“Just go to sleep,” Martin Chalfie’s wife told him late one October night in 2008. Chalfie, a Columbia University chemist, had co-authored an influential paper describing a new method for studying cells with green fluorescent protein, and he was anxiously waiting to see whether it would be recognized. His wife, a fellow academic, tempered his expectations. “It’s a wonderful tool, and lots of people use it,” he recalls her saying. “But, to tell you the truth, it will never win the Nobel.”

So when the call from Sweden came in, Chalfie was asleep. The beginning of his life as a Nobel laureate in chemistry had to wait until morning. He was still in his pajamas when the first journalist got him on the phone. He scolded her for asking whether he believed in God. Academics should not be asked to pontificate outside their fields of expertise! Chalfie was starting to understand that he had become the kind of rarefied figure whose musings on topics unrelated to chemistry were important to the press. He didn’t like it. And yet, he didn’t not like it either. The next thing he did was call his friend Bob—the 2002 Nobel laureate in medicine H. Robert Horwitz—to tell him he wanted to co-sign an open letter of Nobel laureates endorsing Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy.

[Read: A Nobel Prize for artificial intelligence]

This past week, the 2024 Nobel class was introduced to the world, creating a new crop of Olympian figures. Chalfie might tell you that the award hasn’t changed his day-to-day life all that much, that his grant applications still sometimes get denied. But the medal radiates from his chest even when he’s not wearing it. Chalfie learned that his graduate-school mentor bragged about having had three postdoc students who went on to win a Nobel. Chalfie’s dentist counted four laureates among his patients. “I became a collectible,” Chalfie says.

The Nobel is the honor above all honors. The achievements it rewards—in science, literature, and peace—contribute “to the greatest benefit of mankind,” a tagline any other respectable award committee would be too shy to claim. How did a single award from the small nation of Sweden become the undisputed highest honor in the world? The marketing whizzes at Harvard Business School haven’t written a case study on the genius of the Nobel Foundation, but perhaps they should. The Nobel is one of the greatest branding exercises in history.

Establishing a prize is easy.  The hard part is getting anyone to care. Alfred Nobel, a businessman who made his fortune selling dynamite and explosives in the 19th century, was not an obvious candidate to become the namesake of the most prestigious distinction in the world. Nor were Swedish scientists, as opposed to French or British, clearly the ones who should award it. Some biographers link Nobel’s idea to establish a prize for sciences, culture, and peace to the moment he learned that a newspaper had prepared an obituary for him with the phrase  “merchant of death” in the headline. That’s not how he wanted history to remember him.

For the Nobel to become the Nobel, a few people had to get a few things really right. When rich individuals bequeath all their wealth to something other than their would-be heirs, their would-be heirs tend to resist. According to the historian Elisabeth Crawford, the author of The Beginnings of the Nobel Institution, this is one of the biggest obstacles rich men have had in using prizes to secure their legacy. The Italian businessman Jerôme Ponti, for example, had more or less the same vision as Nobel. But after his surviving relatives learned that he had donated his fortune to national academies headquartered in London, Paris, and Vienna in 1874, a group of them successfully litigated to void the will. In the 1890s, the executors of Nobel’s estate had to be a bit more clever. They preemptively reached an agreement with Nobel’s two living nephews, one of whom was particularly gracious and persuaded the rest of the family to honor the late Nobel’s wishes.  

A second reason the Nobel prevailed over prizes of similar ambition was that Sweden turned it into a nationalist project. Nobel himself did not mention anything about Swedish interests, but the government and the press interpreted his bequest as a call to action for the nation as a whole. “The Swedish scientific society could not have been invested with a more glorious task,” a newspaper editorial declared. The effort turned out to be well timed. In the early 1900s, a new prize in Sweden might have seemed unlikely to compete in prestige with one given by the French Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society in London. But when World War I struck, neutral little Sweden had a claim to objectivity that the great powers didn’t.

[Read: The political slant of the Nobel Prize in economics]

Finally, both Nobel and the executors of his will designed the rules wisely. Most prestigious prizes at the time were international only in theory; judges tended to favor their countrymen. Nobel requested that each award be given to the “worthiest person, whether or not they’re Scandinavian.” The Nobel Prize committee became the first to systematically solicit nominations from institutions abroad, turning the award into a sort of contest among nations. And one of the executors of the will had the idea of rewarding achievements no matter when they had been made, rather than just the work or discoveries of the previous year. This was a clever move, not just because some discoveries can take time to reveal their worth, but also because it turned winning the Nobel into a more sweeping victory.

Fortified with its elegant design choices, the Nobel quickly established a first-mover advantage. Universities can come up with new medals in physics, but they will never be able to give the same one that Albert Einstein won. Prizes with more generous cash stipends exist—the Breakthrough Prize, created by Mark Zuckenberg and other tech billionaires, pays $3 million, compared with Nobel’s sum of about $1 million, which co-winners must share—but many people would still prefer to win an award that their parents have heard of. The Scottish economist Angus Deaton, who was knighted in Buckingham Palace and has received plenty of prizes throughout his life, told me that nothing comes close to the Nobel ceremony, which he attended in 2015. On the night after he found out he won, Deaton couldn’t keep the news to himself. He told his Uber driver on the way home from dinner in Princeton and watched him become ecstatically happy. The driver at first assumed that Deaton had won the peace prize; when he learned it was for economics, his enthusiasm dimmed, but only slightly. A Nobel is a Nobel.

Architects and mathematicians might protest that the Nobel doesn’t recognize achievements in their professions, that more people should know about the Pritzker and the Fields. But nobody said prizes were fair. What prizes are meant to be is cheap: Societies can save money by having everyone work toward a grand goal and rewarding only the best. Prizes are prestige in material form. Joseph Stiglitz, who won the economics Nobel in 2001, explained to me that this is precisely their advantage. In many markets, say knowledge and cultural industries, people seek excellence for its own sake, and so money is not the best incentive. America would create more total welfare, Stiglitz argues, if instead of rewarding pharma companies with monopoly patents, we gave drug researchers a prestigious prize with a cash stipend. For that plan to work, of course, we would have to convince people that the prize is indeed covetable, like the Swedes did.

