Science
You've Got Learning
Education Turns to Technology
Every day at 8:45 AM, Village Green Virtual’s 210 students walk through the lobby and scan their IDs on the wall …
The Edible Complex
Paths to the Ultimate Mushroom
Under the brush, a golden-red cap glints. Trembling, I push back the undergrowth and gasp. I then gingerly pull out the …
Beyond Our Fingers
The Hidden Beauty of Recursive Computing
When I was four, I snuck into my mother’s bedroom and flicked the switch by her makeup desk. Big filaments blazed …
Barely Legal
The Volatile Chemistry of Synthetic Drugs
When the video starts, the woman is already on the ground. She is lying on her stomach next to the open …
Runt in Orbit
Pluto and Humanity Do the Long Distance Thing
The interplanetary space probe New Horizons arrived this July in the Pluto system, marking both a new milestone for astronomy and …
ASCII ME Another
How to Text Better
On October 6, 1960, the American Standards Association (ASA) inaugurated the mysterious “X3” committee; a group tasked with determining the standard …
ASCII Me Another
In Pursuit of Perfect Punctuation
On October 6, 1960, a committee from the American Standards Association (fittingly and mysteriously called the “X3” committee) drew up the …
Stuffed to the Gills
An amateur dissection of taxidermy
Prepare the form In Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, the protagonist pulls up to an empty motel and has an unsettling dinner with its …
EARTH LINKS
Technology, Agriculture, and the Computational Metaphor
We conceive of the Internet mostly through metaphors. Early imaginings of a globally distributed network of information likened the nascent web’s …
The Thirst Ahead
One day in late February, the taps that carry water to São Paolo’s 20 million residents suddenly went dry. The effects …
Memoir of a Young Hacker
When I was 13, I wrote a piece of malicious software and put it on my mother’s computer. It took the …
To Be Ourselves
“I founded 4chan eleven and a half years ago at the age of 15, and after more than a decade and …
Bacteria[s] R Us
Last week, a new study delivered confirmation of something that many of us had suspected for decades: the New York City …
The New Obvious Choice
Every June, 1500 interns arrive in Mountain View, California to begin their highly coveted summer internships at Google. They represent approximately …
Tastes Like Chicken
Sizing Up Alternative Meats
Although we live in a culture replete with red paint on fur coats, images of warehouses crammed with livestock, and non-stop …
Notes on Connection
Technology—and more relevantly, those who make/use it—very much wants to work within a language of disruption. Tech has always defined breaks …
Genetic Poetics
Christian Bök gets experimental
“The word is now a virus” —William S. Burroughs Something deeply radical is pulsating under poet Christian Bök’s seemingly normal exterior, …
Iron and Fields
A journey to the inside of the earth
The earth can seem impenetrable, unexplainable, whether you are flipping through the pages of an earth science textbook or staring up …
Cyborgs in the Club
Arca and the digital boundary
On November 1, Venezuelan electronic musician Arca released his debut album Xen, named for Arca’s alter ego, a genderless—though feminine—figure whom …
Bigger Than You Can Imagine
Paranoia and privacy law
Big Data. Admittedly, it’s a great phrase, encapsulating every bigger-better progress narrative in a tight trisyllabic punch. As a term, it …
Intimate Strangers
Growing up on Internet forums
This is the most famous post in the history of Internet forums. On July 14 2004, a user registered as “lonely” …
Accidental Greatness
How some of the world’s most famous discoveries started with mistakes
In 1879, chemist Constantin Fahlberg came home from a long day of experimenting with coal tar. Upon sitting down to eat, …
Meditations on Fusion
"Music is like a drug; whoever acquires the habit can no longer devote himself to important activities. We must eliminate music …
Towards a Greener Future
The environmental impact of cannabis cultivation
A pair of sultry eyes sunken into a frighteningly unblemished face appeared on the screen. Beneath a wisp of smoke ascending …
Pushing Back Silence
“Imagine a world where we never again hear the symphonic startup of a Windows 95 machine. And when the entire world …
A History of Violence
The Australian shark cull and the plight of apex predators “As long as Homo sapiens has been sapient... alpha predators have …
Ghosts in the Machine
The sounds of the digital archive
How can a body connect with the Internet? Think of how each sense wouldconceive of the Internet. It’s harder than you …
Speech: H.D. Davidman
H.D. Davidman is running for public office with the hope of defeating D.H. Benjamin of the incumbent party, FTRPRTY (not an …
Young and Younger
the creative practices of tech’s next generation
In his newest film, A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought Alone, Mike Mills interviews the eight to twelve-year-old …
Web Exclusive: Interview with Fred Turner
Editor’s Note: This unexcerpted interview accompanies “Young and Younger: the creative practices of tech’s next generation” from Issue 9. Fred Turner, …
Ditching the Frame
user interface and the blurring of digital boundaries
Art has always favored the rectangle. Since humans began moving our paintings off of cave walls and onto formal and constructed …
How New Became New Again
technology and origin myth
At the beginning of the world, Camel did not want to work. Every time Horse or Dog or Ox would ask …
Holding Notes
Thinking through St. Vincent and Holly Herndon
“Entombed in a shrine / Of zeroes and ones / You know” –St. Vincent, “Huey Newton” Placing two artists on a …
Six Feet Underwater
Biological immortality in three easy steps
16th Century explorer Juan Ponce de Leon searched for the Fountain of Youth in the place where, today, people go to …
Sharing for Money
An interview with technology writer Tom Slee
Technology lingo rings hopeful. Recently, a Silicon Valley-endorsed candidate for national office promised to bring about “Government 2.0” and claimed to …
Flying Light
tuning out in the sky
As the jet lurches and pitches miles above Rhode Island, a professor of furniture design presses bored thumbs into his iPad. …
In Terra Veritas
world waiting to download
It has been a number of centuries since medieval cartographers filled the uncharted regions of their maps with mythological creatures. When …