No. 69 - Summer 2022 - The New Atlantis

No. 62Fall 2020

No. 62

Fall 2020

Editor’s Note

Correspondence

In What Sense Abundant?

Patrick J. Deneen, Jeffrey Bilbro, and Rich Powell respond to Matt Frost

Essays

Democracy and the Nuclear Stalemate

Taylor Dotson and Michael Bouchey on moving beyond political scientism

The New Net Delusion

Geoff Shullenberger on how 2010’s utopians became 2020’s prophets of doom

Science as Scorekeeping

Brendan Foht on why American political leaders should be players, not spectators

Gratuitous Display

Laurence Scott on the American diner and the viral tip

How We Reason About Covid Tradeoffs

Ben Peterson on why we need to talk more about human dignity

Mending the Healers

Brewer Eberly on whether med school can still offer moral formation

Reviews & Reconsiderations

Saving Ourselves

Tara Isabella Burton on real love as rebellion in TV’s Brave New World

The End of History and the Fast Man

Adam J. White on bidding farewell to America’s car culture — and its democratic virtues

Taking Carbon to Court

Jonathan H. Adler on why a legal victory was not a clear victory for the climate

Promoting the Useful Arts

Michael M. Rosen on why innovators need protection, not planning

Go West, Old Man

John Sexton asks whether we want decline

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No. 63Winter 2021

No. 63

Winter 2021

Editor’s Note

Introducing “Projects for Renewal”

How to rebuild our culture’s relationship with science and technology

Essays

From Tech Critique to Ways of Living

Alan Jacobs asks: If Neil Postman was right, so what?

Put Not Thy Trust in Nate Silver

Geoff Shullenberger on how simulation replaced reality

Recovering Old Age

Joseph E. Davis and Paul Scherz on retrieving our sense of what aging is for

The Case Against “STEM”

M. Anthony Mills on how blurring the line between science and tech puts both at risk

The Egghead Gap

Caleb Watney on China and why the U.S. needs to recruit international talent

A Scientist’s Mind, a Poet’s Soul

Algis Valiunas on the cosmic vision of Humboldt, the great naturalist-adventurer

Of Forests and Empire

Rebecca Burgess on the view from your Christmas tree

The Coronavirus Pandemic

Disarming Frontline Doctors

Devorah Goldman on how the quest to meet medicine’s “gold standard” puts patients at risk

Little Data, Big Headlines

Aaron Rothstein on overinterpreting Covid studies for clicks

Reviews & Reconsiderations

A Bioethics of the Strong

James Mumford on how liberal bioethics forgot its mandate

Why We Need a Technological Environmentalism

Robert Zubrin argues that saving the planet means going high-tech, not back to nature

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No. 64Spring 2021

No. 64

Spring 2021

Essays

Welcoming Our New Robot Overlords

Adam Elkus on how warnings of AI doom gave way to primal fear of primates posting

The Cop-Out of “Follow the Science”

Joseph M. Keegin on how feckless Covid leadership turned us against each other

Chasing the Sun

Nathan Beacom tells the extraordinary story of two Pacific voyages of discovery a thousand years apart

Math and Modernity

David Guaspari on how Descartes’s geometry quietly launched a revolution

Is Climate Change a Foreign Policy Issue?

Seaver Wang argues that opportunity now, not prophecies of doom, should spur America to become a global leader

The Danger of Fact-ist Politics

Taylor Dotson on building a politics of connection where fanatical certainty fails

Patents and the Common Good

Charles Duan on how a delicate balance between innovation and the public interest is at risk

Reviews & Reconsiderations

You Are Not Galileo

Tess Doezema on why it’s time to retire an exhausted trope

The Case Against the Case Against Space

Charles T. Rubin argues that if we had to solve the human condition before we tried anything new, we’d never try anything new

Why We Can’t Leave Nature Alone

Ted Nordhaus argues that we shouldn’t be so bashful about tinkering with the environment to save it

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No. 65Summer 2021

No. 65

Summer 2021

Essays

Redpilling and the Regime

Geoff Shullenberger on how claiming to be a daring outsider who speaks forbidden truths became a standard trope

The Demon of Bureaucratic Chaos

Tristan Abbey on how the Department of Energy does a lot without getting much done

Just Say No to Human–Monkey Chimeras

Brendan Foht on why we can’t trust the biotech industry to set its own rules on a disturbing new practice

Is It Time for a U.S. Department of Science?

