For Gen Z brains are the new boobs.The era of dumbing down is over

 

Jess Cartner-Morley

We are living in a period of political anti-intellectualism. But in pop culture, clever is the new cool

At the very moment Trump’s rambling speeches and meme–fied inanity threaten to overwhelm us, fashion, music and film are moving in the opposite direction

Put down your negroni, hang up your Prada handbag and pick up a paperback. Next time someone whips out their phone to take your picture, grab your reading specs, not your lipstick. Smart is the new hot.

Pop stars are launching book clubs – the 1970s had Studio 54, this decade has Dua Lipa’s online literary salon Service95 – or joining Substack, where Charli xcx recently published a 1,800-word essay interrogating why it is that as a pop star “you cannot avoid the fact that some people are simply determined to prove that you are stupid”. The supermodel Kaia Gerber (who is fashion royalty – her mum is Cindy Crawford) passes the time backstage at fashion week reading Didion, Duras and Camus, not Vogue.

Three years ago, we dressed in pink to go to the cinema to watch Barbie; in 2026, the mind-bendingly structured, early-Victorian masterpiece Wuthering Heights is the talk of Hollywood, and Netflix is betting big on Emma Corrin as Elizabeth Bennet in Dolly Alderton’s forthcoming adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Intellect and glamour – which have always sat at separate tables in the high-school canteen of pop culture (you can’t sit with the cool kids if you are a teacher’s pet, everyone knows that) – are flirting hard.

“This is real,” says trend forecaster Lucie Greene. “There is a backlash against visually focused lifestyle content, which has become so co-opted by brands. Gen Z want more. They want knowledge. They want to go deep down the rabbit hole, on podcasts and on Reddit as well as on TikTok and YouTube.” Meet you behind the bike sheds to discuss Walter Benjamin over a cigarette, babe.

Model Kaia Gerber

“Reading is so sexy,” Gerber said in 2024 when she launched her book club, Library Science. (First pick: Martyr!, the poet Kaveh Akbar’s anarchic debut novel about grief, martyrdom and addiction – hardly an easy read.) She’s right, obviously, but this is bigger than books. It is thinking, as well as reading, that is cool again. The novel under the arm is just the lapel pin of the brainiac. When the brilliant British designer Louise Trotter was appointed to the Italian luxury label Bottega Veneta last year, top of her in-tray was to cast models for a new advertising campaign. The beauties she chose? Zadie Smith and the octogenarian sculptor and poet Barbara Chase-Riboud.

If we were dumbing this down, I could say that brains are the new boobs. But dumbing down is so over, so let’s dig a little deeper into how we got to a place where Dua Lipa posts selfies on Instagram reclining in a fancy hotel room in full glam and a cocktail dress, winking to the camera over her copy of Just Kids by Patti Smith, and actor Jacob Elordi is papped in an airport bookshop flicking through playwright Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie with a second paperback conspicuously stuffed in a pocket.

It all started with a Kardashian. Of course it did – say what you like about that family, their cultural instincts are rarely wrong. In 2018, Kim Kardashian announced that she was embarking on the long, unglamorous process of qualifying for the California bar. For two decades the Kardashians have anticipated and shaped what aspiration looks like. Kardashian’s pivot towards legal study was an early experiment in whether intellectual seriousness could be folded into celebrity without destroying its commercial appeal.

A few years later, reading itself began to creep into the frame. In the summer of 2021, the first season of The White Lotus aired. Its young, beautiful characters were rarely without books by the pool. Sydney Sweeney’s Olivia read Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, while Brittany O’Grady’s Paula was shown with Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The books functioned as character shorthand, a way of signalling that these generation Z kids had hinterlands, but was also a visual assertion that thought could be televisual. Around the same time, paparazzi shots of models and actors reading (Kendall Jenner photographed with a paperback on a yacht in 2019; Emily Ratajkowski reading Joan Didion in bed in 2020) became minor viral events, with the text in their hands scrutinised as closely as their clothes.

Singer-songwriter FKA twigs 

Kendall Jenner 

Ratajkowski’s visibility in this space presented a particular challenge to the status quo, because she is not just pretty, she is hot. And here she was, publishing essays, giving interviews about feminism and power, and, in 2021, releasing My Body, a bestselling collection that insisted that a woman could be a serious writer without backing down on the day job of being a sex symbol. There were echoes of this mind-bend in 2025 when the avant-garde pop star FKA twigs, once notorious for her athletic pole‑dancing skills, delivered a keynote address at the British Library, explicitly calling out what she described as the “dumbing down” of public life. “Where are the thinkers?” she asked, demanding intellect as a civic right, a utility, a public service.

This is a very strange moment for smart to get hot. We are living through a period of pronounced anti‑intellectualism. Expertise is dismissed as elitism, procedure as dull, facts as irrelevant. Trump’s rambling, repetitive speeches have warped public discourse worldwide. The political motivations are clear, since anti-intellectualism has always been foundational to authoritarianism, depriving the people of the framework with which to question power (no need to remind anyone who burned the books). In the US, elite universities are being defunded, investigative newspapers such as the Washington Post depleted and defanged. Everywhere, we are being dumbed down for profit by an addictive social media, which turns us all into remote-working battery chickens of the attention farms of Silicon Valley. We feel powerless in the face of this, and our acceptance of it is insidious: in the modern phrase, “It’s not that deep”, and in the casual they’re-all-as-bad-as-each-other disengagement that is undermining democracy.

