James Poulos

James Poulos is Executive Editor of The American Mind, a publication of the Claremont Institute. He is the author of The Art of Being Free (St. Martin's Press, 2017), contributing editor of American Affairs, and a fellow at the Center for the Study of Digital Life.

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Apollo 11 and the End of Cosmic Civilization

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David Bowie as Major Tom.
By the 1990s, space in the American imagination had become, outside the precincts of Trekkies and Jedi enthusiasts, fully dystopian.

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The Technological Sources of Anti-Growth Politics

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Greta Thunberg speaks at the European Economic and Social Committee plenary session in Brussels, Belgium on February 21, 2019 (Alexandros Michailidis / Shutterstock.com).
Growth is only being demonized because it has been disenchanted, courtesy in part of digital technology.

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The Birth, and Digital Death, of the Electric Dream

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Those shaped by the televisual imagination, like author James Williams, were staggeringly naïve and optimistic at the time of social media’s advent.

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Reading America from the Outside

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Outsiders often see more about us than we do ourselves: James L. Nolan shows us what Tocqueville, Weber, Chesterton, and Qutb noticed.

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Life Finds A Way: Jurassic Park‘s Warning at 25

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Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park (1993). Image: Universal Pictures.
Jurassic Park's question remains: is technology subject to our control anymore?

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Nihilism, Active and Passive

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In response to: The Frivolous Valley and Its Dreadful Conformity

Apple's Cupertino, California headquarters (image: Uladzik Kryhin / shutterstock.com)
Michael Anton is right that our politics and culture will eventually “begin to draw blood” from the gods of entertainment in Silicon Valley.

More Responses

The Needs of a Nationalist-Populist Ideology

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Michael Anton has a fundamental problem with capitalism itself, and how it is practiced in 21st century America.

True Overlords Don’t Work This Hard

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It’s creative destruction that rules in Silicon Valley, not tech arrogance—and that’s a good thing.

Michael Anton’s Rejoinder: Dear Avengers of the Free Market . . .

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The techies want to reconstitute the ancien regime on silicon rather than soil. Tamny and Pethokoukis, whether they realize it or not, are helping.

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An Unlikely Restoration of Memory: Why Dungeons & Dragons Matters

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Dungeons & Dragons (Blackregis/Shutterstock.com).
Many predicted that tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons would disappear, but this discounts the power of memory and the need for community.

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Automated Liberalism?

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Ravil Sayfullin / Shutterstock.com
The machinery of enlightenment, in short, requires of liberalism a new digital immune system.

About

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