This February, we’re teaming up with our beloveds at The Believer for a special bundle. Get a year of two great magazines for one low price.

Daniel Kent, it sometimes feels, is as much a part of Pioneer Works as its old pine beams. And not only because this soft-spoken Canadian, at six feet, four inches, shares the aspect of a pine tree himself. Daniel’s story at Pioneer Works reaches back to the organization’s founding. When he landed in Brooklyn from Edmonton in 2011, he was 19 and a few credits shy of a degree from the University of Alberta. He met a motley crew of artists who were working, at the time, to turn an old iron works in Red Hook into a new kind of art space. He helped the founders of Pioneer Works create a 3-D model of the building––and then designed their inchoate organization’s first logo and website. Eventually he became the Design Director—and the key architect of one of its most distinctive traits: Every facet of the organization’s visual identity—every poster, publication, and T-shirt tied to its programs—is created not externally but by our in-house design department. As Pioneer Works has grown into a widely admired space for showcasing up-and-coming talents as well as those who’ve already attained greater recognition, Daniel and the design team have been instrumental in lending these efforts form and heft.

The design department’s home is the second floor Design Lab, a glass-walled room filled with books and posters and bright vats of ink for hulking Risograph machines. The aesthetic of their prints has been as key to nurturing Daniel’s work as the row of Mac monitors along one wall. It’s here that Daniel has collaborated with a sequence of talented colleagues to build the Pioneer Works “brand” and to design a series of distinctive and award-winning books published by Pioneer Works Press––among them 

Swamp Dogg: If You Can Kill It I Can Cook It

Since 2020, another key aspect of Daniel’s work here has been to coordinate the design of our magazine. Originally conceived as a high-end digital publication whose look and feel mirrors the eclectic vibe of a DIY zine, 

 now also exists in print. And alongside Senior Designer Son Gong and her predecessors Mei Lenehan and Callum Abbott, Daniel has overseen the design of three print issues and several bespoke features—one of which, "

," was nominated for a National Magazine Award for design. It was a pleasure to sit down with Daniel to nerd out on dry-press lettering, the oblique magic of good design, and how he took 

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

You've been at Pioneer Works nearly from the start. And over the past 12 years, you’ve been intrinsic to figuring out a visual identity for the place, that’s vital to the unified ethos or spirit that crosses all the different disciplines and communities we work with. 

 also commingles disparate fields—art, science, music, literature. It’s a publication that aims to model and express what Pioneer Works is all about. But we’ve had the sense, from the start, that it needs to stand out on its own, within the organization and as a publication with something unique to offer, which joins art and science and also pays deep attention to the visual side of publishing, to design.

Daniel Kent

There are many other institutions that have magazines or publications, and they typically go in two different directions. The magazine either stays completely within the institution’s brand ecosystem, or it really stands out. We needed to make 

 accessible and available for free online, so the initial question was: How do we brand this in a way that feels appropriate to the variation and diversity of all the different voices that are involved in it—the breadth of published content and the types of topics touched on? Much of our design at Pioneer Works has been driven by our programs; it’s grown from experiments, and hasn’t been dictated by the institution or forced into a static frame. Pioneer Works, as a brand, is recognizable as more than the sum of its parts. So we made the decision that 

 would have a unique and a recognizable visual system within that Pioneer Works identity.

From there, I brought on Andrew LeClair to collaborate on the design, and he brought a bunch of experience and knowledge around online editorial design work and publishing. And I brought my knowledge of not only design at Pioneer Works, but the mission and spirit of the organization. My initial thought was that the magazine’s conceptual framework would be a dynamic system

rather than being built from limited or uniform visual identifiers. Because we're a small team both at 

 and in the design department, we didn’t want to have to devote tons of time to designing every piece—to choosing a feature image, a headline and typeface, etcetera. We wanted to create an art direction system that functioned 

Right. And for both, we were looking at a whole bunch of different references and publications from different eras—less contemporary magazines or websites than print projects from when publishing became more democratic and expressive because it was more affordable, in the 1960s and ‘70s, especially. I wanted to think about 

more as a DIY print publishing project from the era when 

 landed and dry transfer, pressed-down lettering became omnipresent. With print, just the fact that it's a static object means that you can be a lot crazier with it. You can give headlines different typefaces for each article. You can mess with the layout in all kinds of crazy ways, you can do all this stuff that you can’t do on the web. A webpage needs to work on the phone, it needs to work on a desktop, it needs to autopopulate in all these different places in a modular way.

So I was looking at a lot of that stuff from when Letraset came in. Prior to that, to make a zine you either had to use a typewriter and photocopy it—and maybe draw some bubble letters if you wanted to distinguish headlines or create some type of hierarchy—or you'd have to go to a typesetter and get it actually produced. When press-down lettering became a thing, you could just go buy Cooper in 24 points and then press down your title at any angle or in whatever way you wanted. So suddenly all these DIY zines became more type-expressive. There was just a lot more zaniness. A lot of the typefaces we use on 

 are actually much older, from the turn of the twentieth century, but we associate them with the 1970s because that's when they became widely available outside of the really niche, professional design world.

That moment of print culture was the reference and key inspiration.