Prizes aren’t all great. They distort fields by pushing hopefuls to do the type of work the prize jury will like. According to the economic historians Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg, the Nobel in economics—the only one that Alfred Nobel didn’t stipulate in his will—was used to build legitimacy for free-market reforms in Sweden, elevating the precepts of neoliberal economic theory to the same status as laws of physics. The main ideology the Nobel Foundation appears to be committed to, however, is the importance of preserving the prestige of the Nobel Prize—and in this it has succeeded. If there were a prize for prizes, the Nobel would win every year.

Illustrations by Anuj Shrestha

It’s called the “longest-swim problem”: If you had to drop someone at the place in the ocean farthest from any speck of land—the remotest spot on Earth—where would that place be? The answer, proposed only a few decades ago, is a location in the South Pacific with the coordinates 4852.5291ʹS 12323.5116ʹW: the “oceanic point of inaccessibility,” to use the formal name. It doesn’t get many visitors. But one morning last year, I met several people who had just come from there.

They had been sailing a 60-foot foiling boat, the Mālama, in the Ocean Race, a round-the-world yachting competition, and had passed near that very spot, halfway between New Zealand and South America. Now, two months later, they had paused briefly in Newport, Rhode Island, before tackling the final stretch across the Atlantic. (And the Mālama would win the race.) I spoke with some members of the five-person crew before going out with them for a sail on Narragansett Bay. When I asked about their experience at the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, they all brought up the weather.

With a test pilot’s understatement, the crew described the conditions as “significant” or “strong” or “noteworthy” (or, once, “incredibly noteworthy”). The Southern Ocean, which girds the planet in the latitudes above Antarctica and below the other continents, has the worst weather in the world because its waters circulate without any landmass to slow them down. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the most powerful on Earth, a conveyor belt that never stops and that in recent years has been moving faster. These are the waters that tossed Roald Amundsen and Ernest Shackleton. The winds are cold and brutal. Waves reach 60 or 70 feet. In a second, a racing boat’s speed can drop from 30 knots to five, then jump back to 30. You may have to ride out these conditions, slammed and jammed, for five days, 10 days, trimming sails from inside a tiny sealed cockpit, unable to stand up fully all that time. To sleep, you strap yourself into a harness. You may wake up bruised.

[Read: The last place on Earth any tourist should go]

This is not a forgiving environment for a sailboat. But it’s a natural habitat for the albatross you find yourself watching through a foggy pane as it floats on air blowing across the water’s surface—gliding tightly down one enormous wave and then tightly up the next. The bird has a 10-foot wingspan, but the wings do not pump; locked and motionless, they achieve aerodynamic perfection. The albatross gives no thought to the longest swim. It may not have touched land in years.

The oceanic pole of inaccessibility goes by a more colloquial name: Point Nemo. The reference is not to the Disney fish, but to the captain in Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. In Latin, nemo means “no one,” which is appropriate because there is nothing and no one here. Point Nemo lies beyond any national jurisdiction. According to Flightradar24, a tracking site, the occasional commercial flight from Sydney or Auckland to Santiago flies overhead, when the wind is right. But no shipping lanes pass through Point Nemo. No country maintains a naval presence. Owing to eccentricities of the South Pacific Gyre, the sea here lacks nutrients to sustain much in the way of life—it is a marine desert. Because biological activity is minimal, the water is the clearest of any ocean.

What you do find in the broad swath of ocean around Point Nemo—at the bottom of the sea, two and a half miles below the surface—are the remains of spacecraft. They were brought down deliberately by means of a controlled deorbit, the idea being that the oceanic point of inaccessibility makes a better landing zone than someone’s rooftop in Florida or North Carolina. Parts of the old Soviet Mir space station are here somewhere, as are bits and pieces of more than 250 other spacecraft and their payloads. They had been sent beyond the planet’s atmosphere by half a dozen space agencies and a few private companies, and then their lives came to an end. There is a symmetry in the outer-space connection: If you are on a boat at Point Nemo, the closest human beings will likely be the astronauts aboard the International Space Station; it periodically passes directly above, at an altitude of about 250 miles. When their paths crossed at Point Nemo, the ISS astronauts and the sailors aboard the Mālama exchanged messages.

Illustration by Anuj Shrestha

The Mālama’s crew spoke with me about the experience of remoteness. At Point Nemo, they noted, there is no place to escape to. If a mast breaks, the closest help, by ship, from Chile or New Zealand, could be a week or two away. You need to be able to fix anything—sails, engines, electronics, the hull itself. The crew described sensations of rare clarity and acuity brought on by the sheer scale of risk. The austral environment adds a stark visual dimension. At this far-southern latitude, the interplay of light and cloud can be intense: the darks so very dark, the brights so very bright.

Simon Fisher, the Mālama’s navigator, described feeling like a trespasser as the boat approached Point Nemo—intruding where human beings do not belong. Crew members also described feelings of privilege and power. “There’s something very special,” Fisher said, “about knowing you’re someplace where everybody else isn’t.”

We all know the feeling. Rain-swept moors, trackless deserts, unpeopled islands. For me, such places are hard to resist. Metaphorically, of course, remoteness can be found anywhere—cities, books, relationships. But physical remoteness is a category of its own. It is an enhancer: It can make the glorious better and the terrible worse. The oceanic pole of inaccessibility distills physical remoteness on our planet into a pure and absolute form. There are continental poles of inaccessibility too—the place on each landmass that is farthest from the sea. But these locations are not always so remote. You can drive to some of them. People may live nearby. (The North American pole of inaccessibility is on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in South Dakota.) But Point Nemo is nearly impossible to get to and offers nothing when you arrive, not even a place to stand. It is the anti-Everest: It beckons because nothing is there.

