Darwin killed God: I put this here for myself. Some links to stuff for me to read later.

Saturday, July 18, 2020

I put this here for myself. Some links to stuff for me to read later.

This is The Atlantic’s weekly email to subscribers—a close look at the issues our newsroom is watching, just for you. This week, I invited Ian Bogost, a contributing writer and professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, to talk about his work editing a series on our built environment—an environment made different by the pandemic, but also by many other forces. As always, you can talk with us by replying directly to this email.

— Shan Wang

Dear Reader,

I can’t stop thinking about all the things I normally don’t think about. The width of the sidewalks as I pass people strolling around the neighborhood, maintaining social distance. The safety of ventilation systems circulating air through supermarkets. The bill I just received to insure the automobile I mostly don’t drive right now.

The pandemic has made me newly aware of just how much ordinary technology pervades everyday life. Everyone lives in buildings on roads in cities or towns or counties, made of wood and cement, serviced by vans and trains, undergirded by plumbing and power. These are the places where life happens: work and play, childhood and middle age, dreams and worries. “Metropolis Now” is a project about how technology is transforming this built environment, for better and for worse.

A lot has changed since I first started working on this project, in January 2018. When we covered how restaurants got so loud, we couldn’t have guessed that they’d become quiet again due to contagion rather than redesign. Malls and retail stores were already shifting purpose, even before COVID-19 kept people away. We explored why engineering sank New Orleans before climate change did, and how Cape Town’s drought became an omen for future political turmoil.

We kicked off a new phase of “Metropolis Now” this week, with the audiology expert Kate Wagner writing about how the urban soundscape is a proxy in fights for power and control. Stay-at-home orders made cities quiet, and Black Lives Matter protests made them loud again. Stories in this series will look beyond pandemic and protest to other challenges facing towns and cities, including the changing role of police in television fictions, how global cities started to look so similar to one another, how urban foresters design for the long life span of trees, and how friendship and intimacy are getting redesigned online. Wherever you reside, I hope “Metropolis Now” will help you notice again, or for the first time, how the places you occupy help construct the life you live.

— Ian Bogost