The New Atlantis

Current Issue

No. 77

Summer 2024

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Why We Need Amistics for AI

Tech ethics needs a breakthrough. The Amish have it.

Brian J. A. Boyd

Who Wants to Believe in UFOs?

Strange things in the skies of a clockwork universe

Clare Coffey

Keep Austin Houston?

Why “induced demand” is a tough nut to crack — and whether Texas’s capital city is destined to sprawl

Joseph Lawler and The Editors of The New Atlantis

How Sad Do You Feel Right Now?

The boom in amateur therapists is hurting our children, a new book argues.

Leah Libresco Sargeant

Downtowns Don’t Matter Anymore

Exurbanism is the new urbanism.

Joel Kotkin

Open Wallets, Empty Hearts

Effective altruism asked us to do more good by becoming less human.

Ari Schulman

The Refs Are Working Us

Fact-checking used to be how journalists policed themselves. Now it’s how they police everyone else.

M. Anthony Mills

Virtual Reality Reboots History

The American dream has always meant living in our own fantasy worlds. Maybe it’s time to really go for it.

Charles T. Rubin

The Era of Predictive AI Is Almost Over

“Language models are just glorified autocomplete” has been the critics’ refrain — but reinforcement learning is proving them wrong. New breakthroughs could follow.

Dean W. Ball

Spring 2024

If You Build It, Will They Come?

Austin’s interstate expansion becomes a test case for “induced demand” — and the culture war over faster traffic versus denser cities.

Joseph Lawler

Narcissistic Depressive Technoscience

Why modern man yearns to be replaced, fantasizes of being the one to do it, and how we can stay human instead

Thomas Fuchs

There Is a Planet B

In a new book, the pioneer who figured out how to get to Mars imagines how to stay there.

Rand Simberg

Laboring in the Dark

IVF might sound like an act of taking control, but it felt like an act of surrender.

Charlotte Collingwood

AI Is a Hall of Mirrors

LLMs are giving us a billion ripoffs of what we already are at a moment when we yearn for something new.

Meghan Houser

Golden Eggs

IVF parents shop for good stock at the Ivy Leagues.

Abigail Anthony

Embryos as Schrödinger’s Persons

The Alabama IVF ruling reveals peculiar entities that are neither people nor property until we need them to be.

Leah Libresco Sargeant

Turn on, Tune in, Write Code

How psychedelics went from counterculture to grind culture

Geoff Shullenberger

Taming IVF’s Wild West

Real regulation is long overdue. But consumer protection is not enough.

Emma Waters

Winter 2024

Did Exxon Make It Rain Today?

Why headlines blaming extreme weather on climate change don’t hold up, the peril of catastrophism, and the case that we’re actually safer than ever before

Ted Nordhaus

Barbie vs. Botox

Transhumanism is so over. Wrinkles are so back.

Rachel Altman

Things Used to Work in This Country

An appliance used to be a machine. Now it’s a bureaucracy.

Clare Coffey

Bears in the Villa

For the first time since the fall of the Roman empire, wilderness is returning to Italy. Are Italians ready?

John Last

Surveilling Alone

Home security cameras are booming in an era of rising crime and declining trust. But they’re driving neighbors further apart.

Christine Rosen

A President’s Council on Artificial Intelligence

The White House’s bland solution doesn’t match the problem. Here’s what would.

M. Anthony Mills

Fall 2023

Oiling the Chicken Machine

Queasy about lab-grown meat? Too bad — you’ve pretty much been eating it for decades.

Garth Brown

If Scientists Were Angels

Francis Bacon has been charged with robbing science of its innocence. But what if we’ve all been reading him wrong?

Louise Liebeskind

Who Is The New Atlantis For?

Why 20 years of throwing cold water on utopianism found an audience

Ari Schulman

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Summer 2023

They’re Here…

The AI moment has arrived.

Symposium

Ari Schulman • Brian J. A. Boyd • Adam Elkus • Robert Mariani • Clayton O’Dell • Tess Doezema • Nina Frahm • Daniel Walden • Louise Liebeskind

Special Series: “Reality: A Post-Mortem”

An America of Secrets

Democracy dies in darkness.

Jon Askonas

Reality Is Just a Game Now

Scoring points, hunting for clues, building plotlines, revealing the Grand Narrative... Why are people acting like the national fracture is fun?

Jon Askonas

How Stewart Made Tucker

A world of authentic, post-spin journalism: The dream Jon Stewart spent a decade making real is now America’s waking nightmare. What did he get so wrong?

Jon Askonas

What Was the Fact?

Here lies a beloved friend of social harmony (ca. 1500–2000). It was nice while it lasted.

Jon Askonas

Reality Is Just a Game Now

Scoring points, hunting for clues, building plotlines, revealing the Grand Narrative... Why are people acting like the national fracture is fun?

Jon Askonas

How Stewart Made Tucker

A world of authentic, post-spin journalism: The dream Jon Stewart spent a decade making real is now America’s waking nightmare. What did he get so wrong?

Jon Askonas

What Was the Fact?

Here lies a beloved friend of social harmony (ca. 1500–2000). It was nice while it lasted.

Jon Askonas

Our aim is a culture in which science and technology work for, not on, human beings.

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Special Series

Reality: A Post-Mortem

An essay series on why everyone but you is going insane

Special Series

Recovering the Organism

From the Archives

Fall 2019

After Climate Despair

The hope for a global conversion to austerity has failed to stop climate change. What comes next?

Matt Frost

Winter/Spring 2013

Do Elephants Have Souls?

On the evidence for non-human intelligence, awareness, and emotion

Caitrin Keiper

Summer 2006

Shop Class as Soulcraft

The case for the manual trades

Matthew B. Crawford

Spring 2003

Ageless Bodies, Happy Souls

Biotechnology and the pursuit of perfection

Leon R. Kass

Winter 2004

The Human Explorer

Why sending robots is not enough

Robert Zubrin

Winter 2023

No Other Options

Newly revealed documents depict a Canadian euthanasia regime that efficiently ushers the vulnerable to a “beautiful” death.

Alexander Raikin

Spring/Summer 2016

Saving Science

Science isn’t self-correcting, it’s self-destructing. To save the enterprise, scientists must come out of the lab and into the real world.

Daniel Sarewitz

Spring 2023

Rational Magic

Why a Silicon Valley culture that was once obsessed with reason is going woo

Tara Isabella Burton

Fall 2021

How to Fix Social Media

A century ago, new media tech brought fake news, privacy woes, and censorship fights — and American democracy tamed it. It’s time for new legislation that revives the wisdom of that era.

Nicholas Carr