van Winkle!) only 20 years in the future? What do you imagine the year 2045 will be like for students like you? What are the easiest things to predict–and what are the hardest?
Some things catch fire literally, others metaphorically—and the fires that most interest us are those happening for at least the second time. Without reading the rest of this outline, brainstorm with your friends what it could mean for something to re-ignite, and how different that is than igniting in the first place. When is it better for something to burn twice? And is there a difference between burning up, burning down, and burning with?
Burning has been a ritualistic event in human history forever. A modern day event that celebrates catching fire is "Burning Man" a week-long large-scale desert event focused on "community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance" held annually in the western United States. The event's name comes from its ceremony on the penultimate night of the event: the symbolic burning of a large wooden effigy, referred to as the Man, that occurs on the penultimate night, the Saturday evening before Labor Day. According to Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey in 2004, the event is guided by ten stated principles: radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy.
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There’s no denying that some things excite our passions. For some of you, maybe, World Scholar’s Cup is that kind of cause; others of you might thrill to the fight against global climate change, a big boss in the Forgotten Land, or the harmful impacts of social media. But what would it take to have your feelings about something (or somewhere or someone) re-ignited? Under what circumstances does a person leave a project, then return to it with new zeal?
Not long ago, the future beckoned with open arms. Many people at the beginning of the 20th century–and even at its conclusion!–were certain that social and technological progress would continue endlessly, that there was a kind of Moore’s Law for everything. (At least one influential thinker still believes this.) Consider the musical selection “Counting Up to Twenty” as just one example of this boundless optimism. In those not-so-long-ago times, forecasts for the future were exuberant—and sometimes even exuberantly dull. How do you see the future, and how does your view compare to that of the older people in your life?
Just a side note, Kirby is video game character from the Planet Popstar. A dark vortex appears over Dream Land, sucking up everything on the planet in its path. Kirby is among those sucked into the vortex and finds himself in an abandoned civilization informally called the "new world." The final boss of Kirby and the Forgotten Land is a being known as Fecto Forgo, an alien invader who sought to conquer the Forgotten Land long ago. Captured by the native inhabitants, Forgo's space-warping abilities were used to develop FTL (faster-than-light) travel.
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Blogger Dan Tao shares his thoughts in an essay about Sam Altman's (CEO of Open AI, company behind ChatGPT) interview with award-winning journalist Ezra Klein. There is a NYT transcription of their interview. Klein says, "But what caught my eye about this essay, “Moore’s Law for Everything,” is Altman’s effort to try and imagine the political consequences of true artificial intelligence and the policies that could decide whether it ushers in utopia or dystopia."
According to Tao, "I understood that the general premise was that AI would unlock a phenomenon like Moore’s Law for nearly every sector of the economy; i.e. all forms of labor would become exponentially cheaper every year thanks to assistance from AI, to the point that anything you can imagine that was previously expensive to build or achieve would be democratized."
The essay is divided neatly into 5 parts by Tao.
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The AI Revolution. Altman asserts that we are entering the 4th major technological revolution, following the agricultural, industrial, and computational revolutions. He says more progress will be made in the next 100 years than everything humanity has achieved up until now.
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Moore’s Law for Everything. Altman predicts that thanks to AI, we will reach a point when everything is getting 50% cheaper every 2 years. Think about this: Will this actually be better for mankind?
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Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every 2 years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empirical relationship. It is an experience-curve law, a type of law quantifying efficiency gains from experience in production.
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The observation is named after Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel and former CEO of the latter, who in 1965 noted that the number of components per integrated circuit had been doubling every year, and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. Moore's empirical evidence did not directly imply that the historical trend would continue, nevertheless, his prediction has held since 1975 and has since become known as a law.
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3. Capitalism for Everyone. Altman predicts that taxing income (which he equates with taxing labor) will become increasingly inappropriate and ineffective as the AI revolution transforms the economy. He proposes a new nation-wide equity fund, based on taxing capital (of companies over a certain size) and privately-held land, and distributing it to all citizens over 18. He argues that this will align citizens’ incentives with wanting the country as a whole to thrive which will in turn benefit everyone.
