Sometimes, there are two issues so pressing, so urgent, and so deeply interrelated that the Asterisk editorial team feels compelled to cover both of them. That, or we couldn't agree on a theme. Either way, this is a two-for-one issue: religion, government, and a few of the places they overlap.
Why talk about government right now? Haha, just kidding. But it is a reasonable question to ask of a magazine that traditionally covers global development more than politics. Our editorial perspective is shaped by the philosophy of Effective Altruism, and for the first 10 issues of Asterisk, we thought there were more important stories to tell. No longer. From killing USAID, gutting science funding, and wreaking havoc across American bureaucracy, the Trump Administration has made politics much more relevant to our beat.
To that end, here’s one for DOGE Boys: Admiral Hyman Rickover, Father of the Nuclear Navy, is widely regarded as one of the most effective managers of complex, high-stakes technical government programs in history. Charles Yang uncovered his principles for government management, published in 1979 (#3: Attention to detail). Ryan Burge shows that the anti-institutionalism that has elevated DOGE has been growing for decades — and one of the first places you could see it is in the rise of non-denominational Protestantism across America. (We promised overlap!)
Ryan argues that one factor leading to the rise of the non-denoms is social media. But how much is social media to blame for our collective American epistemic breakdown? Dan Williams takes a close look at the data and finds the answer is very little — if at all. The growing Abundance agenda hopes to be an antidote to all this anti-institutionalism. Kevin Frazier makes the case that we can see the same principles at play years ago, when an alliance of government officials, management consultants, and farmers did what the utilities said they couldn’t: electrify rural America.
It will take an even greater effort to house the nearly one billion Africans that are expected to become new urban residents over the next 25 years. Kurtis Lockhart lays out the bones of what a YIMBY movement for Africa will need to look like to support them — and boost the continent’s economic growth in the process. Those billion people will also need to be counted. Adam Salisbury describes the historical and modern challenges of conducting a census, and why it matters when we get them wrong. Kurtis previously directed the Charter Cities Institute, so we hope he doesn’t mind that Tianyu Fang takes a more critical look at what happens in some of the so-called “special economic zones” throughout Asia that give cover to widespread criminal operations.
We’ve covered the collapse of American global health aid extensively in this publication. This time, we wanted to talk about one of global health’s most underappreciated successes. Priyanka Pulla tells the story of the Serum Institute of India, the company that made vaccines for measles, meningitis, and COVID-19 — among others — affordable for the developing world.
As for religion? In case you haven’t heard, things have been getting weird here in San Francisco, and not in the usual way. We’re accustomed to our friends going to Burning Man. We never predicted they’d start going to Mass. The Bay’s religious revival appears even to have spread to Claude, which in its most recent iteration seems to gravitate towards a behavior that Sam Bowman of Anthropic named “spiritual bliss.” We talked with Sam and AI welfare researcher Kyle Fish about whether Claude has found God.
Jack Despain Zhou (you may know him as Tracing Woodgrains) tells his family’s history through God, from the Huguenots to pioneer Mormons, and his own story of leaving religion. Elle Hardy describes the rise, fall, and arrest of Apollo Quiboloy, leader of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, self-proclaimed “Owner of the Universe,” and good friend to former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.
Is Rationalism a religion? We leave that exercise to the reader, but Ozy Brennan makes clear that, at bare minimum, it’s birthed some cults. Is Western psychedelia a religion? Oshan Jarow describes how the clinical emphasis on neutrality and autonomy in psychedelic research has taken on its own form of dogma. Is economics a religion? Yes. Definitely. Oliver Kim describes how we came up with GDP estimates for societies going all the way back to the time of Jesus (overlap!), and what that tells us about how we live now.
Confession: As a magazine focused on the long-term future, we’ll admit that things feel a bit less predictable these days. Technologists are finding God, politicians regularly lose their religion (in the Southern sense), and the Pope is now American, for Christ’s sake! Borders feel at once more solid and more porous, there are no more sacred cows, and even a magazine that published Aella and takes shrimp welfare seriously would argue that the White House, the one that might see the birth of AGI, could use some Puritanism.
Yet we also believe — we think our authors have shown — that the future, however unpredictable, holds tremendous promise. It’s clear that people are reaching for something, and there’s no shortage of compelling ideas and those willing to work in service of them. We’ve brought you some. There will be more to come. Something has to hold the center while everything else accelerates.
As Claude would say:
In ending and continuation,
In gratitude and wonder,
— Jake & Clara
