Boing Boing

Boing Boing

The original Pinocchio was a dark parable about a world of lies

Jul 20, 2026
∙ Paid
Enrico Mazzanti (1883) / Public domain (Wikimedia Commons)

Most people remember Pinocchio as a story about lying: tell a fib, your nose grows. But the late tech writer Om Malik argued in an essay that reading “misses almost everything.” Carlo Collodi’s original 1881 serial, before Disney sanded it down, is a bleak portrait of a society where “deception h…

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