Yes, and it’s in parallel with what’s currently happening in typography, which is that its production has been democratized. Where there were once these big foundries that literally made metal typefaces you had to buy—because they were physical pieces you couldn’t produce yourself—now they’ve been digitized. Anyone now can download the software needed to design a typeface. There's been a huge Cambrian explosion of independent type foundries that sell fonts on the web.

 we wanted to take that explosion as a jumping-off point, and figure out a basic framework, or scaffold, where you could build in all this expressiveness and all these typographic voices. We developed the initial structure of articles, homepage, all of the discipline pages—all the components of the website—and then figured out the type sizing and hierarchy. After standardizing everything using a single typeface, we went out and licensed about 70 fonts that would automatically swap in for the stock headline font based on the way we coded the website. Every article that’s published receives a different typeface at random, drawn from buckets of typefaces that we allocated for each discipline. So there are a bunch for Science, for example, but you never know which of them you’re going to get until you hit publish. And then there was an additional layer with an article series; those would get assigned a typeface and that typeface would be exclusive to that series to create a consistent identity.

 uses a huge variety of distinct typefaces for our headlines. Was there a specific inspiration for juxtaposing varied fonts in this way?

Yes, one was this catalog from a print shop in Ridgewood, from a few decades ago, that somehow wound up here at Pioneer Works. It was a random phototypesetting shop—one of hundreds in New York in the ‘70s and ‘80s. The catalog is a type specimen. Letraset would've had similar catalogs, and there were a bunch of alternate companies that offered similar things. But this one in particular ended up being a key reference when we were creating the 

 project, chiefly because it showed all of these print typefaces alphabetically. You see so many headlines together and it's really interesting; there’s a general rule in design where you try to limit the number of typefaces you use on a project. You’re taught to keep fonts and sizes—and their pairings—consistent and limited. And you can see why this rule exists; if you imagine a publication with, say, four or five random fonts, it would just seem excessive and arbitrary. But something interesting occurs when there’s much more than that. When it's 50, then it's like, “Oh, now there's this whole other visual system happening.” Rather than focusing on each one individually, looking at so many at once creates a larger tapestry which becomes its own visual field.

Clearly you have a deep passion for print. What was it like moving this web publication to physical form? I’m holding the 

, which was very much like a high-concept, upmarket zine, and then the second one was thicker and more substantial. So it became a kind of circular process––the visual inspiration for the website was print culture, and now you’ve turned the digital platform into a beautiful print magazine.

The initial goal for this digital publication was to take its references from print. To lay out typefaces for print, you typically use InDesign to scale and move the type individually, whereas the website is a system where the type needs to be standardized. So going to print, we got to twist all these knobs we weren't able to control on the web. We could actually editorialize each of the articles to a degree that’s not possible online. We could make a range of different decisions for each piece—and also return to one of our earlier ideas for 

 generally, which was to give images a print-like treatment. 

Online, we decided it would be too limiting for the homepage to be populated with just two-color images, an idea we initially toyed with. But as we turned to print, we decided to echo zines of yore by limiting the whole magazine to three colors, which will always be black and then two spot colors.

That mimics what you’d make on a Risograph, like the one we have at Pioneer Works—this machine from the 1980s that combines a screen printer with a photocopier. Each color of a printed piece is essentially one “screen” you run over thousands of copies, then you set another layer of color over the other color, running each layer of color until you have the finished piece. The effect looks a little wonky and imperfect; blemishes and faded bits are part of the technology’s appeal.

We initially thought we’d print the physical magazine in-house, on our own Risograph. It became a bigger project, so that wasn’t tenable. But we brought that same color limitation to 

’s print publication, as another way of signaling that we're embracing this idea of imperfection and limitation. These technological restraints are an important part of the project and its aesthetic.

These visual references also evoke, for many, a certain era—the ‘70s, specifically. I know you’re keen not to think of 

 as “retro”: it’s important that the project feels contemporary. But it’s also in conversation with the past visually, and with this era that was kind of a hangover from the ’60s. It was a decade with a rough economy, rougher drugs—but also the rise of punk and a countercultural and DIY ethos that is also in the air at Pioneer Works, but with really high production values. One thing you’ve done with 

, in a way, is to bring those two worlds of high and low together.

We're not going to Kinko's with a cut-up little thing, as fun as that sounds. 

 is still relatively scrappy in terms of its scope, both in the size of our team and the budgetary realities of being a nonprofit. But that can work to our advantage, and hopefully the design speaks to that.

I also wanted to talk to you about moving from Issue 01 to Issue 02 and now Issue 03. The second and third print issues maintained much of the same template from the pilot, but they became thicker and more permanent-feeling because we committed to making them on an annual basis. We wanted our magazines to feel a little more substantial. We wanted 

 to become an object that people would really want to live with for a while, like a 

. While the actual issues became a bit bigger, they continued to share the same design sensibility. In the 

 by Daniel Kolitz, about the larger impacts of Adderall addiction and dependence on culture. It was a part of a larger 

 of Adderall essays, “Club Med,” that were honored by 

 and which PW Press will publish as a book. The design of this print feature in particular was nominated for a National Magazine Award. I wonder if you could just talk about the font you chose, and the striking pill layout that you and Callum Abbott designed.

I guess you could say that I’ve been shying away a bit from the granular fetishization of these design choices. I’m wary of becoming some sort of font sommelier, like when you’re at a restaurant and you ask, “I want something that can go with the chicken."

It’s intuitive. I just sort of do it. The 

font is called Zipper. It's a reverse contrast typeface, first released by Letraset but initially very popular in Italy. The contrast emphasis is the opposite of a typical serif typeface where the letters’ vertical parts are heavier or the same weight as the top and bottom horizontal elements. So with Zipper, the horizontal parts are really thick.

As for “Club Med,” we initially published the piece online and Callum did a bunch of editorial illustrations for it, the main one being a 

 made of Adderall pills with a gradient background, which was really great. We wanted to use that for print, but we didn't have the full color spectrum and we needed it to be more high-res. So we replaced the pills and then we needed to choose a different typeface direction. I was thinking about twentieth-century anti-drug PSA campaigns.

