Skip to content
Who's in the Video
A specialist in eighteenth-century French literature and culture, Weber is a fashion historian and the author of "Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the French Revolution." She is also[…]
Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

The fashion author and historian worries about the quantity and quality of her output.

Question: What keeps you up at night?

Caroline Weber: I have friends I admire, scholars I admire, writers I admire who are so prolific who do a book a year or a book every other year. My friend Simon Schama, who I revere, who seems to do a book every other year and also all of these amazing cerebral television shows. I am so impressed by that quantity and quality of that output and I feel if I don’t go to bed worrying about how much more output I can generate the next day, or the next week, or the next month, I might fall by the wayside and become completely useless. So, that’s what really keeps me up the most.

Recorded on October 13, 2009


Related
“Ultimately, the choice rests with each individual: whether to take the convenient route of allowing AI to handle our critical thinking, or to preserve this essential cognitive process for ourselves.”