Apparently a 13-year-old Julia Stiles appeared in an episode of PBS’ Ghostwriter series, playing the hacktivist editor-in-chief of the Hurston High School newspaper in “Who is Max Mouse?” Do let us revel in the memories of a simpler time, full of long-forgotten promises of a better world brought on by Gibsonian buzzwords and the promise of equality and opportunity through a technological utopia.
How naive we once were.
In case you aren’t familiar with Ghostwriter, it was a PBS show about a group of kids who solved mysteries with the help of an invisible ghost who could manipulate letters and words to create sentences and clue the kids in to whatever information that they needed at the time. No one ever knew who this Ghostwriter was, or how it came into its knowledge or abilities, but a 2010 interview with producer and writer Kermit Frazier revealed the surprisingly dark that really puts a fascinating twist on my childhood: “Ghostwriter was a runaway slave during the Civil War. He was killed by slave catchers and their dogs as he was teaching other runaway slaves how to read in the woods. His soul was kept in the book and released once Jamal discovered the book.”
That’s a lot darker, and more powerful, than this old kids’ show ever let me know.
Image by SlimVirgin – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link