We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World – On my Om

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May 25, 2026

I have always wanted to own a Montblanc Writers Edition dedicated to Carlo Collodi, the Italian author whose real name was Carlo Lorenzini. He took his pen name from the Tuscan village where his mother was born, and then spent his career writing under a false name about a character who could not sustain one. I grew up reading the tales of Pinocchio, but only read the non-Disneyfied version as a grown-up. The book left an indelible impression on me. It is a great parable for modern times.

In case you were wondering, I did get the pen. It is one of the most beautiful and underrated pens in the Montblanc Writers Series. I have been mildly obsessed with it for a long time. It is not overwhelming, gaudy, or over the top. It tells the full story, not just of the pen but the story behind it. And it starts with the clip, that subtly hints at Pinocchio’s nose.

The cap is where Montblanc’s craftsmen did their most serious work. It is cylindrical, dark resin, topped by the Montblanc snowflake, wrapped in a silver and platinum skeletal overlay, a filigree of characters and scenes from the story, the dark resin visible beneath through the cutouts. The effect is like looking at a shadow puppet theater contained in your hand. The barrel is restrained by comparison, dark resin with horizontal platinum ring banding, letting the cap hold the eye. The nib carries its own engraving tied to the story.

Holding it in my hands recently, I found myself thinking about the story of Pinocchio, and how it throws the names that dominate our headlines into sharp relief — the ones who shape our zeitgeist of half-truths.

Most Montblanc Writers Editions honor their subjects through association. A name on the clip, a period-appropriate color, a design that nods toward an author’s era. My favorites from this series are Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Schiller, and Dostoevsky. And in recent times I have been drawn to R.L. Stevenson. I love these authors.

Compared to these famous names, most people know Pinocchio but not the author behind it. We all have a surface-level understanding of what the story is. Lies equal long nose. We don’t quite understand the real story or know the real author. And that is why the pen itself is so mysterious and, yes, underrated.

Collectors chasing the more obviously prestigious editions walk right past it, missing the one that is actually doing the most interesting thing. Collodi’s story inhabits the pen, and in one glimpse you know it is telling you something. The story it commemorates is not the one most people remember. I do.

The Adventures of Pinocchio was published in serial form in 1881, aimed at Italian children in the way the 19th century aimed things at children, full of suffering, consequence, and moral instruction delivered through catastrophe. The puppet is hanged. He is swallowed by a giant fish. He watches companions degrade into beasts of burden. The world he moves through is predatory at every level, and the institutions that should protect him are either absent, corrupted, or actively hostile to his interests.

I can only imagine the outrage and horror over this story should it have been published today. I am old enough to have been smacked for my stupid mistakes as a kid. So this was actually not a bad story to read. Still, I can understand how much anxiety it might cause today’s parents.

Most people remember Pinocchio as a story about lying. The nose grows. You get caught. Lesson learned. But that reading misses almost everything Collodi was actually doing. The book is a close study of a society where deception has gone ambient, woven into every institution, every transaction. Courts punish victims. Authority figures perform competence without exercising it. Experts are decorative. Society holds together through spectacle and habit rather than accountability. Into this environment, a naive creature is released, constitutionally unable to resist a good story about easy reward.

The nose is the least interesting lie in the book. The interesting lies are the ones that work.

The Fox and the Cat are the novel’s most modern characters. They persuade Pinocchio to bury his coins in the Field of Miracles on the promise that they will multiply overnight. Exploit impatience, exploit greed, frame skepticism as a failure of imagination, and dismiss skeptics as lacking vision. Remind you of someone? Space Cowboy for example?

That structure is so familiar I barely need to name it. But let me name it anyway.

Everyone from Jensen Huang to Sam Altman to Elon Musk spent a decade accumulating what I have called symbolic capital, the reputation, the prestige, the weight of being seen as someone who understands the future better than the rest of us. Now each of them seems to be running some version of the Field of Miracles, with promises that keep not arriving, timelines that dissolve, products that exist primarily as...