Books & Profiles

Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene

Marco Armiero, Robert S. Emmett, and Gregg Mitman have assembled a cabinet of curiosities for the Anthropocene, bringing together a mix of lively essays, creatively chosen objects, and stunning photographs by acclaimed photographer Tim Flach. Future Remains gathers fifteen objects which resemble more the tarots of a fortuneteller than the archaeological finds of an expedition—they speak of planetary futures.

The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900–1950

Gregg Mitman examines the relationship between issues in early twentieth-century American society and the sciences of evolution and ecology to reveal how explicit social and political concerns influenced the scientific agenda of biologists at the University of Chicago and throughout the United States during the first half of the twentieth century.

On Garbage

By detailing the waste we have discarded, John Scanlan argues that we can learn new things about the building blocks of our culture; he throws new light on the modern condition by examining not what we have kept, but what we have thrown away.