All Issues
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Issue 13: Science
Why do rats laugh? Will AI cure cancer? Laser vision. Thomas Kuhn. IPCC AR6 does not say what you think it says. ESP. Development angst. The breakfast meeting that changed the world. 32 different words for field. Would it kill them to hire a graphic designer?
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Issue 12: Books
Space stations. Shadow selves. “The biggest contribution the United States has yet made to society in the modern world.” Are we doomed? Marshall McLuhan’s hit radio single. Don’t say NPC. Anxiety may occur under any circumstances. What’s wrong with culture? What are Chinese founders reading? What if Google Books just worked? We have all the ideas we need.
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Issue 11: Church & State
Cranberry bouncers. Nuclear submarines. Where do you put 900 million people? Reject tradition, embrace modernity. A family of Zoroastrian horse farmers. Rat cults. Non-rat cults. Who was collecting GDP statistics in the first century? The dark underbelly of SEZs. Giant ants. Stop blaming the algorithms. Is that a church or is it a dispensary? Cyclone emoji. Cyclone emoji. Cyclone emoji.
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Issue 10: Origins
Is evidence real? The second best-attended funeral of the 19th century. Car deaths. Colon cancer. California has a commitment problem. When is it right to indoctrinate children? The undiscovere’d country. AI can’t beat us at rock, paper, scissors. Modernity was invented by German bureaucrats in 1737. A really, truly excessive amount of math.
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Issue 09: Weird
Children’s literature. Chewing sounds. Habitable bubbles on potato-shaped asteroids. Are you a noncongenerist? Nirodha samapatti. Shrimp. Do fruit flies feel? Enough energy to power a large American city. Malevolent Atlantean dwarves. Math homework. What Is It Like to Be a Bot? The future of humanity rests on microscopic worm brains.
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Issue 08: Communities
Clock monks. Wiki wars. Life inside the whiteboard panopticon. Where do prison gangs come from? Beijing urban dictionary. Embrace your inner cult leader. Gambling for fun and Prophit. Readers added context they thought you might want to know. Americans aren’t actually lonely. Blue antelopes. The rationalist essay review you’ve all been waiting for.
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Issue 07: Development
Xenobiology. Catholic schools. When will we have artificial wombs? Old MacDonald meets Big Brother. Weird little guys. Malaria vaccines. The most important part is knowing when to quit. What’s going on with the kids these days? Unleash the DFC. All about GLP-1s. Urban planning, Weber-style. Of course the AI labs are lying to you
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Issue 06: California
This magazine contains the key to ultimate pleasure. Soda taxes. Think tanks. Much more than you wanted to know about public benefits administration. California ideologies. The narcissism of small differences. What does it take to build a city these days? Fault lines. Development hell. The road to Silicon Valley was paved in gold. Why shouldn’t we grow all the alfalfa we want?
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Issue 05: Mistakes
The worst land use policy in the world. Everything Michael Lewis missed. Dictators. Dingbats. Do you know what’s wrong with your air conditioner? Bad laws and bad bets. When to imitate an Italian bureaucrat. Chinese food. Environmentalism’s original sin. What happens after an airplane crashes. The best way to spend $100 billion?
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Issue 04: Measurement
How do you measure seeing god? Does testing vaccines need to take so long? Outlining poverty. Asking better questions. The origins of the ad economy. Can we really say how smart AIs are? Domestic violence during lockdown. Sex, drugs, and colonoscopies. Our most pedantic issue yet.
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Issue 03: AI
Will AI cause an economic explosion? Can animals teach us about LLMs? Chip tracking. Crash testing. Why we’re wrong about China. What does “AI safety” even mean? Lessons from nuclear proliferation. Love in the time of chatbots. When job losses might begin, when Moore’s law might end, and why we try to predict the future.
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Issue 02: Food
Is plant-based meat better for you? What we don’t know about alcohol (and why we still don’t know it). Do oysters feel? How not to starve in a nuclear winter. False advertising. Cholera treatment. Tofu. What’s up with cultivated meat these days? The legacy of the Green Revolution. Moral philosophy, macropods, and more.
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Issue 01: Inaugural Issue
Asterisk is a quarterly journal of writing and clear thinking about things that matter. We’re for Bayes’ theorem, acknowledging our uncertainty, wild imaginations, and well-constructed sentences. We’re against easy answers, lazy metaphors, and the end of life as we know it.
