The Fourth Issue

This issue is focused on Science and the future. With the journalist Chris Hatherill we explore the future of telescopes, a crucial tool for our understanding of the universe. Elvia Wilk introduces us to Oxytocin, an empathy-enhancing drug. Paul Sánchez Keighley meets with Kira Radinsky, a young Israeli scientist who created an algorithm to predict macro political events.

As the photographer Edgar Martins provides us with an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at the European Space Agency, we travel back to the 17th century to rediscover Robert Hooke‘s Micrographia, a book whose beautiful drawings bear witness to the early stages in the history of the microscope.

We then interview two of our contemporary heroes: the science writer and journalist David Quammen, author of Spillover, the celebrated popular book about epidemiology, and Adam Curtis, the well-known BBC filmmaker, whose documentaries are both culturally enlightening and aesthetically thrilling.

Barry Phillips of Cambridge University presents to us the work of Northern Irish Artist Mark Francis whose paintings demonstrate that there is more to the universe than we can see.

Our fiction section for this issue is co-curated by Neil Clarke, editor of the acclaimed science fiction magazine Clarkesworld. He selected for us four stories penned by some of the most interesting contemporary authors within the genre: Ken Liu, Lauren Beukes, Genevieve Valentine and Carrie Vaughn. Finally, we asked Zackary Scholl to share with us some poems, generated by an algorithm he created, that have recently passed the Turing test.

John Kinsella presents to us 5 new poems from his time as Poet and Writer in Residence at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge University.