And yet, at the very moment meme-fied inanity threatens to overwhelm us, some threads of popular culture are moving in the opposite direction. The contrasts can be jarring. Last September, during the week that Trump called climate change “the greatest con job” during a speech to the UN, the New York catwalk shows were taking place. At Proenza Schouler, the show notes came footnoted with a reading list of French feminist writings, including The Third Body by Hélène Cixous and Speculum of the Other Woman by Luce Irigaray, while Joseph Altuzarra left a copy of The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa on every seat. One day in January, I read a news report about Trump confusing Greenland with Iceland four times in one speech, and then toggled to Vogue to read about the latest Saint Laurent menswear show, which was inspired by designer Anthony Vaccarello’s reading of James Baldwin’s seminal 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room.

Did you raise an eyebrow at the back there? It is worth interrogating the scepticism that creeps in any time fashion or glamour are put in the same category as thought or intellect. I refer you here to Dua Lipa’s author interviews, which are superb. In a chat with David Szalay, the author of Flesh, she asked him about the authorial decision to omit the protagonist’s father from a story that has so much to say about masculinity – a point that, Szalay notes, no reviewers had picked up on.

Rock’n’roll may have long set itself in opposition to being square, but the history of pop lyrics debunks the idea that pop stars are stupid. “Celebrities get called stupid if they don’t read, and stupid when they do,” says Hali Brown, the 30-year-old co-founder of BookTok’s @booksonthebedside. “So I don’t really know what people want them to do.” She has no time for the pearl‑clutching over “performative reading”. “Young people are definitely not divested from celebrity culture. If this makes people feel better about reading out and about, that’s good, right?” As Greene points out, “Creatives have always had a close and thoughtful sense of the zeitgeist. Eloquence is part of being a cultural leader.”

It’s complicated. Generation Z are, as Greene puts it, “totally paradoxical, just generally. Worried they spend too much time online, yet spending a huge amount of time online. Worried about the environment, yet Shein’s biggest audience.” It is certainly not as simple as people reading more. The cultural heat runs counter to the general direction of travel. Long-term studies show sustained declines in reading across much of the anglophone world. In the UK, a survey by the charity the Reading Agency found that leisure reading among adults has fallen steadily over the past decade; in the US, the National Endowment for the Arts has reported a sharp drop in literary reading since the early 2000s; in Australia, similar trends show fewer adults reading books regularly, particularly men.

Faced with this decline, the book industry is using fashion as a lever with which to exert counter-pressure. James Daunt, the managing director of Waterstones, Britain’s largest bookstore chain, has spoken about the growth of print book sales among younger readers. Literary fiction and classic novels, in particular, are seeing renewed interest from under-35s. Booksellers report that many customers arrive already primed by social media. They know the covers of novels they have seen referenced online, even if they are not yet sure what they are about. As one London-based bookseller says: “Covers matter enormously, but so does the idea that reading is part of who you are, not just something you do alone.”

And so reading is more visible than it has been in years. You have already seen the books. The blue-and-white covers of Fitzcarraldo Editions peeking out of tote bags. Dog-eared copies of Wuthering Heights on the train, sudden ubiquity lending it the air of a seasonal accessory. Book clubs have proliferated, hosted in bars or online spaces, with discussion as much about identity and feeling as it is about plot. Alongside this sits BookTok, the sprawling corner of TikTok where users, many of them in their teens and early 20s, recommend novels, cry on camera about fictional deaths, annotate favourite passages and turn backlist titles into surprise bestsellers. In a culture saturated with surfaces, the book becomes proof, if not of depth, then at least of the desire for it.

Across the UK, booksellers describe younger customers who are less interested in genres than in signals: what a book says about them, how it looks on a table, how it fits into a life. At BookBar, the London hybrid bookshop and wine bar (with one branch in Islington and another in Chelsea), the founder, Chrissy Ryan, has spoken about how reading has become social again – performative, or just communal, depending on how you look at it. Events sell out quickly. “People want to talk about what they’re reading,” notes Ryan. “They want it to be part of their social life.”

In an age of short attention spans, “not being a slave to your phone is kind of seen as a flex”, says Brown. Recently, she stopped using Spotify and has started listening to the iPod she had when she was 10. “People are realising that their best ideas come from times where they’re engaging with a world beyond short-form content.”

The publishing industry has pounced on an opportunity, inviting figures from outside its traditional gatekeeping structures into positions of authority. Sarah Jessica Parker recently served as a judge for the Booker prize, her presence aiming to signal not dilution but reach. Pandora Sykes is the author of Books and Bits, the most popular UK books newsletter on Substack, with more than 100,000 readers. Before she was a literary tastemaker, she was a front row fixture as a newspaper fashion editor. “There really didn’t seem to be a credible way in which I could be attending fashion shows and being photographed in some zany get-up, while also writing book reviews or interviewing authors,” she says. “I had to pick my poison, and it really did feel that binary: it took ages for people to take me seriously in the culture space, so I really limited the fashion side.” But Sykes’ eye for the zeitgeist and sense of style are compelling for readers for whom a love of books sits alongside less highbrow interests. “Most of us aren’t exclusively readers, or fashion plates. And I don’t think it’s something we apply to men, the idea that everyone who likes books is austere and highfalutin and couldn’t possibly enjoy the lowbrow, or the ornamental. She can, she does, she will again!”

