Daniel Rourke /stream

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Worldbuilding is the art of creating an alternate universe where the rules of present-day Earth life don't apply, and you have been appreciating that art for as long as you've been…

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Worldbuilding is an essential part of any work of fiction. But especially for science fiction or fantasy, it's the lifeblood of storytelling. But when worldbuilding fails, it can wreck your whole…

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Paintings by the masters da Vinci, Rembrandt, Goya, and Caravaggio are often accepted as absolute works. Today, we use mobile devices to capture these images, compressing them onto tiny screens, and…

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Anna Tsing is professor of anthropology at the University of Santa Cruz, California and the Nils Bohr professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, where she heads the Living in the Anthropocene research…

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Kaylene Kau from Taipei made the remarkable invention as part of a design school project. The limb would be able to grip many different objects by curling up with the help…

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Would you want to inherit your friends' stuff? Your valuables might mean just as little Look around the homes of loved ones whose objects you might at some future date have…

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Hayden (not his real name, for reasons that will become obvious) is 18 years old and he will never forget the moment when he first realized he was a necrophile. He…

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My friend June Thunderstorm and I once spent a half an hour sitting in a meadow by a mountain lake, watching an inchworm dangle from the top of a stalk of…

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This is the very lightly edited text of a lecture delivered as part of Through Post-Atomic Eyes in Toronto, 23-25 October 2015. Huge thanks to Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian for…

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Skip Article Header. Skip to: Start of Article. In the mid-’90s, a computer program called Chinook beat the world’s top player at the game of checkers. Three years later, to much…

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The second post in our forum on Nick and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future, from Steven Shaviro. Steven is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. He blogs at The…

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It is possible that the climate wars have already started. The ‘aridity line’ is usually considered to be 200mm of annual rainfall. Below that, you have desert.

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 The oil major Shell has a blisteringly slick and seductive new advert that extols the virtues of gas as a ‘transition fuel’ (which it isn’t).  As a piece of propaganda, it…

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Many people think of Facebook as just the big blue app, or even as the website, but in recent years we’ve been building a family of apps and services that provide…

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Your future windows, walls, and possibly boats will be made of ants — or at least of an ant-like substance. New research shows why ants classify as both a solid and…

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The ultimate fate of waste plastic is hazy – but we know future geologists will find traces of a fleeting era written in the stones. Welcome to the Plasticene ONE million…

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Evolution’s retirement plan has been 3.6 billion years in the making. With the appearance of the modern human being, we now have an organism that can take over from natural processes…

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Worldbuilding is the art of creating an alternate universe where the rules of present-day Earth life don't apply, and you have been appreciating that art for as long as you've been…

Bookmark

Worldbuilding is an essential part of any work of fiction. But especially for science fiction or fantasy, it's the lifeblood of storytelling. But when worldbuilding fails, it can wreck your whole…

Bookmark

McKenzie Wark gets at some very important issues in what we might call “the ontology of the Anthropocene” in this review of Jason Moore’s book Capitalism in the Web of Life.

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Anna Tsing is professor of anthropology at the University of Santa Cruz, California and the Nils Bohr professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, where she heads the Living in the Anthropocene research…

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Would you want to inherit your friends' stuff? Your valuables might mean just as little Look around the homes of loved ones whose objects you might at some future date have…

Bookmark

Hayden (not his real name, for reasons that will become obvious) is 18 years old and he will never forget the moment when he first realized he was a necrophile. He…

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My friend June Thunderstorm and I once spent a half an hour sitting in a meadow by a mountain lake, watching an inchworm dangle from the top of a stalk of…

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In many ways, computers are becoming invisible and will continue to do so.

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Skip Article Header. Skip to: Start of Article. In the mid-’90s, a computer program called Chinook beat the world’s top player at the game of checkers. Three years later, to much…

Bookmark

It is possible that the climate wars have already started. The ‘aridity line’ is usually considered to be 200mm of annual rainfall. Below that, you have desert.

Bookmark

The U.S. military has always been the one place in government with a plan, forever in preparation mode and ready to yank a blueprint off the shelf for almost any contingency.…

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Many people think of Facebook as just the big blue app, or even as the website, but in recent years we’ve been building a family of apps and services that provide…

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Your future windows, walls, and possibly boats will be made of ants — or at least of an ant-like substance. New research shows why ants classify as both a solid and…

Bookmark

Evolution’s retirement plan has been 3.6 billion years in the making. With the appearance of the modern human being, we now have an organism that can take over from natural processes…

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Deep in the arctic, inside over 400 feet of rock, a huge cache of seeds is stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in case of some global emergency. Today, the…