M. Anthony Mills on why messy pluralism is what makes American research great

Dying, But Not Alone

Joshua Briscoe on why we can’t escape the social dimension of choosing how we die

Libidinal Liberalism

Oliver Traldi on whether banning bad behavior just makes it worse

Anthropology as Atonement

Algis Valiunas on why Claude Lévi-Strauss celebrated every culture but his own

Dance Till We Die

Ari Schulman on why Covid security theater failed

Bot Anxiety

Kent Anhari asks what happens to discourse when everyone fails the Turing Test

Reviews & Reconsiderations

Enough About “We”

Phil Christman on when sci-fi needs a little less sci and a little more fi

Can Machines Have Common Sense?

William Hasselberger on how “deep learning” hype misses a basic feature of human intelligence

Losing Ourselves

William Lombardo on why the prospect of loving machines is so sad

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No. 66Fall 2021

No. 66

Fall 2021

Essays

How to Fix Social Media

Nicholas Carr looks to the radio era for a way to solve our Big Tech crisis

Closer to Home

Addison Del Mastro on getting beyond the transportation debate of city versus suburb

Manufacturing Consensus

M. Anthony Mills on why science needs conformity, but not the kind it has now

Walmart, But for Space

Rand Simberg on why cheap rockets will change the design of everything we send up

All Pathology, All the Time

Joseph E. Davis asks what ails a culture that sees illness everywhere

What Is the CDC?

Ari Schulman has eleven ways of looking at the troubled agency

The Invention of Slavery

Diana Schaub reads Lincoln’s lectures on whether technology makes us free

Interview

Nuclear Dread as Memento Mori

Michael Shellenberger on “coming to peace with this radical technology”

Testimony

Defying the Data Priests

Matthew B. Crawford on the threat of rule by algorithmic fiat

Reviews & Reconsiderations

Statistics as Storytelling

Brad East on why America’s defining cultural artifact is the economics white paper

Modernity and the Fall

Caitrin Keiper shows one weird trick to re-enchant the world

Correspondence

Protagonist Earth

David E. Storey and Phil Christman ask how a good novel can be written about climate change

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No. 67Winter 2022

No. 67

Winter 2022

Beyond the State of Exception

Build, Don’t Ban

Philip Wallach on how conservatives can end the Covid wars

Covid and the Brittle West

Bruno Maçães on why nimbleness, not collectivism, explains Asian democracies’ success

Bad Air

Leah Libresco Sargeant on why we should restore miasma theory

We Had a Plan

Tevi Troy on why Covid was a failure of execution, not strategy

Invaluable Servants, Impossible Masters

Joseph E. Davis on what we really need experts to be in a health crisis

End the State Monopoly on Facts

Adam J. White on why the CDC needs more competition

A Common-Good Agenda for Pandemic Policy

Tim Wainwright on why we need new public investment in our medical infrastructure

The Crisis of the Crisis

Geoff Shullenberger on whether Covid politics is the real emergency

Essays

How Tech Despair Can Set You Free

Samuel Matlack reads Jacques Ellul on the totalizing grip of “technique”

Why Aren’t We Talking About Nuclear Waste?

Dennis W. O’Leary on kicking the can when it’s full of spent uranium

StarCraft as Statecraft

Tristan Abbey on why defense strategy should update its favorite gaming metaphors

Interview

Science as Craftwork with Integrity

M. Anthony Mills asks Harry Collins how to strengthen science against populist critiques

Responses to Nicholas Carr’s “How to Fix Social Media”

Big Tech Should Answer to the Public, Not to Speech Regulators

Josh Hawley

Rule Social Media, or Be Ruled by It

Rachel Bovard

Destroy Social Media, or Be Destroyed by It

Antón Barba-Kay

How the “Public Interest” Serves the Interest of the Powerful

Paul Matzko

We Still Don’t Know How to Fix Social Media

Martha Bayles

Don’t Wait for Silver Bullets for Social Media Reform

Nicholas Carr

Reviews & Reconsiderations

How Tech Reform Diminishes Us

Jeffrey Bilbro on social media critics who repeat the mistakes that got us here

The Twitter Surveillance State

Taylor Dotson asks why we became a nation of hall monitors

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No. 68Spring 2022

No. 68

Spring 2022

Reality: A Post-Mortem

What Happened to Consensus Reality?

Introducing a new series by Jon Askonas

Reality Is Just a Game Now

And we’re all losing.

Saving the Real

Therapy Beyond Good and Evil

James Mumford on why a nonjudgmental psychology is failing patients

Reality Minus

David Bentley Hart on the depressing fantasy of minds in simulated worlds

Reformation in the Church of Science

Andrea Saltelli and Daniel Sarewitz on how the truth monopoly was broken up

Hell Is Ourselves

Laurence Scott on the creepiness of an Internet that caters to who it thinks we are

Reading Ourselves to Death

Kit Wilson on text as unreality

Something Happened By Us: A Demonology

Alan Jacobs has a theory about why we’re going nuts online

Essays and Reviews

Danger: Caution Ahead

Gabrielle Bauer on how we let the precautionary principle run wild

Do Americans Care About Space?

