WHAT IF?(The Talk of the Town)

For the past several years, Robert Max Jackson, a professor of sociology at N.Y.U., has taught a freshman honors seminar called "What If? The Art and Science of Imagining a Society That Never Was," in which he poses a series of outlandish questions--what if we could live for hundreds of years? what if a device were invented that would tell you conclusively when someone was lying?--and assigns the science-fiction novels of Isaac Asimov and Ursula K. LeGuin. Jackson, who describes himself as "well left of liberal," likes science fiction because it represents "an effort by someone to alter the rules of life and the social order and then to try to make it make sense." He understands that this can have sinister applications. "I would say that we live in a world where a group of conservatives within the Republican Party would like to do that," he says.

Two weeks ago, when the possibility of an alternate, Bushless universe had not yet been extinguished, he encouraged the class to read several predictive studies of the polls. There was one by a Princeton professor that showed John Kerry winning the electoral college 311 votes to 227, and beating George W. Bush in every battleground state; another which calculated that Kerry had an 87.7-per-cent chance of winning; and an article from the blog Daily Kos about the undecided vote, which was followed by a string of comments, such as "Many Republicans who tell pollsters that they're voting for Bush actually won't." But, by the time Jackson's seminar met last Wednesday, the question of "What if?" had drifted from what might yet be to what could have been, and some of his disappointed liberal students had decided that the class was meant to be "a political fantasy about the breakdown of government."

It was in this anarchic spirit that Yuliya Bulba, an eighteen-year-old button-wearing Kerry supporter from Queens, persuaded Jackson to let the class out a half hour early so that everyone could watch Kerry's concession speech. Bulba and six of her classmates repaired to the campus student center, where they planted themselves in ...