4. Implementation and Troubleshooting. Altman estimates that a decade after implementation, all American citizens would be receiving $13,500 annually from the nation-wide equity fund, and that this would provide significantly more purchasing power than it does today (thanks to the price of everything having decreased significantly during that time).
5. Shifting to the New System. Finally, Altman notes that making the changes he is proposing all at once would cause some amount of shock; so he suggests a more gradual approach that ties the new taxes on capital and land to GDP growth (tax rates are increased incrementally each year until GDP has increased 50% from when they were first implemented). He believes that policymakers will be very popular for supporting this system. Altman concludes by saying, “The future can be almost unimaginably great.”
Counting up to twenty perfectly captures some of the sentiments of the developed world before the millennium by referencing major world events in the 20th century. From the invention of nuclear bombs to the terror of the Cold War, it highlights how human beings have survived "the agony and tears by sheer persistence." It end on a positive note that young people are the ones that will save humanity.
EFX was a Las Vegas Strip production show residing at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino which opened on March 23, 1995. EFX was originally conceived as a showcase for performer Michael Crawford, who was fresh off his four-year run in The Phantom of the Opera and enjoying a successful solo career at the time. When it premiered, it was the most expensive and largest-scaled theater installation in the world.
Lyrics for the song:
The road we travel on
Has never been the one of least resistance
We've made it through the years
The agony and tears by sheer persistence
To the edge of a brave new world
(Chorus)
Counting up to twenty
Has been difficult for some
But as we learn to count to twenty
Should be easy to get to twenty-one
A hundred years ago
We really start to show off our invention
We acquired thе clout
To take each other out was our intеntion
It's amazing we're all still here
Call me a fool but I'm a fool with a heart
I'm an optimistic man
I believe we can make it
Though I don't always sleep at night
Waiting for the light to come and wake me
My thoughts are with the young
They must be the ones to come save me
We just have to let them breathe
“The best is yet to be,” wrote the English poet Robert Browning, a phrase often quoted (out of context) to evoke a sense of possibility and hope. But we now live, many people are saying, in a pessimistic age–in which some people even avoid having children to protect them from the grim days ahead. If you met someone who was sure the future would be full of suffering, would you try to give them hope again? If so, what would you tell them?
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!''
Not that, amassing flowers,
Youth sighed "Which rose make ours,
Which lily leave and then as best recall?"
Not that, admiring stars,
It yearned "Nor Jove, nor Mars;
Mine be some figured flame which blends, transcends them all!"
Rabbi Ben Ezra by English poet and playwright Robert Browning delves into the themes of aging, purpose, and spiritual growth. The poem presents the wisdom of Rabbi Ben Ezra speaking to his younger wife, urging acceptance of life’s imperfections and trust in a divine plan. It suggests that the purpose of life lies in its culmination, with the later stages being the fulfillment of the initial design.
Once again WSC takes the perspective of Podcaster Ezra Klein, a prominent American journalist, political commentator, and co-founder of the news and opinion website Vox. He did not believe former President Donald Trump's problem was his age, and that he is simply voicing what many fear to say out loud. This article was written before Trump was elected the second time.
The Republican presidential candidate's style since the early days of his 2016 race has been outspoken and in contrast to the way many political leaders speak on issues, from immigration to the economy to foreign affairs. "Trump moves through the world without the behavioral inhibition most of us labor under," Klein said, after stating the Republican showed signs of being low on conscientiousness but high in disinhibition. "One of Trump's verbal tics is to say, 'Many people are saying.' But it's the opposite," the host said. "He's saying what many people want somebody to be saying. He's saying what people are saying in private but often are not saying in public."
It’s boom times for doom times, but from artificial intelligence to climate change to food supplies, there’s plenty of reason to be optimistic that the future will be better — if we make it so. According to one major international poll, a majority of young people agreed with the statement that “humanity is doomed.” Respondents were worried about climate change (59% very or extremely worried, 84% at least moderately worried). Over 50% felt sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty. Over 45% said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning, and many reported a high number of negative thoughts about climate change. Respondents rated the governmental response to climate change negatively and reported greater feelings of betrayal than of reassurance. This is a series of six articles by Bryan Walsh.
