Indholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2025 i The New Atlantis

A curious feature of the last few years of anxieties about AI has been how they favor some dystopian fears over others. Right now, because of ChatGPT’s disarmingly natural conversation skills, we see the domination of worries about AIs becoming new, alien minds. Will AI models become conscious? Will we lose control of them? Will they outcompete humanity in the struggle for existence? But these fears remain abstract and indistinct. Meanwhile, a more concrete dystopian future is coming into focus, although it does not receive nearly as much attention: widespread geneticengineering. It is quite possible that the most immediate threat AI poses to humanity is not that its superhuman intelligence will beat us in the game of natural selection, but that it will unleash the power of artificial selection to…

As a child, Marcy was chubby. Her mom was struggling with her weight, too, but she took drugs to keep it down. Fen-phen seemed to work, but it made her cranky, so Marcy was not a fan. When Marcy was fifteen, her mom took her to the doctor and got her on something similar. Marcy hated how jittery it made her feel, so she quit. After that she tried every diet on the books. She got results, but they were always temporary. This went on for decades. By the time Marcy started hearing about Ozempic, she was, to put it mildly, a skeptic. And not just of the drugs but of the whole scheme as she saw it: take the drugs or follow the diet, lose weight; go off the…

Some years ago, my colleagues and I used to joke that after the revolution, all essays about climate change would be written by Bill McKibben. This was during the final years of the Obama administration and the first Trump administration, when McKibben was ubiquitous in the mainstream media. In every year between 2015 and 2021, he published at least two and up to as many as six articles in the New York Times. At the same time, he was writing a regular column at the New Yorker while also publishing in virtually every leading center-left publication in the country: the New Republic, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, the Nation. No major legacy publication, it seemed, was exempt. McKibben’s revolution, though, is looking tenuous these days. The tactics and rhetoric of…

I began this series of articles by describing a destination wedding that made me think of Thomas Jefferson. As I was writing this afterword, I went to another wedding in a faraway place, which put me in mind of another president, Calvin Coolidge. The groom was a career military man from a conservative Catholic family. The bride’s family was liberal and Jewish. As I talked with the families, it became clear that they had strongly diverging ideas about issues like crime, immigration, religion, economics, and the environment. It is commonplace to observe that in the United States, and every other Western nation, these divisions have become so heated that threats of civil war and government collapse have become familiar news headlines. But at the reception there was a shared sense…

Scientific knowledge achieved through years of research, and accepted as true by experts, is rejected by President Trump. It’s rejected by his cabinet. And it’s rejected with the apparent support of a majority of Congress and a majority of voters. Climate change is nothing at all to worry about, vaccines, on the other hand, cause autism, and draconian tariffs are actually good for the economy. But rejection of settled scientific truths is not enough for the president. With government funding on the chopping block for efforts ranging from space science and cancer research to weather prediction and the training of future scientists, Trump is also mounting a historically unprecedented attack on the scientific institutions tasked with discovering the future truths upon which human progress depends. So it’s easy enough to…