Can Art Rewire Your Brain? (March 2026)

This week Saadia Khan brings back one of her favorite conversations of the year. Ramzi Fawaz has just relaunched his podcast, Nerd From the Future, for a second season, and the first new episode is out now.Ramzi is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of The New Mutants and Queer Forms. His next book argues that the humanities can work like psychedelic therapy, using art, literature, and media instead of drugs to change how students see the world.When Saadia and Ramzi first spoke, everyone was panicking about young people. Why are they lonely, why are they cheating with ChatGPT, why are they drifting toward the manosphere. Almost none of those takes were coming from humanities professors, and Ramzi thinks that is a massive mistake. They also get into friendship as loving betrayal, resentment as something you negotiate rather than banish, and why the most abundant society in history has not made anyone happy.Also from Immigrantly: 9/11 at 25 is...