In a recent editor's letter, the new head of MIT Technology Review's print magazine describes a lifelong tug-of-war between ambition and reality. She admits to being a systems thinker who immediately runs feasibility checks on every idea, often telling herself no before trying. Now she wants to give herself and the magazine permission to be more audacious.
The issue she introduces is built around impossible ideas—living on the moon, uploading brains, making synthetic blood, and decoding animal speech. These stories, she writes, remind us that technology is supposed to take cutting-edge research and apply it to make life better, safer, and healthier. When technology makes things worse, she adds, the job is to dig back in and fix what's broken, even if that fix seems impossible.
The letter also draws on her previous work editing a climate newsletter, where she learned that focusing on what we can't do only makes the darkness darker. That perspective frames the magazine's new direction: celebrating the scientists and engineers who refuse to give up on daring endeavors, and encouraging readers to do the same in their own lives.