A year ago, Alaska Senator Tad Stevens became the dunce of the day when he referred to the Internet as a “series of tubes" on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Stevens's wording might have been crude, but it raised an honest question. What, exactly, is the Internet?
Neuroscientist Dan Kersten works to understand how the space in front of us is processed visually by the brain, allowing us to negotiate on a second-to-second basis--driving a car through traffic, maneuvering a pen over paper, dribbling a basketball toward a net. Learn more.
Kale Fajardo finds that despite the idea that we live in a small world, the connections that space and technology facilitate can also reinforce cultural identification.
On a recent stroll down the Mall in Washington, D.C., Elaine Tyler May flashed on a conversation she'd had almost two decades ago inside the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum. Her son Daniel, ten at the time, had been gazing, mouth agape, at the planes suspended from the ceiling.
We may take for granted the spaces we inhabit, but CLA scholars who study space and place don't. From the cul-de-sacs of suburbs to the berths of trans-Pacific cargo ships, we shape and inhabit space—and are shaped by it—in ways that have profound implications in our lives.
By Danny LaChance
