…Papanek’s Design for the Real World (1984) called for the use of socially and environmentally responsible technologies and design. Papanek himself designed a 9-cent radio made of a used tin…

…as sentinels of emerging infectious diseases led the researchers to search for not just one but a multiplicity of viruses. As in other parts of the world, virologists in Hong…

…all of their complexity. In noting that training in mathematics and biomathematics would help ecologists move more easily “across the gap that separates the real world from the world of…

…as rural, and transfer the “quota” to an urban area. They can then spatially manipulate rural and urban designations for development. These certificates function as a market solution to a…

…demagogues. They communicate with their public not directly but through the mediation of signs, because they aim at reforming human actions rather than transforming the natural world. Weber makes a…

…The executive board room of the World Health Organization. The World Health Organization (WHO) received much of the criticism; the organization learned of the outbreak in March but did not…

…founding, the World Health Organization and the World Bank are still promoting this approach as the best sanitary model for the Global South (World Bank 2014). However, it has met…

…like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank, editorials and scientific papers in medical journals like The Lancet, and policy documents and pamphlets prepared by aid agencies, health…

…between the world of concepts and the world of things, a rhythmic and temporal flux that separates it from mass-produced artifacts. Back to apparent failures: in several studies, Microsoft has…

…liquefied petroleum gas. The Enduring Project of Improving Stoves in Rural India In some regions of the world, improved biofuel stoves have diffused successfully. In rural India, however, massive efforts…

…Eastern refugees, the British Museum (and probably other museums) are launching projects to “protect antiquities taken from conflict zones” (BBC News 2015). We don’t quite know how the conflict artifacts…

…‘hipster’ adverts on the streets of a techy part of London (BBC NewsBeat 2015). They have to do this because they know that their pay is very low compared to…

…leak—“Lonesome” Rhodes unwittingly insulting his public in A Face in the Crowd on a hot mic, or newspapers breaking the mistress story in Citizen Kane—but Podesta-size, Cablegate-size leaks (hundreds of…

…The answer came in 2014 when other hacktivists executed exceptionally visible and high-impact public interest hacks. In Peru, the government nearly dissolved after a two-person Anonymous hacktivist crew, Lulzsec Peru,…

…news. News commentary surrounding Flint in fact dwells on how racial animus directed against residents of this “majority minority” city might have driven the neglect and disregard that ushered in…

…be distinguished from drugs or medicines. Treating or Eating? In the twentieth century, food labels and packaging rules were a key tactic in assuring product safety and quality in the…

…outside the industry. Take, for instance, Rule 12 of Michael Pollan’s Food Rules, which urges readers to steer clear of the center store: Rule #12: Shop the peripheries of the…

At long last, doomsday has arrived. Ebola’s Atlantic passage may have mixed genres of tragedy and farce—real human suffering and cable news—but finally a sense of urgency matches years of…

…2014 annual shareholder meeting for Safaricom, a mobile network provider that is the country’s largest and most profitable company. Like other publicly traded corporations around the world, Safaricom stages this…

Among the virologists and public health experts who crafted the “emerging diseases worldview” in the 1990s, Ebola was the paradigm of an emerging disease. The Ebola virus had been discovered…

…running on schedule (Sulston and Ferry 2002:50). Sulston reluctantly, but seemingly inexorably, enters a capitalist world of production. The amounts of money required continually threaten to overreach the capacities of…

…and predictability into the world. In this sense they are vital systems, indispensable to the reproduction of contemporary forms of life and indeed to life itself. This also makes them…

…Let’s take, for example, what is happening in France around the phenomenon of alternative food systems. Neither producers nor consumers evolve in a closed world of either large-scale or small-scale…

Unilever Plantation Map from Unilever Plantations by W.R. Reader. London: Unilever Limited, 1961. Michel Faber liked to have a glass of rum after balancing the day’s ledgers. The shop doors…

…World War I had been a watershed for state-based economic planning in the interest of war mobilization. And in the United States, the War Production Board during World War II…

…Linley’s case demonstrates how online media can help transform loose online social links into significant “in real world” support in times of need. In the case of Between The Bars…

…way and from its special point of view, the statistics of the external world.” (Tarde 1903, 135) For Tarde, one of the very first things that societies have sensed statistically…