Skip to content

All Articles


The massive damage humans have done to the natural world has provoked a backlash that could be just as dangerous, or more. There is a growing global rejection of technology and almost anything human-made in favor of whatever is more ‘natural’. But a simplistic rejection of modern technologies eliminates many of our best options for solving the problems we’ve created.
The massive damage humans have done to the natural world has provoked a backlash that could be just as dangerous, or more. There is a growing global rejection of technology and almost anything human-made in favor of whatever is more “natural.” But a simplistic rejection of modern technologies eliminates many of our best options for solving the problems we’ve created.
The massive damage humans have done to the natural world has provoked a backlash that could be just as dangerous, or more. There is a growing global rejection of technology and almost anything human-made in favor of whatever is more ‘natural.’ But a simplistic rejection of modern technologies eliminates many of our best options for solving the problems we’ve created.
On a wide range of contentious issues, academics and researchers publish work that pretends to offer objective evidence, but which on closer inspection turns out to be advocacy masquerading behind intellectualisms, scientific methodology, footnotes and citations, and erudite language. A recent example is a paper by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and colleagues arguing that genetically modified foods pose such a risk to life on Earth that agricultural biotechnology should be banned under a strict application of the Precautionary Principle.
New York neuroticism is the obverse of Kantian tranquility: harried, unsatisfied, anxious, perturbed. A life filled with worry and noise rather than one steeped in calm and virtue. But is this necessarily a bad thing?