Michael: Alright Kevin, quick-fire round. I give you a book title, you tell me what it's about. Ready? The book is... Unflattening. Kevin: Unflattening? Okay, I'm picturing a very serious guide to getting wrinkles out of shirts. Or maybe a minimalist manifesto against fluffy pillows. Final answer: a critique of modern architecture. Michael: All excellent, very wrong guesses. Today we’re diving into Unflattening by Nick Sousanis. Kevin: Okay, lay it on me. What's it really about, if not my laundry routine? Michael: It's a philosophical manifesto, and here’s the kicker: this book started as the first-ever doctoral dissertation written entirely in comic book form at Columbia University. Kevin: Hold on. A comic book for a PhD? From Columbia? How does that even work? And why? That feels like showing up to a black-tie gala in a superhero costume. Michael: Exactly. And the costume is the point. To understand why he did it, we first have to understand the problem he's trying to solve, a concept he calls 'flatness'.

Kevin: 'Flatness'. Okay, my guess about architecture wasn't so far off then? Michael: Not physical flatness. He describes it as a "flatness of sight, of possibilities." It’s a state of rigid, one-dimensional thinking. And he illustrates this with a brilliant allegory from an old novella called Flatland. Kevin: Flatland. Sounds like a theme park I would not want to visit. Michael: You definitely wouldn't. Imagine a world that exists on a completely flat, two-dimensional plane, like a sheet of paper. The inhabitants are all geometric shapes—squares, triangles, circles. They can move left, right, forward, and back, but the concept of 'up' is literally inconceivable to them. Kevin: So they have no height. They're just... outlines. Michael: Precisely. The protagonist is a respectable citizen named A. Square. One day, a being from the third dimension—a Sphere—visits Flatland. To the Flatlanders, the Sphere's visit is bizarre. As it passes through their plane, all they see is a circle that mysteriously appears, grows larger, then shrinks, and vanishes. Kevin: Whoa, so the Sphere just looks like a changing circle to them? They can't perceive its full, three-dimensional form. Michael: They can't. The Sphere tries desperately to explain the third dimension, the idea of 'upwards.' But to A. Square, it's nonsense. It's outside his entire sensory experience and conceptual framework. He has no words for it, no way to even imagine it. Kevin: That's wild. It's like their whole reality prevents them from seeing the truth, even when it's passing right through them. Michael: And that is Sousanis's central point. He argues that we are all, in some ways, inhabitants of Flatland. We live in a society that encourages this 'flatness.' From a young age, he says, we are "sorted out and put on tracks." We're sent for instruction that follows a "recipe of add this, mold that," all to achieve uniformity. Kevin: That sounds a bit dystopian. But I see it. The standardized tests, the career paths, the daily commute, the endless meetings... you get stuck in a rut. You're living in your own little Flatland. Michael: Exactly. Our experiences get "boxed" and "dispensed." We are "converted into data." And in this process, our vision narrows. What started as a child's wide-open eyes, "teeming with possibilities," becomes "shuttered." We become so entrenched in our two-dimensional routines that we, like A. Square, can't even conceive of a third dimension of possibility. Kevin: Okay, that's a heavy and frankly, a pretty accurate diagnosis of modern life. It's also a little depressing. Does he offer a way out of Flatland? Or are we all just doomed to be squares? Michael: He absolutely does. And the escape hatch is something our own bodies use every single second. It’s a concept called parallax.

Kevin: Parallax? That sounds like a sci-fi term. Michael: It's much more fundamental. Close one eye, and then the other. See how the world seems to shift slightly? That's parallax. Each of your eyes has a slightly different vantage point. Your brain takes those two distinct, slightly different images and fuses them together. That fusion is what creates the perception of depth, of three-dimensionality. Kevin: Right, it’s like 3D glasses. You need both the red and blue lenses to get the full picture. One lens alone is just a flat, colored mess. Michael: A perfect analogy. And Sousanis argues that this is the blueprint for all deep understanding. He says, "there is no single, 'correct' view." The magic, the depth, comes from integrating multiple, different vantage points. A single, 'true' perspective is, by its very nature, false because it's flat. Kevin: I like that. So how does this work outside of just, you know, seeing things? Michael: Well, let's go back to ancient Greece. Around 240 BCE, a brilliant librarian named Eratosthenes heard a strange report. In a city to the south called Syene, on the summer solstice, the sun shone directly down a deep well, meaning it was perfectly overhead. But in his own city, Alexandria, at that exact same moment, columns still cast a shadow. Kevin: Huh. So the sun was in two different places in the sky at the same time? Michael: That's what a 'flat' perspective would suggest. But Eratosthenes used parallax thinking. He had two different vantage points: Syene and Alexandria. He realized the only way this difference in shadows could exist was if the surface of the Earth was curved. By measuring the angle of the shadow in Alexandria and knowing the distance between the two cities, he calculated the circumference of the entire planet with stunning accuracy. Kevin: Wow. So just by comparing two different points on the ground, he discovered the world was round. He 'unflattened' the Earth. Michael: He unflattened the whole world! And this pattern repeats throughout history. Think of Copernicus. For centuries, everyone believed the Earth was the center of the universe. To make the observations fit, astronomers had to invent these absurdly complex models with "circles within circles." It was a system collapsing under its own weight. Kevin: They were stuck in their geocentric Flatland. Michael: Completely. Then Copernicus comes along. He doesn't necessarily have new data. He just makes one crucial shift. He changes the point of view. He puts the Sun at the center. And as Sousanis writes, "Nothing changed, except the point of view - which changed everything." It was a revolution sparked not by a new discovery, but by a new perspective. Kevin: So just by looking from two places at once, or by fundamentally shifting your perspective, you can discover profound truths about the universe. That's a powerful idea. It feels like the core of what he's getting at. Michael: It is. And that brings us back to your first question: why a comic book for a PhD? Because Sousanis argues that comics are the ultimate parallax machine for thought.

