Our Best Stories of 2017

We asked each of our staff to suggest the best story they had written or edited in 2017--the most important, most interesting, or best executed. I found the scientists quietly thinking about how to make better--or just different--kinds of humans to colonize outer space. From our dreams of space travel, a surprisingly strong ethical argument emerges in favor of messing with an individual's genetic code. Kids like my four-year-old niece Hannah are growing up from infancy with digital assistants, and it's time to start talking about what effect it will have on them. My story attempted to start a serious conversation on an under-explored topic despite the scarcity of academic research.