The Magazine

Refugee from Tomorrowland

Jul 23, 2007, Vol. 12, No. 42 • By JONATHAN V. LAST
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Of all the betrayals of childhood, one that still stings came at the hands of the Weekly Reader. Every six weeks or so the teachers at my progressive little Quaker school would distribute copies of the Reader, and we would seize on it as an alternative to school work. The Reader was a short magazine printed in color on newsprint, and nearly every issue led with a story about an amazing technological development just about to burst forth.

Over the years, the Reader told of many wonders. Superconductors were going to change rail travel so that soon trains would be hovering above the ground, zooming along at hundreds of miles an hour. The ocean's kelp farms were on the verge of ending world hunger. In fact, the kelp industry would be so vital, the Reader reported, that underwater cities would spring up to house the workers, complete with hotels which lucky, landlubbing children might visit. Memory fails, but I'm pretty sure that in this innovation, as in many others, the United Nations was to play a sizable role. I suspect the prominence of the United Nations in the Reader's pages was part of what made it acceptable to my teachers. Then as now, Turtle Bay was revered by the Society of Friends on theological grounds, though the Reader sold the U.N. to its grade-school audience as yet another bit of whiz-bang futurism.

Few of the Reader's promises were delivered, of course, and modern futurism generally proved a flop. From Walt Disney's stillborn "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow"--gasp!--to the predicted miracle economics of the new millennium--"By 2000, the machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy," predicted Time in 1966--the future isn't what it used to be.

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