When Rihanna walks, or is raised, or is lowered onto the Super Bowl stage on Sunday, she will not merely be kicking off the game’s halftime show. She will be culminating Rihanna’s Road to Halftime, presented by Apple Music. The world’s most valuable company is in the first year of a reported five-year, $250 million deal to sponsor one of the most watched live-music performances anywhere, which happens to fit between two halves of a game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles. For $50 million a year, a tech behemoth does not just want a good show. It also wants a music video with fans of all 32 NFL teams singing Rihanna’s hit “Stay.” It wants a 10-part streaming-radio series about the greatest Super Bowl halftime shows ever. And it wants to curate an “official collection of 32 playlists featuring the top songs that each NFL team listens to in the locker room, the weight room, and on game day.”

This is a big partnership for Apple and the NFL—and it probably feels like a disappointing consolation prize for Tim Cook and Co. Last year, Apple reportedly vied for the rights to NFL Sunday Ticket, the league’s enormously popular viewing package that lets fans watch their hometown team from far away. The company that beat it out was Google, which in December agreed to spend about $2 billion a year for the rights to Sunday Ticket. But Amazon, not Google, became the first company to put the NFL behind a streaming paywall, coughing up about $1 billion a year to air one Thursday Night Football game a week on Prime Video starting this season.

Big Tech, somewhat suddenly, wants in on the NFL in a way that it hasn’t before. Silicon Valley has long had partnerships with the league and its broadcast partners; perhaps the most famous ad ever run by Apple, its commercial introducing the Macintosh, first aired during the 1984 Super Bowl. More recently, Microsoft has sprung to be the league’s official tablet provider, and its blue Surface tablets are inescapable when the camera pans to the sideline on Sundays. But the connections between the league and tech companies have become much deeper in the past two years, even as tech has hemorrhaged jobs lately. The world’s largest companies and America’s most popular sports league have hit a symbiotic stride. Each is now a unique provider of what the other wants: immense scale and cultural relevance for the tech companies, big money and endless access to technological advances for the league. If anything feels weird, it’s that the match didn’t happen sooner.

The NFL has courted corporate partners for many decades, but the ones to latch on most closely haven’t historically been tech companies. Just think about last year’s Super Bowl, which featured its fair share of tech ads, especially from crypto companies: Still, the halftime show was sponsored by Pepsi, and some of the best ads came from companies such as GM, Hellman’s, and Rocket Mortgage. “If you look at who likes to be associated with the NFL, it’s consumer-goods companies, whether that’s beer, cars, whatever,” Bob Thompson, a former Fox Sports Networks president, told me. “And then media companies,” such as Disney or DirecTV, which might advertise in addition to airing games.

In the simplest sense, what has changed is that the tech giants are now media companies themselves, with big streaming services they are eager to grow. The rise of Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, and YouTube TV has made the tech-NFL relationship far more natural than when Apple was only selling expensive hardware and Amazon was only selling physical things out of warehouses. Amazon, for example, has some of the same interest in the NFL that a big movie studio might have while advertising a blockbuster, or that a retailer such as Taco Bell or TurboTax might have in using the NFL to sell a range of consumer goods.

Buying game rights ratchets up the companies’ platform to sell us things, in part because the very thing we’re watching on is something they’re selling us. Google could use the very existence of Sunday Ticket to plug YouTube TV subscriptions: After all, everyone knows Google, but not everyone might know YouTube TV. “Now, believe me, they’re gonna know YouTube TV, and they’re gonna be searching for it because of that access to the Sunday Ticket,” Hank Boyd, a marketing professor at the University of Maryland’s business school who has previously consulted with both the NFL and companies that work with it, told me. And while Google can’t replace national commercials during games that broadcast networks still produce, it will have what would normally be local advertising slots to sell, which it can use them to boost all kinds of Google products.

No deal is risk free, but one between a company the size of Apple, Google, or Amazon and the NFL is close enough. The tech firms “recognize the fact that if you want to aggregate a very large audience and be pretty much guaranteed that it’s going to be there, there’s no better property than the NFL,” Thompson said. The NFL is not the most valuable business in America. The tech companies throwing millions and billions of dollars into it are. But if one measure of power is the ability to hold eyeballs on demand, the NFL is the most powerful force in our entire culture, miles ahead of the organizations behind prestige streaming dramas, big-budget movies, and the State of the Union address or anything else in politics. Of the 100 most watched American TV broadcasts of 2022, 82—and 19 of the top 20—were NFL games. Particularly for a move like Apple’s $50 million halftime show, it would likely take an enormous failure—“like if we had a Janet Jackson–Justin Timberlake episode,” Thompson said—for Apple to feel like this investment was not a success.

