May Issue

Purity and impurity, clean and dirty, good and bad—language fails when it lures us into binaries. Essayists here acknowledge contamination as the default, and in every case, that one insight remakes the world.

What is that sickening feeling when you encounter a dead thing? Designer Pia Interlandi reframes feelings of disgust around death and decay by interlacing fashion, sustainability, and funeral rites⟶

The sterile lab may just be biology research’s abomination of nature. With the help of LEGO minifigures, scientist Andrew Pelling finds another, perhaps messier, way toward discovery⟶

“The Anthropocene is not the era of human mastery of nature. It is not the fulfillment of dreams of progress. On the contrary! The point of the term is to make us aware of how much we do not control, and of what a mess our species has made without really thinking about it,” writes anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing⟶

After swabbing the trash of Providence, Rhode Island, designer Megan Valanidas retreats to her basement lab to feed bioplastics to her bacteria. So why are all the microbes dying?⟶

Researchers take to the sewers to preempt Covid-19 outbreaks. Journalist Helen Albert surveys the rollout of new wastewater testing tech as a first line against future pandemics⟶

Issue 7 Masthead