by Réka Patrícia Gál

In a recent Lex Fridman podcast interview, Elon Musk refutes astrophysicist Carl Sagan’s famous quote regarding the singularly precious existence of Earth, a planet capable of supporting human life, in the universe. Musk reads Sagan’s words, “The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate," but quickly rejects them. He laughs: “This is not true.

by Crystal Chokshi

Sitting at my kitchen table, I dig my nails into each other while waiting for Raphael to call. Raphael is the financial advisor whom I don’t feel grown-up enough, or moneyed enough, to have. I am a graduate student; I haven’t saved for retirement since the years I worked full-time.

by Kathryn Blair

This is a bit of a musing in code and text about how code shapes the world we live in. As we go, I put together some code to generate a little world. You can see that world, and influence it to become more to your liking via a genetic algorithm.

by Max Liboiron

In 2013, a scientific paper was published on a type of plastic pollution it had discovered called “plastiglomerate.” The paper said it was reporting “the appearance of a new ‘stone’ formed through intermingling of melted plastic, beach sediment, basaltic lava fragments, and organic debris from Kamilo Beach on the island of Hawaii.”

by Madeleine Mendell

Like others researching the storage of digital media and data onto DNA, I have become fascinated by the implications this new storage format will have for our relationships to the living world, to ourselves, and to our data.

by Krista Lynes

Anna Tsing begins her explorations of mushroom picking by arguing that “the time is ripe to sense precarity” (20). She maps precarity in species extinction, job losses, capitalist devastation, and climate change.

by Tanner Mirrlees

Over the past decade, a discourse about the power of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft (or, the “GAFAM”) has grown in North America and around the world. This discourse is constituted by news media stories, business reports, policy documents, public rhetorics and popular cultural works that make innumerable claims and statements about GAFAM’s power in society.

by Tessa Brown

They were the only guests when they arrived at the Airbnb. The owner told them they’d missed the high season by a few weeks. Lucky them, it meant they’d save ten dollars a night on their accommodations. Jasper was still a popular vacation spot, in spite of everything.

by Andrew Kacey Thomas

One of the things I find most interesting about a global pandemic is my awareness of time. I reflect on its nature, its effect on our lives, and whether it’s going too slow or too fast. Covid-19 has made me sit in quiet discomfort with time for months.

by Chris Russill

I am standing off to the side of the photograph in a bright white space.

There are more people than I expected, but then I’m not in the National Gallery of Canada very often.

by Jordan Kinder

Since the use of divination methods to locate oil deposits in the nineteenth-century United States, a sense of the mystical has remained enmeshed with this fuel of modernity [1]. The deep mystification of fossil fuels like oil is partly a consequence of the material capacities that burning it enables.

by Cymene Howe

What if we were to find ourselves entwined by water, bound together through a world ocean? For oceanographers, the seas of the planet are one body of water lying across the surface of the earth, never neatly captured in a name, like Pacific or Indian or Southern.

by MJ Thompson & Liz Miller

Every bike tour needs a starting place, and ours is the interceptor. Our group is made up of university students drawn to the promise of an immersive experience, to the dilemma of waste [1], or perhaps just the challenge of spending a week on a bike.

by Erin Morton

The romance of a white woman’s settler childhood seems innocuous enough when sung in a Taylor Swift lyric. After all, who could fault her for a memory of swinging in the trees over a creek at age seven, “too scared to jump in”? “Please picture me in the trees // with Pennsylvania under me,” sings Swift, as she laments lost loves and childhood friendships of rural U.S. America.

by Anne Pasek

Edmonton is the industrial and policy base for much of the oil sands development in the north of the province—spectacularized through the tar sands campaign, and now the subject of bitter political and cultural divides within the province.

by Mél Hogan

There are six rulers of the global consumer technology industry: Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Netflix and Google. Together, these companies – known as the “Silicon Six” or, simply, “Big Tech” – have come to dominate our global social infrastructure, from operating systems, social media, web searches, and advertising, to the cloud infrastructures from which they operate.