Note the character arc of the book bag. What began with the quietly earnest Daunt Books tote and the New Yorker canvas bag has become a high-fashion money spinner. This season’s must-have Dior handbags are emblazoned not with logos but with titles: Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Madame Bovary, Les Fleurs du Mal. Literature is lifestyle, knowledge is brand. There is something undoubtedly troubling about this pricing of intellectual aspiration – particularly, in the case of the Dior bag, at around £2,400 – but it would be naive to ignore that books have always been aesthetic objects. Home libraries were status symbols long before Instagram; the orange spine of Penguin classics is as recognisable as any designer monogram. The book cover as design object is nothing new: Francis Cugat’s 1925 illustration for the first edition of The Great Gatsby, spectral eyes over blazing cityscape, a fever dream of hedonism and melancholy, is a design classic. In 2024, a signed first edition of it sold for $425,000 at Heritage Auctions, according to the Artnet Price Database.

Any attempt to reduce this to books versus phones will gain you a B-minus at best. Genuine skill and knowledge are also becoming more prized “in online content and within commerce”, says Greene. “Look at the emphasis on athletes, footballers, hockey players and pro skaters as the new fashion and luxury influencers and partners. Culture is looking to people with genuine skill.”

Instagram, once the engine of aspiration, is losing ground to Substack, where depth, voice and argument are given a modern spin, with thinking monetised as expertise plus personality. Podcasts, too, bring long‑form thinking into culture’s fluffier regions. Bella Freud’s long-running podcast, Fashion Neurosis, treats fashion as a route into biography, memory and theory, with recent interviewees including Debbie Harry, Christy Turlington and Annie Leibovitz.

But is smart really the new hot, or is smart only the new hot if you are also hot? Are we just turning this into yet another aspect of life where only pretty people count? As so often, the patriarchy has a lot to answer for here. Intelligence is newsworthy in attractive women, because brains and beauty have for so long been cast as opposing traits. The clever woman was frumpy, unfeminine, difficult. The beauty‑brains binary, which served the patriarchy well, has been internalised. If there is something slightly irritating about watching the already glamorous add intellectual credibility to their portfolios – and we may as well own it – there is also something quietly radical in the refusal to dim one quality in order to legitimise another. The age‑old demand that women choose one identity or the other is being challenged. UK publishers, notably, report that the most engaged reading communities skew young and female. Reading groups, live events and book clubs are dominated by women in their 20s and 30s. It’s interesting that the two major book-to-screen adaptations of this year – Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice – are of novels beloved by female readers.

Where is politics in all this? It used to be the way for young people to engage with the world of ideas. They gathered to talk about revolution, not 19th-century fiction. But with politics now a war zone, who can blame the youth for tapping out? With an assertive strain of modern conservatism consolidating power in the US, and overt political expression becoming more risky, education offers a way of remaining intellectually active without stepping into the blood and gore of the culture‑war colosseum. In a fractious and even dangerous world, reading, quoting and learning are ways to signal seriousness and curiosity without inviting backlash. As political discourse grows coarser, culture finds new places to store complexity.

“Some of this is about expanding what it means to be smart,” says Brown. “There are lots of people who think Trump is smart because he’s a businessman, or that manosphere podcasters are smart because they use scientific words and for some reason always speak really fast. But intellect is more niche. This is about people who want to reflect on the world not just because they want to conquer it or make money. The online reading community is a place where we can talk about things like the patriarchy in an accessible way, through the lens of stories and characters, and I think that can feel healthier.”

With humanities degrees under threat, education takes on the texture of luxury. On TikTok, being “disgustingly educated” is, for want of a better word, the hot new aesthetic. And AI, as ever, is part of the picture. For centuries, we have exercised our brains in our jobs, but if the robots are coming for the jobs, perhaps it is logical that we reclaim our brains for our own use. “And it’s also about trying to make sense of the crazy world we’re living in,” says Greene. “A bit like how Victorians were obsessed with ancient history to make sense of the unprecedented cultural, economic and societal change they were going through.”

Being smart is sexy now. Not only the kind of sexy that makes people fancy you, but the kind of sexy that generates discourse. The kind of sexy that accrues value. The flipside of a dumbed-down world is that thought has scarcity value, and what is rare has always been hyped. Knowing stuff is to the 2020s what limited-edition trainers were to the 2000s. Does that make sense? Whatever. It sounds cool, and that’s what counts.

Slaves in the Islamic world have often found opportunities for social and financial advancement

 

Up to 17 million people have passed through the slave trade in the Muslim world since the 7th century. Tragically, the practice lives on

I began my research into the history of slavery in the Islamic world in Bamako, the capital of Mali, in 2020. Yes, you read that right. Not 1820 or 1920, but five years ago, during a harrowing encounter. Sitting cross-legged on the mud floor of a temporary shelter, a man in his late 50s called Hamey told me how he and his ancestors had been enslaved to a slave-owning family in the western region of Kayes for many generations. It was only two years earlier, after a savage public beating, that he’d managed to escape his enslavement. He broke down repeatedly as he described the near-impossibility, now that he was free, of finding somewhere to live and providing for his family in one of the poorest countries on earth.

Slavery is officially illegal in Mali, but it continues, a hereditary and racialised system, as it does in Mauritania and other parts of west Africa. Nor is the problem unique to the region. In recent years, the Arab world, especially the Gulf, has become a hub of modern slavery – defined by Walk Free, the international human rights and anti-slavery group, as “situations of exploitation in which a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, deception, or abuse of power”.