The NFL’s cultural clout is unrivaled, and the league has become so big and full of so much money that Silicon Valley is part of only a tiny group of businesses that are immune from sticker shock. In the Super Bowl ad market, some 30-second commercials cost an all-time high of $7 million. Even classic consumer brands such as Anheuser-Busch, Skechers, and Burger King have balked at buying spots in the past few years. And when it comes to ballooning broadcast-rights fees, traditional companies such as Disney will eventually meet their limits, and even a cash-splashing streamer such as Netflix has decided to sit this one out. “We’re not anti-sports. We’re just pro-profit,” the company’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos said recently.

But the league also makes a perfect stage for a tech company to advertise new toys that are much different from what traditional broadcasters can offer. Amazon powers an entire NFL advanced-stats platform that becomes an advertisement for Amazon’s cloud-computing and machine-learning prowess. During Thursday Night Football, Prime streams a second telecast with Amazon-generated stats plastered all over the screen. When Google starts selling Sunday Ticket packages, the subscription could become a billboard for lots of Google tech. Given the AI wars now playing out, don’t be surprised if the newest advances soon make their way to an NFL broadcast.

[Read: Football has found its new bogeyman]

But if Big Tech craves the NFL, the NFL craves Big Tech too. The league is perpetually intent on not falling behind or finding itself frozen out of someone else’s big breakthrough. In the past, Thompson and Boyd both noted, this line of thinking has pushed the NFL to do simultaneous deals with every big broadcast network (CBS, Fox, NBC, and ABC/ESPN) rather than leaving one out. By partnering with so many of the biggest tech firms, the NFL is hedging to ensure it won’t miss the next quantum leap in streaming tech, player tracking, advanced stats, real-time sports betting, or something else. Which company will come up with it? Who knows, but probably an NFL partner.

The marriage between the NFL and Big Tech feels like destiny. They are, after all, the two most inescapable dynasties in America, a point now being typed out in Google Docs on a MacBook Pro as my phone buzzes with an ESPN alert about Sunday’s game. Each suits the other in nearly perfect ways, and their unmatched sizes box out almost everybody else who might want in. “I’ve kind of been like, ‘Well, what took you so long?’” Thompson said. “Maybe the NFL wasn’t ready, and maybe [the tech companies] weren’t ready, and now that time has come.” The result is a historically sharp and sudden shift in how we consume the NFL. The league’s Big Tech era is just beginning, and no one knows where it might take us.

On Sunday night, when Rihanna launches into the chorus of “Umbrella,” “Diamonds,” or whatever else she may bless the audience with from the big stage, a lot of eyeballs will encounter Apple’s branding. But viewers will tune in on Fox, not on Apple TV+. Cupertino now has its own tiny slice of the NFL. How long until Apple is hungry for more?

Eleven years ago, on the remote Japanese island of Kojima, a female macaque walked backwards into a stray heap of primate poop, glanced down at her foot, and completely flipped her lid. The monkey hightailed it down the shoreline on three feet, kicking up sand as she sprinted, until she reached a dead tree, where “she repeatedly rubbed her foot and smelled it until all of the sticky matter disappeared,” says Cécile Sarabian, a cognitive ecologist at the University of Hong Kong, who watched the incident unfold. Sarabian, then a graduate student studying parasite transmission among primates, was entranced by the familiarity of it all: the dismay, the revulsion, the frenetic desire for clean. It’s exactly what she or any other human might have done, had they accidentally stepped in it.

In the years following the event, Sarabian came to recognize the macaque’s panicked reaction as a form of disgust—just not the sort that many people first think of when the term comes to mind. Disgust has for decades been billed as a self-awareness of one’s own aversions, a primal emotion that’s so exclusive to people that, as some have argued, it may help define humanity itself. But many scientists, Sarabian among them, subscribe to a broader definition of disgust: the suite of behaviors that help creatures of all sorts avoid pathogens; parasites; and the flora, fauna, and substances that ferry them about. This flavor of revulsion—centered on observable actions, instead of conscious thought—is likely ancient and ubiquitous, not modern or unique to us. Which means disgust may be as old and widespread as infectious disease itself.

