There are many good ideas in Klein and Thompson’s book, but no solutions to the crisis we now face.

Abundance is a good book. It has its flaws. All books do. But its most glaring weakness is not the fault of the authors: It is not a timely book.

As recently as a few months ago, NIH and NSF were indeed irreplaceable. But here, now, they are effectively being bulldozed and scrapped. It was timely and worthwhile last fall to wonder about the ways these massive institutions shape the course of scientific discovery. Today the call-to-action is to rescue whatever datasets we can. The Library of Alexandria is being burned. Salvage what you can.

Books are time capsules, buried on the date the author sends it to press, unearthed by the reader months or years later. They are written for the world as it existed at the time of writing, often with an eye toward the world as the author imagines it might become. But writers are not soothsayers by trade. And it seems the times we now live in are better suited to apocalyptic fiction.