Yes, and those always strangely had the best designs, because I think designers or creative people are inherently iconoclasts, almost categorically. So they had a lot of fun with those projects, and made them really zany-looking and actually kind of great.

The article’s design treatment feels like a PSA or a poster.

Yes, it's taking visual cues from that sort of vocabulary, with its typeface and the way that we set the opposite pages, black and white, and then ran the subhead as two messages to each other, one positive and one negative, in ITC Fat Face, a display typeface from the ’70s. It's made to look super huge because it has a really exaggerated contrast; the tips of the serifs are super thick, and the thin lines are so thin. Just in terms of absolute size they're really small. So they don't distinguish themselves well unless they’re physically…

Yeah, really large. You wouldn't lay out a book with that type. It'd be much too hard to read. It's only for setting large headlines.

So this project began with the web, then we had a print issue, and then another print issue. And now we have a 

, which you’ve put together with Son Gong, our brilliant new Senior Designer. The magazine continues to grow and evolve. We're getting it around because we have distribution now. We’ve received awards. With a publication like 

I think ultimately what success looks like is whether our contributors want to show it to other people. Does it speak to the audience we're trying to engage with? When people see the magazine out in the world, it has to have some degree of shelf appeal, some amount of distinction from everything else. We're always trying to balance our personal ambitions against the goals of the project, but ultimately whether or not it has value depends on whether it has an identity that’s harmonious with the actual content of the magazine. When we hit that, we can be proud of the work we’ve done. ♦

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is Pioneer Works’ Director of Publishing and co-editor-in-chief of

sci-american-typewriter

A Cambrian Explosion of Fonts

Baby-Making on Mars

Becoming Bernie

In the 1990s, astronomy professor Joe Patterson wrote and illustrated a seasonal newsletter, in the style of an old-fashioned paper zine, of astronomical highlights visible from New York City. His affable style mixed wit and history with astronomy for a completely charming, largely undiscovered cult classic: Big Apple Astronomy. For 

, Joe shares current issues of Big Apple Sky Calendar, the guide to sky viewing that used to conclude his seasonal newsletter. Steal a few moments of reprieve from the city’s mayhem to take in these sights. As Oscar Wilde said, “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

January

(1801) On the very first night of the nineteenth century, Giuseppe Piazzi found a slowly moving starlike object, which he assumed to be a comet (at that time, only the planets of antiquity were known). But was it a comet? Maybe not, because it showed no tail or fuzz. Only a few precise observations were obtained before it was lost in the glare of the Sun. Fortunately, a very young Carl Friedrich Gauss—now regarded as the greatest mathematician since Archimedes—became interested in how to derive an orbit from merely three observations. He successfully predicted where it would be when it emerged from the solar glare…and later studies showed that the object moved in a nearly circular orbit between Mars and Jupiter. Sort of like an actual planet!

The object was named Ceres, after the Roman god of agriculture. It was the first known asteroid, or “minor planet” (the currently favored term). There are now many thousands known, most quite small and in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Asteroid names have gone berserk. They ran out of Greek and Roman gods a long time ago. For a good time, google “funny asteroid names”—and if you actually 

 an asteroid (plus solve for the orbit), you can even contribute to the madness.

There was another planetary puzzle that dogged astronomers throughout the nineteenth century: the motion of Mercury. It did not exactly obey Newton’s Laws and some astronomers thought there could be another planet, close to the Sun, that was tugging slightly on Mercury. It even got a name: 

(of course). On January 2, 1860, the French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier announced that he had discovered (through calculation) the orbit of Vulcan. But no one ever actually saw it. Le Verrier was wrong. There were scattered claims of seeing the 

of unknown objects crossing in front of the Sun. But none were confirmed, and Mercury’s odd motion wasn’t explained until Einstein’s General Theory (in 1915) showed that the geometry of space in the near vicinity of the Sun is slightly non-Euclidean.

as close as it ever gets to the Sun, just 0.983 AU from the Sun. Amid January’s deep freeze, this may be surprising. But remember that the seasons are caused not by distance, but by the 

 of the Earth’s axis. The variation in distance (0.98 AU in January, versus 1.02 AU in July) is just not enough to make a big difference.

Still, wouldn’t you expect that the maximally close Sun in January and the maximally distant Sun in July would give the northern hemisphere warmer winters and cooler summers? The opposite

is true—the highest recorded temperature on Earth is 134°F (Death Valley) and the lowest is -109°F (Yakutsk, Siberia). Can you guess the reason for the extremes being reached in the North rather than the South?

The anniversary of Galileo’s death, in 1642. Still under house arrest from the Inquisition, Galileo hung on just long enough to get his magnum opus on dynamics (

) smuggled out to Holland, where it could be published. On this precise date three centuries later, another adventurer in space and time was born: Stephen Hawking. Hawking showed that the two bedrock principles of twentieth-century physics—relativity and quantum theory—can actually be reconciled if black holes emit some radiation. It has never been observed, but we’re still looking!

On these four nights in 1610, Galileo turned his telescope on Jupiter… and noticed four stars which moved around Jupiter—the “Galilean satellites,” as we now call them. Or the Medicean Stars, as Galileo called them, in an effort to curry favor with his patron, Cosimo de Medici (a boy of nine). This discovery did a lot to demolish the Ptolemaic model of planetary motions. It had previously been argued: “If the Earth moves, how can it hang onto the Moon?” Well, there was Jupiter up there, obviously moving around 

, and having no difficulty hanging onto its moons.