I first heard the name Point Nemo in 1997, when hydrophones on the floor of the South Pacific, thousands of miles apart, picked up the loudest underwater sound ever recorded. This got headlines, and the sound was quickly named the “Bloop.” What could be its source? Some speculated about an undiscovered form of marine life lurking in the abyssal depths. There was dark talk about Russian or American military activity. Readers of H. P. Lovecraft remembered that his undersea zombie city of R’lyeh was supposedly not far away. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration eventually concluded that the sound had come from the fracturing or calving of ice in Antarctica. In this instance, freakish conditions had directed the sound of an Antarctic event northward, toward a lonely expanse of ocean. Faraway hydrophones then picked up the sound and mistook its place of origin. News reports noted the proximity to Point Nemo.

[Video: The loudest underwater sound ever recorded has no scientific explanation]

You might have thought that a planetary feature as singular as the oceanic pole of inaccessibility would be as familiar as the North Pole or the equator. In a sci-fi story, this spot in the South Pacific might be a portal to some other dimension—or possibly the nexus of the universe, as the intersection of First and First in Manhattan was once said to be. Yet at the time of the Bloop, the location of the oceanic pole of inaccessibility had been known and named for only five years.

I have not been to Point Nemo, though it has maintained a curious hold on me for decades. Not long ago, I set out to find the handful of people on Earth who have some sort of personal connection to the place. I started with the man who put it on the map.

Hrvoje Lukatela, a Croatian-born engineer, left his homeland in the 1970s as political and intellectual life there became turbulent. At the University of Zagreb, he had studied geodesy—the science of measuring Earth’s physical properties, such as its shape and its orientation in space. Degree in hand, he eventually found his way to Calgary, Alberta, where he still lives and where I spent a few days with him last fall. At 81, he is no longer the avid mountaineer he once was, but he remains fit and bluff and gregarious. A trim gray beard and unkempt hair add a slight Ewok cast to his features.

After arriving in Canada, Lukatela was employed as a survey engineer. For several years, he worked on the Alaska Highway natural-gas pipeline. For another company, he determined the qibla—the precise alignment toward the Kaaba, in Mecca—for a new university and its mosque in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In time, he created a software company whose product he named after the Greek astronomer Hipparchus. This was in the 1980s, when digital cartography was advancing rapidly and civilian GPS systems were on the horizon. The Hipparchus software library—“a family of algorithms that dealt with differential geometry on the surface of an ellipsoid,” as he described it, intending to be helpful—made it easier to bridge, mathematically, three-dimensional and two-dimensional geographical measurements. Lukatela can go on at length about the capabilities of Hipparchus, which he eventually sold to Microsoft, but two of the most significant were its power and its accuracy.

By his own admission, Lukatela is the kind of man who will not ask for directions. But he has a taste for geographical puzzles. He heard about the longest-swim problem from a friend at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and was immediately engaged. You could twirl a classroom globe and guess, correctly, that the oceanic pole of inaccessibility must lie in the South Pacific, probably concealed by the rectangle where most publishers of maps and globes put their logo. But no one had tried to establish the exact location. As Lukatela saw it, the logic of the search process was simple. It takes three points to define a circle. Lukatela needed to find the largest oceanic circle that met two criteria: The circumference had to be defined by three points of dry land. And inside the circle there could be no land at all. The oceanic point of inaccessibility would be the center of that circle.

I’ll leave the computational churning aside, except to say that Hipparchus was made for a problem like this. Drawing on a digitized cartographic database, it could generate millions of random locations in the ocean and calculate the distance from each on a spherical surface to the nearest point of land. Lukatela eventually found the three “proximity vertices” he needed. One of them is Ducie Island, a tiny atoll notable for a shark-infested lagoon. It is part of the Pitcairn Islands, a British overseas territory, where in 1790 the Bounty mutineers made their unhappy home. A second vertex is the even tinier Motu Nui, a Chilean possession, whose crags rise to the west of Easter Island. The character Moana, in the animated movie, comes from there. The third vertex is desolate Maher Island, off the coast of Antarctica. It is a breeding ground for Adélie penguins. The three islands define a circle of ocean larger than the old Soviet Union. Point Nemo, at the center, lies 1,670.4 miles from each vertex. For perspective, that is roughly the distance from Manhattan to Santa Fe.

Lukatela completed his calculations in 1992, and quietly shared the results with his friend at Woods Hole and a few other colleagues. As the young internet gained users, word about Point Nemo spread among a small subculture of geodesists, techies, and the simply curious. In time, new cartographic databases became available, moving the triangulation points slightly. Lukatela tried out two of the databases, each recalibration giving Point Nemo itself a nudge, but not by much.

Lukatela had named the oceanic pole of inaccessibility after the mysterious captain in the Jules Verne novel he had loved as a boy. Submerged in his steampunk submarine, Captain Nemo sought to keep his distance from terrestrial woes: “Here alone do I find independence! Here I recognize no superiors! Here I’m free!”

But Captain Nemo couldn’t entirely stay aloof from the rest of the planet, and neither can Point Nemo. Many of the boats in the Ocean Race carry a “science package”— equipment for collecting weather data and water samples from regions of the sea that are otherwise nearly impossible to monitor. Data collected by their instruments, later given to labs, reveal the presence of microplastics: Even at the oceanic point of inaccessibility, you are not beyond the reach of humanity.

An article this past spring in the journal Nature reported the results of a scientific expedition that bored deep into the sediment of the ocean floor near Point Nemo. The focus was on the fluctuating character, over millions of years, of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, whose existence became possible after tectonic forces separated Australia and South America from Antarctica. The current helps regulate temperatures worldwide and keep Antarctica cold. But, as the Nature article explained, its character is changing.

