Indholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2025 i The New Atlantis

Dear Reader— With some admirable exceptions, American science and tech writing is a drag. The world changes but the words stay the same. You know the ones I mean: privacy … bias … disparate impact … corporate misbehavior … scientists say … we now know … autonomy … informed consent … misinformation … techbros … DEI … woke … fascism … restoring science to its rightful place I’m not here to debunk any of these concepts. But taken together, this mode of thinking has become stifling. It doesn’t get to core questions about what science is or what we are. It diminishes us. It divides us. It offers facts but not truth. The New Atlantis works in a fundamentally different mode. Our aim is not “communication,” “storytelling,” or “afflicting the…

Around the country, pro-choice advocates say, new state-level restrictions on abortion are leaving doctors afraid to intervene in emergency pregnancies. Pro-life advocates say that the letter of these laws is clear — that they explicitly list emergency medical conditions for which doctors can legally intervene, and, beyond that list, also protect doctors who make good-faith judgments in situations in which the life of the mother may be at risk. Who is right? The conflict might reside not in the law itself, but just outside it. At least some doctors are willing to say that what is tying their hands is not the law but hospitals, where legal committees are prioritizing conservative risk management over the needs of women, babies, and even their own physicians. The clearest evidence that this is…

In September, I published a profile in the New York Times of Jay Bhattacharya, the new director under President Trump of the National Institutes of Health, which funds over $40 billion a year in medical research. (An unpaywalled link is available at TheNewAtlantis.com/JB.) Most of the profiles that had been written about Bhattacharya up to that point were framed around depicting him either as the great intellectual villain of the pandemic or as its hero. I think both framings miss that Bhattacharya has been offering a deeper critique of America’s medical research system than the standard populist-right complaints about Covid and wokeness. My aim was to air this critique and ask if he might wind up as a successful reformer. The result: I found Bhattacharya’s reform vision to be more…

You’re not hallucinating the great weirding of America. The visual evidence is everywhere. Start with what you can see. You’re in a small town in Wisconsin, the heart of Normal America. The transgender assistant manager at CVS has a septum piercing, a wolf cut, and a nametag that reads “Finn.” A block away, the 4channer construction worker in the Sam Hyde shooter shirt listens to Bladee and plots his impending virality. At Target, the anime section has metastasized from one shelf to an entire aisle. These aren’t random weirdos and they aren’t teenagers in a phase. Walk through any office park and you’ll find the same aesthetic bleeding through the cubicles: anime stickers on laptops, Discord running on second monitors. They’re a new American type, young but trans-generational, as distinctive…

One day, Mrs. Pengelley came to London seeking the assistance of Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective with the mustache, whose “little grey cells” assist him in solving mysteries. With a troubled look, she tells him that she fears she is being slowly poisoned. The doctor doesn’t see anything much the matter, she says. He attributes the stomach trouble to gastritis. She even sometimes improves, but strangely this happens during the absence of someone in her life, confirming in her a certain suspicion. After listening to her tale with great interest, Poirot agrees to take up the case. He sends the lady back and plans to catch a train the following day to begin his investigation. Discussing the matter with his close friend, Captain Hastings, Poirot admits the case is…

Dominic Burbidge rightly highlights the need for AI ethics to begin with the humans coding the algorithms, emphasizing computer programming as a practice with internal “moral ends” requiring “moral habits.” His essay (“AI Ethics Is Simpler Than You Think,” Fall 2025) suggests that all that AI ethics needs is for practitioners to be informed by good moral theory, which will let them make good, moral algorithms. Pope Leo XIV recently tweeted a similar idea, exhorting “all builders of #AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work.” The sentiment struck a chord: When venture capitalist Marc Andreessen issued a mocking meme in reply, enough people leapt to the pope’s defense that Andreessen deleted the tweet. Burbidge rightly turned to philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in his exposition of how…

Think of what the typical American city looks like today: its hollowed-out core dotted with parking lots, its run-down inner-city neighborhoods, its sprawl. How did this happen? Cities weren’t like this a hundred years ago. They were real cities in the sense in which most people would understand the word, with jobs, businesses, houses, churches, and every other institution related to daily life concentrated around a dense center. Today, cities are almost the inverse of that, with a large population settled out in sprawl, and a hollowed-out center where far fewer people live. Conversations about this transformation typically collapse into a focus on attitudes about cars. On one extreme, urbanists blame an American fetish for SUVs and highway construction for our lack of charming walkable neighborhoods and the destruction of…

In 1997, the World Health Organization released a report declaring an obesity epidemic. In both developed and developing countries, with almost no exceptions, rates of obesity had been rapidly rising, often doubling in the span of a few decades. Obesity, the authors note, “is now so common that it is replacing the more traditional public health concerns, including undernutrition and infectious disease, as one of the most significant contributors to ill health.” Almost thirty years later, the report looks both prophetic and quaint. Its concerns have proved to be warranted — type 2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, certain cancers, heart disease, and a host of other ailments caused or exacerbated by obesity have indeed replaced malnutrition and infectious disease as the primary causes of ill health in many countries.…

When Jack Kevorkian set out for California in 1976, he had every intention of leaving medicine behind in Michigan. The last two decades had been ones of disappointment and defeat. He was nearly fifty, unmarried, and stalled out in his career as chief pathologist at a large hospital in Detroit. So, like many others facing midlife crises in that hangover decade, he packed up his few belongings and headed west to devote himself to art. His idea was to adapt Handel’s Messiah for the big screen. Kevorkian knew next to nothing about filmmaking, but he loved the music passionately. For the next few years, he worked on the project — a frustrating, mentally isolated period in which his passion gradually gave way to a deeper and more consuming obsession. California…

A Times profile of the new NIH director: In September, the New York Times published a profile by our editor of Jay Bhattacharya, the new director of the National Institutes of Health. A follow-up appears in this issue as “Does MAGA Actually Want American Science to Win?” A free version of the profile can be found at TheNewAtlantis.com/JB. NEH helps to fund “The Lonely Neighborhood”: Our essay series won a National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman’s Grant, allowing us to extend it into additional reported pieces. This issue features the second essay in the series, “The Bills That Destroyed Urban America.” Event at St. John’s College with Cosmos Institute: In July, our editor moderated the “AI and the Development of Human Capacities” panel at St. John’s College, hosted by the…