Hold tight—this page is coming soon.
Essays
A collection of essays exploring the core ideas, criticisms, and concerns that undergird New Athens. Our rough equivalent to the Federalist Papers.
On partisan politics and American identity →
New Athens is fundamentally for reform and against revolution. We welcome everyone, including people who have flirted with the far-right and far-left. High energy people are essential to any healthy society—so long as they’re building instead of destroying. In New Athens we unite in the belief that American is worth fighting for, that the Constitution should endure, and that righting the ship will take highly-motivated patriots of all stripes. While idealistic, our approach is also deeply practical: by giving people something to do with their beliefs beyond screaming them into the void of the internet, New Athens is an offramp from social media nonsense and a regrounding in the real world. No anonymous trolls, no back button, and compromise is not a lofty ideal to snicker at—but a normal, practical requirement of living in the physical world.
Life without a smartphone or AI →
Bluntly, we’re hard core and uncompromising about banning smartphones, including smart watches, but we’re no Luddites. A smartphone is a general-purpose computer you carry around with you. If it’s not general-purpose, or if you can’t carry it around, it’s not a smartphone any more. Practically speaking, in New Athens this means you can carry a dumb phone that just makes calls, or glue or lock your smartphone to your desk (standard security cables are $15 on Amazon), or both. That’s it—welcome to town. The point is to draw a line between you, a person, and the machines you use to get things done. We’ll note that many social philosophers peg the release of the iPhone as the beginning of the cyborg era—the widespread adoption of technology that stays on our person, even if it’s not (yet) implanted in our bodies. But it doesn’t take a PhD to understand this stuff. Here’s what you get back when your smartphone stays on your desk: when you walk outside, you’re just walking outside; when you’re at work, you’re just working; when you’re eating dinner, you’re just eating dinner, likely with people who are also just eating dinner. In other words, ditching the smartphone does not just return you to real life, but grants you multiple lives: a home life, a work life, friend groups, hobbies, side hustles, a good night’s sleep. Smartphones make us one person to everyone in all settings at all times. It’s exhausting and dumb and everyone knows it (or at least feels it). If smartphones became popular because they made people feel smart and connected (and then reduced them to husks), New Athens will thrive because it makes people feel sane, productive, and loved by real people in the real world.
New Athens’ founding story →
In a nutshell, everything in America started sucking all at once. And a city is the smallest social unit at which everything can be fixed all at once. Not too big, not too small—just right.
Sources of inspiration for New Athens →
Mary Harrington, Paul Kingsnorth, Jonathan Haidt, Louise Perry, Rob Henderson, Charles Marohn, and others.
The schism →
Behind the scenes, a central insight
New Athens Launch Company operating principals →
summary graf for operating principals essay
What we mean by “single-income family” →
New Athens represents a strong, though limited, set of opinions about children, parenting, and family formation. We have two primary stakes in the ground: First, we believe is it normal and good for all people to strive to have kids, even if they ultimately don’t. Second, the strongest families are those where one parent is home. We are intentionally not taking a stance on who that should be, husband or wife, though we’re also not shy to note that, for most of human history, the homemaker role has been played by women. We take no stand on work hours. If both parents want to work part-time, great. The point is that, whenever a kid is home, a parent ought to be home, too. A few further beliefs: For women, having your first child in your mid teens (again, as women did through most of human history) is jumping the gun, and if you’re 30 you waited too long—but better late than never. For kids, we broadly believe that playing with other kids is healthy and looking at a screen alone is harmful. Philosophically, we believe the concept of a “free range” childhood is directionally correct, and that helicoptor parenting stunts a child’s growth and makes parenting harder than it needs to be. Parents should feel like they’ve qualified for the Olympics if their children have reliable food, shelter, and clothing; are getting enough sleep; feel safe at home; can hear the word “no” without totally melting down, and, when young, get read to for at least 10 minutes of a day. There are many other things we, the people behind New Athens, do for our kids, but we’re disinclined to suggest any are right for all families.
