n 1987, my fourth grade teacher asked us to imagine life 25 years in the future and to describe, in complete sentences and legible cursive, our future selves and the state of the world. I didn’t understand the power of setting an imagined future to paper. I’d recently written about a pig on a cruise liner and about a macaroni noodle that had adventures with a spoon. “Life in 2012” didn’t seem so different. It was just a story.