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The impacts of climate change are accelerating worldwide, but emergency agencies and political bodies are not always equipped to anticipate where, when, or how severe the next unnatural disaster will be. Amid megafire seasons, for example, scientists are revising models of fire behavior that were calibrated to natures that increasingly diverge from known baselines and trends. Emergency responders' trust in patterns has become an occupational hazard. At these edges of knowledge, struggles to maintain responsive capacity in disrupted ecologies are at play; a larger reckoning with runaway climate change as a relational problem space is in order. Rather than making me resort to despair about the world's "end," such labors redirect my attention toward horizons of expectation in which knowledges are still actionable, not obsolete, and where capacities for future interventions are viable and not denied. These activities, enmeshed in a rubric of horizon work, shift expert authority and promote critical realignments across political, activist, and Indigenous spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polish physician and sociologist of science Ludwik Fleck was a prisoner in Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, the day my father, a US army physician, arrived there with the liberating troops. My father was exposed to Nazi brutality as a young Jew living in Vienna in the 1920s. Fleck was from Lvov, an epicenter of Nazi persecution. For both, a paramount question was what kind of medicine could be practiced in a world of deliberate extermination. Did they meet? My father's late-life memoir notes that "the inmates who were physicians immediately proceeded to make use of their skills to help their fellow inmates." That piqued my interest in how Fleck's socioscientific insights, described in Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact , emerged from his prewar experience of Nazi terror, when his scientific work, sociological-philosophical background, and observations of the prevailing fascism coalesced. This shaped his awareness of how collective thinking—by a nation, race, party, or class—produces facts and how politics and prejudice get entangled in scientific work. This essay explores Fleck's legacy and how both physicians offered resistance and reprisal to fascism, compelling concerns in view of today's increasing tolerance for fascism, racism, antisemitism, and "alternative" truths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do barn swallows reveal about the future? In the biogeographical space of “the Zone” around Chernobyl,Adriana Petryna shows us how they force us to think about the origins of extinction.