In seven years, here’s what I got right and what I missed

I’ve been at Vox since Future Perfect, our section devoted to tackling the world’s most important and unreported problems, launched in 2018, and I am incredibly grateful to all of you — our readers — for what it has become. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading a lot of our old articles, asking myself, what holds up? What did we do best? What did we get wrong?

It’s a sober sort of accounting, because while I think we got a lot of stuff right that no one else did — our 2018 and 2019 coverage of the importance of preventing the next pandemic holds up particularly well — I am never quite sure if it mattered. The way that we learned we were right, after all, is that a pandemic happened, killing millions and devastating our world in a way that will take a long time to recover from.

It’s not generally considered the job of journalists to prevent catastrophes. But if there is anything we could have written that would have made the Covid-19 response actually work — to contain the virus early, or better target measures to keep people safe — that would have mattered more than anything else.

I’m in this reflective mood because, after seven years at Future Perfect, I am leaving to start something new (I’ll share more details in the coming weeks). I will be moving into a contributing editor role here at Future Perfect, because I still believe it is one of the most distinctive and important corners of the news. I have had an incredible experience here, and am incredibly grateful for all I’ve gotten the chance to write and do.

At Future Perfect, we’ve highlighted incredibly cost-effective, lifesaving global aid programs that are the crowning achievement of the Bush administration and a testament to the fact American power can be used for good. Now they’re under threat, and some of them are gone. I’ve written about the importance of preventing pandemics — yet post-Covid, the policy appetite for doing anything at all to prevent the next one seems totally absent.

I’ve also covered the replication crisis in science and the gradual, painstaking progress the scientific community has made in imposing standards for reproducibility and truth, only for a massive new crisis in science to emerge: Under the new administration, funding for high-impact cancer and vaccine and anti-aging research has been slashed, programs canceled, and some top researchers deported.

Reporting matters. I think it matters more than ever in this new AI-fueled world, where talk is cheap but new ideas, specific details, and an understanding of where our focus and attention should lie are relatively scarcer — and harder to find than ever in a growing vortex of uncertainty. Future Perfect matters, and our style of work — trying to tell the most important stories that others aren’t paying enough to — is almost by definition always going to be underserved.

I’m proud of the work we did. But I love our country and our world and I care about humanity’s future, and it’s impossible, in the present state of the world, to feel like we’ve done enough to actually change the course of things.

I take comfort in the fact that, as grim as the world seems today, along every single dimension I lose sleep over, it has been worse before. Government corruption and political weaponization of the Department of Justice has been worse. Child mortality and the toll of infectious disease has been much worse. Even the blatantly stupid flirtation with annihilation, which I fear characterizes our current approach to AI, has been worse — it’s hard to surpass the recklessness of the nuclear arms race early in the Cold War. We are not uniquely doomed any more than humans have ever been.

So my parting wish for Future Perfect (my incredible colleague Dylan Matthews is taking over for me in our Friday newsletter) is that it focuses not just on writing the stories no one else is writing but also on the marriage between those stories and results in the real world. There’s a lot of work to do, and journalism is more embattled than ever, but also more necessary than ever. I’m incredibly proud of the work I’ve done here, grateful for the chance to do it, and grateful for the whole team here.

And I want to say again that I’m grateful to you, our readers. When I started at Future Perfect, there was an open question as to whether anyone even wanted to read about the topics we cover. But your readership has made Future Perfect a success for all this time — a rare bright spot in an increasingly difficult industry. Every week, I get thoughtful emails from people from all over the country and the world, sharing new perspectives I had never considered. You are the people who make Future Perfect possible, and I’ve learned so much from writing for you over the last seven years.