What are zoos? Do we live in one?

Does visiting a zoo ever give you a strange feeling—not just about our relationship with nature, but maybe even about your own life? What kind of science and ideas lie behind zoos, and could they tell us something about human existence and our future? This month we workshopped a draft treatment for a fictional story, in which a young woman living in a building closed off from the rest of the world realizes she’s in a zoo where the last humans are being kept alive.

To help us think about this draft treatment, we also read and discussed a published essay: “Wild Things: Animal nature, human racism, and the future of zoos” by David Samuels, a long-time nonfiction writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The New York Times Magazine.

Image: A photograph from the Bronx Zoo by the legendary New York City photographer Gus Powell that appeared in the June 2012 issue of Harper's magazine to illustrate the article "Wild Things" by David Samuels.