"Every one of us lives his life just once," Greta Garbo once said, adding, "if we are honest, to live once is enough." In the age of AI, however, living more than once is an option. More than a century after her screen debut and decades after her ashes were laid to rest in a Swedish woodland cemetery, the Hollywood superstar's descendants are ready to consider an AI version of her taking a 21st-century film role. Her likeness has already been reanimated with AI for an ad for a Swedish industrial company, a practice some critics call "ghostploitation."

When the utopian ideals of the American Arts and Crafts movement began to splinter against the hard realities of a growing post-war industrial society, a fascinating cultural initiative was initiated by first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Disheartened by the machine age but still yearning for a lasting connection to the handmade, she brought together a group of makers who redirected their focus toward a pastoral view of America’s colonial past. By 1926, Val-Kill Industries—a bold p...