When The Builders Association began working on their Ayn Rand–inspired, technofeudalist-satirizing production of ATLAS DRUGGED (Tools for Tomorrow), the 2024 election was still years away. By the time the show premiered at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in October 2024, it was just around the corner. This dossier—comprising an interview with Richard Schechner, commentary, script excerpts, and a summary of the Builders’ mediaturgy—is a comprehensive examination of the factors that influenced the genesis of ATLAS DRUGGED, and the ludicrous “predictions” made by the sprawling, technologically advanced work that have since come true.

Here There Are Blueberries (2018–ongoing), the Tectonic Theater Project’s most recent work, tells the story of a photo album from Auschwitz collected in 1944 by Obersturmführer Karl-Friedrich Höcker, adjutant to camp commander SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Baer. The photos, now at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, show Nazi soldiers, their families, and concentration-extermination camp staff relaxing and socializing. Tectonic not only presents the photos but also investigates curating, memory, and historical responsibility. The interview details the process that brought Here There Are Blueberries into existence.

The clinical case describes a 13-year-old boy with a history of transposition of the great arteries, ventricular septal defect, and pulmonary stenosis who underwent surgical correction at age 1 with the REV procedure and the Lecompte maneuver. At age 2, severe subaortic obstruction required reoperation for subaortic tunnel reconstruction, myectomy, and reimplantation. Due to severe right ventricular outflow tract dysfunction, a 19 mm No-React Injectable BioPulmonic prosthesis was implanted. At 12 years, the patient presented with reduced exercise tolerance. Echocardiography and cardiac catheterisation demonstrated severe stenosis and regurgitation of the pulmonary bioprosthesis, right ventricular dilatation and hypertrophy, and an increased right ventricular–pulmonary artery gradient with normal pulmonary artery pressures. The manuscript presents an in vitro test demonstrating that the No-React Injectable BioPulmonic prosthesis frame can be modified using high-pressure balloons to increase its true inner diameter. The patient subsequently underwent transcatheter valve-in-valve implantation of a 23 mm Sapien 3 following pre-dilation and frame modification of the 19 mm No-React Injectable BioPulmonic prosthesis with a 22 × 20 mm Atlas Gold balloon, achieving an favourable haemodynamic outcome. Post-implant pulmonary arteriography excluded any intra-perivalvular regurgitation. Post-procedure haemodynamic assessment showed a residual peak-to-peak gradient of 10 mmHg, with systolic right ventricular pressures below half of systemic pressure. At the 6-month follow-up after the procedure, the post-procedural peak echocardiographic gradient across the pulmonary prosthesis was measured at 28 mmHg, with no evidence of regurgitation. Short-term results have been optimal, which encourages the use of this strategy for the treatment of similar cases.

In the final decades of its existence, the Qing imperial state sought to unify and standardize policies of frontier management. In this context, mapping and surveying practices developed as socio-technological discourses that transformed how Qing authorities asserted their territorial claims in the Eastern Himalayas. Most scholarship on the history of Qing-era frontier management has tended to focus on Chinese nation-building practices. However, this article foregrounds the deconstruction of the epistemic regime governing the production of geo-knowledge about the Eastern Himalayas by investigating the appropriation and rejection of the interlocutors of local and indigenous knowledge, networks, and actors.

How did military surveyors establish authoritative ideas about their own expertise? This article focuses on the late-Qing surveys of the Dzayul river basin commissioned by Zhao Erfeng and carried out by his subordinate officials Cheng Fengxian, Duan Pengrui, and Xia Hu. Between 1910 and 1911, Zhao Erfeng ordered new surveys of the regions located at the north-easternmost tip of modern-day Arunachal Pradesh, to demarcate the Qing Tibetan dominions and Chinese territory from that of British India. The surveyors Cheng Fengxian, Duan Pengrui, and Xia Hu, mapped the route of the Dzayul River which flowed into British Indian territory through the Mishmi hills into Assam as the Lohit. These surveys largely claimed that natural features marked the “natural” or “traditional” boundaries of the imperial state, against local knowledge productions that framed those same topographical features as connectors rather than dividers. By dissembling the various strands that informed this archive of Qing colonial knowledge, I investigate the processes by which state-produced narratives created new kinds of citational practices to designate who could be recognized as an “expert” of the mountainous geography of Tibet and the trans-Himalayan regions.

Contemporary visual artist Nona Faustine’s White Shoes series stages and documents her reparative practice of taking self-portraits in sites around New York City where enslaved Africans lived, died, and are buried. Considering Faustine’s self-portrait series not only as photography but also as performance documentation invites theorizations of memorial practices (rather than monumental objects) and their affordances for liberatory aesthetic projects.

This article examines Teresa of Avila’s articulation of and response to spiritual suffering in the Interior Castle. It applies a feminist hermeneutic to the text in order to locate the resources that contribute to Teresa’s resiliency in the face of this suffering. This approach to the text reveals that Teresa’s use of contemplative prayer and interactions with her community facilitate a direct engagement with her suffering so as to make it manageable. Her successful navigation of the spiritual journey allows her the opportunity to share her insights toward resiliency with her community by speaking honestly about her experience in her writings. This article’s approach to reading the Interior Castle lifts up Teresa’s experience as a potential resource for women today who may have difficulty locating a sense of agency in their own experiences of suffering.

Worldwide, the legal profession is grappling with how deeply to embrace the datafication of law. Drawing on interviews and the public record, this article offers a case study of how France’s 2016 Law for a Digital Republic—which promised public release of all judicial decisions—exposed divisions within the French legal profession over technology, big data, and identity. A heated debate over “predictive justice” (justice prédictive) mobilized competing coalitions, ultimately resulting in France becoming the first country to ban data analytics that reveal the identity of individual judges in 2019. For scholars of the legal profession, this episode highlights how legal professionals serve as gatekeepers of technological change and, in the process, reshape law-related cultural scripts central to national identity. For scholars interested in big data, the French case reminds us that the datafication of law is not an inexorable force, but rather a contested political process. And for those interested in court administration, France’s experience offers insight into how one early-moving jurisdiction re-negotiated the boundaries of privacy and judicial transparency for the twenty-first century.