The American Revolution was won with two things: a bold claim to self-determination and a fighting spirit. These two ideas, in essence, became the First and Second Amendments—the one-two punch that showed the world we don’t play around. “The First Amendment is what we stand for,” writes Katherine Boyle. “The Second is how we enforce it.”
For this month’s installment of America at 250, our yearlong celebration of America’s milestone birthday, we toasted to America’s technological revolution. Boyle’s essay traces the genesis of America’s love affair with technology back to the Second Amendment and urges us to recall how “FAFO is ingrained in our national ethos.”
We published two not-to-be missed essays on this theme: one by by Noah Smith on the rise of the new American Luddites—and how we came to take lifesaving technology for granted—and another by Marc Levinson on an American innovation as essential as it is overlooked—the big metal box that made the modern world possible.
We also ran a reader poll on the greatest invention in American history, and we can officially announce that the winner is the transistor (with air-conditioning a close second). In the Comments section, readers urged us to include these honorable mentions: the airplane, the chocolate chip cookie, and the .45 Colt.
Now, for the final part of this installment, we’re bringing you a conversation with a great American tech revolutionary: Anduril founder Palmer Luckey. The 33-year-old defense-tech wunderkind sat down with Bari Weiss in Washington, D.C., earlier this month for a wide-ranging conversation about why the U.S. built the wrong military, how to manufacture weapons like iPhones, and why America needs to become—as he puts it—“the world’s gun store.”
Watch their conversation below, and raise a glass with us to American innovation.
—The Editors
This comment is related to the piece by Noah Smith, The Return of the Luddites. I am unable to comment directly to the article since the comments were turned off. If the aim of the article is to imply anyone questioning the safety of vaccine is "anti-vax kook", the case has not been made. The piece referenced a single vaccine, the polio vaccine. There are over 15 childhood vaccines on the childhood vaccine schedule many with multiple shots over the span of the first 10 years of a child's life beginning at birth. There are no long term studies of the safety of any of these vaccines. A few are a month of follow-up and some a few days of follow-up for safety. Furthermore, there are no study of safety for these vaccines when given in combinations (i.e., several difference vaccines given together as a single dose such as the MMR plus chicken pox, or multiple shots of difference vaccines on the same visit in cases of "catch up"). Given the sharp increase in incidents of childhood chronic illness, it is common sense to raise concerns and to seek the causes that may be driving these chronic illness. It is unhelpful to attack people who raise these concerns with name calling. I would like to see Bari host an honest debate between the two sides on the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
In the late 90s I worked for a company owned by a former president of Sea-Land. He and many of the senior management had worked for Sea-Land in the early days and knew Mr McLean well. I enjoyed conversations about the infancy of the industry that would change the world and what it was like at the very beginning.