by Henriette Steiner & Kristin Veel

In May 2020, we published Tower to Tower: Gigantism in Architecture and Digital Culture (MIT Press), a cultural history of gigantism in architecture and digital culture, from the Eiffel Tower to the World Trade Center.

by Tricia Toso & Pier-Olivier Tremblay

We begin our story in the parking lot of a Windsor Salt Company distribution centre located in what is known today as Montreal, Canada [1]. On the other side of a chain link fence are hundreds of pallets of market-ready bags of salt for consumers to buy and spread over the sidewalks and entrance ways of their homes and businesses.

by Kate Maddalena

This story happens on the kind of late summer day pictured below, a day when I took my son to a local lake to throw stones, ride his bicycle, and, when we were both good and sweaty, to swim. Like many mothers, I love to be in ‘nature’. I feel connected to it, humbled by it.

by Joshua Neves

“I had suppressed the reasons I felt compelled to write this book…” Jason Pine confesses in the preface to his spellbinding The Alchemy of Meth: A Decomposition. I will leave the author to tell his own story. But it is a story (or, rather, many stories) that has stayed with me.

by Madison Snider

The long, dark, and damp winter of social isolation led me back to knitting. After a few calls to my grandmother, I felt the muscle memory come back. I hoped to stave off boredom, ease some anxiety, and maybe have something to show for the time warp we were living through.

by Thomas Patrick Pringle

In light of the recent release of Can’t Get You Out of My Head, Adam Curtis’s The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts bears re-examination. Curtis’s 2011 appropriation essay film visits English botanist Arthur Tansley’s influential, similarly titled article to appraise how the metaphor of the self-regulating ecosystem came to prominence in networked society.

by Ayesha Vemuri

In December 2020, the president of the Power Construction Corporation of China (Powerchina) announced plans to develop a large hydropower project on the lower Yarlung Tsangpo river. This run-of-river dam is projected to be the biggest hydroelectric power station in the world, with a generating capacity of 60 gigawatts, which is three times more than China's current largest dam, the Three Gorges.

by Réka Patrícia Gál

In a recent Lex Fridman podcast interview, Elon Musk refutes astrophysicist Carl Sagan’s famous quote regarding the singularly precious existence of Earth, a planet capable of supporting human life, in the universe. Musk reads Sagan’s words, “The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate," but quickly rejects them. He laughs: “This is not true.

by Crystal Chokshi

Sitting at my kitchen table, I dig my nails into each other while waiting for Raphael to call. Raphael is the financial advisor whom I don’t feel grown-up enough, or moneyed enough, to have. I am a graduate student; I haven’t saved for retirement since the years I worked full-time.

by Kathryn Blair

This is a bit of a musing in code and text about how code shapes the world we live in. As we go, I put together some code to generate a little world. You can see that world, and influence it to become more to your liking via a genetic algorithm.

by Max Liboiron

In 2013, a scientific paper was published on a type of plastic pollution it had discovered called “plastiglomerate.” The paper said it was reporting “the appearance of a new ‘stone’ formed through intermingling of melted plastic, beach sediment, basaltic lava fragments, and organic debris from Kamilo Beach on the island of Hawaii.”

by Madeleine Mendell

Like others researching the storage of digital media and data onto DNA, I have become fascinated by the implications this new storage format will have for our relationships to the living world, to ourselves, and to our data.

by Krista Lynes

Anna Tsing begins her explorations of mushroom picking by arguing that “the time is ripe to sense precarity” (20). She maps precarity in species extinction, job losses, capitalist devastation, and climate change.

by Tanner Mirrlees

Over the past decade, a discourse about the power of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft (or, the “GAFAM”) has grown in North America and around the world. This discourse is constituted by news media stories, business reports, policy documents, public rhetorics and popular cultural works that make innumerable claims and statements about GAFAM’s power in society.

by Tessa J. Brown

They were the only guests when they arrived at the Airbnb. The owner told them they’d missed the high season by a few weeks. Lucky them, it meant they’d save ten dollars a night on their accommodations. Jasper was still a popular vacation spot, in spite of everything.

by Andrew Kacey Thomas

One of the things I find most interesting about a global pandemic is my awareness of time. I reflect on its nature, its effect on our lives, and whether it’s going too slow or too fast. Covid-19 has made me sit in quiet discomfort with time for months.

by Chris Russill

I am standing off to the side of the photograph in a bright white space.

There are more people than I expected, but then I’m not in the National Gallery of Canada very often.

by Jordan Kinder

Since the use of divination methods to locate oil deposits in the nineteenth-century United States, a sense of the mystical has remained enmeshed with this fuel of modernity [1]. The deep mystification of fossil fuels like oil is partly a consequence of the material capacities that burning it enables.

by Cymene Howe

What if we were to find ourselves entwined by water, bound together through a world ocean? For oceanographers, the seas of the planet are one body of water lying across the surface of the earth, never neatly captured in a name, like Pacific or Indian or Southern.

by MJ Thompson & Liz Miller

Every bike tour needs a starting place, and ours is the interceptor. Our group is made up of university students drawn to the promise of an immersive experience, to the dilemma of waste [1], or perhaps just the challenge of spending a week on a bike.