Making Sense

Dear Reader —

There is a recurring theme I have heard over the last few years from commentators on the right, and in the past many weeks from those on the left too: Our sense-making organs are broken.

“Sense-making organs” means the websites, shows, officials, agencies, leaders, and influencers we turn to for information about the world. Like our physical eyes and ears, we don’t just use these to know what’s true or false but to attune ourselves to what matters and away from what doesn’t. The sense-making organs orient us in reality.

It would be one thing if many of us were chronically disappointed by events. But many of our fellows seem fundamentally caught off guard by developments that informed people could have seen coming.

When we are properly oriented, we should not be caught off guard as often as we have been lately. This is what it means to say that the sense-making organs are broken.

One core purpose of The New Atlantis is to offer the clearest possible thinking on the questions we explore — to speak clearly with integrity.

But another is to change how we’re thinking, to move discourse away from shallow, amoral, irrelevant questions toward weighty, true, good questions. This is the task of orientation that so many of us are coming to realize we have been missing.

If you read Scientific American, Wired, or Vox, you’ll regularly encounter ideas presented as surprising shifts in conventional wisdom… that regular readers of The New Atlantis already knew about months or years earlier. Ideas like:

• In 2020, we warned in January that concerns about the novel coronavirus were not hysterical, and in March that lockdowns would be damaging without an achievable purpose and clear exit plan.
  
  
• Our 2017 article “Growing Pains” outlined the limited evidence for and serious dangers of using puberty blockers to treat children with gender dysphoria, a conclusion that just in the last year or two has begun breaking through in mainstream coverage.
  
  
• Our 2015 investigative article “The Ebola Gamble” warned that public health was compromising its pandemic response for the sake of managing public psychology. It also warned that established distinctions between airborne, droplet, and contact transmission had no basis in physical reality and were dangerous to rely on, a conclusion now echoed by the WHO.
  
  
• Years of articles by Robert Zubrin have warned that NASA’s new launch and lunar return programs are disorganized boondoggles the agency can’t possibly deliver on, a view now increasingly echoed in reporting and commentary.
  
  
• The growing crisis of Canada’s lax safeguards for euthanasia has received widespread reporting since our 2022 investigative report “No Other Options.”

This is what good sense-making looks like. It’s why our task is neither to follow the science nor to stick it to the establishment, but to offer insights with staying power.

Today’s surprising ideas in The New Atlantis are tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.

We have a new presidential administration about to begin, and for now the landscape of its approach to science and tech policy is wide open.

We are in the early stages of what might be a technological transformation on a scale not seen since the Industrial Revolution. Yet we’re stuck talking about AI through staid terms like “disparate impact” and “misinformation” that might prove to be sideshows. It’s as if we’re pilgrims at Plymouth in 1630, aliens have landed, and all we can ask is what this will do to hat buckle production.

This is the kind of moment where the paramount task is to make sense of things. That is our aim.

To do it, we need your help. Our goal for this year’s fundraising campaign is $300,000.

Unlike many publications, The New Atlantis does not have a parent organization or deep-pocketed bankroller that provides a financial backstop. About 35% of our core operational funding every year comes from reader donations. Reader support isn’t a matter of padding out the budget for us — it is essential to doing our work and to whether we can expand it.

We are also thrilled to announce that a group of five individual readers has seeded a $70,000 match toward our campaign goal. All donations up to that amount will be matched dollar for dollar. We thank these readers for their generosity, and ask you to take advantage of this opportunity to double the impact of your gift.

You can read more about our campaign and what your donation will go to at our campaign webpage.

Our appeal to you this year is simple: If you think we’re doing unique work in helping readers make sense of the world, help us do it again, do more, and reach more readers next year.

With thanks for your support and your readership,

Ari Schulman
Editor, The New Atlantis

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