John Konicki and James Pethokoukis read public polling on the final frontier

Surveillance Humanism

Paul Dicken warns that an unholy union of AI and HR is nigh

Sad Trek

Alan Rome on how an exhausted liberalism killed sci‑fi’s sunniest franchise

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No. 69Summer 2022

No. 69

Summer 2022

Reality: A Post-Mortem, Essay 3

How Stewart Made Tucker

A world of authentic, post-spin journalism: The dream Jon Stewart spent a decade making real is now America’s waking nightmare. What did he get so wrong? — By Jon Askonas

Essays

The Case for a Pandemic Moonshot

Tom Ridge and Asha M. George on why next time we shouldn’t accept the same bad options

Unsustainable Alarmism

Taylor Dotson on why we can’t stay in crisis mode forever

Power Metals

Tristan Abbey asks exactly how bad China’s dominance of rare-earth elements is for America

The Technocrat’s Dilemma

Alexander Stern on how expert rule is destroying itself

Was Fusionism a Fluke?

Howe Whitman III reads Hayek and Lewis on what once unified the Right

Reviews & Reconsiderations

Stuck Between Climate Doom and Denial

Roger Pielke, Jr. on the failure of Unsettled, a popular critique of climate science

Can We Be Human in Meatspace?

Brad East asks if revolution against tech starts at home

The Supergenius at the End of the World

David Polansky on democracy as an obstacle to Muskian great men in Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi

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No. 70Fall 2022

No. 70

Fall 2022

Essays

A Nuclear Renaissance?

Thomas Hochman and Nate Hochman on whether U.S. atomic power is really due for a comeback

The Secret Life of Leftovers

Nat Watkins on how our ancestors gave us cheese and beer, but we’re leaving our children garbage

Bacon Bacon Shakespeare Spy

Sam Kahn on one brilliant madwoman’s quest to show that the Bard’s works were secretly penned by the father of science, at war with his own creation

How to Search for Life on Mars

Robert Zubrin, Steven Benner, and Jan Špaček on why we won’t find anything unless we stop refusing to look

Kitty Eats the Internet

Antón Barba-Kay on why cat memes fill a gaping void in our online lives

Middle Seat to the Moon

Charles T. Rubin on how to keep the thrill alive once billionaires make space travel routine

The Big Whimper

David Kordahl on why cosmology may not end with a bang

Correspondence

Is Morality Therapeutic?

Steven C. Hayes asks whether patients need to hear hard truths or make hard choices

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No. 71Winter 2023

No. 71

Winter 2023

Investigation

No Other Options

Alexander Raikin reveals a Canadian euthanasia regime that efficiently ushers the vulnerable to a “beautiful” death

Essays

Arcs of Life

Matthew Loftus on why a just society does not kill suffering people

Who’s Afraid of Cowardice?

Adam Roberts on what we can learn from heroes who run away

Can There Be a Conservative Futurism?

John Ehrett on why the retreat from time is not a winning answer to our tech malaise

The Long Delay Is Nearly Over

Alex Dubin on the return of human travel beyond Earth

Triptych

The Joy of Losing Your Phone

Clare Coffey on why we still need the kindness of strangers

Driven Apart

Clare Coffey on the myth of the open road

How to Make Friends

Clare Coffey on going to a bar when fighting the system gets tough

Exchanges

Is Nuclear Returning Too Fast or Too Slow?

Thomas Hochman and Taylor Dotson discuss whether the industry can overcome its obstacles

Overthinking Heroism

Adam Roberts and Alan Jacobs discuss “Who’s Afraid of Cowardice?”

Reviews & Reconsiderations

A Humanism of the Abyss

Alan Jacobs on Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings and how identity keeps us apart

Still Truckin’

Nicholas Clairmont on the anti-car zeitgeist

When the Machine Opts In to You

Joel Cuthbertson on why the self-help response to oppressive tech makes the problem worse

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No. 72Spring 2023

No. 72

Spring 2023

Feature

Rational Magic

Tara Isabella Burton on why a tech culture obsessed with reason is going woo

Reality: A Post-Mortem, Essay 4

What Was the Fact?

Here lies a beloved friend of social harmony (ca. 1500–2000). It was nice while it lasted. — By Jon Askonas

Essays

Out of the Wild

Samuel Matlack on why we can’t rid nature of us

What Does “Scientific Progress” Mean, Anyway?

