A Visual History of the Future

Decades ago, artists’ imaginings formed high expectations about the world to come. Were these just fantasies–or was it the work of pioneers whose visions of the future actually helped to shape it?
Darren Garrett

Breaking the Cycle

The future of reproductive health in India, from early ideas about population control to on-the-ground interventions happening now, to a world where men and women share contraceptive responsibility.
Hannah Harris Green

A Noxious Problem

Smog in cities and smoke in the home cause a huge range of short- and long-term health conditions. Why is the world’s biggest public health crisis only getting worse?
How We Get To Next

Beats: Space

Space is where we project our dreams–and our nightmares–of the future.

Beats: Food

Food structures our day, and food systems shape our world

Beats: Disability

“Disable” is an active verb, and disability describes the social and environmental barriers that prevent access just as much as an individual body’s physical reality.

Beats: Health

Access to health care is as much a matter of public policy as it is the size of a person’s pocketbook; within a doctor’s office, many factors affect the quality of treatment.

Disappearing Languages and Tooltips

Obfuscating a feature is obviously not a great solution, and it’s arguably a total betrayal of the principles I laid out above. But it was the best compromise we found between giving people information we knew they’d want, while not promising something we couldn’t deliver in a fair and equal manner.
Duncan Geere
2 min read

The Web Divided

Will machine translation ever bring us together?
Corin Faife
10 min read

The Questionable Compromises of Privately-Owned Cities

The reason a privatized city is so much quicker and easier to build is not down to the inherent superiority of the free market, but because it removes power from people and communities and centralizes it into the hands of one person or corporation.
Samira Shackle
4 min read