Before the discovery scene in Bertolt Brecht’s play 

, a curtain appears with the ominous words: “January 10, 1610: Heaven Abolished.”

Last quarter Moon, rising near midnight. Also, Jupiter is at “opposition” tonight—meaning “opposite the Sun, transiting near midnight”… and therefore in a great position for telescopic observation.

 
The Orthodox New Year, which is New Year’s Day on the 

 calendar (as distinct from the modern calendar, which was instituted by Pope Gregory in 1582).

 
Five good overpasses of NYC (or anywhere nearby) by the ISS (International Space Station) occur this month. Here’s the schedule:

Magnitude -3 and -4 means “brighter than any star, and as bright as Venus.” For these ~five-minute apparitions, look first near the WSW horizon. It looks like a plane, except that (a) its light doesn’t flash, and (b) it disappears suddenly in the middle of the eastern sky (as it enters the Earth’s shadow).

The ISS moves at about 18,000 mph, so it travels about 1,500 miles during these quick visions. It’s strange that the station could be mistaken for a plane—yet it is, frequently.

ALL appearances of the ISS start from the west, and end (roughly) in the east.

The waxing crescent Moon passes pretty close to Saturn on these nights. Saturn’s rings are pretty close to edge-on this month, so they won’t present the beautiful view we all love. But if you have a decent telescope and a good southwestern horizon, give it a look. As a consolation prize, look for the brilliant Venus, low in the southwest, an hour after sunset. The medium-bright starlike object next to it is Saturn, as a telescopic look will confirm. But you’ll need a really good southwestern horizon.

First-quarter Moon. Excellent time for telescopic observation—when the mountains and crater walls cast long shadows, as seen from the Earth.

The Moon is next to the Pleiades tonight. Very nice target for observation through binoculars.

Things are getting a little crowded up there. On these nights, the nearly-full Moon is practically on top of Jupiter and the Gemini twins.

February

, as we have come to call it. This is the first of the four “cross-quarter days,” roughly the mid-points of the four seasons. The groundhog connection dates back to an old German legend about the predictive power of badgers. In Christian liturgy, it’s also called Candlemas (candles are lit during services).

BTW, since you’re reading a calendar, it’s a fair guess that you’re interested in such things. If so, indulge yourself, visit 

, read about this day, and find room for a new habit.

The nearly-full Moon is very close tonight to Regulus—the brightest star in Leo and the “backward question mark” of the winter sky.

For observers in NYC, the International Space Station (ISS) will make a pass directly over NYC at precisely 6:37 pm EST tonight. These overpasses are dramatic. You’ll first see it low in the NW, at 6:34 pm. It bears repeating that it may resemble a plane—except that it has no flashing lights and appears to be flying directly over NYC (which only hijacked planes do).

At 6:37, directly overhead, it’s as bright as Venus, and at 6:40 it 

in the SE, even though it’s still 30 degrees from the horizon (only UFOs do this). That’s because it’s entering the Earth’s shadow.

The ISS orbits at ~18,000 mph. When you first see it, it’s roughly over Minnesota. Three minutes later, it’s over NYC. You can see why “landing” this giant structure—a football field in size and requiring 42 visits by astronauts to assemble in orbit—will eventually be a gigantic engineering problem.

Theoretically, these overpasses happen a lot, but only a few are so conveniently placed and timed for NYC. The only other really good one this month occurs the next night, February 4, starting at 5:46 pm. Same progression and duration. A splendid reward for six minutes of observation!

Last quarter Moon, rising around midnight.

On this day in 1913, sky-watchers from Saskatchewan to Bermuda saw a great procession of meteors moving rapidly across the sky. There were hundreds, throwing off sparks as they went and maintaining a near-perfect formation. This was probably a tiny comet or asteroid, which happened to strike the Earth’s atmosphere at grazing incidence. It might have dissipated or skipped off the atmosphere, like a flat stone skipping off a pond.

such objects are out there. Our detection methods mainly pick up the larger ones, and those are too few to pose a serious concern. 2021 had a real groaner of a movie about one (

 had some silliness too, but the science was spot-on perfect. A 400-foot tsunami roaring over Columbus Circle is just what you’d get with a deep impact in the ocean!

Galileo’s birthday in 1564. Very nearly the day of Michelangelo’s death (February 18). Perhaps the greatest scientist and artist of the last millennium.

First day of Ramadan, probably. The mullahs in Mecca will be carefully scrutinizing the western sky tonight, to glimpse the thin lunar crescent (just following the New Moon). If they see it, Ramadan starts. But they do have modern calendars, so they might bend the rules a bit to allow for cloudy weather.

On this day in 1930, Clyde Tombaugh discovered a faint moving object beyond Neptune, soon named Pluto after the ruler of the underworld. It was considered the outermost planet of the solar system, until it was ruthlessly dethroned in 2006. (Basically, it was deemed too small, too distant, and more closely resembling the “dwarf planets” in the debris at large distances from the Sun.)

This decision was massively unpopular among America’s children, partly because of what they had learned in school, and partly because of Pluto the Dog. Astronomers be warned: Don’t mess with Disney characters.

Tonight, the thin crescent Moon gets very close to Mercury in the early-evening sky. It won’t be a barn-burner of a sight, very low in the southwest. I’ve only seen Mercury a few times—and supposedly, even Copernicus never saw it (he relied on Arab observations from earlier centuries). But if you have a clear SW horizon, give it a try! If you see a stationary point of light very near the lunar crescent, that’s Mercury. No telescope needed, of course—only naked-eye observations count. (Maybe binoculars are OK, in a pinch… but get away from any buildings in the southwest!)

