The Week Things Came Back
There was a week, in April of 2026, when a number of things long given up for lost came quietly back. A stock price returned to where it had last stood in the year two thousand. A booster rocket flew for a second time. Seven patients with one of the worst cancers in medicine were, six years later, still alive. A dead actor returned to a movie screen with his family's blessing. And in a brownstone in Brooklyn, a dozen adults put their phones into a colander and read a book. These are small items, taken one at a time. Taken together, they are a kind of annual report on what repair looks like now.
I find I am unable to stay cynical about the share price of a semiconductor company. On Thursday, April sixteenth, the stock of the Intel Corporation closed at sixty-eight dollars and fifty cents — its highest level since the year two thousand, when the dot-com bubble was still intact and an older generation of engineers were building chips in Hillsboro and Chandler and hoping for the best. The company had lost itself for the better part of a decade; in fiscal year twenty twenty-five alone its foundries lost ten billion dollars. This April it has added roughly one hundred billion dollars in market value, the strongest month for the stock in half a century. A piece of the American manufacturing project has, in the slowest and least dramatic possible way, found its way back. What made the difference was not ideology. It was work. Twenty-six years of very patient, mostly unheroic work.
A rocket flew twice. On Sunday, April nineteenth, Blue Origin launched its New Glenn vehicle for the third time, and the first-stage booster — named, with engineering fondness, Never Tell Me the Odds — returned for the second time from space to land on a drone ship in the Atlantic. All seven of its engines had been replaced. The upper stage did not quite do its job, a satellite ended up in the wrong orbit, and that is the truth of it; nothing in rockets is ever entirely clean. But the lower half of the system flew, returned, and will fly again. Meanwhile NASA, fresh from the safe return of Artemis II, has begun selecting the lunar landers that will carry humans onto the south pole of the Moon for Artemis III. It turns out the old instinct — send a machine up, bring it home, send it up again — was correct.
Seven of the eight patients are still alive. Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is among the most unforgiving diseases in medicine; its five-year survival rate is approximately thirteen percent, and the tumor usually returns within a year of the surgery meant to remove it. In 2022, Vinod Balachandran, a surgeon-scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering, enrolled sixteen patients in a tiny trial of a personalized messenger-RNA vaccine developed with BioNTech and Genentech. The vaccine, autogene cevumeran, is manufactured from the individual patient's own tumor: from the specific set of mutations that belongs to that one human being and to no one else. Of the eight patients whose immune systems responded, seven are still alive, four to six years after treatment. The median vaccine-induced T cell is expected to persist for seven and a half years. Those are numbers so small they are almost embarrassing to quote. They are also the reason this is being described, at the centers where it is being described, as the beginning of a new era.
A dead man returned to the screen, with his daughter's permission. The trailer for As Deep As The Grave, a Western based on the 1920s archaeological work of Ann and Earl Morris among Ancestral Puebloan sites in the American Southwest, was shown at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on April fifteenth. Val Kilmer, who was cast as the priest Father Fintan, died in April of 2025 before filming could begin. His voice has been reconstructed by the British firm Sonantic from archival recordings; his likeness has been built, under the supervision of his estate and in collaboration with his daughter Mercedes, by generative-AI tools that did not exist when he fell ill. He appears in the film for more than an hour of screen time — sometimes as the spectral older priest, sometimes as a younger version of himself, the dashing man of the cloth. It is the first authorized performance of its kind for a deceased actor of his stature. One can object to the practice. One can also notice, more quietly, that there is a kind of mercy in it.
In a brownstone in Brooklyn, some adults dropped their phones into a metal colander and read a book for two hours. The organizer, D. Graham Burnett, is a historian of science at Princeton, and with a small band of collaborators he has written a manifesto called Attensity, which describes the ongoing effort to "rewild" human attention. A neighboring effort calls itself the Attention Liberation Movement; its members gather in living rooms, sometimes in the open air, and practice — among other things — staring at their bare palms to notice that the palms are there. One may laugh; there are colanders, after all. One may also notice that it is the first serious movement, in some time, to propose that the human nervous system has standing of its own.