Goldberg: The electrocution of Topsy the elephant by Thomas Edison at Coney Island’s Luna Park in 1903. My motives for wanting to be there are kind of schizophrenic. The do-gooder time traveler in me wants to be there to let everyone there know what Edison’s true motives are for the electrocution, which I’d like to think would have had potentially far-reaching implications. I have no illusions about being able to save Topsy herself, but it would have been nice if her death could have revealed Edison’s black heart to the general public and brought recognition to Nikola Tesla, overlooked genius of the twentieth century. The wistful-tourist time traveler in me wants to be there because, either before or after the elephant goes down, I could enjoy Coney Island in its heyday. I’ve seen old films and postcards of Coney Island in the early 1900s and it was clearly the most beautiful amusement park ever.

Iagnemma: I would have loved to have been a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Since I would have been useless as a hunter, canoeman, naturalist, or cook, I suppose I might have been Meriwether Lewis’s personal assistant. It would have been great for so many reasons: seeing the western US before it had been settled, interacting with Lewis (who was a great explorer and, by all accounts, an exceptionally smart man). Even hearing Thomas Jefferson’s stories, secondhand from Lewis, would have been wonderful.

Sorrentino: Not to derail the entire spirit of the thing, but I’ve never been more conscious of actually inhabiting history. “Interesting times,” etc. It makes me despair a little––a writer is in a better position than maybe anybody else to lodge a coherent protest, but it’s looking obvious that few people are interested in coherent protests or the action that should flow from them. There’s all this awareness of what’s going on politically, socially, economically, environmentally, and there seems to be very little way to participate other than as a willfully blind accomplice. Our participation begins and ends with The Daily Show.

––When and how did you first become interested in this historical event?

Casey: Charcot is one of those larger-than-life characters; he’s almost a parody of himself. I’m interested in the history of psychiatry and he looms large there. He was the first Professor of Diseases in the Nervous System and was at the forefront of neurology (it was just emerging when he started school). He was a plump fellow with no facial hair, often compared to Napoleon. He had a pet monkey who, I believe, dined with the family. His son fled an internship at his father’s hospital to sail a ship—the aptly named Porquoi Pas—on an exploration of the Northern seas, where he eventually sank near Iceland. There’s an island named after him (Charcot Island). So, Charcot Senior was the kind of father who inspired his son to go really, really far away from him and die doing dangerous things. He was not a simple guy and the combination of wanting to help (let’s study the problems of the mind) even as he’s treating his patients a bit like circus animals (let’s get really famous and lose track of the original, honorable goal) is, let’s face it, not so unusual. Interesting people doing groundbreaking things are, often, compelling complicated assholes. And then there’s the patient. Again, this notion of someone with anguish they can’t describe aiming to please a doctor in order to get help or attention or love is heartbreaking to me. The woman who was the “young woman with the convulsive attack in the auditorium” says at one point during that particular Tuesday lesson, “Mother, I am frightened.” Charcot’s response? “Note the emotional outburst.” But the woman’s performance in all of this is also strangely heartening. She’s doing whatever she can to get something.

Goldberg: I was watching a collection of Edison’s early films and one of them documented Topsy’s execution. I’d already known about the golden age of Coney Island, but hadn’t known that Luna Park’s debut year included the execution of an elephant as a publicity stunt. It wasn’t until years later that I learned the undercurrents of jealousy and greed that were the event’s secret motivating factors.

Iagnemma: Probably after reading Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage, which is a very engaging treatment of the expedition. Somehow I missed the PBS love-fest from a few years ago.

Sorrentino: Around the time that I heard a TV commentator in the days after the 2000 presidential election ask some expert or another whether he thought that Al Gore would “take the high road” and concede the election to Bush––there was something so marvelously Orwellian about the language, the sinuous suggestion that to contest the vote would be a ploy, a selfish act not in the interest of the American people or democracy. And of course this “expert” didn’t object; didn’t protest that there was nothing subversive or unsportsmanlike in letting the democratic process play itself out. It became clear to me that protofascism had at last established the kind of foothold it likes best: quietly persuasive, almost homespun, declaiming what Roland Barthes witheringly calls “the perfect intelligibility of reality.” The unchallenged use of that sort of language managed in two seconds to do what a loudmouth like Rush Limbaugh hasn’t done in twenty years.