In its most recent report, from 2023, Walk Free’s Global Slavery Index reported that Arab states have the world’s highest prevalence of slaves (10.1 per 1,000 people), ahead of Asia and the Pacific (6.8), Europe and Central Asia (6.6) and Africa (5.2). The countries in the region with the highest numbers of people trapped in modern slavery were Saudi Arabia (740,000), Iraq (221,000), Yemen (180,000) and Syria (153,000).

The history of slavery and the slave trade in the Islamic world is as long as the history of Islam. Whereas the notorious Atlantic slave trade lasted from the 15th to the 19th centuries and enslaved 11-14 million Africans, the slave trade practised within the geographical heart of the Muslim world, centred on North Africa and the Middle East, lasted from the seventh century until the 20th and enslaved 12-15 million, perhaps even 17 million. Vast numbers of men, women and children were taken overwhelmingly from sub-Saharan Africa, together with Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Caucasus during the Ottoman period. More covertly and in much smaller numbers, slavery – if not institutionalised trafficking – continues today.

But Islam did not conceive slavery in the Middle East, any more than Christianity devised it on the shores of the Atlantic. (It is just as wrong to call this phenomenon “the Muslim slave trade” or “Islamic slave trade” as it would be to call its Atlantic version “the Christian slave trade”.) Seventh-century Arab Muslims, already surrounded by the ancient slaving civilisations of the Persians and Byzantines, inherited the tradition of slavery from their pagan ancestors and refined and adapted it in an Islamic context. Islam permitted slavery from the outset and with their range of regulations, and rights afforded to slaves, the Quran and Islamic jurisprudence combined to improve the lot of the average slave.

My new book Captives and Companions, the first history of its kind for the general reader, is the result of years of research and travel in the Muslim world. Here are the stories of eighth-century concubines, ninth-century plantation slave revolts, 13th-century slave soldiers who founded mighty dynasties ruling Egypt, Syria and Iraq, and generations of Christian boys “harvested” annually from the Balkans to become the Ottoman Empire’s crack soldiers – the Janissaries. Eighteenth-century Muslim and Christian corsairs marauding across the Mediterranean rub shoulders with 19th-century Ottoman eunuch millionaires, downtrodden Egyptian cotton-pickers and enslaved Africans labouring on Zanzibari clove plantations. There are disturbing accounts of 20th-century pearl divers, date palm cultivators in the Gulf, and Yazidi women serially raped in the recent terrorist “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq.

On the other hand, it may surprise you to know that slaves in the Islamic world have often found opportunities for social and financial advancement. From the earliest days of Islam, enslaved men – and in some cases women – could rise to the heights of society. Take Bilal ibn Rabah, an Ethiopian slave who became one of the prophet Mohammed’s most cherished “companions” (disciples and followers), and earned the exceptional distinction of becoming Islam’s first muaddin, or caller to prayer. Famous eunuchs and concubines could become the richest men and women of their day.

Eunuchs represented one of the Islamic world’s longest-lasting categories of enslavement. Mohammed himself was given Mabur, a eunuch, by the Byzantine ruler of Egypt in 627. Although castration is prohibited by Islam, for centuries leaders across the Islamic world looked the other way and imported enormous numbers of mutilated boys. Nineteenth-century descriptions of castration, provided by Western travellers, are not for the faint-hearted. Boys were shackled to a table, wrote Raoul du Bisson, a Frenchman who watched Christian monks perform the operation in Ethiopia in the 1860s. “The operator then seizes the little penis and scrotum and with one sweep of a sharp razor removes all the appendages.” Styptic substances used to cauterise the wound around the urethra included hot oil, dust or tar, honey, butter and mule dung. Mortality rates appear to have been one in three.

Concubines, too, have endured for virtually the entire lifespan of the Islamic world and, unlike eunuchs, were not prohibited. Mohammed was given Mariyya in 627, and had several others. Women captured during the world-changing Arab Conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries were routinely enslaved as concubines. The Abbasid caliph Mutawakkil, leader of the Islamic world from 847–861, had 4,000 of them, as did Muqtadir, one of his 10th-century successors. Al Aziz, the Fatimid caliph of Cairo from 975-996, kept 10,000 concubines and eunuchs combined. In some cases, the voices of these courageous and charismatic women have been preserved. Arib, a concubine from 9th-century Baghdad, admitted to having slept with eight caliphs. Asked what she looked for in sex, she replied: “A hard p---k and sweet breath.”

Abolition came late in the Islamic world. Though many indigenous voices called for it in the 19th and 20th centuries, including Mohammed Abduh, Grand Mufti of Egypt, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, the Indian philosopher, and Rashid Rida, the anti-Western Islamic revivalist, they did not amount to a movement. Ultimately, it was global economic forces and international political pressure, often led by the British, to combine and bring slavery to a stuttering close. (For all the reformist zeal of the Young Turks, slavery – as opposed to the slave trade – hadn’t been abolished in the Ottoman Empire before its fall in 1922.)

What is remarkable today is how one version of slavery and the slave trade continues to dominate Western public consciousness. To take just one example, A Short History of Slavery, by the historian James Walvin, was published in 2007. Of the book’s 235 pages, 201 focus on the Americas.

By contrast, the history of slavery in the Islamic world – so long, various and controversial – has been neglected. That is starting to change: a new generation of Moroccan, Tunisian, Algerian and (in particular) Turkish researchers are poring over the archives and asking uncomfortable questions. Among other things, their work will demonstrate that, although it has become fashionable in some quarters to vilify the West as the supreme historical villain, such a stance is historically and factually incorrect.

