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March 14, 2023
No One Is in Control
In 1878, a wave of yellow fever swept through the American South and spread out through the Mississippi River Valley. Along with cholera, “yellow jack,” as it was known—after the yellow quarantine flags displayed on ships afflicted by the contagion—had long been a scourge of the American South. As far back as the 1790s, Congress…
October 24, 2022
Saving Liberalism from Itself
The Crisis of Liberalism Liberalism is in crisis. Its defenders, who see liberalism as a bulwark against tyranny, fear that illiberalism now threatens to overwhelm liberal democracy. Its critics, who say liberalism is a failure that erodes community and tradition, welcome a “post-liberal” order. Today’s liberalism debate gives the false impression that this crisis is…
June 30, 2022
Supreme Court Holds EPA Can’t Cap Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Power Plants
The Supreme Court just decided “the most closely watched environmental case in decades,” West Virginia v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In the 6-3 opinion, the Court holds that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cannot use Clean Air Act §111(d) to set power-sector-wide greenhouse gas emissions standards for state power plants. The Court also explains that the…
March 28, 2022
Illiberalism’s True Colors
Nineteen-fifty-six—when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary—was, according to the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, the year “British communists lived on the edge of the political equivalent of a collective nervous breakdown.” If 2016 did not constitute such a year for conservatives in the West, then perhaps 2022—when Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine—will, at least for those…
February 3, 2022
Improving Research Funding Efficiencies and Proposal Diversity Through NSF Science Lottery Grants
The United States no longer leads the world in basic science. There is growing recognition of a gap in translational activities — the fruits of American research do not convert to economic benefits. As policymakers consider a slew of proposals that aim to restore American competitiveness with once-in-a-generation investments into the National Science Foundation (NSF), less discussion has been…
January 25, 2022
Is This Still an Emergency?
With a new variant running rampant, an enormous wave of cases, hospitals under strain, mask mandates returning, states of emergency being redeclared, and schools reverting to virtual learning, it is easy to get the sense that we have slid back to where we started. A raft of news articles in late December described the perilous and demoralizing feeling that the country…
December 23, 2021
Science as Craftwork with Integrity
Editor’s Note: The coronavirus pandemic has brought onto the center stage of public debate our deep, although often unarticulated, disagreements about the nature of scientific knowledge and the authority of scientific experts. Seeking insights on these questions, we asked former New Atlantis associate editor M. Anthony Mills, who has written widely on philosophy, science, and expertise, to…
November 18, 2021
A More Productive Way to Spread Federal Science Funding Around
In an age of many irreconcilable partisan divisions, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have quietly come to agree on at least one thing: the federal government must do more to shore up American science and technology. To that end, various pieces of bipartisan legislation aim to revitalize US research and development (R&D) by increasing funding for federal science agencies, particularly the…
October 1, 2021
Manufacturing Consensus
After having been told for over a year that there was a scientific consensus that Covid had a natural origin — and that any suggestion of a possible lab leak in Wuhan was tantamount to a xenophobic conspiracy theory — it now appears that there is not, and never was, such a consensus. And the…