––What bit of culture from today would you want with you?

Birkerts: Certainly not television, or the internal combustion engine, or the concept of insurance, or sleep-aids, or plastic, or the camera, or cell-phones, or the internet, or the idea of the diet…Maybe the idea of melting cheese onto grilled meat (if that had not yet been discovered)…

Gabriele: My education. I think, as a woman in the late 1890s, it would help open up my options—hopefully making prostitution an unattractive alternative. Oh, and my iPod.

Love: A few years ago my husband pointed out that if we happened to be transported back to ancient Rome (we were watching the TV series Rome at the time), we wouldn’t be able to help modernize the empire because we don’t actually know how anything in our modern world works. So we decided to each learn how something really important works, just in case. I chose ‘how to make penicillin’ and he chose ‘how to generate and harness electricity.’ Neither of us has done it yet. But I guess bringing penicillin back to medieval Europe would mess up my whole life-with-death thing, anyway. Which kind of proves how stupid my medieval fantasy is. Obviously I’d rather live in a world with penicillin than one without, and I’d rather everyone else did, too.

Miller:

1. Antibiotics

2. Dental floss

3. Pilates machines

4. iPods

5. Sondheim

6. Purell. So much Purell.



Jaime Clarke is the author of the novel WE’RE SO FAMOUS, editor of DON’T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME: CONTEMPORARY WRITERS ON THE FILMS OF JOHN HUGHES, and co-founder of POST ROAD, a national literary magazine based out of New York and Boston