The New Atlantis - A Journal of Technology & Society

Google.gov

Amid growing calls to break up Google, are we missing a quiet alignment between “smart” government and the universal information engine?

by Adam J. White

Noah Berger/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Algorithmic Injustice

Don’t blame the algorithm — as long as there are racial disparities in the justice system, sentencing software can never be entirely fair

by Tafari Mbadiwe

For the Love of Mars

Why settling the Red Planet can lift us from our antihuman malaise

by James Poulos

Martin Hargreaves

Shakespeare’s Worlds of Science

New scholarship reveals a Bard brooding over the science of his day. What can we learn from his vision of cosmic upheaval?

by Natalie Elliot

The Idea Incarnate

How Dr. Frankenstein’s thoughts ran away from him

Brendan P. Foht

Responsible Frankensteins?

The trouble with the idea that we can play God, but ethically

David M. Buisán (JellyLondon.com)

Quantum Poetics

Why physics can’t get rid of metaphor

by Samuel Matlack

The Evangelist of
Molecular Biology

James D. Watson’s unfinished quest
to master genetic destiny

by Algis Valiunas

The Undeath of Cinema

Why digital resurrection is so creepy — and how it will make Hollywood’s creative crisis worse

by Alexi Sargeant

Making Technological Miracles

by Mark P. Mills

We need creative breakthroughs in energy, medicine, and transportation. How can we plan for them? Great inventions are often unpredictable and serendipitous — and so curiosity-driven research remains essential for technological progress. EUROfusion

The Tech Backlash We Really Need

by L. M. Sacasas

Silicon Valley will only be strengthened by its present scandals unless we ask deeper questions.

by Doug Sikkema

Modern disenchantment may be a myth, but it is still the water in which we swim.

by Waleed Al-Shobakky

A Saudi experiment in education aims to solve the West’s science malaise — and become a global research powerhouse.

Aditya Prabaswara (CC)

Must Science Be Useful?

Letters from scientists and policy experts on our widely read article “Saving Science,” with a response from Daniel Sarewitz.

Morgan Ray Schweitzer

Till Tomorrow

by Adam Roberts

Three recent books go a long way toward humanizing the abstract “time” of physicists.

by Joseph E. Davis

Why do we have an “epidemic” of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder? The common explanations miss the underlying reasons our society is disposed to medicalize ADHD.

by James K. A. Smith

Social science’s big flaw isn’t relativism or the idea that social situations shape human action. The real arguments are over competing visions of the Good — and how the pursuit of the Good shapes our motivations.

by Aaron Rothstein

The emphasis on patient satisfaction can turn doctors into little more than customer-service providers. Reform in medicine must bring both better curing and caring.

by Murillo Pagnotta

The concept of information has become central to modern biology, especially to the field of genetics, where DNA is often taken to be simply an organism’s instruction manual. But, Murillo Pagnotta argues, much “info-talk” is faulty or oversimplified — a failing with implications for how we think about nature, nurture, growth, and evolution.

Evolution and the Purposes of Life

by Stephen L. Talbott

Modern biology has tried to abolish purpose from living things — even as biologists implicitly attribute purposes and goals to molecules, genes, and the evolutionary process of natural selection. Stephen L. Talbott exposes the hidden assumptions behind the view that purpose in nature is just an illusion, and shows why purpose cannot be ignored or explained away.

Did Thomas Kuhn Kill Truth?

by David Kordahl

A debate on the nature of truth turns into a squabble over whether the father of the “paradigm shift” threw an ashtray at Errol Morris’s head.

Bill Pierce/Getty

The Joy of Cryptozoology

by Clare Coffey

Why explore the cognitive hinterlands?

Popperfoto/Getty

Stories of Faith & Science

Faith and the Fear of Death

Jonathan Jong on confronting our mortality from the lab and the altar

Encounter in the Vale

Jonathan Mosedale recounts a story of hiking, frailty, and glimpsing the divine

Dom Escott

Richard Feynman and the Pleasure Principle

by Algis Valiunas

The story of the vibrant, vivid, heroically fruitful and joyous life of a scientific legend.

Permission: Melanie Jackson Agency, LLC; courtesy the Archives, California Institute of Technology.

The Political Path to GPS

by Anthony Paletta

How war and peace forged the universal map

by Olga Rachello

The human stories of people who don’t want to be human

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Wokeness and Myth on Campus

by Alan Jacobs

The standard critique of college protests cries “free exchange of ideas!” But the students are motivated by social needs more fundamental than the ones affirmed by liberal norms.

Middlebury College