 Four essays on popular novels, classic and contemporary, that address science, medicine, and the human condition.
[Detail from frontispiece of 1831 edition of Frankenstein (Wikimedia)] |
 The Lost Prestige of Nuclear Physicsby N. J. SlabbertNuclear physics was once considered the pinnacle of man’s effort to know reality; its image was tarnished by association with the bomb’s destructive violence. N. J. Slabbert, tracing the drop in public esteem, argues for a return to nuclear science and technology. The Fusion Illusionby Max Schulz
Test Ban Treaty, Take Twoby Christopher A. FordIs the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty a constructive step towards disarmament, or an underhanded attempt to weaken the United States? With the Senate poised to reconsider its 1999 rejection of the treaty, Christopher A. Ford explains why its hopeful supporters and fearful opponents both miss its true significance. Romancing the Atomby Robert R. JohnsonAt the dawn of the atomic age, with an arms race underway and peaceful uses for nuclear power on the horizon, thousands of hopeful prospectors took to the mountains in search of uranium. Robert R. Johnson tells the story of this forgotten rush — and of how it may be returning. ALSO: The editors of The New Atlantis denounce dithering on Yucca Mountain. |
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The New York Times bestseller SHOP CLASS AS SOULCRAFT
MORE: For more reviews, excerpts, and interviews, click here. |
by Kendra Okonski
A growing international movement claims that access to clean water is a human right; that water should not be bought and sold as a commodity; and that government, not private enterprise, should distribute water. But how would this work in practice? Can governments be trusted to keep the taps flowing? Kendra Okonski explains where the water-rights movement goes wrong and how markets can effectively preserve and deliver clean water. 
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[Photo courtesy NSF]
What and When Is Death?by Alan RubensteinPatients suspended at the threshold between life and death, having lost all brain activity but biologically maintained by life-support technology, present a bioethical conundrum: We do not take vital organs from living bodies, and cannot take them from decaying ones. Defining death precisely is imperative for the ethical treatment of patients and the ethical practice of organ transplantation. Alan Rubenstein examines the philosophical history and controversy surrounding the phenomenon of “total brain failure.”
Embryos in Limboby Jacqueline Pfeffer MerrillWhen fertility treatment centers first started freezing embryos in the early 1980s, no one expected the number of stored embryos to rise to 400,000 by 2003. How did this happen? How do families think about their frozen embryos and what should happen to them? Jacqueline Pfeffer Merrill turns to the patients weighing the fate of their embryos. |
 The Road to Rationingby Paul Howard and David GratzerBerkeley political scientist Jacob S. Hacker has focused on health care policy for more than a decade; his ideas are increasingly influential among Democrats. But the reform plan that he proposes—a plan similar to President Obama’s—would result in massive new government involvement in health care. Paul Howard and David Gratzer outline Hacker’s plan and its flaws, and offer three commonsense ideas for restraining health care costs. Socialism and Cancerby David GratzerHealth care in the United States is worse than what you’d get in Colombia, Saudi Arabia, or Cuba—at least according to liberal critics and international bureaucrats. Not so fast, says David Gratzer. Far from dismal, American health care is by some important measures the best in the world, and a close look at the statistics reveals a link between market forces and quality medicine. Fixing American Health Careby Joseph V. KennedyThe American system of employer-based health insurance is a happenstance of history, the result of wage controls put in place during World War II. It distorts the health care market by separating value from price: workers are unaware of the true cost of the medical services they receive. In this overview essay, Joseph V. Kennedy examines how competition could be used to maximize quality and minimize cost. ALSO: The editors of The New Atlantis on the stakes in the health care fight. RELATED: For more on health care policy, read James C. Capretta’s health care policy blog Diagnosis. |
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The Ethics of Counterinsurgency
by Keith Pavlischek
The American military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have raised questions about how to ethically engage in irregular warfare, particularly when facing insurgents and terrorists. Turning to just war theory for guidance, Keith Pavlischek argues that it is indeed possible to wage a morally acceptable counterinsurgency—but he wonders whether international law has kept pace with military realities. READ MORE
[Photo courtesy DOD]
 by P. W. SingerThe conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have proved the value of robots in warfare: Unmanned systems are deployed on the ground alongside American troops, as well as patrolling and attacking from the skies. Robots now on the drawing board promise to be even better at sparing friends and hunting enemies. P. W. Singer describes how unmanned systems are revolutionizing warfare and explains how we will have to rethink the laws of war as robots become more capable and lethal. [Photo illustration based on image from DOD] |
Fighting Fake Drugs
by Roger Bate
Public health efforts in developing countries depend on inexpensive medicine, but how can generics be reliably distinguished from counterfeits? Roger Bate offers two approaches to testing imported drugs in Africa. READ MORE
China’s Organ Market
by S. Elizabeth Forsythe
For Chinese patients needing organ transplants as well as foreigners frustrated by long waiting lists in the West, the announcement of an official, regulated Chinese organ market may seem promising. But China’s record on transplantation does not inspire confidence. S. Elizabeth Forsythe explores disturbing reports of organs harvested from prisoners. READ MORE
Nutrition and Tradition
by John Schwenkler
Legions of dieticians and nutrition experts command our attention, obedience, and guilt — but do they really know any more than your grandmother about what makes a healthy meal? John Schwenkler counsels turning to the wisdom of the ages for dietary guidance. READ MORE
Disability Politics
by Ari Ne’eman
Conservatives should not be so quick to write off the disability rights movement as exclusively a friend of the left. Rather, Ari Ne’eman argues, a closer look at the issues that disability-rights advocates truly care about, specifically issues related to bioethics and the new eugenics, reveals an opportunity to forge a new alliance. READ MORE
Too Hot to Handle
by Jordan R. Raney
The climate-change debate has become highly combustible, with extremists on both sides fanning the flames with their exaggerations. Jordan R. Raney reviews Red Hot Lies, a prime example of this genre, and counsels less rhetoric and more reason from all sides. 