[Read: Do not read this at lunch]

Researchers can’t yet say that disease-driven disgust is definitely universal. But so far, “in every place that it’s been looked for, it’s been found,” says Dana Hawley, an ecologist at Virginia Tech. Bonobos rebuff banana slices that have been situated too close to scat; scientists have spotted mother chimps wiping the bottoms of their young. Kangaroos eschew patches of grass that have been freckled with feces. Dik-diks—pointy-faced antelopes that weigh about 10 pounds apiece—sequester their waste in dunghills, potentially to avoid contaminating the teeny territories where they live. Bullfrog tadpoles flee from their fungus-infested pondmates; lobsters steer clear of crowded dens during deadly virus outbreaks. Nematodes, no longer than a millimeter, wriggle away from their dinner when they chemically sense that it’s been contaminated with bad microbes. Even dung beetles will turn their nose up at feces that seems to pose an infectious risk.

If disgust behaviors are quite common among animals, it would make a lot of evolutionary sense: They guard against disease before it has a chance to begin. Discussions of immunity tend to center on T cells, B cells, antibodies, and vaccines, but those cells and molecules are not foolproof. Behaviors that help us avoid infection at all, meanwhile, can act as “a real first line of defense,” says Vanessa Ezenwa, a disease ecologist at Yale. If fear is what shields animals from predators—threats that tend to dwarf them in size and strength—disgust is its underappreciated sibling, protecting against the minuscule dangers that wriggle into bodies and destroy them from the inside out. And some version of that impulse “is probably universal, cutting across humans and nonhumans alike,” Ezenwa told me.

Many animals’ reactions to grossness certainly recall our own. When Sarabian presents macaques with tasty grains of wheat, balanced on piles of faux poop, they shy away from the food; when she coaxes hungry chimps into touching wet, sticky dough during a search for bits of delicious fruit, the apes visibly recoil and refuse to proffer their hands again. During one of Sarabian’s recent experiments, a mere photograph of a disease-carrying bug was enough to wig out a female ape, who turned her back to the screen and refused to reengage until the picture disappeared. Even some of the familiar facial expressions of disgust—a wrinkled nose, scrunched eyes, a mouth pinched into a slit—can be spotted in certain primates. “This may have the function of preventing things from getting into the mouth, sinuses, and eyes,” Sarabian told me. Rodents, too, seem to close off their faces to a degree when they taste the acridity of quinine—and when mice sniff out the telltale signs of infection in others of their kind, the same brain regions that are active in skeeved-out humans roar to life in them, too.

If the roots of disgust run this deep in evolutionary time, some hygienic tendencies are probably hardwired into DNA. Newborn humans don’t need a formal lesson in revulsion to grimace, gape, and gasp when something bitter is placed on their tongue. Pedro Vale, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Edinburgh, has found evidence that the degree to which fruit flies avoid disease-causing microbes may be coded into their genes. And in the same way that some people can be more fastidious or slovenly, animals can display a wide range of comfort with grit and grime, sometimes in ways that seem to be influenced by sex and age. Across several species, females are more hygiene-conscious than males, possibly because it’s far riskier for them to acquire infections that could be passed on to their offspring. And juvenile monkeys and kangaroos may be more contamination-conscious than adults because parasites hit them especially hard.

[Read: Immune cells are more paranoid than we thought]

But disgust can also be learned. Clémence Poirotte, of the German Primate Center, and Marie Charpentier, of the Institute of Evolutionary Science of Montpellier, have found that certain mandrills—the blue-and-red-faced monkeys of Rafiki fame—are more cagey about grooming sick family and friends, while others hardly mind. Those tendencies, Poirotte told me, seem tightly tied to families’ maternal lines, a hint that the monkeys are inheriting their hygienic habits from their moms. We humans seem to learn similar lessons in childhood: Prior to preschool age, many kids aren’t all that bothered by the sight or smell of poop. It’s their parents who seem to drill that aversion into them, and cement it for life.

The potential perils of ignoring the ick factor are clear: infection, disease, death; felled families, epidemics, population declines. But many animals—humans sometimes among them—don’t always heed the omens of blech. For years, Hawley, at Virginia Tech, has been trying to suss out why house finches won’t shun other birds infected with an often-fatal bacterial infection called mycoplasmal conjunctivitis. The disease is about as visible as it gets: “It’s pink-eye to the extreme,” Hawley told me. “These birds just look awful.” And yet, the finches don’t seem to care; some males even seem to prefer the company of ailing birds.

