Indholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2025 i The New Atlantis

A NEW SERIES Americans are living ever more isolated lives. We get married later, start families later, have fewer children, and report more loneliness than ever before. Everyone suspects that new technology has something to do with this. But what if we’re also suffering from the failure of a very old technology? Somehow it has become astonishingly expensive to buy a house in the United States. The median house sale price is now $417,000. Fifty years ago, in today’s dollars, it was $232,000. And the young are getting priced out: In 1981, the median first-time homebuyer was 29 years old. Today he or she is 38. In this new essay series, originally reported by Joseph Lawler, we will explore how the U.S. housing market suffers from a series of distortions…

Editor’s Note On February 24, The New Atlantis co-hosted the event “Dignity and Dynamism: The Future of Conservative Technology Policy” at the American Enterprise Institute. In the event’s keynote address, Katherine Boyle, a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and cofounder of its American Dynamism practice, made the case for a new alliance between the tech industry and the family against the overweening power of the state: We are now living through a generational political shift whereby an industry of builders can choose to ally with the most organic, nurturing, and future-focused institution that nature has ever created: the family. And I believe it’s in the best interest of both tech and the family to do so. Editor Ari Schulman, in a conversation with Boyle on stage…

Big government, not the free market, is the reason the suburban single-family home has become the symbol of the American lifestyle. Across the United States, it is functionally illegal to build housing like what you find on Elfreth’s Alley, Philadelphia, one of the most photographed residential areas in the country, famous for its gorgeous row houses in the middle of the city. At the same time, the federal government subsidizes the construction of McMansions in greenfield locations miles from the nearest town center. Thanks to incentives to take out large long-term mortgages, for many buyers the key consideration in buying a house is how well it can store and generate financial value — overriding considerations like location, amenities, and beauty. Here’s how the system, the American system, works: First, the…

PART 3 What Keeps the Lights On Put a bagel in a toaster oven and push a button. In a few seconds, heating elements inside the oven glow red and heat the bagel. The action seems simple— after all, ten-year-olds routinely toast bagels without adult supervision. Matters look different if you inquire into what must happen to make the oven work. Pushing the button engages the mechanism of an incomprehensibly vast multinational network: the North American electrical grid. The numbers are dazzling. The United States alone has more than 6 million miles of power lines, enough to stretch to the Moon and back twelve times. An average U.S. single-family home contains almost 200 pounds of copper wire — and there are more than 80 million U.S. single-family homes. The Empire…

In the fall of 2018, a man named Akihiko Kondo married a doll named Hatsune Miku — not a doll in the figurative sense of a beloved woman, to be clear, but an actual plush doll, with long turquoise hair. The doll was the physical version of a computer-generated pop star created in 2007, who performs online, and “live” on real stages as a hologram. The bride wore white, and Mr. Kondo a matching tuxedo. Their union is in many respects a symbol of the stresses facing marriage today, and a harbinger of what is to come. Across the industrialized world, marriage rates are plummeting. In Japan, where Mr. Kondo despaired of finding a human spouse, marriage rates fell from 9.3 per one thousand inhabitants in 1960 to just 4.1…

There is a profound paradox in great cities today. We are accustomed to thinking of our cities as engines of creation, where creatives and disrupters of all stripes go to prosper. Yet at the same time we see widespread fears that in the future the very urban structures that have come to be the incubators of change will be particularly vulnerable to the destructive powers they have unleashed. Futurist-oriented thinkers have easily envisioned city- and civilization-destroying conflicts since at least World War I. With the advent of nuclear weapons, such futures became even easier to imagine. Add to that decades of the looming specter of environmental destruction, with its direct or indirect consequences for the viability of cities, and dystopian urban futures only become more plausible. Covid seems to have…