Having visited Mercury yesterday, the lunar crescent pays a visit to Saturn in tonight’s early-evening sky. But no big deal—Saturn is on the Moon’s usual menu for monthly visits.

Birthday of Copernicus in 1473. Copernicus is often hailed as marking the great transition from medieval to modern ideas about the universe. But historians of science tell a somewhat different story. He seems to have published his master work, 

, from his deathbed in 1543—probably at the urging of his student, Joachim Rheticus. Perhaps despairing that the master would ever publish the full work, Rheticus pre-published his own version in 1540 (

Ironically (in view of what happened to later advocates of heliocentrism), Pope Paul III expressed interest in the idea, while Martin Luther called Copernicus “a damn fool.”

Tonight, the Moon is just north of that famous “Pleiades” star cluster—otherwise known as the Seven Sisters. Great sight in binoculars!

On February 27, 40–60 minutes before sunrise, look low in the southeast for a thin waning crescent Moon. Above it is Mars, and above Mars is the brilliant Venus. On the morning of the 26th, the planets are in pretty much the same place, but the Moon is to the

 (as you view it) of the Mars-Venus pair.

You’ll need a good horizon and clear sky (but not crazy-good and crazy-clear) to see these.

March

The 50th anniversary of the launch of Pioneer 10, humanity’s most ambitious venture out of our home solar system. The spacecraft was designed to study Jupiter (which it did in 1973), but then went sailing past Neptune—into what you might call “interstellar space.” It’s still there, coasting along at 51,000 mph in the direction of the bright star Aldebaran. It’ll arrive—well, get close, anyway—in a mere two million years. It bears a plaque showing who sent it (a man and a woman), where it came from (third planet from a star), and even a suggestion for what frequency to use in sending a return radio message (1420 MHz, the “song of interstellar hydrogen”).

Seems unlikely the Aldebaranites will figure all that out, but it’s worth a try—assuming, of course, that Jeff Bezos or Richard Branson don’t mount a recovery mission to add Pioneer 10 to their private collections.

Full Moon and a total lunar eclipse, because the Moon is now exactly opposite the Sun. Unfortunately for most of us North Americans, it occurs slightly too late at night to be easily visible. It’s mainly a Pacific Ocean affair. On the west coast of North America, you can see most of it if you have a clear view to the west. Mid-eclipse is at 6:34 am EST, so folks in eastern USA will see only the beginning—and even then, they'll need a very clear view down to the western horizon to see the Moon at all.

The date of the semi-annual rip in the fabric of time, scheduled for 2 am EST on Sunday, March 8 (“spring ahead, fall back”). It’ll go into effect just about everywhere in the U.S., except sunny Hawaii and Arizona, where they presumably don't need any help saving daylight.

Last quarter Moon, rising around midnight (1 am EDT).

The anniversary of the discovery of Uranus—the first planet to join the planets of antiquity—by William Herschel in 1781. Uranus was the father of Saturn and the grandfather of Jupiter; William was the brother of Caroline Herschel and the father of John Herschel—famous astronomers all! Although the discovery date is credited as March 13, the object was sighted and catalogued as a star many times previously. On March 13, Herschel realized that it changed positions in the sky, and he therefore classified it as a comet. (Since all

were known in antiquity, the idea of “discovering” a new planet was just too weird to contemplate.) After tracking it for two more years, he realized that it had no tail, and orbited in a near circle outside the orbit of Saturn. QED: PLANET. Herschel wanted to call it Sidus Georgium (Star of George) to curry favor with the English monarch. But Americans will recall that during 1781–3, George III had to deal with issues more serious than planets.

Also the exact anniversary of the 1986 flyby (within 600 miles) of Halley's Comet by the European spacecraft Giotto, which snapped some amazing photos

The original Giotto painted a famous fresco, 

, likely in the year 1320. In it, the Star of Bethlehem is represented as a comet, and we know that Comet Halley visited the inner solar system in 1301. Had old Giotto been around for Halley's 1986 visitation, he would surely have painted the comet in the background of Bill Buckner's famous error to “win” the World Series for the New York Mets.

Prof. Joe Patterson is a professor of Astronomy at Columbia University, an observational astronomer, and a baseball enthusiast. (He was also our editor-in-chief’s first astronomy professor.)

sci-ameliapro

Big Apple Sky Calendar: January, February, March 2026

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This note from the editors appears in print in our 

—alongside essays by Emily Raboteau, Marcus J. Moore, Dr. Sylvester James Gates, and Catherine Lacey; poems by Eileen Myles and Ariana Reines; and drawings by Daniel Johnston.

We humans get much less sleep than other primates, typically not succumbing to drowsiness until well past nightfall. We’re also inclined to socialize after dusk; some celebratory behaviors are only abided after sundown. These nocturnal habits are more than cultural norms. They reflect evolutionary consequences that can be attributed to our domestication of fire. The rise in evening hours spent around burning cinders may have shaped our ancestors’ circadian rhythms in ways that are now biologically embedded.

It was around a million years ago, give or take a few hundred thousand, that the first hominids controlled fire. Our evolutionary predecessors would have known fire’s heat and light, engulfing trees or torching plains, shaping their landscapes. Naturally occurring fires were first captured and maintained to warm hands and roast game, to protect caves and kin from predators at night. But then our forebears struck flint to dry grass to make fire themselves, a discovery that still eludes our chimpanzee cousins. This advance has been credited by scientists with much of what makes us human. Fire allowed us to migrate from tropical to temperate zones; to cook and consume vastly increased sums of protein and calories; to take in the fatty acids that our brains needed to grow. We controlled fire. But then fire controlled us––not just our daily cycles but our mandibles, our metabolisms, our minds.