I could tell you that a little more than 200 years ago, nearly half of all children born died before they reached their 15th birthday, and that today it’s less than 5% globally. In pre-industrial times, starvation was a constant specter and life expectancy was in the 30s at best. At the dawn of the 19th century, barely more than one person in 10 was literate, while today that ratio has been nearly reversed. I could tell you that today is, on average, the best time to be alive in human history. But, people don't believe so.
A 2015 survey of thousands of adults in nine rich countries found that 10% or fewer believed that the world was getting better. On the internet, a strange nostalgia persists for the supposedly better times before industrialization, when ordinary people supposedly worked less and life was allegedly simpler and healthier. (They didn’t and it wasn’t.)
In his 2022 book Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century, the economic historian Brad DeLong shared, "In 1870, an average unskilled male worker in London could earn enough per day to buy 5,000 calories worth of food for himself and his family. That was more than in 1600, but not significantly more, and not enough to easily feed everyone consistently. By 2010 — the end of what DeLong in his book called “the long twentieth century” — that same worker could afford to buy the equivalent of 2.4 million calories of food per day, a nearly 50,000% increase."
Some believe we are stuck in the Malthusian Trap, named after the 18th-century English cleric and economist Thomas Malthus. The trap argues that any increase in food production or other resources that allowed the population to grow was quickly consumed by that increased population, which then led to food shortages and population decline.
The fact that as of 2016 some 13% of the world still lacked access to electricity — the invisible foundation of modernity — is just as worthy of our worry. The fact that 85% of the world — a little less than 7 billion people — lives on less than $30 a day should keep us awake at night. We have made much progress, solved old problems, created new challenge and we have the potential to progress a lot more.
Pumping the brakes on artificial intelligence could be the best thing we ever do for humanity. Progress in artificial intelligence has been moving so unbelievably fast lately that the question is becoming unavoidable: How long until AI dominates our world to the point where we’re answering to it rather than it answering to us?
First, we got DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion, which can turn a few words of text into a stunning image. Then Microsoft-backed OpenAI gave us ChatGPT and this year DeepSeek. AI is adapting at lightening speed.
Scientist and researchers from opposite sides are lining up on this debate. Even if AI poses risks, maybe its benefits — on everything from drug discovery to climate modeling — are so great that speeding it up is the best and most ethical thing to do! Would AI want to destroy humanity? It probably wouldn’t. But it could destroy us anyway because of something called the “alignment problem.” The article gives an example. Imagine that we develop a super-smart AI system. We program it to solve some impossibly difficult problem — say, calculating the number of atoms in the universe. It might realize that it can do a better job if it gains access to all the computer power on Earth. So it releases a weapon of mass destruction to wipe us all out, like a perfectly engineered virus that kills everyone but leaves infrastructure intact. Now it’s free to use all the computer power! In this Midas-like scenario, we get exactly what we asked for — the number of atoms in the universe, rigorously calculated — but obviously not what we wanted. So how do we deal with this?
Objection 1: “Technological progress is inevitable, and trying to slow it down is futile” This is a myth the tech industry often tells itself and the rest of us. This is mostly a myth because the government has in the past placed limits on research based on ethical concerns, most notably human cloning.
Objection 2: “We don’t want to lose an AI arms race with China” You might believe that slowing down a new technology is possible but still think it’s not desirable. Maybe you think the US would be foolish to slow down AI progress because that could mean losing an arms race with China. Jeffrey Ding, an assistant professor of political science at George Washington University explained that "China could take an even slower approach [than the US] to developing AI, just because the government is so concerned about having secure and controllable technology."
Objection 3: “We need to play with advanced AI to figure out how to make advanced AI safe” This has become out-fashioned as AI has moved so quickly that there is already a lot of unknowns. "Our current systems are already black boxes, opaque even to the AI experts who build them. So maybe we should try to figure out how they work before we build black boxes that are even more unexplainable."
How to flatten the curve of AI progress
Jeffrey Ding, believes that slowing AI progress in the short run is actually best for everyone — even profiteers. “If you’re a tech company, if you’re a policymaker, if you’re someone who wants your country to benefit the most from AI, investing in safety regulations could lead to less public backlash and a more sustainable long-term development of these technologies,” he explained. “So when I frame safety investments, I try to frame it as the long-term sustainable economic profits you’re going to get if you invest more in safety.”
