A writer who elegantly connects the dots is critical to the important, often fraught, conversations of our time.

Jill Lepore wrote a fantastic article in The New Yorker last week called “Are robots competing for your job?” She lays out a history of human fears about automation and the often-misguided worries that attend those fears.

She fairly skewers several of the most alarmist futurists across generations, as well as skewering the concept of working as a futurist—a “modern-day shaman”—in the first place.

The crux of her article is Lepore’s juxtaposition of distress about automation with distress about immigration. 

“Fear of a robot invasion is the obverse of fear of an immigrant invasion, a partisan coin: heads, you’re worried about robots; tails, you’re worried about immigrants. There’s just the one coin. Both fears have to do with jobs, whose loss produces suffering, want, and despair, and whose future scarcity represents a terrifying prospect.”

Some people worry robots and A.I. are coming for the jobs and another subset of the populace is sure it is the immigrants and outsourced foreign labor. Both camps are sometimes misguided and often alarmist. For me, this was a new way of seeing.

Best line in the article? “Panic is not evidence of danger; it’s evidence of panic.” Lepore brings the heat. I love that line.

Within her bio on her Harvard faculty page is a link to a two-page doc she wrote in 2009 called How to Write a Paper for This Class. The how-to itself, aimed toward history students, is at once hilarious and concise. The primer for good writing, equally applicable in term papers or scholarly articles, comes wrapped in a metaphor about gutting a fish. It brims with great advice—and imagery—for anyone who writes, researches, or could do with a reminder to ask the best sort of questions we can. 

A good historian sees many pictures and connects the dots across generations. A historian who is also a great writer connects those dots to my life. She provides firm footing from which I can see more than one perspective while loosening my grip on my own assumptions. Often, she provides a path forward. She also provides an ending.  As she says to her college students, “Make sure to end. It’s not over till there’s nothing left but the bones, and the smell of the ocean.”