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Oct 13, 2024 | 
clairelevans.substack.com | Claire Evans
Craig Reynolds has always been drawn to patterns in nature. When he was a kid, he had a thing about the trailing shapes of clouds, and the way tree branches sway in the breeze. He watched ants, marveling over their minute comings and goings, the way their tiny labors accumulated in colonies. But nothing was more beautiful to him than flocks of birds, murmuring in great black clouds.
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Oct 8, 2024 | 
evans-crittens.com | Claire Evans
Today is day 8 of Blogtober and the suggested prompt is: “The Modern Harvest: Consider how the concept of “harvest” has evolved in contemporary, urbanized lives”. Again, I’m sticking closely to the prompt today as I want to share a modern harvest idea that I’ve noticed happening in recent years: community apple juicing. When we think of the word harvest, it often conjures up romantic images of golden fields, ripe crops, and farmers reaping the fruits of their labour.
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Oct 1, 2024 | 
clairelevans.substack.com | Claire Evans
We all have one: three pounds of winkled grey-pink peering out at the world from behind castle walls of bone. It’s the seat of consciousness and dreams. It holds memories, harbors love, shocks with fear, awe, and pain; it works over the raw input of the senses, smoothing the chemical signals, wavelengths of light, vibrations and electrical messages it receives into a cogent picture of its realm.
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Aug 30, 2024 | 
growbyginkgo.com | Max G. Levy |Alex Pearlman |Claire Evans
When we talk about the path ahead for synthetic biology, from necessary tech breakthroughs to ambitious policy changes, there is a reason why we call it building the future. Futures don’t manifest in a blink. Scientific understanding inches forward; our capacity to produce with it multiplies. The towers of technology built tomorrow will stand atop materials that exist today.
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Aug 30, 2024 | 
growbyginkgo.com | Claire Evans |Erika Szymanski |Claire Hendershot |Ian Woods
Studying biology, biotechnology, and synthetic biology is a regimented affair. People looking to learn about the possibilities of biotechnology, whether or not they even want to do it as a career, often can only access it through formal and expensive university education. Access to a biological future, as a result, is gated off by class and opportunity. A new generation of biologists, ecologists, and educators is looking to change that.
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Aug 30, 2024 | 
growbyginkgo.com | Max G. Levy |Claire Evans
Welcome to the biological city of the future. As we move deeper into an age of biotechnology, and contend with the burden of the climate crisis, we face dueling challenges: How do we leverage nature to engineer a better future, and how do we do so sustainably? This project features the perspectives of people working on inventive answers to this question. The landscape is enormous, so this project does not attempt to capture all the technology that will get us where we want to be.
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Jul 2, 2024 | 
clairelevans.substack.com | Claire Evans
Last weekend I hit the holy grail of estate sales: a former electrical engineer and computer fanatic with hoarder tendencies had passed, leaving an attic full of meticulously-organized back issues of IEEE Spectrum and MacWorld, wall-sized ASCII art printouts, three-ring binders full of satellite data, ancient Radio Shack manuals, books on electronic spycraft, computer simulations, and systems thinking.
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Jun 9, 2024 | 
clairelevans.substack.com | Claire Evans
After seven hours in the car, the road still pulls like a tide on my ears. Even after I’m splayed on the motel bed, its momentum continues, as though the tarmac were unspooling somewhere below the box spring. Fitting, then, that the movie we’ve selected from the depths of the cable box is about the liquid pull of the world.
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May 12, 2024 | 
clairelevans.substack.com | Claire Evans
Note: this week I’m trying something new and sharing some fiction. I wrote this story in a fever a few summers ago, inspired by J.G. Ballard’s Report on an Unidentified Space Stationand an image, which has haunted me for years, from Michael Green’s Zen and the Art of the Macintosh, of an ancient computer falling into ruin in the jungle. Re-reading it today, I was struck by how much it resonates with the themes of this newsletter.
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Apr 28, 2024 | 
clairelevans.substack.com | Claire Evans
In 1971, the astronaut Stuart Roosa, a former U.S. Forest Service ranger who’d logged his first flight miles smoke-jumping wildfires in Oregon, brought a forest into space. Tucked into Roosa’s personal kit, hundreds of pine, sycamore, sweetgum, redwood, and Douglas fir seeds made a historic 34 laps around the moon. When Apollo 14’s crew returned to Earth, they spent two weeks in an isolation chamber, and the forest underwent decontamination, too.