My final confrontation with modern slavery came last year in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania. Here I met a woman in her fifties called Habi. She had, like Hamey in Bamako, managed to escape a life of slavery. Regularly beaten and repeatedly raped as a child by her ‘master’, she came, again like Hamey, from a long line of enslaved men and women, and – having been rescued by her brother in 2008 – was now living free, but in destitution. Home was a small, breeze-block shelter, buried in deep drifts of sand, in the outer reaches of a poverty-stricken settlement, under a scorching sun.

But Habi struck a note of defiance. She said it was only when she came to Nouakchott as a free woman that she realised she’d never really lived. “Before that, I was just an object,” she told me. “I didn’t exist as a human being. Now, praise God, I am free.” She has stood for the Mauritanian parliament twice, and has dedicated the rest of her life to fighting slavery. It’s both tragic and disconcerting that, in 2025, such a fight goes on.

Built to Last: Memory, imagination, and the architecture of Mariam Issoufou

 

Kibo Ngowi

Mariam Issoufou’s architecture is distinct. Perhaps because it looks so familiar yet so unusual at the same time. 

Where the earth speaks: Housing in Niamey, Niger, designed by Mariam Issoufou, doesn’t ape Western suburban architecture but uses local materials and aesthetics, including thick walls so the spaces are cool without air-conditioning. 

A wall might be made of compressed earth but curve like concrete. A window might be shaped like an arch you once saw in a medieval city, or a village courtyard or both.

Her buildings carry the weight of memory and the clarity of invention. 

They seem to belong as much to the past as they do to a future — not yet fully realised, straddling the realm between imagination, antiquity and reality.

There is a kind of silence to her structures. The kind that settles over a space when it has been designed with care and patience. 

In Dandaji — a village on the arid western plains of her home country, Niger — a library stands beside a mosque and both are built of earth pulled from the ground just metres away. It doesn’t feel symbolic. It feels natural. As if the village decided to rise taller and Issoufou simply gave it form.

In Niamey, a housing block built for the city’s growing middle class doesn’t mimic Western suburbia. Instead, it offers courtyards for gathering, thick walls that cool the air without machines, passages that bend and open like market alleys. 

The lines are sharp but the logic is organic. The geometry never feels forced. You could run your hand along the walls and feel stories pressed into them.

In her hands, architecture doesn’t just shelter. It speaks. It honours. It reflects. Her buildings don’t shout but they sure don’t whisper either. They have the presence of something that knows where it came from and is confidently deciding where to go.“I think the biggest trap we’ve fallen into is conflating modernity and Westernity,” she told Justin McGuirk, director of the Design Museum’s Future Observatory, during a live interview at the recent Abu Dhabi Culture Summit in the United Arab Emirates. 

“This idea that somehow modernity has a style has been, to me, the most bewildering realisation, because there is no such thing. 

“There is modernism, which is something that came out of the West.

“Modernity itself is a principle; it’s something that can be quite universal and that we can all claim. And it absolutely does not have an aesthetic to me, it’s a mindset. It’s a way of thinking of yourself in the present, and of projecting yourself into the future.”

“And, for me, it’s straightforward to go from an architecture that is rooted to learn from what came before, but then make a new interpretation of it that can exist in the present, and can then evolve into something new for the future.”

To explore Issoufou’s work and ideas is to discover how much they challenge conventional wisdom about modern architecture and what form that should take in the Global South. Yet somehow her work has been embraced in Africa and beyond.

Established in 2014, her architecture and research firm Mariam Issoufou Architects has offices in Niamey, New York and Zurich. One of its crowning achievements was the Hikma Community Complex in Dandaji, which won two Global LafargeHolcim Awards for sustainable architecture.

Further afield, in the Kaolack region of Senegal, Issoufou is building the Bët-bi Museum of Contemporary Art and Culture. 

In Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, she’s developing the Hayyan Housing Project and Lifestyle Centre. And in Monrovia, Liberia, she’s leading the design of the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Centre for Women and Development in collaboration with fellow architects Sumayya Vally and Karen Richards Barnes.

In preparing to speak to Issoufou, I framed many of my questions around the use of “traditional African architecture” but, the more I reflected, the more I realised how much even that choice of words is loaded with assumptions.

I grew up in Gaborone, Botswana, during a boom time when it was among the fastest-growing cities on the continent and, in large part, that meant importing the structures of skyscrapers, imposingly tall buildings made of glass and concrete, from Europe and North America. This was progress. This was development.

Meanwhile, the kind of architecture that naturally grew out of the Botswana environment, the rondavels and the thatch roofs, rarely featured into the new vision of how Gaborone would grow to become a world-class city. Because that was traditional. That was outdated. 

Reflecting on this led me to ask Issoufou if she had faced pushback in her efforts to institute her perspective into her architectural practice.

“Yes, of course,” she says. “But, at the end of the day, what I ended up realising is that you really have to empathise with where people are coming from. 

“So, it’s not really about wanting to institute anything. 

“I think, for me, I was more focused on having the conversation and then really challenging those views.

“Like, when I first started talking about earth architecture, people literally laughed in my face. 

“They’d say, ‘You’re trying to set us back 200 years. Like, what do you think this is? We’re not trying to live in the past.’” 

