Shanthi Chandrasekar, Kolam – Aishwarya (Earth), 2018, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 inches.

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Spring 2021

Technoscientific Bodies

Michael Sappol

The sensory pathway and radio system, in Gerhard Venzmer et al., Hand- und Lehrbuch der Krankenpflege 1 (Stuttgart: Franckh’sche Verlag, 1938), pl. 10. Originally from Fritz Kahn, Das Leben des Menschen … Read More
Winter 2025

The Heart Is Not Neutral

Adam Briggle

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that justice is harmony and that injustice is faction—the disharmonies that tear society apart. The question, then, is how to hold a political community together. In… Read More
Summer 2024

The Power of Space Art

One of the remarkable qualities of space art is its ability to amplify the mysterious intangibility of the cosmos (as with the late-nineteenth-century French artist Étienne Trouvelot) and at the same time… Read More
May 30, 2025

The Shade Technician

In a heat-sieged city whose residents have become functionally nocturnal, an essential worker labors during the day to fix private shade structures designed to provide shelter from the grueling sun for anyone who can pay.
May 30, 2025

The Limits of Heat Resilience

How resilient to extreme heat can humans really be? Our bodies have a limit—and our response to climate change should reflect that.
June 24, 2024

Preparing Researchers for an Era of Freer Information

Peter W. B. Phillips

If you Google my name along with “Monsanto,” you will find a series of allegations from 2013 that my scholarly work at the University of Saskatchewan, focused on technological change in the… Read More
January 16, 2024

Ground Truths Are Human Constructions

Florian Jaton

Artificial intelligence algorithms are human-made, cultural constructs, something I saw first-hand as a scholar and technician embedded with AI teams for 30 months. Among the many concrete practices and materials these algorithms… Read More
January 16, 2024

How Generative AI Endangers Cultural Narratives

Jill Walker Rettberg

Sometime last summer, I needed to install a new dryer in my home in Bergen, Norway. I opened a localized version of Google and typed a request for instructions in Norwegian. Everything… Read More
Fall 2024

The Puzzle of Pricing the Future

R. David Simpson

Liliana Doganova describes her book, Discounting the Future: The Ascendency of a Political Technology, as a study in the “historical sociology” of discounting. Discounting—determining what value to place on income in… Read More
February 28, 2025

Mothering the Bay

When a busy BART train suddenly screeches to a stop deep under the San Francisco Bay, passengers turn to personalized AI agents to understand what’s happened—but they begin to realize that those agents may obscure more than they illuminate.
Spring 2024

Taking Aristotle to the Moon and Beyond

G. Ryan Faith

In 2009, journalist Tom Wolfe, author of the space-age classic The Right Stuff, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times entitled “One Giant Leap to Nowhere.” Commenting on the… Read More
September 2, 2022

Competing in the Twenty-First Century

Innovation PolicyA New S&T Policy for a New Global RealityBruce R. Guile, Caroline S. WagnerGlobalized science and engineering capability has changed how innovation happens and who it benefits. US policies need to… Read More
September 3, 2024

Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer: Refugee Communication Networks

Faheem Hussain, Kimberly Quach

In our miniseries Cool Ideas for a Long, Hot Summer, we’re working with Arizona State University’s Global Futures Lab to highlight bold ideas about how to mitigate and adapt to climate… Read More
January 17, 2025

The Wait

When Emilia’s brother disappears, she turns to a government agency that tracks citizens’ locations in real time in order to protect them—only to realize that the agency’s real goal is to simply create an illusion of safety.
February 27, 2024

Building Community in the Bayou

Monique Verdin, J. D. Talasek

At the age of 19, Monique Verdin picked up a camera and began documenting the lives of her relatives in the Mississippi Delta. Little did she know that she would spend the… Read More
December 13, 2024

A Healing at the Triple B Trophy Lodge

What if you could create a clone of someone who has done you harm—and then kill it? When a skeptical journalist visits the cultish “kill therapy” retreat to profile its ambitious founder, she inadvertently opens the door to histories she had long endeavored to forget.
November 22, 2024

A Time Between

Detectives digging into evidence of a tragic death find themselves confronted with two different versions of the past—and, perhaps, the present.
Fall 2022

Innovation in Mentorship

“Academic Mentorship Needs a More Scientific Approach,” by Beronda L. Montgomery, Fátima Sancheznieto, and Maria Lund Dahlberg (Issues, Summer 2022), calls to light how well-intentioned but neglectful mentorship serves as… Read More
November 8, 2024

Collateral Damage

From the Future Tense Fiction archives: A short story from Justina Ireland about what happens when a robot is sent into combat alongside human soldiers.
October 25, 2024

Patrons

Cassidy McFadzean imagines extraterrestrials who selectively lift humans from Earth and transport them to a deep-space artists colony. As they do, the distant visitors, known as Patrons, dramatically shift the terrestrial communities where they touch down.
March 7, 2023

Episode 27: Confronting Extreme Heat With the World’s First Chief Heat Officer

Jane Gilbert, Jason Lloyd

Miami is so renowned for its warm weather that its professional basketball team is the Miami Heat. But extreme heat can be life-threatening, even in cities like Miami that are used to… Read More
October 4, 2024

Empathy Hour

From the Future Tense Fiction archives: A story about the aftermath of massive climate migration, and the use of deepfake technology to manufacture complacence.
Spring 2024

An Elusive and Indefinable Boundary

Virginia Hanusik

Seven years before the release of Silent Spring in 1962, marine biologist and writer Rachel Carson wrote The Edge of the Sea. Part field guide to the Atlantic seashore, part meditation on… Read More
September 27, 2024

Move Fast and Fake Things

In a recent episode of the podcast Women at Warp, the hosts discussed their favorite episodes of the various Star Trek series in which the Holodeck—a fully immersive, interactive virtual reality… Read More
Fall 2023

An Epic Battle Against Polluters

Charles N. Herrick

When we think about the evolution of environmental policy, many of us tend to imagine congressional committee wrangling, Sierra Club activists trying to out-hustle coal industry lobbyists, and competing policy briefs from… Read More
December 20, 2022

Episode 23: Shirley Malcom – Where Science and Society Meet

Shirley M. Malcom

Shirley M. Malcom is a trailblazer in the area of broadening participation in science. Currently senior advisor and director of the SEA Change initiative at the American Association for the Advancement of… Read More
Summer 2023

How to Investigate an Algorithm

Meredith Broussard

At the end of 2021, Sujin Kim was a senior at the University of Michigan. Eager to follow up her undergraduate political science studies with a PhD, Kim was applying to 15… Read More
January 24, 2024

To Discourage Science Misconduct, Encourage “Delight of Discovery”

Tom Burroughs

A top research center, the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, plans to retract or correct numerous scientific papers amid allegations that the authors falsified data by manipulating images. In Issues, the science… Read More
Winter 2024

Lessons from Ukraine for Civil Engineering

The resilience of Ukraine’s infrastructure in the face of both conventional and cyber warfare, as well as attacks on the knowledge systems that underpin its operations, is no doubt rooted in the… Read More
January 16, 2024

The Question Isn’t Asset or Threat; It’s Oversight

Emmanuel Didier

As part of a research group studying generative AI with France’s Académie Nationale de Médecine, I was surprised by some clinicians’ technological determinism—their immediate assumption that this technology would, on its own,… Read More