I spent several hours recently with one of the article’s authors, Gisela Winckler, at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, high on the Palisades overlooking the Hudson River. Winckler is a physicist and an oceanographer, and her interest in oceans and paleoclimate goes back to her graduate-school days at Heidelberg University, in Germany. She confessed that she’d first learned about Point Nemo not from a scientific paper but from the 2010 album Plastic Beach, by Damon Albarn’s project Gorillaz. Winckler is intrepid; early in her career, a quarter century ago, she descended to the Pacific floor in the submersible Alvin, looking for gas hydrates and methane seeps. Yellow foul-weather gear hangs behind her office door. On a table sits a drill bit used for collecting sediment samples. Water from Point Nemo is preserved in a vial.

Illustration by Anuj Shrestha

Winckler’s two-month expedition aboard the drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution, in 2019, was arduous. Scientists and crew members set out from Punta Arenas, Chile, near the start of the dark austral winter; they would not encounter another ship. The seas turned angry as soon as the Resolution left the Strait of Magellan, and stayed that way. The shipboard doctor got to know everyone. Winckler shrugged at the memory. That’s the Southern Ocean for you. The drill sites had been chosen because the South Pacific is understudied and because the area around Point Nemo had sediment of the right character: so thick and dense with datable microfossils that you can go back a million years and sometimes be able to tell what was happening century by century. The team went back further in time than that. The drills punched through the Pleistocene and into the Pliocene, collecting core samples down to a depth corresponding to 5 million years ago and beyond.

The work was frequently interrupted by WOW alerts—the acronym stands for “waiting on weather”—when the heave of the ship made drilling too dangerous. Five weeks into the expedition, a violent weather system the size of Australia came roaring from the west. The alert status hit the highest level—RAW, for “run away from weather”—and the Resolution ran.

But the team had collected enough. It would spend the next five years comparing sediment data with what is known or surmised about global temperatures through the ages. A 5-million-year pattern began to emerge. As Winckler explained, “During colder times, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current itself becomes cooler and slows down, shifting a little bit northward, toward the equator. But during warmer times, it warms and speeds up, shifting its latitude a little bit southward, toward the pole.” The current is warming now and therefore speeding up, and its course is more southerly—all of which erodes the Antarctic ice sheet. Warm water does more damage to ice than warm air can do.

Before I left the Palisades, Winckler walked me over to the Lamont-Doherty Core Repository, a sediment library where more than 20,000 tubes from decades of expeditions are stacked on floor-to-ceiling racks. The library was very cold—it’s kept at 2 degrees centigrade, the temperature of the sea bottom—and very humid. Open a tube, and the sediment may still be moist. I wondered idly if in her Point Nemo investigations Winckler had ever run into a bit of space junk. She laughed. No, the expedition hadn’t deployed underwater video, and the chances would have been infinitesimal anyway. Then again, she said, you never know. Some 30 years ago, during an expedition in the North Atlantic, she had seen a bottle of Beck’s beer from an array of cameras being towed a mile or two below the surface. In 2022, in the South Pacific, the headlights of a submersible at the bottom of the Mariana Trench—about seven miles down, the deepest spot in any ocean—picked up the glassy green of another beer bottle resting in the sediment.

Jonathan McDowell has never been to the ocean floor, but he does have a rough idea where the world’s oceanic space junk can be found. McDowell is an astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is also part of the team that manages science operations for the Chandra deep-space X-ray telescope. At more or less monthly intervals, he publishes a newsletter, Jonathan’s Space Report, notable for its wide-ranging expertise and quirky humor. He has written about Point Nemo and its environs, and in an annual report, he provides long lists, in teletype font, with the coordinates of known debris splashdowns.

British by parentage and upbringing, McDowell looks ready to step into the role of Doctor Who: rumpled dark suit, colorful T-shirt, hair like a yogi’s. He is 64, which he mentioned was 34 if you count in Martian years. I met him at his lair, in a gritty district near Cambridge—some 1,900 square feet of loft space crammed with books and computers, maps and globes. One shelf displays a plush-toy Tribble from a famous Star Trek episode. A small container on another shelf holds a washer from the camera of a U.S. spy satellite launched into orbit in 1962.

McDowell has been preoccupied by spaceflight all his life. His father was a physicist who taught at Royal Holloway, University of London. As a teenager, he began keeping track of rocket launches. In maturity, McDowell has realized a grander ambition: documenting the history of every object that has left the planet for outer space. Nothing is beneath his notice. He has studied orbiting bins of garbage discarded decades ago by Russia’s Salyut space stations. If a Beck’s bottle were circling the planet, he’d probably know. McDowell estimates that the thousands of files in binder boxes on his shelves hold physical records of 99 percent of all the objects that have made it into orbit. For what it covers, no database in the world matches the one in McDowell’s loft.

Unless something is in very high orbit, what goes up eventually comes down, by means of a controlled or uncontrolled deorbit. The pieces of rockets and satellites and space stations large enough to survive atmospheric reentry have to hit the planet’s surface somewhere. McDowell pulled several pages from a printer—colored maps with tiny dots showing places around the world where space debris has fallen. The maps reveal a cluster of dots spanning the South Pacific, like a mirror held up to the Milky Way.

Guiding objects carefully back to Earth became a priority after 1979, when the reentry of the American space station Skylab went awry and large chunks of debris rained down on southern Australia. No one was hurt, McDowell said, but NASA became an object of ridicule. The coastal town of Esperance made international news when it tried to fine the space agency for littering. From the 1990s on, more and more satellites were launched into orbit; the rockets that put them there were designed to fall back to Earth. The empty ocean around Point Nemo became a primary target zone: a “spacecraft cemetery,” as it’s sometimes called. That’s where Mir came down, in 2001. It’s where most of the spacecraft that supply the International Space Station come down. There are other cemeteries in other oceans, but the South Pacific is Forest Lawn. The reentry process is not an exact science, so the potential paths, while narrow, may be 1,000 miles long. When reentry is imminent, warnings go out to keep ships away.