With fire we developed a compulsive need to transform our circumstances by controlling Earth’s resources. We forged ever-more potent tools for doing so. Since the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago, this impulse has defined our accelerating dash toward what once may have looked like techno-salvation but which looks increasingly like our own extinction. Our will to turn Earth’s combustibles into energy has been the essential story of the anthropocene ever since James Watt got his steam engine whirring in 1769. Ambition cooking the biosphere into oblivion.

We contemplate these aspects of our species’ story at Pioneer Works, sometimes with bemusement. After dark, our audience collects around the fire pit in our garden for conversations and music that have inspired pages in this print issue, 

’s third. Robert Macfarlane reminded us, as we recount in an assemblage of quotes from animals who’ve graced our stage, that “when we recognize what is human in the creaturely, we also recognize what is creaturely in the human.”

It’s perhaps inevitable, as our own oblivion feels proximate, that we’ve turned our technology toward a signal fantasy of our age: the aim of leaving our damaged earth altogether to colonize space—never mind that our mandibles, metabolisms, and minds have been forged by forces here on Earth. That’s the subject of one piece here. Others skirt our self-proclaimed importance and our technological compulsions. Biologists remind us that whales have been breaching and thriving in our oceans for 50 million years with no technological ambition, while we’re on the brink of self-inflicted extinction after tens of thousands.

We sapiens are a technological species. We’re also an artistic one, and have been since our forebears threw up drawings by firelight on the walls of caves. We examine our lot, and produce wonders. This issue charts some of those, in the prose of writers we cherish and drawings by a musician we love; in geometric diagrams of reality’s matrix and maps of ocean floors; in tributes to cosmic jazz and efforts to daylight a brook in the Bronx; in an excavation of the history, and ghosts, of the brick-walled former iron works we call home.

Our fundamental nature as pyrotechnic primates may well be incompatible with our longevity as a species. This we know. What will we do while we’re here? Are we apes? Are we geniuses? Are we poets? Will we burn Earth to the ground? Can we save it? Will we go to Mars? Should we? Are we the apex in life’s experiment or villains in the evolutionary story?

As Cornel West said from our stage, “We are a wretched species…yet we are also wonderful.” ♦

Janna Levin and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro are the editors-in-chief of 

gen-excaliber-nouveau

Issue 03, Available Now

Like its mythological namesake, the real-life Hydra

is hard to slay. These tiny animals, freshwater polyps related to jellyfish, can survive just about any encounter with a blade. Hack away one of its tentacles, and a Hydra will simply regrow the lost limb. Chop off a Hydra’s head or slice its cylindrical body in half, and within a few days you’ll have two new animals instead of one dead one.

Hydra can even regrow after being shredded to bits, centrifuged, and then smooshed back together into balls of a few hundred cells (they have no brains, so this probably isn’t as traumatic as it sounds). Each of those little balls—despite being, initially, a haphazard hodgepodge of random cells from the original, ill-fated animal—will grow into a perfectly functional Hydra. And if that weren’t enough, Hydra are so unfussy that they can even regrow from clumps of cells cobbled together from several 

 individuals. These patchwork aggregates develop into one new, united being—albeit one with a few extra heads.

“Most of the time I mix, like, 50 Hydra together,” physicist-turned-biologist Anaïs Bailles told me. “They don't care, they will actually make just one individual out of that.”

Bailles’ 50-animal aggregates derive from clonal strains that once shared the same genome. But Bailles has also mixed together two strains so different from one another that people used to think they were distinct species. Still, the animals grow perfectly well, "united again as one species," she says.

I've been thinking about Bailles' doubly mythological Hydra-Chimeras ever since talking to her about her work on Hydra development this summer. I had learned to think of biological development in machine terms, as construction according to a "genetic blueprint” or “genetic program." But faced with the Hydra, my machine metaphors failed: If a single animal can have several different genomes at once, which one is the blueprint? This might not even be the right question to ask. Because life is not constructed along pre-drawn plans. It grows.

Bailles isn’t shredding up Hydra for fun, though she does radiate with enthusiasm for these plucky polyps. At the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, Bailles studies Hydra to answer a question she originally encountered years ago as a young physicist pondering how the Big Bang spiraled outward into the universe we know today: 

 does complexity emerge in the natural world?

In cosmology, this question is sometimes stated: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The universe started out simple and became complex; scientists are still piecing together the story of how that happened. When Bailles first peered at a developing embryo under the microscope, she saw an echo of the same problem. Like the uncomplicated early universe that became our star-studded cosmos, an animal egg is far simpler than the organism it will become. Where does the complex form of the adult animal come from?

By the eighteenth century, some scientists had concluded that embryos must—somehow, somewhere—contain the full complexity of the future adult. Some imagined tiny homunculi crouching in the heads of sperm cells. Others didn’t take things quite so literally, but still believed that the embryo was, somehow, completely sculpted in advance by its parents. Growing up was simply a matter of scaling up.

This idea, called preformation, might seem unscientific to us now. But in its heyday, it was a materialist alternative to vitalism, the claim that physical forces alone could not account for life. Today, vitalism is considered magical thinking. But centuries ago, many scientists struggled to imagine that mere “matter in motion”—the only stuff of the universe, for a materialist—could organize spontaneously into a living being. Vitalists could invoke a supernatural “life force” that they believed guided the gradual emergence of new forms during development. Materialists could not. But if each new generation was entirely predetermined and engineered by the last, biological complexity would be no more mysterious than human construction. Placing parents in the role of clockmaker brought embryos into the clockwork universe—a perfect, predictable machine ruled not by the supernatural but by the laws of physics.

