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.
Charles C. Mann

Current Issue

No. 80

Spring 2025

View Issue
An Essay in Three Parts
Policy Sea Changes Under Trump 2

Stop Hacking Humans
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

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”
  • ⠀ ⠀
  • Breakfast for Eight Billion
    Fertilization, irrigation, genetics: the three practices that let us feed the whole world for the first time in history
  • ⠀ ⠀
  • 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.

More from Spring 2025
Winter 2025

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

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

Fall 2024

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

What We Should Build

... and probably could soon if we tried

Giant nets to clean garbage from the ocean  •  Homes where old people and disabled people can help each other out  •  Chains of geothermal power stations to keep the Yellowstone supervolcano from destroyi