Illustration by Anuj Shrestha

When I mentioned the conversation between the Mālama crew and its nearest neighbors, the space-station astronauts, McDowell pointed me toward a bank of flatscreens. He called up a three-dimensional image of Earth and then showed me the orbital path of the ISS over the previous 24 hours. Relative to the universe, he explained, the plane of the ISS orbit never changes—the station goes round and round, 16 times a day, five miles a second. But because the globe is spinning underneath, each orbit covers a different slice of the world—now China, now India, now Arabia. McDowell retrieved a moment from the day before. The red line of the orbit unspooled from between Antarctica and New Zealand and traced a path northeast across the Pacific. He pointed to the time stamp and the location. At least once a day, he said, the space station will be above Point Nemo.

[Read: A close look at the most distant object NASA has ever explored]

McDowell is drawn to the idea of remoteness, which maybe shouldn’t be surprising: To an astrophysicist, remoteness is never far away. But, he said, “there are layers and layers when it comes to how you think about it.” In 2019, a space probe relayed pictures of a 22-mile-long rock known as Arrokoth, the most distant object in our solar system ever to be visited by a spacecraft. That’s one kind of remote. More recently, the James Webb Space Telescope has found galaxies more distant from our own than any known before. That’s another kind. McDowell brought the subject almost back to Earth. On our planet, he said, Point Nemo is definitely remote—as remote as you can get. “But I’m always moved by the thought of Mike Collins, who was the first person to be completely isolated from the rest of humanity when his two friends were on the moon and he was orbiting the far side, and he had the moon between him and every other human being who has ever lived.”

Collins himself wrote of that moment: “I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it.”

I joined Hrvoje Lukatela and his wife, Dunja, for dinner one evening at their home near the University of Calgary. Hrvoje and Dunja had met at university as young mountaineers—outdoors clubs offered a form of insulation from the Communist regime. They emigrated together soon after their marriage. In the basement office of their home, he still keeps his boyhood copy (in Croatian) of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Lukatela spread maps and computer printouts on the table as we ate.

Lukatela might wish to be remembered for the Hipparchus software library, but he accepts that the first line of his obituary will probably be about Point Nemo. He is proud of his discovery, and like a man with a hammer, he has a tendency to see everything as a nail. He and Dunja spend part of the year in Croatia, and in an email this past spring, he sent me some new calculations that solve the longest-swim problem for the Adriatic Sea (“with millimetric numerical precision”). Set him down alongside Loch Ness or the Central Park Reservoir, and I can guess what he’d be thinking.

Lukatela has a dream for Point Nemo, though probably not one that he can pursue alone. His hope is that someone, someday, will venture into the South Pacific and leave GPS receivers on Ducie Island, Motu Nui Island, and Maher Island, establishing the location of the triangulation points more accurately than ever before. While they’re at it, they might also drive brass geodetic markers into the rock. Ducie and Motu Nui would be relatively easy to get to—“I could do it on my own,” he ventured. (Dunja, listening, did not seem overly concerned.) Access to Maher Island, Lukatela went on, with its inhospitable location and brutal weather, might require some sort of government expedition.

[From the February 1906 issue: A history and future of human exploration]

What government would that even be? Lukatela indicated Maher Island on a map. Officially, it is part of Marie Byrd Land, one of the planet’s few remaining tracts of terra nullius—land claimed by no one. But Lukatela recalled hearing that Maher Island had recently come under the jurisdiction of one of those start-up micronations that people invent to advance some cause.

He was right. Maher is one of five Antarctic islands claimed by the Grand Duchy of Flandrensis, a Belgium-based micronation devoted to raising ecological awareness. At international conferences, the grand duke, Nicholas de Mersch d’Oyenberghe, wears military dress blues with handsome decorations and a yellow sash. But he answers his own email. Asked about Lukatela’s ambition, he explained that his country is the only one in the world that seeks to bar all human beings from its territory; the thousand or so people who have registered as citizens are all nonresidents. “No humans, only nature!” is the Grand Duchy’s motto. However, he went on, a mission to install a GPS receiver and a geodetic-survey marker would be deemed scientific, and welcomed. The Grand Duchy would be happy to provide a flag.

The astronaut Steve Bowen has orbited above Maher Island and Point Nemo many times. Before being selected by NASA, Bowen was a submariner; he knows a lot about life in a sealed container far from anywhere. He was one of the crew members aboard the International Space Station who spoke with the Ocean Race sailors as their trajectories crossed at Point Nemo. When I caught up with him this past summer, he compared his circumstances and theirs. The astronauts sleep a lot better, he said—in microgravity, you don’t wake up bruised. But the environment never changes. There is no fresh air, no wind, no rain. Bowen remembered the exhilaration whenever his submarine surfaced in open sea and he would emerge topside into the briny spray, tethered to the boat, taking in a view of nothing but water in every direction.

In the space station, Bowen would often float his way to the seven-window cupola—the observation module—and gaze at the planet below. From that altitude, you have a sight line extending 1,000 miles in every direction, an area about the size of Brazil. In a swath of the planet that big, Bowen said, you can almost always find a reference point—an island, a peninsula, something. The one exception: when the orbit takes you above Point Nemo. For a while, the view through the windows is all ocean.

That same expanse of ocean will one day receive the International Space Station. When it is decommissioned, in 2031, the parts that don’t burn up in the atmosphere will descend toward the South Pacific and its spacecraft cemetery.

Last March, aboard a chartered ship called the Hanse Explorer, a Yorkshire businessman named Chris Brown, 62, exchanged messages with Lukatela to make sure that he had the coordinates he needed—the original computation and the later variations. Brown values precision. As he explained when I reached him at his home in Harrogate after his return from the South Pacific, he and his son Mika had been determined to reach Point Nemo, and even have a swim, and he wanted to be certain he was in the right neighborhood.