M. Anthony Mills on the three rival visions of how to fix science

The Demise of the Garage Inventor

Joseph Joyce on how Hollywood forgot the tinkering dad

Selling the Drama

Katherine Dee eulogizes “humdog,” who led a tech backlash in the days of dial-up

Shallowfakes

James R. Ostrowski warns against exaggerating the AI disinfo threat

Why Were They Dropped?

Algis Valiunas on revisionist accounts of the fateful decision of 1945

Fusion and the Holy Grail

Tristan Abbey suggests choosing wisely

Reviews & Reconsiderations

Nature, Toothless and Declawed

Clare Coffey on Martha Nussbaum’s dubious case for animals as liberal subjects

Digital Appeasement

Bonnie Kristian on “meganets,” a TED-brain excuse for surrender without a fight

Human Resources

David Polansky on why Soylent Green was more prophetic than it seems

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No. 73Summer 2023

No. 73

Summer 2023

They’re Here

Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

Ari Schulman on why this time, we should believe the hype

B.S. Jobs and the Coming Crisis of Meaning

Brian J. A. Boyd asks whether destroying pointless jobs is really worth celebrating

AI Can’t Beat Stupid

Adam Elkus on why predictions of AI apocalypse overrate the power of raw intelligence

The Dead Internet to Come

Robert Mariani on why our chatbot future is a lonely place right out of a paranoid delusion

Why I Fired My AI Agent

Clayton O’Dell opts out of assimilation

How the State Built This AI Moment

Tess Doezema and Nina Frahm on why the law isn’t lagging behind AI, it’s leading it

The Speech of the Dead

Daniel Walden writes against AI necromancy

Sam Altman Doesn’t Want To Be Your AI King

Louise Liebeskind on why he might be anyway

Reality: A Post-Mortem, Essay 5

An America of Secrets

Jon Askonas on why democracy dies in darkness

Editorial

Take No for an Answer on Genetic Engineering

Good news: The agonizing moral quandary of “designer babies” has been resolved. But will scientists accept democracy’s verdict?

Essays

Culture War as Imitation Game

Luke Burgis on the timeliness of René Girard’s case against idolizing politics

How Congress Was Saved

A Lover of Good Government reports from the year 2039 on how the spirit of efficiency reformed a once-maligned institution

The Masking Debate We Didn’t Have

M. Anthony Mills on why critics are repeating their opponents’ mistake

Resistance in the Arts

Alan Jacobs on why Substack won’t save us

Reviews & Reconsiderations

Clicks of Desire

Tara Isabella Burton on how the Internet obeys you

Humanity Does Not Strike Back

Charles T. Rubin on why the end of the human species would be bad, actually

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No. 74Fall 2023

No. 74

Fall 2023

Essays

Oiling the Chicken Machine

Garth Brown on how you’re already eating lab-made meat

The Downer About Uppers

Charles Fain Lehman on whether Adderall is feeding America’s drug crisis

The Fantasy of Energy Independence

Peter Z. Grossman on how U.S. energy policy got stuck at the gas station in 1973

In Your Face

John Fechtel on Vision Pro and Apple’s friction eliminators

The Open Sky

Lars Erik Schönander: cheap satellites + AI chatbots = “queryable Earth”

The New Atlantis at 20

Who Is The New Atlantis For?

Ari Schulman on why throwing cold water on utopianism found an audience

If Scientists Were Angels

Louise Liebeskind on how we’re misreading the original New Atlantis

Missing the Manhattan Project

Ari Schulman on a moment when we still knew that science could conquer — and sin

Reviews & Reconsiderations

Warm Planet, Cool Heads

Nicholas Clairmont on a new book that warns against making the climate bucket too big

Wounded Healers

Algis Valiunas on why it often takes one “unquiet mind” to treat another

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No. 75Winter 2024

No. 75

Winter 2024

Did Exxon Make It Rain Today?

Ted Nordhaus on how the story of climate change and extreme weather is being oversold — and why building, not fear, is the answer

Space and the Wild

Bears in the Villa

John Last on whether Italians are ready for the return of wilderness

What Is Space For?

William Boyce on why we gaze and why we should go

We Used to Build Things

Tech Strikes Back

Nadia Asparouhova on why “accelerationism” is an overdue corrective to years of doom and gloom in Silicon Valley

Accelerating to Where?

Robert Bellafiore on the anti-politics of the new jet pack lament

Things Used to Work in This Country

Clare Coffey on how your kitchen radio became a bureaucracy

Essays

Surveilling Alone

Christine Rosen on home security cameras in an era of rising crime and declining trust

A President’s Council on Artificial Intelligence

M. Anthony Mills on why the White House’s bland solution doesn’t match the problem

Barbie vs. Botox

Rachel Altman: transhumanism is so over, wrinkles are so back

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No. 76Spring 2024

No. 76

Spring 2024

Feature