Underground

This issue is haunted. When the team conceived of the theme, we imagined the underground in terms of roots, nature, technology, secrets, science fiction, wilderness, the unseen, the unspoken, alternatives, what lies beneath. What we received included some of these themes, but also unexpectedly much darker: solitude, death, disease, decay, ruins, war, slaughter, poverty, anxiety, turmoil, incest, sorrow, suicide, underworlds, the digression of progress. Our designers created an intricate illustration of an uprooted radish on the cover, somehow harkening back to our original thoughts, and at the same time a figure emerges from the roots, as if dancing, celebrating all that begins, lives, and ends in the underground.

During our sequencing...