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Medicine and Moral Authority
by Daniel P. Sulmasy
Once a hallowed vocation, the practice of medicine now tends to unchecked consumerism. Daniel P. Sulmasy reads Trusting Doctors, a study of the relationship between American medicine and religion at the turn of the twentieth century, to reveal what we’re missing. READ MORE
Irving Kristol, whose career as an essayist and editor reshaped American politics, has died. The breadth of his interests and the force and clarity of his arguments have been a model for us; his love of country has been an inspiration. Our condolences to the Kristol family.
—The Editors
- Science, Technology, and The Public Interest
- Remembrances in the New York Times, Washington Post, London Telegraph
- Kristol’s articles in The Public Interest, in Commentary, in the Weekly Standard, and in The New Republic
AIDS Relief and Moral Myopia
by Travis Kavulla
In Africa, AIDS is not just a medical problem but also a moral and spiritual one. As Travis Kavulla explains, if Western public health officials fail to take into account the day-to-day role of religion and the supernatural in African social life, their attempts to combat the spread of AIDS will not gain traction.
[Photo courtesy PEPFAR]
Keeping Books Safe
by Elizabeth Mullaney Nicol
Old books provide American children with a gateway to the genius and imagination of the past. But a new federal regulation bans the sale of all children’s books published before 1985 that do not meet stringent lead-content standards. As used booksellers scramble to clear their shelves, Elizabeth Mullaney Nicol argues in defense of out-of-print books that may soon be irretrievably lost. READ MORE
[Photo courtesy Roy Costello]
Leon Kass on the Sciences and the Humanities
On May 22, New Atlantis contributor Dr. Leon Kass delivered the Jefferson Lecture, the prestigious lecture hosted each year by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He used the occasion to describe his path from the sciences to the humanities.
- Lecture: “‘Looking for an Honest Man’: Reflections of an Unlicensed Humanist”
- Introduction: Remarks introducing Kass by New Atlantis contributing editor Wilfred M. McClay
- Appreciation: An essay honoring Kass by New Atlantis senior editor Yuval Levin
- Conversation: An interview with Kass, published in Humanities magazine
- More: Our archive of Dr. Kass’s essays and books
Reality and the Postmodern Wink
by James Bowman
We are all postmodernists now. At the movies, the director, the audience, and sometimes even the characters are all in on a little secret: none of it is real. Bring back the fantasy, urges James Bowman, a self-declared curmudgeon. Only by taking itself seriously once again can art achieve its purpose—to seem more true than truth. READ MORE
Nations, Liberalism,
and Science
by Peter Augustine Lawler
What is the relationship between liberalism and the nation? Can liberalism have a future without the nation, in an age of global cosmopolitans? And how, Peter Augustine Lawler asks, has our changing understanding of the natural world and man’s place in it—from natural theology to modern science—changed personhood and politics? READ MORE
by Ari N. Schulman
Describing the brain and even the mind in terms taken from computer science—inputs and outputs, software and circuits—is now so common that it’s easy to miss its significance. But, as Ari N. Schulman explains, this way of talking reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how both minds and computers work, as well as a central failure of artificial intelligence research: by relying on the premise that the mind is a computer, it cannot produce computers that are like the mind.
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- Futurisms: Unmanning the front lines.
- Text Patterns: Living in a tweet-only world.
- Diagnosis: Rahm Emanuel vs. Obamacare.
- Is political science really science?: Contributing editor Wilfred M. McClay asks whether professors of politics should think of themselves as scientists.
- Contributing editor Matthew B. Crawford’s book Shop Class as Soulcraft, which began as a New Atlantis essay, has been selected as one of Publisher Weekly’s top ten books of the year.
- When Folly is Forever: Editor Adam Keiper reviews a new book that argues that forgetting has become too costly and that we will always be haunted by our digital pasts.
- New essays by senior editor Christine Rosen on the new Winnie-the-Pooh book and contributing editor Alan Jacobs on The Wind in the Willows.
- Form and Color in the Animal Kingdom: In the latest issue of his NetFuture newsletter, New Atlantis contributing editor Steve Talbott reports on provocative recent scientific writings about morphology, metabolism, and mutations.
- Grow Up: Senior editor Christine Rosen argues that today’s new generation of parents, raised on constant reminders of their own individual uniqueness, refuses to see themselves as merely the latest in a long line of people who have reared children.
- Lifestyles of the Honest and Awkward: We are “in the early stages of a debate,” writes senior editor Christine Rosen, “about whether autism-spectrum conditions are disorders to be medicalized (and, presumably, cured) or merely more extreme expressions of normal behavior that we should treat with greater tolerance.”
- How Much Does It Cost to Go to Space?: New Atlantis contributing editor Robert Zubrin on how junk cost estimates supplied to the Augustine Committee threaten to sink NASA’s human spaceflight program.
- Accepting the Challenge Before Us: The testimony of Robert Zubrin before the Augustine Committee considering options for the future of America’s space program.
The Rise of Cyber-Schools
by Liam Julian
Demand for online learning is on the rise, but not everyone is embracing it. Liam Julian describes the conflict over alternative instructional methods, the students and parents they can empower, and the vested interests that oppose them.
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