by Brendan P. Foht

The CRISPR technique has reignited the decades-old debate over genetic modification. Brendan P. Foht argues that genetic therapy should be used to treat and prevent disease in actual patients, whether those patients are born or unborn, and that schemes for enhancing the human race through genetic modifications — or for protecting it from genetic modifications — should not interfere with our obligations to future generations.

• Sara Seager on how — and why — we search for Earth-like planets orbiting distant stars
• Marcelo Gleiser on why the findings of physics should help ease our sense of cosmic angst
• Luke A. Barnes on what it means to say that the universe appears “fine-tuned” for life

Miss Marple and the Problem of

Modern Identity

by Alan Jacobs

Agatha Christie’s famous amateur sleuth uses her knowledge of human nature to discern if people really are who they say they are — one of the central problems of modernity. Alan Jacobs reflects on the differences between being known by one's neighbors and being known by the state.

by Lee Lane

The recent surge in oil and gas production might seem to give the United States increased leverage over authoritarian regimes that depend on oil exports. But, as Lee Lane argues, the geopolitical benefits of American oil production may have been overestimated, and the U.S. oil boom may end up bringing our chief geopolitical rivals — China and Russia — together.

Love Conquers All

by Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey

A number of idealistic communities popped up in nineteenth-century America, each dedicated to its own vision of freeing human beings from society’s constraints. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s months spent at one of these communities became the basis of The Blithedale Romance, his novel about how ill-conceived schemes of liberation can do more to suppress the human soul than to free it. Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey revisit Hawthorne’s tale of dashed dreams.