Now of course we know that it’s DNA, and not a preformed homunculus, that the sperm delivers to the egg. In the twentieth century, scientists identified the chromosomes as the units of inheritance. They “cracked the genetic code” by learning to read the protein messages written in DNA’s four-letter molecular alphabet—and much more. By the 1980s, scientists had counted the human chromosomes, linked sickle cell disease to a specific gene, cloned frogs, established the first genetic engineering company, and rebranded the leading embryology journal as one of developmental genetics. Researchers could now not only observe inheritance, but tinker with the “blueprint of life.”

And, very quickly, the genome was understood as just that—a blueprint. Writing in 1955, only three years after the discovery of the DNA double helix, physicist and biochemist George Gamow (who proposed the idea of the genetic code) described the cell as a factory and the chromosomes as the “filing cabinets where all the production plans and blueprints are stored.” The metaphor not only stuck, but shrunk: the genome metaphorically transformed from a filing cabinet of blueprints into 

 blueprint, singular. When the Human Genome Project completed the first full human genome sequence in 2000, President Bill Clinton described it in a White House announcement as the “working blueprint of the human race.” A quarter century later, in 2023, the announcement of the first human pangenome (a sort of collective genome accommodating human diversity) was announced as an “expanding view of humanity’s DNA blueprint.”

The blueprint is an intuitive metaphor, but Bailles and her Hydra should give us pause. When she shreds up and recombines multiple animals in a Hydra-Chimera, different patches of tissue could easily harbor distinct genomes. And yet, together, those cells become one animal. Where is its blueprint?

You can find it clutched in the tiny fist of the sperm homunculus: in other words, nowhere. The idea of the genetic blueprint is “a sort of neo-preformation,” neurogeneticist Kevin Mitchell of Ireland's Trinity College Dublin told me. Nobody is arguing anymore that dogs have puppies instead of kittens because dog embryos contain tiny, preformed dogs, Mitchell says. Nevertheless, the blueprint metaphor still asserts that, in its place, “there is a dog genome, which contains—in an inescapable, deterministic way—the outcome of development.”

Bailles studies brainless polyps; Mitchell studies brains. Specifically, he’s interested in the genetics of brain development, especially as it relates to psychiatric and neurological disorders and differences. And yet he’ll be the first to say that there is no genetic blueprint for a brain.

“The term blueprint is problematic because it suggests that one bit of the genome encodes one bit of the organism, right? There's a one-to-one mapping. You can already see in the genome the shape of the thing to come,” Mitchell explained. In a blueprint, windows stand for windows and staircases stand for staircases. But if you crack open a genome, you will not find anything that corresponds so directly and specifically to an eye, an optic nerve, or sickle-cell anemia. Genes specify the amino acid sequences of proteins, not fully formed body parts or behaviors or diseases.

Simon Fisher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands also criticized the idea of one-to-one mapping when I asked him about his problems with the genomic blueprint metaphor, which he’s vocal about on social media. Fisher studies the role of genes in language and language disorders and was on the team that, in 2001, discovered the first gene mutation associated with developmental speech and language disorders.

Genes specify the amino acid sequences of proteins, not fully formed body parts or behaviors or diseases.

“When I started working on this—on genes and language and genes and language disorders—there were people looking for a gene for grammar,” Fisher told me. “They really thought there was going to be one gene that would do an operation in the brain that would explain all of language. And there are still people who believe that.”

The gene Fisher and his colleagues linked to language, 

, is associated with the development of speech in people. In birds, it is involved in learning vocalizations and songs. In bats, it might play a role in echolocation. When 

doesn’t work normally, it can cause speech disorders in humans and disturb singing in birds. “It’s very easy to break a behavior by breaking a gene, right? But for it to encode this whole behavior?” Fisher said. “That's a stretch.”

 does encode is a protein. Trios of DNA “letters” correspond to specific amino acids, the building blocks of protein, and when a gene is expressed, its DNA is “read off” in a chain of biochemical steps to build a protein. 

’s protein then sticks to specific sequences of DNA to change how other genes are read off into their own corresponding proteins. Researchers still haven’t found all of its target genes, but there are likely hundreds. What’s clear is that 

 is far more than a “language gene”—mutant mice without it are runts with deformed brains and lungs so weak that most can’t survive longer than a month. It also plays roles in other organs and might not work normally in some cancers.

Hydra Cells Regenerating

Even in simpler cases, like the single-gene mutations that cause cystic fibrosis, the gene involved does not “code for” cystic fibrosis, Fisher explained. It codes for a protein that, when damaged or absent, leads to disease in the context of a body.

But if the genome does not contain a clear plan for an adult organism, what 

In the 1961, biologists François Jacob and Jacques Monod described a genetic circuit that switches a gene for lactase, the lactose-digesting enzyme, on or off in bacteria. Glucose is the bacteria’s favorite food, but it’ll make do with lactose in a pinch. The circuit Jacob and Monod discovered, the 

 operon, “turns on” lactase only when lactose is available 

 there’s no glucose around. This discovery won the Nobel Prize in 1965 and inspired Monod to imagine the genome not as a blueprint, but as a program or computer code.