“And we had to have this conversation about the fact that it has nothing to do with the past. And again, that’s why I like to give wood as an example, or stone. These are materials that we’ve used forever. And in places where they grow and they’re abundant.”

One thing that has helped Issoufou’s cause is the undeniable benefits that come with using earth in terms of both practicality and sustainability. For the Hikma Community Complex in Dandaji, most of the project materials were sourced within a less than 5km radius from the site, while concrete was limited to structural elements such as columns and lintels. 

The project introduced compressed-earth bricks made with laterite soil found on site. 

The thermal mass of these bricks made natural ventilation possible, keeping indoor temperatures comfortable and removing the need for air conditioning.

“We tend to think of certain types of materials as being non-modern and feel somehow we have to explain them in contemporary terms or have to justify their use,” Issoufou says. 

“And I think that’s the first trap we fall in, because there is nothing inherently traditional about any materials versus others.

“When we build with wood, we don’t think of wood as being a traditional material. So, there’s certain stigmas that we associate with certain materials and earth is definitely one of them. 

“But I don’t think of materials in terms of modern or not. I think of them in terms of practicality, in terms of what makes sense to me. 

“It’s not an aesthetic response at all. It’s just a logical response to the local conditions. And the climate is just one of the dimensions of those conditions.”

The Hikma Community Complex combines the restoration of old buildings with the addition of new structures. An existing mosque has been renovated and adapted as a library, with study spaces, classrooms and workshop areas in the gardens, and a larger new mosque building has been added.

“Earth is the exact same in its usefulness as wood or stone but somehow the only material that has that stigma is earth. And why is that? 

“What we have all internalised in a profound manner is our inferiority. We have an ingrained inferiority complex. So, we accept things as being valuable if they are valuable in the West or if the West has decided that they’re valuable.”

Mariam Issoufou’s journey to becoming an internationally lauded architect wasn’t straightforward. She began her working life pursuing a career as a computer engineer, earning a bachelor’s degree in technical computing from Purdue University in Indiana in the US in 2001, and then a master’s degree in computer science from New York University in 2004.

“I wanted to be an architect very early on, but it kind of didn’t make sense to me, because I didn’t really know anybody who was an architect,” she reflects. 

“I was privileged enough to be sent to the US to study and it felt a bit obscene to study something like architecture because it takes a lot of effort and money. 

“For this education I was receiving, I felt like I needed to study something that would have a good return on investment.

“How I grew up, it was either you have to become a doctor or lawyer. And this is very typical, I think, of most immigrant families. 

“And at the time, it was the late Nineties, so I just looked around and tried to see what seemed like a solid career. That’s why I studied computer science — because it was around the time of the internet boom. It was a good decision. I believe I don’t regret doing that first before coming to architecture.”

She worked in the computing field for seven years before deciding to become an architect to fulfil her childhood aspirations. 

In 2013, Issoufou earned her master’s degree in architecture from the University of Washington. The following year she founded Mariam Issoufou Architects. 

Her career took off swiftly. In addition to leading an architecture firm with a presence on three continents, Issoufou is also a professor of architecture heritage and sustainability at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, one of the most prestigious architecture schools in the world.

She’s a 2019 laureate of the Prince Claus Award and was named as one of 15 Creative Women of Our Time by The New York Times in 2020.

At the heart of Issoufou’s practice is a deep belief in collaboration and continuity. For her, architecture is not just about building structures, it’s about building systems of knowledge and opportunity that can outlast the project itself.

When renovating the old mosque as part of the Hikma Community Complex, she brought in the original masons who constructed the building decades earlier. Rather than simply restoring the space to its former state, the team taught these masons how to work with adobe-enhancing additives and erosion-protection techniques, updating their traditional craft with new layers of resilience.

The approach was not about preservation for its own sake but about growth: “We don’t look for artisans because they already know how to make what we want,” Issoufou explains. “We study what they can do and then we design something new that pushes that skill forward.”

She recalls a metalworker who had never bent thick iron pipes into curved structural forms before. When faced with the design for a market structure, he laughed at the model and asked if she had pulled the concept from the internet. 

But, after testing a prototype together, he travelled to Benin to purchase a machine. Now, he’s one of only two people in Niger with that capacity and his business has grown as a result.

It’s a ripple effect. “Even if we stop a project, the skills don’t stop,” Issoufou says. 

Her masons have since been contracted for work in Senegal and Mali. Her brick-makers are being called in for international jobs. 

The process is just as important as the product, and the people who shape the project — brick by brick, weld by weld — are not treated as footnotes. They’re credited in publications, in images, in the very narrative of the work.

“We make sure that their names are known,” Issoufou says. “That a photographer from Tahoua, or a contractor from Niamey, can be found and called and offered more work. That matters to us.” 

For her, architecture is never just about what is built. It’s about who builds it, and what they’re able to build next.

The past few years in Niger have been marked by political instability. In July 2023, a military coup ousted the democratically elected president, one of several power shifts to shake the Sahel region. Borders closed, international aid froze and sweeping sanctions followed. For many, it felt like the future had been put on hold.

Among the stalled projects was a major cultural work in Niamey led by Issoufou’s firm — an elegant composition of elliptical towers built of  compressed earth, designed as both a civic landmark and a communal heart. 

“It was an extinction event for the firm, honestly,” Issoufou admits. “We were about to break ground. And then everything stopped.”

Yet despite the upheaval, her practice did not collapse: “What saved us was that we were already working in so many different countries nearby,” she explains. “Most of the projects were already outside Niger.” 

