Meena Khandelwal and Kayley Lain reflect on half a century of failed efforts to change how people cook in rural India, before adding a little device of their own to the fire.

As food has industrialized, it has changed, along with our bodies and our economies. Matthew Hockenberry charts conceptual connections in this issue with a timeline.

Robert Foster explores how mobile phones in Papua New Guinea offer new ways for both companies and consumers to give and receive care.

Is an aquifer a tank or a sponge? Andrea Ballestero investigates how publics navigate the scientific indeterminacy of the underground in Costa Rica

Ashley Carse explores water distribution and its publics on the Isthmus of Panama

[From The Cross Cultural Partnership website. Discussed by James Leach in his presentation.–ed] DRAFT version 0.3, September 2007 Preamble The cross-cultural partnership template is designed to help potential collaborators to reach understanding and agreement on the terms of their collaboration. In many contexts people look to the law to establish or enforce a ‘safe space’ ...

Why can’t crowds defend themselves? Alek Felstiner explores how the power of crowds to decide is also a weakness when it comes to organizing.

Christopher Kelty opens up a toolkit from the 1990s to explore the prehistory of apps, platforms, and algorithms.

Does the unfiltered, illicit status of a leak change the nature of information? Molly Sauter offers a consideration of the half-life of stolen data.

Do you know how to read your electricity bill? Canay Özden-Schilling examines how new electricity experts—and new publics—are creating and contesting the price of U.S. household energy today.

Brenda Chalfin reflects on the use of design as a little development device.

Jamie Cross explores how a solar-powered lamp became the go-to solution to Puerto Rico’s energy crisis.

Amidst the debate over various culprits for honeybee colony collapse (pesticides, pathogens, parasites, habitat loss, etc.), Chloe Silverman asks a different question: what exactly is a healthy living system in an age of increasing vulnerability?

Tatiana Thieme explores how doing your business has become an opportunity for business in Nairobi.

Personalized recommendation is the new marketing. Nick Seaver explains how ‘collaborative filtering’ de- fines people through their purchases.

At the end of the great credit bubble there was still a tremendous amount of borrowing potential in the hands of consumers.  Of the $5 trillion in US credit card lines outstanding only $800 billion was reportedly in use.  So in the spring of 2009, with unemployment and bankruptcy on the rise, the card companies ...

Boris Jardine tells the story of a little ladder intended to tell us what everyone wants. Where on the ladder are you?

Lawrence Cohen de-duplicates the complex story of India’s Biometric Archive(s).

The labels on our food exist in a complex political struggle over consumers’ attention. Xaq Frohlich walks us through the information infrastructure of the label and its impact on our “choices.”

Andreas Folkers recalls how nuclear energy created a powerful counter-public in Germany beginning in the 1970s, and assesses the contemporary politics of energy alternatives.

Tom Scott-Smith gets inside an award-winning shelter designed for refugees and asks: what makes it any better than a tent?

Vanessa Manceron argues that when naturalists take part in monitoring programs on their “local patch,” they are caught between two forms surveillance: care and control.

Soe Lin Aung examines the Thilawa special economic zone to shed light on infrastructure’s changing publics in contemporary Myanmar.

Stephen J. Collier, James Christopher Mizes, and Antina von Schnitzler ask how infrastructures and their publics are taking shape today.

Sophie Dubuisson-Quellier shows how French markets and social movements interact in food provisioning

Jenny Bangham explains how the attempt to create a supply of all possible types of human blood gave rise to genetic diversity research in the 20th century.

“It’s just we wanted, we needed something for the deployment which would kind of work in a general way. […] So there were problems with it, it’s not a kind of definitive answer, but it certainly found its uses.” Drawing on the analogy of a box filled with mementos, stored under the bed, or in ...

Gabriella Coleman and Christopher Kelty guide readers through Limn Number 8 on Hacks, Leaks, and Breaches.

While policemen watch out for public security, psychologists watch out for the mental health of policemen. Emmanuel Didier looks at these two different uses of statistical data.

What makes a city smart? Alan Wiig examines a project to promote urban development through information infrastructure in Philadelphia.

How did the self-service economy emerge? Franck Cochoy displays the ‘pico-infrastructure’ behind modern consumption.

Brenda Chalfin and Xhulio Binjaku imagine designs for the future with Dwelling-Based Public Toilets in Urban Ghana.

Sven Opitz and Ute Tellmann explore energy infrastructure and the construction of a European commons.

What does Abu Dhabi's green future look like? Gökçe Günel explores Masdar City in a once-promising Personal Rapid Transit Pod.

How is modernity being reclaimed as a Chinese project? Jonathan Bach investigates the politics of infrastructure in today's most ambitious developmental state.

What kind of people will we become if we keep trying to archive everything? Geof Bowker reports from inside the Skinner Box.

Global health is like the viruses it claims to be combatting; Theresa MacPhail explains how.

Alex Wilkie The two excerpts that follow are drawn from my Ph.D. research User Assemblages in Design: An Ethnographic Study. The thesis is an examination of the role of multiple users in user-centered design (UCD) processes and is based on a six-month ethnographic field study of designers employed to apply the principles and practices of ...

Is your mobile phone company seeing like a state? Emma Park and Kevin P. Donovan explore telecommunications and contemporary nationalism in Kenya.

The emergence of China’s circular economy

Jonathan Morduch traces the rise of microfinance, and argues that it's time for a new vision.

Lyle Fearnley looks at what happens when farmers draw a line between wild and domestic that scientists miss.

Women under thirty and retired men might have surprisingly similar tastes for gambling. Natasha Dow Schüll explains how casinos have created a new kind of crowd.

A brief introduction to the idea behind Issue Number Nine, and the concepts associated with it.

In the realm of U.S. homeland security, the word of the day seems to be “resilience.” Benjamin Sims explains.

Christopher Otter diagnoses the impossibility of fully governing large-scale food systems and the novel ecologies they create.

James Christopher Mizes examines how an emerging style of African infrastructure planning and finance is inflecting an old political collectivity with “new” values.

Alberto Corsín Jiménez & Adolfo Estalella Could we speak of a saint as a prototype for a religious movement or of a clue as a prototype for a crime? Writing in the early 20th century, philosopher Max Scheler thought that heroes, saints and geniuses played a prototypical role for larger models of social organisation.[1] Scheler ...

Micro-lending plus crowd-sourcing creates its own problems. Roma Jhaveri explains how to keep crowds happy.

From within the interminable traffic jams of Dakar, Senegal, Caroline Melly examines how bottlenecks—or embouteillages—have become a fixture of modern life and a window into local ideas about global im/mobility and future possibility.

What does keeping the lower Mississippi River open for shipping have to do with coastal land loss, regional ecological change, and a pile of rocks? Joshua Lewis explores the relationship between transportation and ecological chokepoints in Louisiana.

Archives make the future. Editors Boris Jardine and Christopher Kelty explore how archives govern us.

What is the scope for local planning in large-scale infrastructure projects today? Stephen J. Collier, Savannah Cox, and Kevin Grove explore the multiple publics of flood control in New York City

Marilyn Strathern To what might an anthropologist wish to attach the term prototype? Prompted by Christopher Kelty’s reference to a conference publication preceding the conference, I recall a slim volume I brought out before a short seminar series held in 2004.[1] The volume does not really count as a prototype since it was not meant ...

Philip Bougen explores terrorism risks and making the unthinkable insurable.

Five year planning is dead. Long live the five year plan! Andrew Barry explores infrastructure's transparencies and opacities in the UK

Judith Kaplan explores the possibility of a new GOLD standard for archiving the world's endangered language data.