Kevin: Okay, I'm ready for this. Connect the dots for me. How is a comic book like Copernicus? Michael: Because reading a comic forces you to use two kinds of vision at once. On one hand, you read it sequentially. You follow the words, you move from panel to panel, left to right, top to bottom. It's a linear journey through time. Kevin: Right, like reading any book. Michael: But at the same time, you're also taking in the entire page as a single, simultaneous image. You see the layout, the composition, the relationship between all the panels at once. Your eye darts around, making connections. It's a spatial experience. As comics theorist Scott McCloud says, in comics, "the passage of time is written in space." Kevin: That's a cool phrase. So you're reading in a line, but also seeing in a web. Michael: Exactly. And this mirrors a fascinating theory about the brain's hemispheres. The neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist argues the left hemisphere is built to break things down, to focus on individual parts, to follow sequences. The right hemisphere is built to see the big picture, the context, the whole. Comics, Sousanis argues, hold these two modes of thinking in "electric tension." They force your brain to do both at once. Kevin: Oh, I get it now! The words are one 'eye' and the pictures are the other 'eye.' And the panels and the layout... that's a whole other way of seeing. You need all of them together to get the 'depth' of the idea. Michael: You've got it. The form of the book is its argument. It's not just illustrating ideas; it's creating a space where you experience them. Sousanis calls comics an "amphibious language," one that can live in both the world of words and the world of images. This allows him to show, not just tell, "the unflat ways in which thought unfolds"—with all its tangents, connections, and overlapping ideas. Kevin: It makes sense why the book has been so widely acclaimed, winning major awards like the Eisner. It’s not just a gimmick; it’s a whole new way of doing scholarship. Though I've heard from some readers that it can be a bit polarizing, that the academic language can feel dense. Michael: That's a fair point. It is an academic work, after all. But the visual element is designed to make those dense ideas more accessible, to give you another way in. The author, Nick Sousanis, actually has a background in mathematics before he dove into art and education. He's all about finding new structures for understanding. He even created a superhero in junior high called "Lockerman" who could step through any door and emerge from any other. That idea of finding hidden pathways has been with him his whole life. Kevin: From Lockerman to a Columbia PhD. That’s a great story. He’s literally been trying to unflatten things since he was a kid.

Michael: He really has. And ultimately, that's the book's invitation to all of us. Unflattening isn't just a book about seeing differently; it's an experience of seeing differently. It demonstrates that our rigid categories—word versus image, art versus science, logic versus intuition—are often the very walls of our own Flatland. Kevin: It’s a powerful message. The book argues that we’re all tangled in these invisible threads of history, biology, and culture. And you can’t just cut them to be free. Michael: Exactly. In fact, Sousanis, drawing on the philosopher Bruno Latour, redefines emancipation in a radical way. He says it’s not about being "freed from bonds." True freedom is about "identifying more threads of association." Liberation comes from seeing more connections, understanding the web more deeply, not from pretending you can float above it all. Kevin: That’s a profound shift. Freedom isn't isolation; it's a richer, more complex connection to everything. It really makes you wonder... what 'third dimension' are we all missing in our own lives, just because we've never thought to look from a slightly different angle? Michael: That's the question, isn't it? Maybe it’s in a conversation with someone you disagree with, or in trying a hobby you think you’d be terrible at, or even just taking a different route on your commute. The book suggests that new dimensions are all around us, waiting for us to open a second eye. We'd love to hear from our listeners about this. What's a "Flatland" moment you've had, where a shift in perspective suddenly revealed a whole new reality to you? Share your stories with us on our social channels. Kevin: I can't wait to read those. This has been a mind-bending one. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.