There is so little fresh surface water on Earth that if you collected it all into a ball, it would barely reach across New York City. Running water is a miracle — but the technology that brings it to us and takes the waste away is actually thousands of years old. The only barrier to staying hydrated today is political will.
Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience looks at how two decades of digital tech have alienated us from our bodies and the world
The traditional selling point of the suburbs: they’re nature preserves for Living, set apart from the real world. What if we made them little fiefdoms instead?
There’s no time like the present to revisit the warning of forgotten media theorist Harold Innis: “Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult.”
When you’ve got a “diseases of civilization” crisis, you’re gonna get some weirdos.
The gatekeepers are dying. Why is everything so mid?
Fertilization, irrigation, genetics: the three practices that let us feed the whole world for the first time in history
Introducing “How the System Works,” a series on the hidden mechanisms that support modern life