This wasn’t just a lark. Brown has been attempting to visit all eight of the planet’s poles of inaccessibility, and he had already knocked off most of the continental ones. Point Nemo, the oceanic pole, was by far the most difficult. Brown is an adventurer, but he is also pragmatic. He once made arrangements to descend to the Titanic aboard the Titan submersible but withdrew in short order because of safety concerns—well founded, as it turned out, given the Titan’s tragic implosion in 2023. The ship he was chartering now could stay at sea for 40 days and was built for ice. Autumn had just begun in the Southern Hemisphere when the Browns left Puerto Montt, Chile, and the weather turned unfriendly at once. “Nausea was never far away,” he recalled.

[Read: The Titanic sub and the draw of extreme tourism]

But approaching Point Nemo, eight days later, the Hanse Explorer found a brief window of calm. Steering a Zodiac inflatable boat and guided by a GPS device, Brown made his way to 4852.5291ʹS 12323.5116ʹW. He and Mika slipped overboard in their wetsuits, becoming the first human beings to enter the ocean here. A video of the event includes photos of the men being ferociously attacked by an albatross. While treading water, they managed to display the maritime flags for the letters N, E, M, and O. Then, mindful of Lukatela’s further calculations, they headed for two other spots, a few miles distant—just to be safe. Admiral Robert Peary’s claim to have been the first person to reach the North Pole, in 1909, has long been disputed; his math was almost certainly off. Brown did not want to become the Peary of Point Nemo.

He isn’t, of course. I think of him, rather, as Point Nemo’s Leif Erikson, the man credited with the first New World toe-touch by a European. I think of Hrvoje Lukatela as some combination of Juan de la Cosa and Martin Waldseemüller, the cartographers who first mapped and named the Western Hemisphere. Jonathan McDowell is perhaps Point Nemo’s Alexander von Humboldt, Gisela Winckler its Charles Lyell and Gertrude Bell. Steve Bowen and the Ocean Race crew, circumnavigating the globe in their different ways, have a wide choice of forebears. The grand duke of Flandrensis may not be Metternich, but he introduces a hint of geopolitics.

Unpopulated and in the middle of nowhere, Point Nemo is starting to have a history.

This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “The Most Remote Place in the World.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Since last October 7, I have averted my eyes from social media at many moments, and not for the obvious reasons—not because a virtual yelling match had reached a painfully high pitch or become a crude display of mental entrenchment. That would be par for the course when it comes to Israel and Palestine. I would turn away, quickly switching tabs, when I was suddenly confronted with a clip from Gaza of a father covered in dust crawling over mounds of rubble and calling out for his buried children, or the sight of a mother kneeling and screaming over a row of tiny, white-shrouded bodies.

The emotional intensity of these videos was overwhelming. The clips never told me anything about these Gazans. They only plunged me for a few excruciating seconds into what was surely the most awful moment of these human beings’ lives. The humanity—the fear, the grief, the physical pain—was so raw and uncut that, in my recognition of it, I recoiled.

The year since Hamas’s brutal massacre and the carnage wrought by Israel’s response has reduced the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to its most elemental feature: a demand for recognition. What has been revealed in the aftermath is the desperation of this need. When people put up posters with the faces of Israeli grandparents and babies kidnapped to Gaza, that was a plea for recognition; when others tore them down, that was a denial of that recognition. When my otherwise thoughtful young Israeli relative told me, casually, that she doesn’t feel bad about the deaths of Palestinians, because “they are all guilty, all of them,” that was also a denial of recognition. The horrid debates about whether rape occurred on October 7 were an argument over recognition. There were pleas to be seen and then the purposeful, often malicious refusals to see. And I found this interplay—the desire and the withholding—to be one of the most devastating aspects of this awful year.

The grandfather of the Israeli soldier Jordan Bensimon cries over his casket during his funeral on July 22, 2014, in Ashkelon, Israel. (Andrew Burton / Getty)

In Isabella Hammad’s new book, Recognizing the Stranger, which consists mostly of a lecture she gave at Columbia University, the novelist explores what it has meant for the Palestinian people to be endlessly seeking this acknowledgment of their humanity. Hammad recounts a story she heard while visiting a kibbutz. She encountered a skittish young soldier named Daniel—he said he was “a ‘little’ colonel”—who was hiding out after having deserted the Israeli army. He told her that, while guarding the Gaza border, he’d spotted a man, completely naked, walking toward him. The man was holding a photograph of a child. Daniel’s instruction was to shoot him in the legs, but he could not do it. Instead, Daniel dropped his weapon and ran.

Hammad is both heartened and distressed by this story. It does show how a person can suddenly become visible to another, can reveal themselves and thereby cause minds and behavior to change. But she is troubled by what has to happen to bring this about: “It was, after all, on the little colonel’s horizon that that man in Gaza appeared, walking toward him without his clothes on, literally risking his life to undertake this desperate performance of his humanity, saying, look at me naked, I am a human being, holding up a photograph of a child, who we easily imagine was his own child, killed by Israeli missile fire.”

Look at me naked. This performance of humanity, mostly for an outside, adjudicating world, is not just a Palestinian burden—though Hammad presents it as such. Israelis, too, have been desperate to be seen, not as occupiers or settlers, but as people just hoping to live their lives.

Along with Hammad’s book, a few others published around the anniversary of October 7 offer first drafts of the history of that day—drafts that take as their starting point the stories of individuals. These are people who woke up one Saturday morning and were soon dodging bullets and grenades, cradling the dead bodies of their husbands and daughters, kneeling before AK-47s and begging to be spared.

[Michael A. Cohen: The rape denialists]

One Day in October, by Yair Agmon and Oriya Mevorach, is an oral history in the style of the Nobel Prize–winning Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich. The authors gathered 40 stories, told from the perspective of the survivors about their own experience or that of a killed loved one. The narratives all seem to follow a three-act structure: We meet someone who is wonderfully idiosyncratic; we follow them through the horrors of that day; we learn something of their bravery and decency.

This amounts at times to a performance of humanity as desperate as that of the man in Hammad’s story. The victims are idealized, elevated even in their ordinariness, remembered as the most courageous, the kindest, the most beautiful.

