What Ada Palmer’s University of Chicago Papal election LARP can teach us about our own future.

Ada Palmer is a wonder. Not only is she a tenured University of Chicago historian who specializes in the forbidden information of Florence during the Inquisitions (witchcraft, homosexuality, heresy and other fascinating subjects); she’s also a composer, librettist and performer whose album-length retelling of Norse mythos is, astoundingly, exceeded by her song about space travel (if this doesn’t make you well up, I don’t want to know you).

And to top it all off, she’s a brilliant science fiction writer, whose inaugural series, Terra Ignota, has just concluded with its fourth and final volume, Perhaps the Stars.

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