Interview • 11 min read Bare Beauty, Beyond Euclid Jordan Ellenberg calls geometry “the cilantro of math,” which is to say that few people feel neutral about it. His…
Panama • 5 min read Strangers on boats. When my grandmother immigrated to Canada from Scotland, she brought a trunk full of her grandmother’s photo albums, which…
Reading Group • 1 min read We're reading Dust Dust is so ubiquitous that most people barely notice it. Jay Owens is an exception. She has been paying close…
Project Notes • 8 min read How Slow Scan TV Shaped The Moon lee wilkins on slow scan TV, the technology that brought the moon landing to the masses.…
Project Notes • 10 min read Notes, 2023-12-11 James Coleman on the complexity of incentive structures around negative emissions technologies.…
Project Notes • 6 min read Notes, 2023-12-04. With 2023 drawing to a close, I have a New Year’s resolution: I will do more field reporting. This…
Tools • 6 min read Let a Hundred Mechanisms Bloom. Spencer Wright on antique apple parers, and how an old tool can force you to confront a problem anew.…
Project Notes • 7 min read Plastic Archeology. George Cave on the evolution of Lego and the archeology of plastic.…
7 min read Ford and Macadam. It used to be rare that more than a couple of sentences at a time were cut from drafts of…
Project Notes • 7 min read Accord of the Rings Hillary Predko on the strange and powerful Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer.…