This metaphor is perhaps more helpful because it acknowledges that development plays out in time: the genome, according to Monod, is a set of step-by-step instructions for building an organism, not a blueprint of the final product.

 doesn’t map to any one behavior or structure but rather controls how other genes behave, like a logical operation in a computer program. But there's a problem with the program metaphor. Run a program twice, and it should do exactly the same thing, yielding reliable, reproducible results. Real genomes, however, do not work that way. Environmental factors—for instance, prenatal exposure to alcohol—can clearly influence development in ways that are not preprogrammed in the genome. But even if the influence of nurture could be eliminated completely, nature would still not get the same result from every run of its genetic “programs.”

Mitchell believes that development involves a degree of random chance—what he calls “developmental noise.” In normal flies, for example, particular neurons involved in muscle activation almost always connect to the same muscles in the body wall. But Mitchell has shown that mutating a particular gene leads those neurons to fail to connect, but not always — only sometimes. The mutation doesn't guarantee any particular outcome, it just skews the odds.

Recognizing inherent developmental noise could help resolve some of the confusion around why traits like height, left-handedness, or—more importantly—autism are highly but not entirely heritable. When one identical twin is autistic, the other is autistic up to around 90 percent of the time. 90 percent sounds high. But it isn't 100 percent.

“Evolution has made this really robust program,” says Mitchell. “But when you start to degrade that program by adding genetic variation, it just becomes a bit more variable.”

Life is not a sermon “read out” from some genetic Book of Genesis. 

This is just one of many reasons some researchers think we need completely new ways of thinking about genes and development. Alan Rodrigues and Amy Shyer of Rockefeller University, both life scientists studying how organs self-organize in embryos, the genome is neither a blueprint nor a code. It’s not a machine at all, they told me, and thinking of life that way is holding science back.

Putting on the shoes of a twentieth-century scientist, it’s easy to understand why researchers looked to machines to understand life. The long effort to purge biology of vitalism and bring it closer to the domain of physical science and its “mechanisms” had been hard fought and only recently won. Industrialization had, over the preceding century, mechanized the world—and thanks to Alan Turing’s theory of computation, that even included human thought. The first commercial digital computer, a room-sized machine called UNIVAC I, was turned on at the U.S. Census Bureau two years before the double helix structure was discovered in 1953. The new sciences of machine code and genetic code matured in parallel.

So it’s perhaps understandable that genetics and developmental biology have long focused “on information transmission, linear causality, chains of cause and effect, and things like regulation and control,” Rodrigues told me. “I’m willing to admit that this was a useful way to get a grounding in biology over the last 50 years. But our view is that it is now a bottleneck and we need to let go of the machine.”

Shyer and Rodrigues are especially interested in how life self-organizes across scales in space and time. They are skeptical that genes and biomolecules are more fundamental than processes unfolding at the scale of tissues, organs or organisms. Two years ago, they showed that skin follicles in chick embryos are not pre-patterned by genes or proteins, but emerge dynamically out of physical interactions between clumps of stiffer or more fluid cells at the level of tissue. It’s not just gene expression that influences groups of cells, they argue. Mechanical properties that only exist at the group level—like stiffness or fluidity—can ripple downward to influence gene expression.

Bailles, Mitchell, Fisher, Rodrigues, and Shyer work on very different systems and come from very different disciplinary backgrounds. But their work echoes a common message: that the complexity of life is not pre-encoded in the genome, but emerges through development in a way that is not fully captured by the mechanical metaphors of blueprints and computer codes.

When I asked Fisher, Rodrigues, and Shyer about better metaphors, they said that they don’t have a ready replacement—though Shyer and Rodrigues are actively working with philosophers to develop new and better ways of thinking and talking about life. Mitchell, though, does have a concrete suggestion. Recently, he and a colleague proposed that the genome is like a generative model, the kind of computer program that powers AI art generators like Midjourney. Generative models learn abstract patterns—“catness” instead of a specific cat—and elaborate them dynamically in several increasingly complex, partially randomized steps to produce entirely new images. The same model, given the same prompt, is exceedingly unlikely to produce the same output twice.

Mitchell’s metaphor seems particularly helpful for understanding the role of chance in development and for recruiting machine mathematics to describe life in useful ways. Still, I can’t help but yearn for a more organic analogy. Generative models are, after all, machines. And life—a shifting, restless thing that's more process than artifact—is not.

, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson hypothesized that human language—and cognition—rests on metaphors rooted in our embodied, biological lives. Perhaps it’s a bit ironic, then, that I find myself leaning more and more on language itself as a metaphor to understand biology.

Life is not a sermon “read out” from some genetic Book of Genesis. Development, I imagine, is a dialogue between the genome, experience, environment, chance, and the forces of the physical world. And just like human conversation, it unfolds simultaneously across scales in space and time—a shared glance, a quick text, a dinner conversation, a public debate, a viral video, a protest, a movement. Each scale feeds into the next, tied up in tangled loops of cause and effect like the infinite staircases of an M.C. Escher painting. But even that impossible blueprint would be just a beginning. ♦

Elise Cutts is a science writer in Austria who distills complex science, math, and tech into words that spark wonder and curiosity.

A Cambrian Explosion of Fonts

Baby-Making on Mars

Becoming Bernie

Big Apple Sky Calendar: January, February, March 2026

Big Apple Sky Calendar: January, February, March 2026

Issue 03, Available Now

Issue 03, Available Now

Myth of the Genetic Blueprint

Myth of the Genetic Blueprint

What Day Isn’t a Headlock?

What Day Isn’t a Headlock?

A Lily Pad on the Muck

The Expansion of the Universe

Maggie Nelson: Compatible Perversities

Death Poems from Eileen Myles

When Baseball Threw Physics a Curve