This issue opens from Dubai, where I’m split between the Dubai Future Forum and MBZUAI’s “The Future of Being Human” symposium, and uses Hal Foster’s *The Anti-Aesthetic* and DOGMA 95 as lenses on generative AI. The lead essay argues for an AI Anti-Aesthetic: a way of working with machine image-making that keeps the seams visible, foregrounds intention and judgment, and restores the interval between prompt and picture as the place where thinking happens. From there, the newsletter moves...

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A visit to Harvard-Westlake’s student-run “NextGen” Future Day becomes the anchor of this issue. I was invited to sit on a panel about AI — but the real story wasn’t the panel at all; it was the students themselves. Their earnestness, curiosity, and initiative offered a welcome reminder that hope often comes from the people actually building the future, not the ones forecasting it. From there the issue wanders outward: the Dubai Future Forum; ComfyUI meetups and the...

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This week’s issue reflects on how Hello, Skater Girl — Julian Bleecker’s 2011–2012 photo project documenting women’s skateboarding is an exemplar of his broader practice: noticing the overlooked and making emerging futures tangible. From photographing Amelia Brodka and Lizzie Armanto before they became Olympians to building OMATA as an analog counterpoint in a digital market, Julian traces the throughline between observation, imagination, and action. The issue also features the new podcast Futurish by Radha Mistry and Tobias Revell,...

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