Sublime

In the fifty years since Vostok 1, the first ever manned spaceflight, asteroid mining has gone from a perennial pipedream of the Star Trek Forever crowd to a serious enough proposition that a Vatican astronomer felt the need to address ethical concerns in public. In fact, in April 2012 — and with backing from the likes of Google cofounder Larry

The next day’s Crimson put the controversy on page 1: “Psychologists Disagree on Psilocybin Research.” The day after that, the story was picked up by the Boston Herald, a Hearst paper, and given a much punchier if not quite as accurate headline: “Hallucination Drug Fought at Harvard—350 Students Take Pills.” Now the story was out, and very soon

April was now twenty, and because she was truly sympathetic to the human condition, she was besieged by a band of stars and handsome devils, who came to her when life for them stayed too glamorous for too long and didn’t seem real. Eventually, April went to sea and became a sailor.

In a world of synthetic gene drives, the border between the human and the natural, between the laboratory and the wild, already deeply blurred, all but dissolves. In such a world, not only do people determine the conditions under which evolution is taking place, people can—again, in principle—determine the outcome.

“They didn’t have the word teen yet,” McCracken told me, so that wasn’t how journalists mocked the largely female audience that adored these stars. “They used moronic at that time. Women were seen to have the minds of children.” (She clarified that this was originally a clinical term coming out of the eugenics movement, used to indicate that a