The New Atlantis

Current Issue

No. 76

Spring 2024

If You Build It, Will They Come?

Austin’s interstate expansion becomes a test case for “induced demand” — and the culture war over faster traffic versus denser cities.

Joseph Lawler

Embryos as Schrödinger’s Persons

The Alabama IVF ruling reveals peculiar entities that are neither people nor property until we need them to be.

Leah Libresco Sargeant

AI Is a Hall of Mirrors

LLMs are giving us a billion ripoffs of what we already are at a moment when we yearn for something new.

Meghan Houser

Taming IVF’s Wild West

Real regulation is long overdue. But consumer protection is not enough.

Emma Waters

Narcissistic Depressive Technoscience

Why modern man yearns to be replaced, fantasizes of being the one to do it, and how we can stay human instead

Thomas Fuchs

Golden Eggs

IVF parents shop for good stock at the Ivy Leagues.

Abigail Anthony

Turn on, Tune in, Write Code

How psychedelics went from counterculture to grind culture

Geoff Shullenberger

There Is a Planet B

In a new book, the pioneer who figured out how to get to Mars imagines how to stay there.

Rand Simberg

Laboring in the Dark

IVF might sound like an act of taking control, but it felt like an act of surrender.

Charlotte Collingwood

Winter 2024

Did Exxon Make It Rain Today?

Why headlines blaming extreme weather on climate change don’t hold up, the peril of catastrophism, and the case that we’re actually safer than ever before

Ted Nordhaus

Tech Strikes Back

“Accelerationism” is an overdue corrective to years of doom and gloom in Silicon Valley.

Nadia Asparouhova

Barbie vs. Botox

Transhumanism is so over. Wrinkles are so back.

Rachel Altman

Things Used to Work in This Country

An appliance used to be a machine. Now it’s a bureaucracy.

Clare Coffey

Accelerating to Where?

The anti-politics of the new jet pack lament

Robert Bellafiore

A President’s Council on Artificial Intelligence

The White House’s bland solution doesn’t match the problem. Here’s what would.

M. Anthony Mills

Bears in the Villa

For the first time since the fall of the Roman empire, wilderness is returning to Italy. Are Italians ready?

John Last

Surveilling Alone

Home security cameras are booming in an era of rising crime and declining trust. But they’re driving neighbors further apart.

Christine Rosen

What Is Space For?

Why we gaze and why we should go

William Boyce

Fall 2023

Oiling the Chicken Machine

Queasy about lab-grown meat? Too bad — you’ve pretty much been eating it for decades.

Garth Brown

If Scientists Were Angels

Francis Bacon has been charged with robbing science of its innocence. But what if we’ve all been reading him wrong?

Louise Liebeskind

The Downer About Uppers

Adderall is America’s new legal drug of choice. Is it fueling the drug crisis?

Charles Fain Lehman

In Your Face

Apple’s friction eliminators want to get under your skin.

John Fechtel

Who Is The New Atlantis For?

Why 20 years of throwing cold water on utopianism found an audience

Ari Schulman

Warm Planet, Cool Heads

A new book warns against pushing all the world’s problems into the climate bucket.

Nicholas Clairmont

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Summer 2023

Why This AI Moment May Be the Real Deal

This time, believe the hype.

Ari Schulman

AI Can’t Beat Stupid

Predictions of AI apocalypse suffer the classic egghead blunder: they overrate the power of raw intelligence.

Adam Elkus

Sam Altman Doesn’t Want To Be Your AI King

...but he might be anyway.

Louise Liebeskind

They’re Here…

The AI moment has arrived.

Symposium

Ari Schulman • Brian J. A. Boyd • Adam Elkus • Robert Mariani • Clayton O’Dell • Tess Doezema • Nina Frahm • Daniel Walden • Louise Liebeskind

Special Series: “Reality: A Post-Mortem”

An America of Secrets

Democracy dies in darkness.

Jon Askonas

Reality Is Just a Game Now

Scoring points, hunting for clues, building plotlines, revealing the Grand Narrative... Why are people acting like the national fracture is fun?

Jon Askonas

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?

Jon Askonas

What Was the Fact?

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

Jon Askonas

Reality Is Just a Game Now

Scoring points, hunting for clues, building plotlines, revealing the Grand Narrative... Why are people acting like the national fracture is fun?

Jon Askonas

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?

Jon Askonas

What Was the Fact?

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

Jon Askonas

Our aim is a culture in which science and technology work for, not on, human beings.

About Us Explore Projects

Staying Human

A More Natural Science

On the Modern Project

The Technological Condition

Mind & Human Nature

A More Political Science

Beyond Earth

The Good Earth

The Practice of Science

Featured Collections

Special Series

Reality: A Post-Mortem

An essay series on why everyone but you is going insane

Special Series

Recovering the Organism

From the Archives

Fall 2019

After Climate Despair

The hope for a global conversion to austerity has failed to stop climate change. What comes next?

Matt Frost

Winter/Spring 2013

Do Elephants Have Souls?

On the evidence for non-human intelligence, awareness, and emotion

Caitrin Keiper

Summer 2006

Shop Class as Soulcraft

The case for the manual trades

Matthew B. Crawford

Spring 2003

Ageless Bodies, Happy Souls

Biotechnology and the pursuit of perfection

Leon R. Kass

Winter 2004

The Human Explorer

Why sending robots is not enough

Robert Zubrin

Winter 2023

No Other Options

Newly revealed documents depict a Canadian euthanasia regime that efficiently ushers the vulnerable to a “beautiful” death.

Alexander Raikin

Spring/Summer 2016

Saving Science

Science isn’t self-correcting, it’s self-destructing. To save the enterprise, scientists must come out of the lab and into the real world.

Daniel Sarewitz

Spring 2023

Rational Magic

Why a Silicon Valley culture that was once obsessed with reason is going woo

Tara Isabella Burton

Fall 2021

How to Fix Social Media

A century ago, new media tech brought fake news, privacy woes, and censorship fights — and American democracy tamed it. It’s time for new legislation that revives the wisdom of that era.

Nicholas Carr