Then again, perhaps the cost of evading illness is just too high to pay. Squeamishness, as protective as it can be, can also come with major drawbacks—which is probably why so many animals seem willing to bend or break their codes of hygiene. Sometimes, the calculus comes down to calories: The macaques on Kojima, often unwilling to consume grains of wheat that have touched poop, will still try to snarf down feces-contaminated peanuts—a favorite fatty, energy-rich food.

For other animals, it’s about the company they keep. Mandrills continue to groom infected family members; female mice may grudgingly couple up with sickly suitors when healthy ones are scarce; vampire bats—which deteriorate very quickly when starved—still share blood meals mouth to mouth during disease outbreaks. And although human mothers reliably find soiled diapers to be quite grody, they’re far less grossed out when the feces within comes from their own kid. The choice to schmooze with an infected friend or family member is always “a trade-off,” says Martin Kavaliers, a neurobiologist at the University of Western Ontario, “especially when in the wild, every individual is likely to be infected with something.” Bolder, more gregarious animals may end up with more infections. But their social lives may be richer, too.

[Read: We’re giving up on the (frog) pandemic]

As much as people love to paint themselves as more civilized and sophisticated than other creatures, “I don’t think animals are in any way, shape, or form dirtier than us,” Sebastian Stockmaier, a biologist at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, told me. Some of the animals we most associate with filth and squalor are actually very proactive about public health, says Aram Mikaelyan, an entomologist at North Carolina State University. Infected honeybees willingly exile themselves to keep the rest of the colony safe; ants groom away each other’s fungal spores, carry corpses out of the nest, and designate latrines far away from kitchens to avoid contaminating their food. Termites may build their nests out of feces—but the bricks are antimicrobial, and are arranged to keep those homes well ventilated with fresh air. Many people, meanwhile, can’t even be bothered to wash their hands after they use the bathroom.

Humans have made it awfully easy to avoid confronting the sensations of yuck that other creatures clue into every day, Mikaelyan told me. We mask bodily stink with deodorant; we scent our clothes with sprays and perfumes. We mist our homes with air fresheners to comfort ourselves about not cleaning them as often as we should. It seems a very different system from what evolution might have dreamed up, all those eons ago. But while humans fuel entire industries by covering up what’s gross, plenty of other animals are sticking to what they know best: simply keeping the disgusting stuff out.

As the first student papers of the academic semester come rolling in, college and high-school teachers are expressing concern about ChatGPT, the artificial-intelligence interface that responds to queries with competent, if boring, paragraphs. It seems to open up whole new vistas of academic dishonesty, and it calls into question how and why we teach writing at all. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School has said that ChatGPT’s answers to his operations-management class would have earned a B or B–. That seems about right; if a student in my first-year writing class had turned in a ChatGPT-generated essay last semester (and for all I know, someone did), they would have easily passed.

The fact is, boring competence is better than what some high-school or college graduates attain, and it’s all most people, in their daily lives, need their writing to be. If, in a few years, AI can do a passable job at most adult writing tasks—sharing information, telling quick stories, apologizing for the delay, and expressing a hope that all is well—then why spend so much time in school learning the maddening complexities of English prose? Surely there are more important things to study than subject-verb agreement, comma splices, and transition sentences.

But learning to write is about more than learning to write. For one thing, it’s about learning to turn a loose assemblage of thoughts into a clear line of reasoning—a skill that is useful for everyone, not just those who enjoy writing or need to do a lot of it for work.

[Read: The end of high-school English]

Just as important, learning to write trains your imagination to construct the person who will read your words. Writing, then, is an ethical act. It puts you in relation to someone you may not know, someone who may, in fact, not yet exist. When you learn to write, you learn to exercise your responsibility to that person, to meet their needs in a context you cannot fully know. That might sound like a lofty goal for a paper about, for instance, the major causes of the American Revolution. But even that bog-standard assignment can get students to anticipate what another person knows and expects. You wouldn’t write the same essay to a veterans’ group as you would to new immigrants.

Writing is never simply self-expression. It’s expression to a specific audience for a specific purpose. In some cases, like a love letter, a writer knows their audience intimately. In others, the audience is every bit a work of the imagination as a novel’s characters are.

Great writers have known this truth for centuries. Nathaniel Hawthorne writes in the introduction to The Scarlet Letter that “when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him, better than most of his schoolmates and lifemates.” Writers, then, should give up trying to address the public at large, but should “imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk.”

