The Coldscape

Nicola Twilley

More than three-quarters of the food consumed in the United States today is processed, packaged, shipped, stored, and sold under artificial refrigeration. The shiny, humming stainless steel box in your kitchen is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak—a tiny fragment of the vast global network of temperature-controlled storage and distribution warehouses cumulatively capable of hosting uncounted billions of cubic feet of chilled flesh, fish, or fruit. Add to that an equally vast and immeasurable volume of thermally controlled space in the form of shipping containers, wine cellars, floating fish factories, international seed banks, meat-aging lockers, and livestock semen storage, and it becomes clear that the evolving architecture of coldspace is as ubiquitous as it is varied, as essential as it is overlooked.

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The Tattoo Solution

George Prochnik

The universality of tattooing is a curious subject for speculation.
—Captain James Cook

I
Everybody everywhere, it seems, originally agreed that their skin could be better, that it wasn’t doing the job it might have done, that it was holding in too much or hiding too little; that it needed a hole, a gash, a bump, a rash, a zag, a zig, a beast, a grid, a swirl, a sword, a word, a Lord, a girl, a grin, a heart, a yin, a cross, a globe, a star, a sleeve, a polychromatic cosmic sheath marking every place the body bleeds.

That much is obvious. Human beings believe the ecology between what’s outside and inside is off and the epidermis is the best place to begin redressing this imbalance. The universality of tattooing Cook pointed to reflects the universality of the knowledge that we are not made in our own image. Whatever we might be, we look down at our bare skin and know there’s been a mistake, an omission. This unruly fabric in which we’re so wrapped up—this, anyway, is not it.

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D.I.Y. Eye in the Sky

Andrew Toland

While searching for images of Beirut’s skyline on the internet, I came across three images posted to someone’s Flickr account. I wanted to find out who took them. What was the exact location in Beirut from which they were taken? Exactly what time of the day were they taken? What could be unearthed about the person who took them? Just how far beyond the images could you go?

Step 1 WHAT YOU WILL NEED: One computer, connected to the internet. That is all.

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Heavy Breeding

Michael Wang

In 1920, the brothers Lutz and Heinz Heck, directors of the Berlin and Munich zoos, respectively, began a two-decade breeding experiment. Working with domestic cattle sought out for their “primitive” characteristics, they attempted to recreate “in appearance and behavior” the living likeness of the animals’ extinct wild ancestor: the aurochs. “Once found everywhere in Germany,” according to Lutz Heck, by the end of the Middle Ages the aurochs had largely succumbed to climate change, overhunting, and competition from domestic breeds.¹

The last aurochs herds died out in the Polish-Lithuanian Union, where a documented population persisted under royal protection in Mazovia until the middle of the seventeenth century. Historical descriptions of these animals identified the aurochs as similar to domestic oxen, but entirely black, with a whitish stripe running down the back.² More distant accounts emphasized their ferocity and imposing size. Julius Caesar described the aurochs of Germania as an elephantine creature prone to unprovoked attack.³

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Trap Streets

James Bridle

In 2001, the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain took the Automobile Association, a motoring organization, to court over copyright infringement, claiming the Automobile Association was using Ordnance Survey maps as the source material for its atlases and town plans.


The Ordnance Survey originates in a 1747 plan to facilitate the subjugation of the Highland clans following the Jacobite uprising of 1745, when Lieutenant Colonel David Watson proposed that a comprehensive survey of Scotland would assist in further campaigns. The result—The Duke of Cumberland’s Map produced under the command of its namesake by William Roy, Paul Sandby, and John Mason—was the first military-quality map of the British Isles, and grew into the Principal Triangulation of Great Britain (1783–1853), which set the standard for the Ordnance Survey’s work.


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Just Deserts: An Interview with Danielle S. Allen

Justin E. H. Smith and Danielle S. Allen

What are the differences in the ways different societies conceptualize punishment? What are the differences in the ways they enact it? And what can be learned by looking at other systems of punishment about the contingency and potential for transformation of our own system? Ancient Athens has often served as a model for certain of the modern world’s deepest aspirations in democratic government and philosophical rationality. At least since Nietzsche, it has also sometimes been approached as an extremely foreign land, whose values and practices, in their strangeness, can at the same time show just how strange our own are. How, now, does Athens look when we turn our attention to its conceptualization and enactment of punishment?

Danielle S. Allen is a political theorist who has addressed these questions in her work on both ancient Athens and modern America. Author of The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (Princeton University Press, 2000), Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Why Plato Wrote (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), Allen is UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Justin E. H. Smith spoke to Allen by phone about the relationship between justice, punishment, and citizenship.

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Reimagining Recreation

James Trainor

There was a child went forth every day, / And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder, pity, love, or dread, that object he became, / And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.
—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1856

Mid-1970s I’ll pin the blame on Robert Moses for this one.

After all, it was one of his playgrounds, one of the safe, drab, battleship-gray ones whose WPA-era design had changed little since Moses assumed power as New York City’s parks commissioner in 1934 (during his twenty-six-year reign, 650 playgrounds were built). The banal swing-set. The bone-jarring seesaw. The galvanized slide. The joyless sprinkler. Each static feature was set far apart from the others, as if to avoid cross-contamination of respective functions, all of it embedded in a vast expanse of summer-blistered asphalt and concrete. I was five years old and with a sizable gash in my forehead, blood streaming down my face (eight stitches, lots of iodine, Roosevelt Hospital emergency room); it was my first and last major mishap in a New York playground, one that instantly implanted a lifelong phobia of pebble-dashed concrete. Along with asphalt (a “resilient” surface, Moses once proudly explained, that prevents children from “digging and eliminates dust”), it was the most unlikely play surface ever concocted by bureaucratic city planners charged with the safety of Gotham’s young. (An artificial agglomerate, it was thought to give traction to little feet running through sprinkler basins, but had the added benefit of acting like a human cheese-grater for unexpectedly airborne kids.)¹

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