Below: copy of the above for eventually putting elsewhere. (This used to be on the homepage.)
Views
Brief notes on the core ideas, criticisms, and concerns that undergird New Athens.
On partisan politics and American identity →
New Athens is fundamentally for reform and against revolution. We welcome everyone, including people who have flirted with the far-right and far-left. High energy people are essential to any healthy society—so long as they’re building instead of destroying. In New Athens we unite in the belief that American is worth fighting for, that the Constitution should endure, and that righting the ship will take highly-motivated patriots of all stripes. While idealistic, our approach is also deeply practical: by giving people something to do with their beliefs beyond screaming them into the void of the internet, New Athens is an offramp from social media nonsense and a regrounding in the real world. No anonymous trolls, no back button, and compromise is not a lofty ideal to snicker at—but a normal, practical requirement of living in the physical world.
Life without a smartphone or AI →
Bluntly, we’re hard core and uncompromising about banning smartphones, including smart watches, but we’re no Luddites. A smartphone is a general-purpose computer you carry around with you. If it’s not general-purpose, or if you can’t carry it around, it’s not a smartphone any more. Practically speaking, in New Athens this means you can carry a dumb phone that just makes calls, or glue or lock your smartphone to your desk (standard security cables are $15 on Amazon), or both. That’s it—welcome to town. The point is to draw a line between you, a person, and the machines you use to get things done. We’ll note that many social philosophers peg the release of the iPhone as the beginning of the cyborg era—the widespread adoption of technology that stays on our person, even if it’s not (yet) implanted in our bodies. But it doesn’t take a PhD to understand this stuff. Here’s what you get back when your smartphone stays on your desk: when you walk outside, you’re just walking outside; when you’re at work, you’re just working; when you’re eating dinner, you’re just eating dinner, likely with people who are also just eating dinner. In other words, ditching the smartphone does not just return you to real life, but grants you multiple lives: a home life, a work life, friend groups, hobbies, side hustles, a good night’s sleep. Smartphones make us one person to everyone in all settings at all times. It’s exhausting and dumb and everyone knows it (or at least feels it). If smartphones became popular because they made people feel smart and connected (and then reduced them to husks), New Athens will thrive because it makes people feel sane, productive, and loved by real people in the real world.
New Athens’ founding story →
In a nutshell, everything in America started sucking all at once. And a city is the smallest social unit at which everything can be fixed all at once. Not too big, not too small—just right.
Sources of inspiration for New Athens →
Mary Harrington, Paul Kingsnorth, Jonathan Haidt, Louise Perry, Rob Henderson, Charles Marohn, and others.
The schism →
Behind the scenes, a central insight
New Athens Launch Company operating principals →
summary graf for operating principals essay
What we mean by “single-income family” →
New Athens represents a strong, though limited, set of opinions about children, parenting, and family formation. We have two primary stakes in the ground: First, we believe is it normal and good for all people to strive to have kids, even if they ultimately don’t. Second, the strongest families are those where one parent is home. We are intentionally not taking a stance on who that should be, husband or wife, though we’re also not shy to note that, for most of human history, the homemaker role has been played by women. We take no stand on work hours. If both parents want to work part-time, great. The point is that, whenever a kid is home, a parent ought to be home, too. A few further beliefs: For women, having your first child in your mid teens (again, as women did through most of human history) is jumping the gun, and if you’re 30 you waited too long—but better late than never. For kids, we broadly believe that playing with other kids is healthy and looking at a screen alone is harmful. Philosophically, we believe the concept of a “free range” childhood is directionally correct, and that helicoptor parenting stunts a child’s growth and makes parenting harder than it needs to be. Parents should feel like they’ve qualified for the Olympics if their children have reliable food, shelter, and clothing; are getting enough sleep; feel safe at home; can hear the word “no” without totally melting down, and, when young, get read to for at least 10 minutes of a day. There are many other things we, the people behind New Athens, do for our kids, but we’re disinclined to suggest any are right for all families.