From the Biblical fruit that brought about the moral downfall of mankind to -terminator- seed strains engineered to ensure that farmers have to buy new seed stocks every year, from banana republics to the annual tomato-throwing festivals in Spain, the story of fruits and vegetables opens an idiosyncratic window on human development and interaction. Cabinet 23 includes Steve Featherstone on a doomsday global seed repository on a remote Arctic island; a conversation with legendary kitchen scientist Harold McGee on the cooking of fruits and vegetables; Frances Richard on the national...

The cultural, social and scientific management of death--how to postpone it, how to prepare for it, what to do with remains, how to remember the deceased--forms the rarely acknowledged framework for the formation of society. Community is only possible if its members avow and disavow, the fact that every one of them will die. The many ways in which we live with, and despite, this knowledge inform the focus of Cabinet 49, with its special section on -Death.- Contributions include Stacey Roberts on the science of delaying death; Simon Jonasson on DIY burials; Elga Holt on the difference...

Across history, the morality of taking what belongs to another has been of concern to both theologians and lawmakers. Yet theft necessarily raises the question of what constitutes ownership, opening onto a longstanding philosophical debate about the relationship between property, freedom and virtue that stretches from Plato through Aquinas, Kant and Marx to contemporary theorists of intellectual property. And the different kinds of stealing--embezzlement, fraud, extortion, piracy, shoplifting--are as expansive as the categories of things (objects, ideas, images, styles, identities) that are...

The idea of the North in modernity--its associations with sparseness and scarcity, to hardships and remoteness--has fed countless narratives of journeying to places and fates unknown. In classical antiquity, however, the north was a place of perfection. In the 5th century BCE, Pindar wrote of the wonders of Hyperborea--a northerly land whose natives lived unaffected by -sickness or ruinous old age, - by -toil or battles.- The poet also claimed this kingdom could be found -neither by ship nor on foot, - and it is this mix of terrestrial encounter and lyric indeterminacy that continues to...

Just as the very first constructed containers emerged at a time when new techniques of food gathering and storage began to give rise to novel technologies of collection, transportation and conservation, so too have the innovations in -packaging- across the hundreds of intervening millennia both flowed from, and made possible, new modes of social, cultural and economic activity. Familiar throughout history on both the domestic (from hollowed gourds or animal skin pouches to clay pots, amphorae, and glass jars and bottles) and commercial scales (from chests and barrels to tin cans, cardboard...

This description of Cabinet issue 61 was written on 1 September 2015. Which also happens to be 17 Dhu al-Qada 1436. And 17 Elul 5775. And 19 Wu 4713. The passage of time may be immutable, but the innumerable systems (Gregorian, Islamic, Hebrew and Chinese, respectively, above) that have been used to order our experience of Earth's transit through the solar system suggest that our methods of measuring it are not. With its roots in the Latin kalendae--meaning -the called, - the word refers to the practice of Roman priests -calling- the first day of each Roman month--the calendar...

A zone of deprivation and emptiness but also a space for adventure and even divine revelation, the desert has historically resisted human domination, even as it has continued to tantalize the cultural imagination. Cabinet issue 63, with a special section on -The Desert, - includes Maria Golia on the long history of tomb raiding in Egypt; Margaret Spelling on her recent visit to the town built in the Andalusian desert as a set for Italian spaghetti westerns; and Jonathan Randall on climate change and the shifting boundaries of the world's deserts. Elsewhere in the issue: George Pendle...

One of only a handful of substances produced in nature expressly as food, milk is fundamental for infant mammalian nutrition, but is also foundational in human myth and religion. Cabinet issue 62, with a special section on -Milk, - includes Renata Salecl on the psychoanalytical implications of the recent death of a child solely breastfed for the first five years of his life; Jeff Dolven on milk and luminosity; Esther Leslie and Melanie Jackson on the ways in which milk is transformed from primary material to metaphorical excess; and Melanie Tyson on the colonial history of condensed...