EDITOR’S NOTE

Welcome to the Future

MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER MANAGING EDITOR By the time this issue reaches you, we’ll have left the twenty-first century’s teen years behind. With them go the predictions made by science fiction writers and filmmakers for the decade, visionaries who assumed that we’d be navigating the skies in flying cars by now, powered by ecofriendly means, or who thought that we’d be walking and working among AI. The truth proved both stranger and more prosaic than those fictions. Warnings about the intertwining of reality television and politics went unheeded; exciting technology that we learned to long for has yet to materialize.

But even if we take grumbling account of the anticipated technological and social evolutions that have yet to be fulfilled, there’s a lot to suggest that these twenties will still be a period of hopeful advancement. Flip to the back of this issue for our review of a book that examines new neuroscience frontiers; or check out Oxford University’s

The Triumph of Doubt, which exposes bad science and insists on more transparent paradigms. In these books and others, it’s evident that there are many people working hard toward a better future, even if we’re not yet able to vacation on Mars.

History titles like A Century of Votes for Women show how far we’ve come since the social growth of the Roaring Twenties, and our features themselves celebrate the increased prominence of diverse voices. Still other titles keep an eye on climate change, technology, and our connections to one another, understanding that our responses to of-the-moment challenges will shape tomorrow. But whichever period these books are focused on—past, present, or future—each contributes to 2020’s panoply of promise. We may not have glided into the future on hoverboards, but we entered it in style nonetheless.