Member update: The issue that almost wasn't.

Resilience is almost here. Opt-Out Nation is on the way.

To make a digital magazine every month — especially themed ones, as we do — you need to be generating a constant stream of ideas: articles, themes, interview subjects, etc. And then, inevitably, you need to kill most of them. Ideas that seemed brilliant over coffee often feel half-baked by lunch, and buried deep in our company’s Google Drive lies a graveyard of ideas that’ll never rise to the page.

One in particular lay there dormant for weeks. Then we gave it a second look. Now, months later, it’s one of my favorite projects I’ve worked on at Big Think. It’s a print issue we’re calling “The Opt-Out Nation,” a reference to the U.S., which is approaching the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

That nice round number wasn’t the sole reason we chose this theme. The Trump administration is, for better or worse, advancing what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently called “a rupture in the world order,” as the U.S. opts out of longstanding post-World War II alliances and rewires relationships between nations across the globe.

So, on the geopolitical front, we’ll be speaking with Richard N. Haass, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, about the end of an era, the beginning of another, and the question of whether the U.S. has a coherent vision of the future. We’ll also be recording a special interview with podcast legend Dan Carlin, creator of the Hardcore History series, about America’s long history of opting out.

But don’t expect a magazine like Foreign Affairs. We set out to bring you stories about Americans opting out of all sorts of things, each of which touches on a bigger story playing out across the country — from a comedy writer’s reckoning with the directive to “find your true passion,” to an astronomer’s take on why Americans are opting out of a scientific worldview, to a journalist’s dispatches from a literal opt-out community in the Arizona desert where building codes are optional, houses are strange, and residents have taken the country’s housing debate to its logical extreme. Much more to come about this print issue, which publishes in June.

In the meantime, our Spring 2026 issue, The Roots of Resilience, is shipping out to members soon!