Visions 21: How We Will Live and Play

By James Kelly, Deputy Managing Editor

The second best part about working on our Visions for the 21st Century series is coming up with the kind of questions that will make you think about the future in fresh, offbeat ways. The best part is matching writer with question, especially given what this week's installment is about: how we will live and play 25 or 50 years from now. Says Priscilla Painton, who along with Richard Zoglin edited the current issue: "What's fascinating is to see all the ways in which the old rules are likely to be rewritten--in our politics, in our religions, in our families, even in the way we design our houses and try to look our best."

Several writers played with the idea of what life online and off-line would look like. TIME contributor Robert Wright explains why we will never log off again, while FORTUNE columnist Stanley Bing does a hilarious send-up of what will happen to today's couch potatoes. (Hint: think mashed.) David Gelernter, professor of computer science at Yale, argues that despite the way our lives are being turned into data streams, we will have as much privacy as we need. Novelist Mark Leyner predicts, tongue slightly in cheek, that no longer will we have to go to sporting events to experience the thrill in person; blessed with technology, "you'll hop around your living room like a maniac as you actually experience the excruciating pain of Mike Tyson's incisors on your ear."

Thanks to high-tech baby-making techniques, women and men will increasingly no longer need to mate in the traditional ways, and Barbara Ehrenreich explores the implications with Swiftian wit. Peter Beinart, editor of the New Republic, says goodbye to politics, predicting that instead religion will become the primary force in shaping society. Nicholas Lemann, author of The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, takes a different tack in answering the question, "Who Will Be the Next Elite?" The answer: not yesterday's Wasp or today's SAT high scorer, but the young entrepreneur who IPO'd his way into the ruling class.

We asked two architects, Wes Jones and Bernard Tschumi, to build the houses of tomorrow, one suburban, the other urban. In "What Will Our Skyline Look Like?" Richard Lacayo argues that the steel-and-glass Modernist box is about to be sliced, diced and shredded. Five designers--Giorgio Armani, John Bartlett, Randolph Duke, Tommy Hilfiger and Vera Wang--created a closetful of clothes, with Wang's wedding dress, I guess, a good indication that at least she thinks the institution of marriage will survive.

Ben Stiller, who acts, directs, writes and for all we know works as a U.N. peacekeeper on weekends, explores "What Will Make Us Laugh?" Two artists, musician Moby and director Julie Taymor, offer radically different visions of their world, with Moby turning us all into composers and Taymor predicting that what we will really crave in 2025 is the wild, exhilarating experience of leaving behind our computers and TVs on a Saturday night and going to...the theater. "Artists were especially turned on by our assignment," Zoglin says. "They love grappling with the question of how technology will or won't change the way we get our entertainment and respond to works of art."

Finally, we have the second installment of Caleb Carr's novella, which is being serialized in all five Visions issues. I won't give away the ending, but even if I wanted to, I couldn't: Caleb (best-selling author of The Alienist) is writing each chapter as the Visions 21 series progresses.

Our next Visions installment will focus on science and space and will appear in April. Don't miss our newsmagazine show on CNN, which is doing a companion series of one-hour specials. And of course, come visit us at time.com/v21

James Kelly, Deputy Managing Editor