While the Niamey project remains on pause, the firm has pushed forward with work in Senegal, Ghana, Benin and Liberia, including the Bët-bi Museum and the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Centre, which are breaking ground this year.

This regional spread is no accident. Issoufou has designed her practice to be flexible and cross-continental. 

“Over the past decade and more, we’ve built an incredibly robust remote working system,” she says. 

“That’s a legacy from my computer science background. It means I can draw, review and collaborate, regardless of where I am.”

Still, her commitment to Niger remains unwavering. 

“The headquarters of the firm being there is incredibly important to me,” she says firmly. “There’s no scenario where that’s not the case.” 

Rather than despair, she sees the crisis through a lens shaped by lived experience: “We come from a part of the world where the ground is always unstable to some extent. So, you build systems of resilience, both professionally and personally.”

For Issoufou, that isn’t about resistance alone; it’s about readiness. 

“You can’t run out of patience when things flip,” she says. “You have to understand that the chaos will end and you have to be ready to pick up the pieces afterward. This is temporary. It will pass.”

Issoufou’s architecture defies categorisation and reframes the conversation entirely. Rooted in the soil of her home country, yet expansive in its reach, it proposes an alternative vision of modernity, one that honours the past not by preserving it in amber, but by folding it into new futures.

In a world quick to flatten tradition into stereotype or discard it altogether in the pursuit of progress, Issoufou’s buildings whisper a different kind of intelligence, one born of listening closely to place, to people and to materials often overlooked.

Maybe that’s the quiet radicalism at the heart of her practice. From Dandaji to Monrovia, from earth bricks to elliptical towers, her crafting goes beyond architecture and encompasses a methodology of care, a politics of presence.

In uncertain times, her work reminds us true modernity doesn’t come from erasure or mimicry but from the courage to imagine continuity. It’s not about where you build, but how, and with whom. And it’s in that grounded imagination that Issoufou’s vision finds its most enduring form.

Why do some societies become creative powerhouses while others stagnate?

 

Johan Norberg

Any decent artist could have created realistic characters, with volume, physical weight and a spatial presence, with the use light and color to suggest distance, because that is after all, what the world looks like. So why was the Renaissance painter Giotto the first one to do it in 900 years?

Or take the flying shuttle, which helped to make weaving much more productive during the Industrial Revolution. It required no special knowledge and only took some string and two wooden boxes on either side. And yet, for 5,000 years, no weaver tried it.

Why do we suddenly get an explosion of creativity and progress in certain places and moments – and why do they end? That is what I examine in my book Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages (Atlantic Books). 

I have learned that ages become golden because they imitate and innovate. They first emerge because of cheating. They didn’t come up with all the innovations that made them prosper; instead they took them from others.

Athenian, Italian and Dutch merchants picked up new ideas on their business trips. Like the Borg of Star Trek, the Romans constantly absorbed peoples, ideas and methods by conquest, and Abbasid Baghdad actively sponsored a translation project to lay their hands on the world’s knowledge and science.

But there is a limit to how far imitation can get you. To make this progress self-propelling, these cultures had to combine these inputs with their own thoughts to create innovations, from higher agricultural yields to artistic rebellions. This takes inclusivity back home. People have to be allowed to try new things. Free speech, free markets and a rule of law that constrains the arbitrary actions of rulers leave room for this. 

But get Giotto and the flying shuttle, it takes something more: a broader culture of optimism. Innovation is difficult and controversial, and the results are never guaranteed. Therefore, you need a sense that there is hope and possibility, and you need role models around you who have shown the way, to make it seem like it is worth trying. Others to be inspired by, learn from, and to compete with.

This progress sometimes became self-sustaining because, at a certain point, it started transforming the self-identity of these cultures. That is why we often see clusters of creativity, like philosophy in Athens, art during the Renaissance, classical music in Vienna and technology in Silicon Valley.

Pessimism, the sense that it is hopeless, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is a clue to the decline and fall of golden ages.

It is as if history has a Great Status Quo Filter (similar to the hypothesis about the Fermi paradox on why we have not encountered alien life despite the likelihood that it exists). Civilizations in every era have tried to break away from the shackles of oppression and scarcity, but increasingly they faced opposite forces, and sooner or later these dragged them back to earth.

Elites who have benefited from the innovation that elevated them want to kick away the ladder behind them, groups threatened by change try to fossilize culture into an orthodoxy, and aggressive neighbors are attracted to the wealth of the achievers and try to kill the goose to steal its golden eggs. However, outsiders can kill and destroy, but they can’t kill curiosity and creativity. Only we can do that to ourselves.

When under threat, we often seek stability and predictability, shutting out that which is different and unpredictable. All these golden ages experienced a death-to-Socrates moment in times of crisis, when they soured on their previous commitment to open intellectual exchange. They started to support strongmen, control the economy and abandon international exchange. This made the fear of disaster self-fulfilling, since those barriers limited access to other possibilities and restricted the adaptation and innovation that could have helped them deal with the threat.

Where does that leave our civilization? The present Anglosphere age, started by the Industrial Revolution and carried on by the American Revolution and the liberal world order after the Second World War has been the most golden so far, since it has also been global. For the first time, improvements in living standards and opportunities have not been limited to one region.

Since 1820, the share of people in extreme poverty globally has been reduced from more than 8 out of 10 to fewer than 1 out of 10, and life expectancy shot up from 30 to 74.

