Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2025 i The New Atlantis

Shortly after the outbreak of the Covid pandemic in early 2020, rumors started to circulate that the virus that triggered it came from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. This story was quickly rejected by expert institutions and mainstream media outlets as an empirically baseless and even racist conspiracy theory — a verdict propagated through social media by fact checkers who deemed such claims to be misinformation. The scientific community’s “overwhelming” conclusion, declared a now infamous letter in The Lancet in March 2020, was that “this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” and jumped from animals to humans. Yet as the pandemic worsened, it became clear that the alleged scientific consensus around the natural origins of Covid-19 was tenuous at best and disingenuous at worst. By the spring of 2021, the so-called “lab…

America now has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to open the space frontier by initiating a sustained program of human exploration of Mars. Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship launch system will soon be operational, offering payload delivery capability comparable to a Saturn V Moon rocket at about five percent of the cost. Musk has positioned himself close to President Donald Trump, who at his inauguration in January promised that his administration would be “launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” As far as meeting the central political and technical conditions for making a bold reach to the Red Planet are concerned, it’s game on. There are, however, several problems. First and foremost, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the government agency that one would expect to lead…

In the spring of 2020, as social distancing became the norm and almost the whole world retreated online, one industry particularly struggled to rework its business model: pornography. For its product, six feet apart might as well be six miles. It didn’t take long, though, before the market worked its magic and hit upon a solution. A U.K.-based site, OnlyFans, had developed a subscription service for adult-content creators. With pornographic actors unable to shoot in the studio, many set up direct-to-consumer services on the platform. Meanwhile, with bars and clubs shut down, sex-starved singles quickly provided a surge in demand to match the surging supply. Between March and April, the user and creator bases both jumped by 75 percent. By the end of the year, the site had 85 million…

If you study air and space disasters, you will notice a recurring pattern: there are often well-placed observers who know almost immediately what went wrong. Sometimes those observers had even been warning that a disaster exactly like that was coming — that it was just a matter of time. A few examples: • The Max 8’s faulty pilot override: In 2019, when an Ethiopia Airlines flight fell out of the sky near Addis Ababa, within a day, numerous media articles speculated that the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, which was designed to override pilot controls and push the plane’s nose down when it detected a potential stall, had mistakenly triggered during normal flight. The official investigation showed that this was indeed the direct cause —as well as the cause of the…

On February 7, in a classic Friday evening news dump, the Trump administration set off one of those frantic controversies that seem to be our fate for the next few years. A tweet from the official X account of the National Institutes of Health declared: Last year, $9B of the $35B that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) granted for research was used for administrative overhead, what is known as “indirect costs.” Today, NIH lowered the maximum indirect cost rate research institutions can charge the government to 15%, above what many major foundations allow and much lower than the 60%+ that some institutions charge the government today. This change will save more than $4B a year effective immediately. The tweet was backed up by a more formal memo justifying the…