Journey of a Single Line
[Image: A1 (1930) by Wacław Szpakowski, via Miguel Abreu Gallery]. I meant to write about these way back when they first appeared in the Paris Review, but alas. In any case, Wacław Szpakowski was a…
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The Age of Horror
[Image: “Clouds, Sun and Sea” (1952) by Max Ernst, courtesy Phillips.] There’s an interesting space where early modern, mostly 19th-century earth sciences overlap with armchair conjectures about th…
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Instrumental Revelation and the Architecture of Abandoned Physics Experiments
Semi-abandoned large-scale physics experiments have always fascinated me: remote and arcane buildings designed for something other than human spatial expectations, peppered with inexplicable instru…
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A Spatial History of Sleep
[Image: Fish preserved in the eternal ocean of a closed jar at the American Museum of Natural History; old Instagram by Geoff Manaugh]. Although this is a classic example of something I am totally …
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Submarine Psychiatry
[Image: An otherwise unrelated photograph of a submarine, via Vice]. Something I’ve always loved about the architectural novels of J. G. Ballard—his excellent but under-rated Super-Cannes, the clas…
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The Ghost of Cognition Past, or Thinking Like An Algorithm
[Image: Wiring the ENIAC; via Wired] One of many things I love about writing—that is, engaging in writing as an activity—is how it facilitates a discovery of connections between otherwise unrelated…
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Corporate Gardens of the Anthropocene
[Image: The Washington Bridge Apartments, New York; via Google Maps]. One of the most interesting themes developed in David Gissen’s recent book, Manhattan Atmospheres, is that the climate-controll…
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The Coming Amnesia
[Image: Galaxy M101; full image credits]. In a talk delivered in Amsterdam a few years ago, science fiction writer Alastair Reynolds outlined an unnerving future scenario for the universe, somethin…
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Offworld Colonies of the Canadian North
[Image: Fermont’s weather-controlling residential super-wall, courtesy Blackader-Lauterman Library of Architecture and Art, McGill University]. An earlier version of this post was published on New …
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Tree Rings and Seismic Swarms
[Image: An otherwise unrelated print of tree rings from Yellowstone National Park, by LintonArt; buy prints here]. The previous post reminded me of an article published in the December 2010 issue o…
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Infrastructural Voodoo Doll
For the past few months, on various trips out west to Los Angeles, I’ve been working on an exclusive story about a new intelligence-gathering unit at LAX, the Los Angeles International Airport. To …
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Sovereign Flocking Algorithms
[Image: Flocking diagram by “Canadian Arctic sovereignty: Local intervention by flocking UAVs” by Gilles Labonté]. One of many ways to bolster a nation-state’s claim to sovereignty over a remote or…
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Sunken Cities
[Image: Raising a house to help survive future floods; photo by Eliot Dudik, courtesy The New York Times]. The climate change-induced flooding of coastal cities along the U.S. eastern seaboard has …
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Plasma Bombs and Sky Bridges
[Image: Via NOAA]. The U.S. Department of Defense has awarded a handful of small business grants for exploring the “controlled enhancement of the ionosphere.” The aim of the grants is to find new w…
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Zone for Game
[Image: Via TechCrunch]. There was finally something interesting to read about Pokémon Go. The game—which involves overlaying the physical world with a grab-bag of exotic creatures that players att…
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Schrödinger’s Speleology, or the Stalking of “Entranceless Caves”
[Image: A cave entrance in France, via Wikipedia]. I recently finished reading Last Words by Michael Koryta, a detective novel largely centered on an unmapped fictional cave system in southern Indi…
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The Sky-Math Garden
[Images: Via Peter Moore’s piece on “dueling weathermen” over at Nautilus]. As mentioned in the previous post, I recently had the pleasure of reading Peter Moore’s new book, The Weather Experiment.…