As we have learned from history, however, nothing is forever. The question is, is the great filter in front of us or behind us? My conclusion is that it is never behind us once and for all, because the forces of reaction and tribalism exists within human nature and we carry it with us wherever we go. It can return and threaten us at the most unexpected moment, but it does not mean that it will win.

I don’t think that the American-led world order will be destroyed from the outside. There are too many countries and populations who see their interest in open trade and a rules-based order, and that choice gives them more innovation and growth in the long run. But it can all be torn down from the inside, by regulations and unsustainable debts, by erecting walls, trade barriers and unconstitutional strongman rule.  

As Abraham Lincoln said about the risk of an end to the American experiment in 1838: “It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

That is our choice today as well. But we have an advantage over earlier golden ages, because we can learn from their successes and their mistakes. We know what we should do, to try and rediscover that sense of life, that sense of wonder, and fight for openness and liberty, to rebuild a culture of optimism. In the end, golden ages are a choice.

“Open Socrates” encourages us to recognize how little we know, and to start thinking

 

In “Open Socrates,” the scholar Agnes Callard argues that the ancient Greek philosopher offers a blueprint for an ethical life.

Jennifer Szalai

Maybe this is the year that you have resolved to drink less and exercise more. Or maybe you want to be kinder, gentler and more caring to the people around you.

In “Open Socrates,” Agnes Callard suggests that self-improvement, at least as we usually understand the term, isn’t so much a matter of willpower, but of ideas. It’s not that we are weak-willed creatures, who know what “the good” is and then fail to pursue it; it’s that we haven’t given enough thought to what “the good” is in the first place. “The hard work of struggling to be a good, virtuous, ethical person” is, “first and foremost, intellectual work,” she writes.

Callard, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, is aware that “more intellectualism!” isn’t exactly an easy sell, which is undoubtedly why she waits until Page 129 to describe her chosen approach as “hard-line intellectualist.” But she is so earnestly excited by her subject that even a skeptical reader is bound to feel a swell of enthusiasm as she makes her full-throated case for a life of the mind. She wants her book to do double duty: advance a “neo-Socratic ethics” that can pass muster with her fellow philosophers, and offer lay readers an accessible introduction to how “living a truly philosophical life” can “make people freer and more equal; more romantic; and more courageous.”

This is a book that is charming, intelligent and occasionally annoying. The irritation is wholly appropriate: Socrates, whom Callard affectionately calls a “wet blanket,” was known for challenging his interlocutors to the point of exasperation, pushing them to think harder about whether what they had just said was what they truly meant. “I realized, to my sorrow and alarm, that I was getting unpopular,” Socrates ruefully reflected, after having alienated a number of powerful politicians in Athens and before being sentenced to death. Callard was so enthralled by Socratic philosophy as a college student that she wanted to “be Socrates” and set out to hound strangers at an art museum with big questions about the meaning of life. “They felt trapped,” she recalls now, “and I felt not at all like Socrates.”

Socrates died in 399 B.C., and it’s not as if there’s a shortage of writing about him or his thought. But Callard says that Socrates has too often been “diluted”: treated like a “sauce” that could enhance one’s critical thinking instead of as the main event, whose ethics, if properly understood, were nothing short of radical. He called himself a “gadfly” and also a “midwife” — refuting his interlocutors’ falsehoods but also helping them bring true ideas into being. The acts of destruction and creation were connected, arguably even one and the same. Refutation was never to be done for its own sake; only by helping to peel the scales from people’s eyes could they see the world anew.

Following Socrates’ example is a lifelong pursuit. All too often, Callard says, we react instinctively to “savage commands”: doing something because it is dictated to us in the moment by our body (to pursue pleasure and avoid pain) or by social bonds (to pursue pride and avoid shame). Such commands make us “waver,” she says, and contradict ourselves: “They might give us a loud, clear answer as to what we ought to do, but the answers don’t last.”

The question of time comes up a lot in “Open Socrates.” There is, most obviously, the matter of our limited time on Earth, and Callard agrees with Socrates that philosophy is preparation for death. Thinking more deeply about what we know and what we don’t pushes us beyond our usual (unthinking) habit of “getting through the next 15 minutes.” She opens her book with the example of Tolstoy, in his “Confession,” recalling how his 50-year-old self suddenly wasn’t sure what any of it — love, children, worldly success — was for.

Callard’s name may be familiar to those who have read a profile of her in The New Yorker. She left her first marriage, to another philosopher, to marry a graduate student, also a philosopher. She talks as if love is an ecstatically intellectual pursuit, at least when it’s going well. In “Open Socrates,” she describes how we can get so caught up in our own thoughts that we don’t let evidence from the world in; another person can reveal to us our own blind spots, nudging us just so in order to see what we were missing. Socratic inquiry, with its emphasis on dialogue, reveals thinking as a communal process: “In the presence of others, something becomes possible that isn’t possible when you are alone.”

I find this notion inspiring, even if I’m not as confident as Callard that “our most fundamental wish” is to be treated “as an intellectual thing.” She puts so much stock in the power of thought that she suggests it can get us out of the most intractable dilemmas: “What appears to be a difficulty with life” is “in fact a difficulty in our thinking about life.”

But she also allows that “thinking about life” isn’t necessarily guaranteed to yield the knowledge one seeks. Socrates used to say that he knew nothing other than the fact of his own ignorance. Despite some of her grander pronouncements, Callard invites us to think alongside her. “Open Socrates” encourages us to recognize how little we know, and to start thinking.