Translation: Better to make some money now with a slowly improving AI, knowing you’ll get to keep rolling out your tech and profiting for a long time, than to get obscenely rich obscenely fast but produce some horrible mishap that triggers a ton of outrage and forces you to stop completely.
Some may say that it is our instinct and duty to procreate, but facing climate change, some woman are changing their views. An exclusive Guardian survey has found that almost a fifth of the female climate experts who responded have chosen to have no children, or fewer children, due to the environmental crises afflicting the world.
The Guardian approached every contactable lead author or review editor of all reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 2018. The IPCC’s reports are the gold standard of climate knowledge. Of the 843 contacted, 360 replied to the question on life decisions, a high response rate. 97 female scientists responded, saying they had chosen to have fewer children. All but 1 percent of the scientists surveyed were over 40 years old and two-thirds were over 50, reflecting the senior positions they had reached in their professions. 25% of the respondents were women, the same proportion as the overall authorship of the IPCC reports.
Most of the female scientists interviewed had made their decisions about children in past decades, when they were younger and the grave danger of global heating was less apparent. They said they had not wanted to add to the global human population that is exacting a heavy environmental toll on the planet, and some also expressed fears about the climate chaos through which a child might now have to live. The publication of The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich in 1968, mentioned by several of the scientists in their survey responses, was a particular flashpoint. The debate prompted past allegations of racism, as nations with fast-rising populations are largely those in Africa and Asia. Nevertheless, it is not about where population increase comes from. “How many people we have is irrelevant if only a small percentage are doing most of the damage.” Most people feel apprehensive about leaving our posterity in world less sustainable than we enjoy today.
Take a step back from the broader future to zoom in on small things that can also be recalled to life with new vitality: musical bands, TV shows, even products once abandoned to museums and overstock warehouses. (For instance, walk around your school and may spot someone buzzing about with a film camera.) We’ll investigate them more later in this outline, but, for now, what other dead or derelict institutions, products, or trends do you think will become popular again in our lifetimes? Is there a restaurant that you and your family miss that you wish would be revived—and how much effort would you be willing to put into that revival?
While actual resurrection is probably still impossible, individuals can still be recalled to life in different ways, as in this first book of A Tale of Two Cities–whether it is after incarceration, illness, or a different kind of darkness. Do you know anyone who has found a new lease on life in this way? How can we best support someone who is starting over again?
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
This is one of the most well-known first lines in the world of classic literature. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens is a historical drama set in London and Paris prior to the French Revolution. In 1775, a banker named Jarvis Lorry travels to Dover, where he meets a young, half-French woman named Lucie Manette. Together, the pair travel to Paris to recover her father, Alexandre Manette. Once a successful doctor, Manette was, for unknown reasons, imprisoned 18 years ago in the
infamous Bastille prison. He has now been released and is in the care of a former servant named Ernest Defarge, who now runs a wine-shop in the impoverished Saint Antoine district of Paris. Doctor Manette’s long imprisonment has left him in a bad psychological state; he is largely unaware of his surroundings and constantly busies himself making shoes. His daughter’s arrival seems to spark some signs of recognition in him, however, and the group departs for England. To know more about A Tale of Two Cities - recommend checking out a quick video summary.
Book 1 introduce one of the novel’s other central themes: the possibility of redemption, rebirth, and resurrection. First, and most clearly, Mr. Lorry imagines digging out someone who has been buried alive. Later, it becomes clear that he is traveling to meet a man who has been imprisoned for nearly two decades in a French prison and whom Lorry hopes to restore to some semblance of his former life. This parallel Lorry draws between imprisonment and death (or at least burial) is significant as it links Christian concepts of redemption and resurrection, including the idea of the resurrection of Christ.
The introductory questions have sparked many different takes on life - "best is yet to come," "our future is doomed," and "maybe there is round 2." Life is full of twists and turns, just like each WSC season and curriculum full of interesting and thought-provoking concepts. Whatever life is, WSC is never boring. Now we are through with the guiding questions, lets get started on the rest of the sections!