The New Atlantis

Current Issue

No. 80

Spring 2025

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Special Series

How the System Works

An ongoing essay series on the hidden mechanisms that support modern life — and what happens if we don’t maintain them

We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It
Introducing “How the System Works”
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Breakfast for Eight Billion
Fertilization, irrigation, genetics: the three practices that let us feed the whole world for the first time in history
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A Spring in Every Kitchen
There is so little fresh surface water on Earth that if you collected it all into a ball, it would barely reach across New York City. Running water is a miracle — but the technology that brings it to us and takes the waste away is actually thousands of years old. The only barrier to staying hydrated today is political will.

An Essay in Three Parts

Will AI Be Alive?

What lies ahead and how to face it well

Brian J. A. Boyd

Gaining Situational Awareness About the Coming Artificial General Intelligence

How to see clearly what lies ahead

Brian J. A. Boyd

AI Will Seem to Be Alive

How to judge prudently what kinds of beings they will be

Brian J. A. Boyd

We Must Steward, Not Subjugate Nor Worship AI

How to act rightly in response

Brian J. A. Boyd

Gaining Situational Awareness About the Coming Artificial General Intelligence

How to see clearly what lies ahead

Brian J. A. Boyd

AI Will Seem to Be Alive

How to judge prudently what kinds of beings they will be

Brian J. A. Boyd

We Must Steward, Not Subjugate Nor Worship AI

How to act rightly in response

Brian J. A. Boyd

Policy Sea Changes Under Trump 2

From cradle to grave, surrogacy to smartphones to gender surgery to euthanasia, Americans are using technology to shortcut human nature — and shortchange ourselves. Here is a new agenda for turning technology away from hacking humans and toward healing them.

Brad Littlejohn, Clare Morell, Emma Waters

The Deeper Question Raised by the NIH Grant Overhaul

Is the Trump administration’s goal to run the government or oppose it?

Yuval Levin

The Mars Dream Is Back — Here’s How to Make It Actually Happen

Between SpaceX’s breakthroughs and Trump’s inaugural promise, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity. But it can’t be realized as an eccentric’s project or a pork banquet. Here’s a science-driven program that could get astronauts on the Red Planet by 2031.

Robert Zubrin

How Virologists Lost the Gain-of-Function Debate

For years, scientists kept the debate about risky virus research among themselves. Then Covid happened. As President Trump prepares to crack down on virology research, the expert community must face up to its own failures.

M. Anthony Mills

The Deeper Question Raised by the NIH Grant Overhaul

Is the Trump administration’s goal to run the government or oppose it?

Yuval Levin

The Mars Dream Is Back — Here’s How to Make It Actually Happen

Robert Zubrin

How Virologists Lost the Gain-of-Function Debate

M. Anthony Mills

More from Spring 2025

If the Reagan Airport crash was “waiting to happen,” why didn’t anyone stop it?

It’s surprisingly common for “it’s just a matter of time” warnings to get ignored in aviation. It suggests rot in the air safety system — but also beyond it.

Ari Schulman

Are We Under-Bubbled?

Why the future needs more people willing to be duped

Leah Libresco Sargeant

You Are Not an Ape-Brained Meat Sack

In quantum mechanics, a physics that cares

Spencer A. Klavan

Winter 2025

The New Control Society

The gatekeepers are dying. Why is everything so mid?

Jon Askonas

We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It

Introducing “How the System Works,” a series on the hidden mechanisms that support modern life

Charles C. Mann

Breakfast for Eight Billion

Fertilization, irrigation, genetics: the three practices that let us feed the whole world for the first time in history

Charles C. Mann

A Pattern of Noncompliance

Ontario’s euthanasia regulators have tracked 428 cases of possible criminal violations — and not referred a single case to law enforcement, say leaked documents.

Alexander Raikin

The Tyranny of Now

There’s no time like the present to revisit the warning of forgotten media theorist Harold Innis: “Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult.”

Nicholas Carr

Can You Solve a Lifestyle Epidemic Without Lifestyle Gurus?

When you’ve got a “diseases of civilization” crisis, you’re gonna get some weirdos.

Garth Brown

Make Suburbia Weird

The traditional selling point of the suburbs: they’re nature preserves for Living, set apart from the real world. What if we made them little fiefdoms instead?

Clare Coffey

So You’ve Decided To Carry Your Brain Around

Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience looks at how two decades of digital tech have alienated us from our bodies and the world

Nicholas Clairmont

One to Zero

How to destroy the future

Charles Carman

Fall 2024

The Builder Issue

The Editors of The New Atlantis

Ethics Won’t Save Us From AI

Why rationalists can’t answer the doomers or the boomers

R. J. Snell

If We Can Do It In Baltimore…

Why it takes a disaster to build fast

Aidan Mackenzie

We Don’t Need This Much Permitting

What matters is whether building projects actually follow the law, not whether they promise to in advance.

Michael Catanzaro

For Whom Shall We Build?

Marc Andreessen wants us to go faster. But what does that matter if nobody’s left in the car?

Yuval Levin

What Permitting Reform Can’t Fix

It’s not enough to remove roadblocks — you have to want to drive.

Tristan Abbey

Will Anyone Vote for Abundance?

“Time to build” is a great idea. But it’s not clear that liberals or conservatives really want it.

Thomas Hochman

Why the Progress Debate Goes Nowhere

You say “jetpacks,” I say “cabin in the woods,” let’s call the whole thing off.

Samuel Matlack

Mass. Exodus

Massachusetts is one of the richest states in the country — because it’s pricing out its own middle class. Why did the state stop building enough to house them?

Joseph Lawler

Collection | Fall 2024