Archive
More than thirty years of First Things articles at your fingertips.
Articles
Automating the Human Mind
It’s striking how little turmoil the dawn of AI is causing at top universities across the country. Big Tech companies are moving quickly to embed AI products into every...
The Myth of Technological Neutrality
The status of crank is rarely remitted in the span of ten years, but that is what has happened to me. I spent two decades, from 1999 to 2019,...
The Real Digital Divide
I was recently invited to lunch at an elite club in New York for work. When I made the mistake, unbeknownst to me, of pulling my dumb phone out...
The Courage to Be Right
There is tremendous pressure to be wrong these days. It takes a lot of character to be right. Much about First Things—a magazine I have read devotedly since my...
Sarah Huckabee Sanders Against Smartphones
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, governor of Arkansas, appears uncowed by Big Tech. Inspired by Jonathan Haidt’s new book Anxious Generation (which I reviewed favorably in American Affairs), on May 6, Sanders sent...
The World that Google Wants to See
If Big Tech companies have observed anything about human nature in their rise to economic, political, and cultural dominance, it is that Homo sapiens prefer artificial, digital experiences to...
Recovering Our Memory
Being executive director of a think tank that monitors the health of marriage and family in America requires me to be intimately familiar with grim news. To keep my...
Polar Rescue
Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America’s Future by jean m. twenge atria, 560 pages, $32.50 The sexual...
Ensnared in the Web
About ten years ago, I acquired a deep suspicion of smartphones and social media. Riding a late-night L Train back to my Brooklyn apartment, I looked up from my...
Workism Isn’t Working
Workism is a new word, and it’s a good one. It captures the spirit of our elites, who from childhood are raised to be workers for work’s sake. Work...
Miyazaki’s Reality
Miyazakiworld: A Life in Artby susan napieryale, 344 pages, $30 Never-Ending Man, a documentary that recently enjoyed a limited release in the United States, shows an exchange between the...
The Allure of Sustainability
An energetic graduate of Wesleyan College, class of 2013, no longer proud of her achievement-packed résumé, cuts off contact with her mother, flies to Hawaii, lives in a hut,...