I would not go so far as to say that you and I are friends, but to convince you that I’m right about writing and the moral imagination, I need to make a mental model of who you are: what you value, what annoys you, how much explanation and evidence you need. And then I invite that imaginary version of you to look over my shoulder and suggest revisions. My editors give voice to a model of you too. (And meanwhile, advertising software compiles its own portrait.) If the essay is to succeed, our models must do justice to who you are. That’s the first step in our responsibility to you.

When this act of imagination is executed well, a reader can feel profoundly understood, as if a stranger has told them some previously unknown truth about themselves. That’s how I felt reading Meghan Daum’s 2014 essay “Difference Maker,” which is about her ambivalence toward parenthood and her somewhat ineffectual advocacy for children in the foster-care system. Daum describes a “Central Sadness” that became a “third party” in her marriage. “It collected around our marriage like soft, stinky moss,” she writes. “It rooted our arguments and dampened our good times. It taunted us from the sidelines of our social life.”

My wife and I both read the essay when it came out and thought, Yes, this is what we’re feeling. Our Central Sadness had a different character than Daum’s had, but it played a similar role for us. Naming the affliction didn’t solve the problem, but it did help us understand its depths. Reading the essay was therapeutic.

Writers are not morally better in their behavior than other people, and writing is not the only way to develop an empathetic mind. In fact, in the age of Instagram and Substack, many writers abuse their power to forge imaginary connections by cultivating one-sided, parasocial relationships with readers. Through calculated oversharing about their daily lives, authors can maintain the illusion that they are their readers’ smartest or funniest or most curmudgeonly friends.

Still, developing this ability to connect with others through the imagination is central to ethical life. The philosopher Mark Johnson argues in his 1993 book, Moral Imagination, that ethics is not primarily about applying universal rules to specific situations but about “the ongoing imaginative exploration of possibilities for dealing with our problems, enhancing the quality of our communal relations, and forming significant personal attachments that grow.” Empathy plays a central role in this model of ethics. We cannot act responsibly toward others unless we “go out toward people to inhabit their worlds, not just by rational calculations, but also in imagination, feeling, and expression.”

[Read: The college essay is dead]

School, however, does not often train students to exercise this mode of imagination through writing. “I find that when students arrive in college, they don’t see writing as a medium of communication, really,” Jim Warren, an English professor at the University of Texas at Arlington who specializes in rhetoric and composition, told me. “They see it as sort of this engineering task that they’re then going to present to us as examiner and hopefully have us say, ‘Yeah, you did it right.’”

A big part of the problem, Warren writes in a recent article, is that though all 50 states’ education standards (plus those in the District of Columbia) require that students learn to write essays to specific audiences, only 12 states actually test high-school students on this ability. And because tests drive curricula, Warren contends, it is likely that students in the majority of states are getting little, if any, instruction in how to write with an audience other than their teacher in mind.

To be sure, trying to figure out “what the teacher wants” is an exercise in moral imagination, albeit a limited one. The task for teachers is to expand that exercise. Warren told me that for some assignments, his students write about whatever they want to whomever they think needs what they have to say. The students then research this audience and explain to Warren whose eyes he’ll read their paper through. In peer-editing sessions, students adopt the mindset of one another’s audiences. Warren said students tell him at the end of the semester that the exercise gets them thinking more about readers’ expectations. “I think it moves the needle a bit,” he said.

In the scope of human history, mass literacy is a new phenomenon. Today, just about anyone can, in principle, communicate to someone far away in time and space. Writing is not the only modern form of action at a distance, though. Around the same time that human societies became literate on a large scale, their citizens also began burning mass quantities of fossil fuels that, we now know, can make life much harder for people who are far away in time and space.

Some of the biggest ethical challenges facing residents of rich countries in this century have to do with how we act toward people we can only imagine: climate refugees who (for now) mostly live far away, future people who will inhabit post-Anthropocene Earth, artificial intelligences, and animals whom we see as having a growing scope of rights.

Now that we are beginning to reckon with the harm we have done to the climate and are trying to reverse it, we need every bit of the empathetic imagination that mass literacy fosters. It seems inevitable that large-language models of AI will allow us to offload some of the writing tasks that students learn in school. But we can’t allow ourselves to lose the capacity to empathize with distant strangers at just the moment when we’re more able than ever to communicate with them.