The love explored here isn’t purely human; it’s a search and a recognition, a curse and a cure. And for all you lonelyhearts, it’s ubiquitous.

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This issue is written in code (English) on a platform of code (0,1) about code (A, T, C, G). Meaning is mediated through multiple layers—yet when meaning appears, code seemingly vanishes. In these essays, code becomes a locus of discrimination, irretrievability, and discovery where culture and biology lock horns.

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The creatures that inhabit this issue may be pariahs of cuteness, but we humans owe them debts of gratitude—and kindness. In the words of Donna Haraway, “Kin are unfamiliar (outside what we thought was family or gens), uncanny, haunting, active.” In Interspecies, meet your kin.

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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.

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Food—there’s maybe no other topic that so immediately conjures a web of endless associations. So while this issue explores delicious, scrumptious, and even strange foods, it’s also about something that lies just beneath the proverbial peel: systems. Every morsel is a system within a system.

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A new president, an attack on democracy, a moment to meditate on desired futures: scientists, environmentalists, designers, and educators reflect on the challenges humanity faces to bring about personal, cultural, and environmental wellbeing.

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Despite the pandemic again breaking records, there’s suddenly oxygen to imagine new futures. In the miasma of Covid and a fractured American body politic, let’s take a moment to consider Reinvention. The prompt: What changes would you like to see over the next four years?

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Bodies—the fate imposed on them by culture is often far more insidious than the fate imposed by biology. In this issue, essayists search for the integrity of bodies in a culture that seeks to control them.

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By now it’s obvious that the built environment has taken on new meanings. Thinkers in biology, design, and architecture take on the future of spaces and how they can be reimagined, redefined, and reconstructed.

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Within a few short months the world has fixated on one thing: a virus. Covid is not only infecting our bodies, but also our minds and culture. In our inaugural issue, we offer another lens through which to view life during a pandemic.

Read Issue 01⟶