At Future Perfect, we've highlighted incredibly cost-effective, life-saving global aid programs that are the crowning achievement of the Bush administration and a testament to the fact American power can be used for good. Now, they're under threat, and some of them are gone. I've written about the importance of preventing pandemics — yet post-Covid, the policy appetite for doing anything at all to prevent the next one seems totally absent.
I've also covered the replication crisis in science and the gradual, painstaking progress the scientific community has made in imposing standards for reproducibility and truth, only for a massive new crisis in science to emerge. Under the new administration, funding for high-impact cancer and vaccine and anti-aging research has been slashed, programs canceled, and some top researchers deported.
Reporting matters. I think it matters more than ever in this new AI-fueled world, where talk is cheap but new ideas, specific details, and an understanding of where our focus and attention should lie are relatively scarcer — and harder to find than ever in a growing vortex of uncertainty. Future Perfect matters, and our style of work — trying to tell the most important stories that others aren't paying enough attention to — is almost, by definition, always going to be underserved.
I'm proud of the work we did. But I love our country and our world, and I care about humanity's future, and it's impossible, in the present state of the world, to feel like we've done enough to actually change the course of things.
I take comfort in the fact that, as grim as the world seems today, along every single dimension I lose sleep over, it has been worse before. Government corruption and political weaponization of the Department of Justice has been worse. Child mortality and the toll of infectious disease has been much worse. Even the blatantly stupid flirtation with annihilation, which I fear characterizes our current approach to AI, has been worse — it's hard to surpass the recklessness of the nuclear arms race early in the Cold War. We are not uniquely doomed any more than humans have ever been.
So, my parting wish for Future Perfect (my incredible colleague Dylan Matthews is taking over for me in our Friday newsletter) is that it focuses not just on writing the stories no one else is writing but also on the marriage between those stories and results in the real world. There's a lot of work to do, and journalism is more embattled than ever but also more necessary than ever. I'm incredibly proud of the work I've done here, grateful for the chance to do it, and grateful for the whole team here.
And I want to say again that I'm grateful to you, our readers. When I started at Future Perfect, there was an open question as to whether anyone even wanted to read about the topics we cover. But your readership has made Future Perfect a success for all this time — a rare bright spot in an increasingly difficult industry.
Every week, I get thoughtful emails from people from all over the country and the world, sharing new perspectives I had never considered. You are the people who make Future Perfect possible, and I've learned so much from writing for you over the last seven years.
