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The pandemic highlighted our intimate relationship with biology. Urban tech is already charting these new urban landscapes and frontiers. Sampling sewage for COVID-19 virus was a key source of data that helped anticipate outbreaks in many cities, weeks before clinical tests revealed a new spike. And biomedical researchers are sequencing the microbiomes within urban transit systems in dozens of cities to compare notes on local fauna.
Forecast: Wild & Well | the Future of Urban Tech
futureofurbantech.org
The old idea from Iris Murdoch endures: the most important revelation that stories offer is that *other people exist*. Stories in fiction and stories unfolding right before our eyes. Other people exist! A miraculous banality, half comedy and half tragedy, and a truth that takes rituals and habits to take seriously. We calibrate our inflated sense of self by learning from others’ gifts and from their suffering, and perhaps we learn the most when those two are almost irreducibly mixed.
Object Lessons
Sara Hendren
As a medium, photography is kind of intrinsically selfish. So I bring prints to people as a way of hopefully giving a small thing back in exchange for the trust and time that they’ve given to me. But it also shows them how I see them, and that’s important because sometimes there’s a dissonance in how somebody sees themself compared to how an outsider might view them. Sometimes people will get a picture and we’ll have a conversation about whether or not it aligns with their self-image, and I think that’s kind of interesting to wrestle with as a photographer.
Matt Eich: “I Don’t Dress Loud, I Don’t Walk Loud, I Don’t Talk Loud”
Bill Shapiro
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise