The founding editors reflect on the journal’s origins

Can the war on life be rendered obsolete?

Traces on the sea

Mumbai’s discarded taxis are an archive of the city

On the road to Uganda’s future

Facing a post-antibiotic future, scientists and patients forge new alliances in pursuit of old therapies

Can deconstruction unlock resources abandoned in late industrial cities?

As media forms come and go, why do cassette tapes live on?

How the COVID-19 pandemic resuscitated old satellite technology in Thailand

Cochlear implants deemed obsolete in one country become vital in another

Why are farmers burying underwear in their fields?

An artist reimagines objects discarded in Accra’s vulcanizer shops

An interview with R2R advocate Kyle Wiens

​​How whaling history lives on in Nantucket’s energy politics

The emergence of China’s circular economy

Illuminating Obsolescence

Chokepoints are problems not only of space, but also of time. Jason Cons explores this temporality in Bangladesh’s Sundarbans, a mangrove forest that has become a laboratory for fashioning the future in a warming world.

Orit Halpern visits the blasted grounds of a Canadian gold-mine to understand how mines work as convergence points of speculation, engineering, information, and futures and derivatives trading.

The Dredge Research Collaborative show how sediment management undergirds the social and economic life of the Great Lakes region. Dredging embodies a central fact of the Anthropocene: there is no away.

Carwil Bjork-James explores the politics of blockades in Bolivia, a country where terrain, a scarcity of connecting roads, and a tradition of mass protest make it a land of chokepoints.

Financial algorithms have smoothed the vagaries of overheated markets. Christian Borch shows how algorithmic trading produces its own set of new chokepoints.

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.

Gabriela Valdivia traces the sticky interplays of infrastructure, toxic waste, and labor that shape life and value at Ecuador’s Esmeraldas oil refinery.

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.