Netta Epstein was a 22-year-old living in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7. His story is told in One Day in October by his fiancée, Irene Shavit, who describes Epstein as “a real goofball, one of the funniest guys you ever met.” They had planned to go to Epstein’s grandmother’s for breakfast on October 7 because she was making the Yemenite pastry jahnun. Like most of the people on the kibbutzim bordering Gaza, Epstein and Shavit’s drama played out in their safe room, as they struggled to keep the Hamas terrorists out—“We heard them opening the safe room and screaming ‘Where are you! Come out!’ in this heavily accented Hebrew. Then they started throwing grenades at us.” The couple managed to survive two grenades, but the third one rolled too close to them, and Epstein instinctively threw himself on top of it, dying instantly and saving his fiancée. Shavit then lay there for hours, hiding under a bed, with Epstein’s body blocking her from the view of other terrorists who entered the room. She described her thoughts as she waited: “I was there for hours facing Netta, watching him lying there with his gorgeous body, with his sculpted buns—I always teased him that he spent far more time toning his behind than I ever did … What an amazing body; he’s really the most gorgeous guy in the world.”

An ideology that recognizes only the pain of Palestinians does not know what to do with this sort of story—painfully sweet in its humanness. There is no room for it. When all one sees is colonized and colonizers, certain experiences register and others do not. The colonized deserve the much-denied recognition of their humanity, especially as they are killed by the tens of thousands. The colonizer, by virtue of his position, is responsible for any terror that might be visited upon him; his suffering, his humanity, can be ignored. The flip side of this thinking can also, of course, be found in Israel, where any loss of an innocent Jewish life is mourned but the deaths of thousands of Palestinian women and children can be dismissed as collateral damage. This parsimoniousness, to characterize it generously, has only heightened the competition for acknowledgment—for proving that “we” are more human than “them.”

I give the Haaretz journalist Lee Yaron a lot of credit for cutting through this sad rivalry. In her book, 10/7, which also catalogs the events of the day through those who became victims, she makes a choice not to depict Palestinians. Their history is not hers to tell, she says—“I wait with all humility to read the books of my Palestinian colleagues, which will surely tell the stories of the innocents of Gaza, who suffered and died from my country’s reaction to their leadership’s violence.” What she does is apply reportorial rigor to her own side. Her subjects are just people on the day that will be their last; this is not hagiography. The most relevant thing about them is the fact of their murder. But they are also not anonymous. They each represent one flicker of humanity in this panoramic account. In an afterword, the novelist Joshua Cohen, Yaron’s husband, even compares this work to the memorial books created after the Holocaust “to reclaim the dead, at least some of them, from numeric anonymity and political exploitation.”

Yaron’s compendium is relentlessly depressing because of the senselessness and brutality, the death after death. But she manages to escape the need to prove anyone’s worth. They just are. And who they are also represents a wide swath of Israeli society: the young French Israeli woman who had left her infant with her husband for the weekend so she could relax at the Nova dance festival; the elderly Soviet Jewish retirees about to board a van to take them to a spa day at the Dead Sea; a pregnant Bedouin woman on her way to the hospital to give birth; the Nepalese and Thai guest workers hiding behind stacked bags of rice. In these stories, the violence of that day is a rupture in reality, indiscriminate and unforgiving.

Humanity reveals itself in the smallest details; it becomes easier to forget the fight to claim the most empathy when the focus is on those qualities of an existence that feel totally familiar and otherwise unremarkable. The work of the Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha is filled with such details. His poems have appeared in many literary publications, including The Atlantic, over the past year, which made his story of being detained by the Israeli army as he and his family were trying to leave Gaza, published in The New Yorker in December, particularly disturbing. Abu Toha’s new book, Forest of Noise, gathers together that recent writing. The best of it describes the everyday experience of a waking nightmare—much of it in Gaza but some from the distance of Egypt, where he is living now. “Under the Rubble” includes some simple exchanges with his young son:

My son asks me whether,
when we return to Gaza,
I could get him a puppy.
I say, “I promise, if we can find any.”

I ask my son if he wishes to become
a pilot when he grows up.
He says he won’t wish
to drop bombs on people and houses.

The more Abu Toha roots his poems in his reality, in those details, the more drawn I am to them. If this was his own performance of humanity, then it was the subtlest of dances, something like butoh, in which the dancer seems to move a millimeter every second, demanding your full concentration to appreciate how slowly a muscle can extend itself in space. In “What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Air Strike,” Abu Toha offers nothing more than a list of instructions: “Turn off the lights in every room / sit in the inner hallway of the house / away from the windows / stay away from the stove / stop thinking about making black tea / have a bottle of water nearby / big enough to cool down / children’s fear.” It goes on like this, the banal suddenly profound, the abnormal proximity to death suddenly normal.

[Amor Tobin: How my father saved my life on October 7]

Children grieve during the funeral on November 11, 2023, of the Faojo family, killed in an Israeli bombing of Rafah in Gaza. (Said Khatib / AFP / Getty)

This particular poem reminded me of passages from another October 7 book, Amir Tibon’s The Gates of Gaza, an adapted excerpt of which appeared recently in this magazine. Tibon, also a Haaretz reporter, spent the day trapped with his wife and two young daughters in the safe room of their house in Kibbutz Nahal Oz while their neighbors were shot and their houses set on fire. Tibon alternates between the story of the day—while he was hiding, his father, a retired general in his 60s, made his way to the kibbutz to try to save his son and his family—and the history of the community, which sits about a mile from the border with Gaza.

