Ross Andersen

Twenty Years After the Storm What home meant before, and after, Hurricane Katrina

20 years ago this month, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. For so many New Orleanians, our lives are demarcated by this moment. If someone ask you about an event or memory from the past, we say “was it before or after the storm?” On this twentieth anniversary, I wrote about going back home.

Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End America’s run as the premier techno-superpower may be over.

This reads a bit like an obituary for American science. Or a murder story from the crime beat.
www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End America’s run as the premier techno-superpower may be over.

Indeed: www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End America’s run as the premier techno-superpower may be over.

The attack on our universities, the lack of respect for education and expertise, the attack on medical research to keep us healthy, what purpose does it serve? It makes our country weaker.

Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End America’s run as the premiere techno-superpower may be over.

"Every scientific empire falls, but not at the same speed, or for the same reasons."

Fascinating article on the history of scientific empires. Soviet science, at its zenith in the mid-1950s, collapsed entirely in the late 1980s. And now American science has begun its collapse.

Gift link.

Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End America’s run as the premier techno-superpower may be over.

“The future of Soviet science was looking grim…One by one, he watched them start new lives elsewhere. Many…went to the U.S. At the time, America was the most compelling destination for scientific talent in the world. It would remain so until earlier this year” www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

The rapid decline of American science has few precedents in history, writes @rossandersen.bsky.social. We are witnessing an unparalleled act of self-sabotage: https://theatln.tc/6OLrjo4V

Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End America’s run as the premiere techno-superpower may be over.

Terrific piece. A must-read for academics:

"Not since the Red Scare...has American science been so beholden to political ideology."

www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

Such a smart and important one from @rossandersen.bsky.social

Insightful article by @rossandersen.bsky.social

Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End America’s run as the premiere techno-superpower may be over.

Absolutely fantastic story by @andersen on how scientific excellence and leadership get squandered by nations.

An important piece from @TheAtlantic

www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

Great read by @rossandersen.bsky.social for @theatlantic.com!

"Trump’s interference in the sciences is something new. It shares features with the science-damaging policies of Stalin and Hitler, says David Wootton, a historian of science. But in the English-speaking world, it has no precedent, he told me: “This is an unparalleled destruction from within.”

Important.

How Scientific Empires End And what it means for America

This is brilliant- terrifying, frustrating & enraging - but brilliant. It is also a warning to anyone interested in research. Unless there is a focus on maintaining broad cultural support for all types of research catastrophic change can happen rapidly www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

Going to be talking nukes with brilliant colleagues at this subscriber-only event tomorrow morning: bsky.app/profile/radi...

The Nuclear Club Might Soon Double As American power recedes, South Korea, Japan, and a host of other countries may pursue the bomb.

It may surprise many that Japan has been ready to build #nuclear weapons for decades - perhaps *within a month or so* if needed.

Or that it too has used this credible capability as a bargaining chip to convince the United States to commit to Japan's defence.

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

The One Place Where Nuclear War Isn’t Abstract A conversation with Ross Andersen about what he saw in Hiroshima

"For me, it was seeing the burned clothes of very small children in the museum and thinking about what happened to them and also what happened to 20,000 other children. The enormity of that suffering is hard to even hold in your mind," @rossandersen.bsky.social on his visit to Hiroshima. ⤵️

The Nuclear Club Might Soon Double As American power recedes, South Korea, Japan, and a host of other countries may pursue the bomb.

The single most consistently under appreciated issue of the year. For all the recent focus on Iran, East Asia is where the world’s fastest nuclear-bomb buildups are unfolding. “A dangerous proliferation cascade may be about to break out, right in the shadow of Hiroshima," writes Ross Andersen.

The Nuclear Club Might Soon Double As American power recedes, South Korea, Japan, and a host of other countries may pursue the bomb.

"Every moment that humanity spends with these weapons spread across the Earth, pointed at one another, is a foolish gamble with the highest-possible stakes." www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

For all the recent focus on Iran, East Asia is where the world’s fastest nuclear-bomb buildups are unfolding. “A dangerous proliferation cascade may be about to break out, right in the shadow of Hiroshima,” @rossandersen.bsky.social reports. https://theatln.tc/ZYCe7JUT

The Nuclear Club Might Soon Double As American power recedes, South Korea, Japan, and a host of other countries may pursue the bomb.

An extraordinary and unsettling story, beautifully written by the great @rossandersen.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

Gift link here: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

Our August issue is given over to the 80th anniversary of that attack, and the dawning of the nuclear age. I’m so proud to be a part of it.

In Seoul and Tokyo, I mostly met with members of the local defense intelligentsia. But near the end of my trip I visited Hiroshima and spent some time with Governor Hidehiko Yuzaki, and had a day I’ll never forget with Keiko Ogura, a survivor of the American atomic attack on that city.

The Nuclear Club Might Soon Double As American power recedes, South Korea, Japan, and a host of other countries may pursue the bomb.

🧵 Earlier this year, I traveled to East Asia for a story about whether South Korea and Japan will pursue nuclear weapons as China continues its nuclear build-up and the U.S. becomes a (much) less reliable ally.

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

The Nuclear Club Might Soon Double As American power recedes, South Korea, Japan, and a host of other countries may pursue the bomb.

”Like almost everyone I talked with in Seoul, Heo eventually mentioned Ukraine. When the Soviet Union fell, Ukraine had a nuclear arsenal on its soil, but Bill Clinton helped persuade the Ukrainians to give it up. Not to worry, he said. The U.S. will have your back.”

The Nobel Prize Winner Who Thinks We Have the Universe All Wrong Cosmologists are fighting over everything.

“With weighty matters of career, ego, and the very nature of existence at stake, the Hubble tension has led to a bit of tension among cosmologists.” Ya think?!
www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

Duke appears to have lost NIH grants because they used the prefix "trans" in reference to disease transmission, transgenic genetic material, translational studies, or signal transduction www.dukechronicle.com/article/2025...