Greetings, Future Tensers,
This week, we’re excited to announce the return of Futurography, a series of monthlong courses in which we explore both the practicalities and potential of emerging technologies. Though we have a host of exciting topics coming in the months ahead, we’re starting very, very small with an investigation of nanotechnology.
We’ll be publishing a range of articles on the topic in the weeks ahead, but, as always, to kick it off we have a conversational introduction and a cheat sheet. And if you’re left wondering just how small this stuff is, we’ve put together a quick video on the size of the nanoscale. We hope you’ll follow along throughout the course, but we also invite you to sign up for our separate Futurography newsletter (there’s a link on this page) to get updates when new topics and articles are available.
Part of our goal with Futurography is to provide a nonalarmist account of technological conditions: To understand why that’s important, read this piece, in which psychology professor David LaPorte discusses how paranoid delusions often mirror technological advancements. While LaPorte looks at some unfortunate responses to technological anxieties, there are healthier ways manage those feelings, as Katrina Gulliver found when she started knitting to resist other digital distractions. It might also help to chart your technological entanglements like these two designers did when they mapped their smartphone usage over the course of a week.
Here are some of the other stories we read while trying to remember our old Dropbox passwords:
- Clean energy: Thanks to wind power, Iowa (of all states!) is producing massive amounts of electricity from renewable sources.
- Apple: The EU recently hit Apple with a huge tax bill, but things are more complicated than they seem. Law professor Adam Chodorow breaks it down.
- Healthy eating: Kavin Senapathy argues that though food stamp benefits should be usable online, we should be suspicious of organizations pushing dubious claims about organic and gluten-free products.
- Spaceflight: A SpaceX rocket exploded last week, taking an expensive satellite with it. As you’ll see, Mark Zuckerberg is rightly frustrated.
Events:
- On Monday, Sept. 19 at 6:30 p.m. in Washington, D.C., Francis Fukuyama will host a Future Tense screening and discussion of Children of Men as part of our “My Favorite Movie” series. For more information and to RSVP click here.
Booting up our atomic microscope,
Jacob Brogan
for Future Tense