But despite the genuinely heroic story Tibon describes of his father surviving ambushes and gunfights to reach them, my focus kept shifting to the drama of the little girls—Galia, 3 and a half, and Carmel, almost 2—sitting in the darkness of the safe room for 10 hours, the sound of gunfire outside, without food or water or access to a bathroom, and needing to stay absolutely quiet. How did Tibon and his wife keep them busy? Galia wanted an apple; Carmel requested ice cream. At one point after six hours, Carmel toddled around the room in the dark, accidently stepped on something, and started to cry. Tibon and his wife panicked, held her close, and she calmed down, fell asleep; then the parents lost it for the first time that day. “Up until that point, we had both taken pains to maintain our composure, knowing that any signs of distress from either one of us would make the girls even more scared than they already were,” Tibon writes. “But now, all of our carefully restrained emotions came pouring out: the fear, the anger, the remorse.”

I mention these fathers and their children not by way of arriving at some facile point about moral equivalence. I’m not trying to collapse the experiences of people on either side of the Gaza border. They are enormously different. But if you’re searching for humanity, you might find it best here in the granularity of experience and emotion, in the desire for safety, in the agony of trying to protect children from harm.

In her survey of all the ways Palestinians try to have their humanity recognized, Hammad landed on one that felt the least fraught, the least desperate, to her: to forget that anyone is watching or making a wager or rooting from the outside, to forget the need to show the scars, and amputated limbs, and blood. “I like this idea of breaking into the awareness of other people by talking candidly among ourselves,” Hammad writes. I like this too, and I felt most moved, while reading the works of Israelis and Palestinians after this year of death, when they stopped performing for anyone else.

It is hard to ever imagine an end to the suffering competition; both groups are too locked into the idea that the recognition they each seek is a scarce commodity, that if one side claims it, the other side loses. But they’re wrong. And this heartbreaking mistake, more than anything else, is what stands in the way of their suffering’s end.

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1988. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

[Read: Why kids aren’t falling in love with reading]

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

In 1979, Martha Maxwell, an influential literacy scholar, wrote, “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.” Dames, who studies the history of the novel, acknowledged the longevity of the complaint. “Part of me is always tempted to be very skeptical about the idea that this is something new,” he said.

And yet, “I think there is a phenomenon that we’re noticing that I’m also hesitant to ignore.” Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one familiar explanation for the decline in reading aptitude: smartphones. Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

[Read: The terrible costs of a phone-based childhood]

But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests. Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But “in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.”

Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels. “There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy? ” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it. Carol Jago, a literacy expert who crisscrosses the country helping teachers design curricula, says that educators tell her they’ve stopped teaching the novels they’ve long revered, such as My Ántonia and Great Expectations. The pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the shift away from teaching complete works.

In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey of about 300 third-to-eighth-grade educators, only 17 percent said they primarily teach whole texts. An additional 49 percent combine whole texts with anthologies and excerpts. But nearly a quarter of respondents said that books are no longer the center of their curricula. One public-high-school teacher in Illinois told me that she used to structure her classes around books but now focuses on skills, such as how to make good decisions. In a unit about leadership, students read parts of Homer’s Odyssey and supplement it with music, articles, and TED Talks. (She assured me that her students read at least two full texts each semester.) An Advanced Placement English Literature teacher in Atlanta told me that the class used to read 14 books each year. Now they’re down to six or seven.

Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen. But private schools are not immune to the trend. At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel.

The issue that Dames and other professors have observed is distinct from the problem at community colleges and nonselective universities, where some students arrive with literacy and comprehension deficits that can leave them unable to complete collegiate courses. High-achieving students at exclusive schools like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.

Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”

[Xochitl Gonzalez: The schools that are no longer teaching kids to read books]

Andrew Delbanco, a longtime American-studies professor at Columbia, now teaches a seminar on short works of American prose instead of a survey course on literature. The Melville segment used to include Moby-Dick; now his students make do with Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” There are some benefits—short works allow more time to focus on “the intricacies and subtleties of language,” Delbanco told me—and he has made peace with the change. “One has to adjust to the times,” he said.

The Columbia instructors who determine the Lit Hum curriculum decided to trim the reading list for the current school year. (It had been growing in recent years, even while students struggled with the reading, as new books by nonwhite authors were added.) Like Delbanco, some see advantages to teaching fewer books. Even the best-prepared students have probably been skimming some of their Lit Hum assignments for years. Joseph Howley, the program’s chair, said he’d rather students miss out on some of the classics—Crime and Punishment is now off the list—but read the remaining texts in greater depth. And, crucially, the change will give professors more time to teach students how they expect them to read.

But it’s not clear that instructors can foster a love of reading by thinning out the syllabus. Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past. Every year, they tell Howley that, despite enjoying what they learned in Lit Hum, they plan to instead get a degree in something more useful for their career.

The same factors that have contributed to declining enrollment in the humanities might lead students to spend less time reading in the courses they do take. A 2023 survey of Harvard seniors found that they spend almost as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they do on academics. And thanks to years of grade inflation (in a recent report, 79 percent of Harvard grades were in the A range), college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work.

Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books. They might read more as they age—older adults are the most voracious readers—but the data are not encouraging. The American Time Use Survey shows that the overall pool of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time.

The economic survival of the publishing industry requires an audience willing and able to spend time with an extended piece of writing. But as readers of a literary magazine will surely appreciate, more than a venerable industry is at stake. Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own. “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics,” Kahn, the Berkeley professor, said. “Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.”

Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey; they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.

Over and over, the professors I spoke with painted a grim picture of young people’s reading habits. (The historian Adrian Johns was one dissenter, but allowed, “My experience is a bit unusual because the University of Chicago is, like, the last bastion of people who do read things.”) For years, Dames has asked his first-years about their favorite book. In the past, they cited books such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Now, he says, almost half of them cite young-adult books. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series seems to be a particular favorite.

I can imagine worse preparations for the trials, and thrills, of Lit Hum. Riordan’s series, although full of frothy action and sometimes sophomoric humor, also cleverly engages in a literary exercise as old as the Western canon: spinning new adventures for the petulant gods and compromised heroes of Greek mythology. But of course there is a reason that, despite millennia of reinterpretations, we’ve never forgotten the originals. To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read The Iliad—all of it.

This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.