Alona Bach
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bachwards.bsky.social
Alona Bach
@bachwards.bsky.social
430 followers 200 following 62 posts
Archive haunter (where history of technology + Yiddish meet); theatre/-er-maker; rogue illustrator. PhD candidate in MIT's Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, & Society (HASTS).

she/her | 📷: Der praktisher elektrotekhniker (1925)
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bachwards.bsky.social
Nandini Goel on architecture's abstractions, and what the Rhino viewport reveals and obscures.

💿 contrastsmag.net/article/view...
via @contrastsmag.bsky.social
A graphic reading: Viewportal (al in parentheses) Fictions. On abstraction and the unmaking of reality through Rhino. Nandini Goel. Quote: To reckon with what we must remember while designing, we must first address what our Rhino viewport conditions us to forget.
November 3, 2025 at 9:36 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
Molly Brodsky's lyrical meditation on eruvin considers not only the physical structure of an eruv—its components, its vulnerabilities—but also how it coheres community.

💿 contrastsmag.net/article/life-at-the-wire/
via @contrastsmag.bsky.social
A graphic reading: Life at the Wire. Molly Brodsky. Quote: The eruv is not just The Wire; it is The Wiring—stringing fences and maintainers and observers and laws and spaces into a connected knotty mixture. Contrasts 01. Portals.
November 2, 2025 at 2:16 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
Kelsi Dunman on Google Maps and memory.

💿 contrastsmag.net/article/ther...
via @contrastsmag.bsky.social
A graphic reading: Thereafter, we lingered. Kelso Dunman. Quote: Hovering in the balm of September 2007, I wonder who was inside the house when Google's street view car rolled by and froze my childhood in time. Contrasts 1. Portals.
October 31, 2025 at 6:40 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
Kevin C. Moore on truth, generative AI, and accessing the fragmentary past.

💿 contrastsmag.net/article/the-...
via @contrastsmag.bsky.social #STS
A graphic reading: The Vesuvian Fallacy. Kevin C. Moore. Quote: It matters little whether or not the unraveled text of the Herculaneum scroll is legitimate: we cannot know. Contrasts issue 1. Portals.
October 31, 2025 at 12:28 AM
bachwards.bsky.social
Emma Jahoda-Brown on landfill, odor, home: contrastsmag.net/article/land...

You can read more about Emma's work on the Chiquita Canyon landfill on the @castac.bsky.social blog: blog.castac.org/2025/09/odor...

via @contrastsmag.bsky.social
A graphic reading: landfill as portal. Emma Jahoda-Brown. Quote: What I loved about the landfill was my anger about the landfill. Contrasts issue 1, portals.
October 30, 2025 at 6:19 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
Word of mouth is one of the best ways for new publications to get off the ground, so if you enjoyed a piece (or two or three), please share with your friends, via whatever online portal strikes your fancy.

Read about portals & more: contrastsmag.net
Contrasts
An online magazine about the intersection of science, technology, and society.
contrastsmag.net
October 30, 2025 at 12:40 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
(Of course the real Kundes cartoon of the moment is still: bsky.app/profile/bach...)
bachwards.bsky.social Alona Bach @bachwards.bsky.social · Jan 22
"Aroysgeshtelt."

—Cartoon from April 23, 1920, by Lola (Leon Israel) in Der groyser kundes, a #Yiddish biweekly humor magazine, p. 3.
Yiddish cartoon showing Uncle Sam sitting dejectedly, head in hands, on the steps of a grand building labelled "American Institutions, American Traditions." A copy of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are lying by his side.
April 1, 2025 at 6:41 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
(The cartoon in question, printed on the back of the grey box, one page later in the magazine)

—Der groyser kundes [March 31, 1911], p. 12.
The cartoon from the back of the page: a Jewish jester (the Kundes mascot) and a devil, laughing and pointing at the reader. The caption reads (with backwards English letters, so it would appear forwards when held up to the light from the other side) "April Fool".
April 1, 2025 at 6:37 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
We publish:
+ long-form pieces (~3–4k words/equivalent, flexible genre);
+ “BroadcaSTS” (<300 words);
+ “From the Source” (showcasing & contextualizing a primary source, ideally with suggestions for how it might be used in classrooms).

We'd love to hear from you! contrastsmagazine.github.io
February 25, 2025 at 12:07 AM
bachwards.bsky.social
We invite submissions on "portals" from emerging scholars both within academia (undergrads through early-career scholars) and without (including artists & designers). We are keen to feature STS-adjacent work in a wide range of forms & genres—narrative nonfiction, visual essays, interviews, & beyond.
Screenshot of three bullet-point paragraphs of text from the CFP, reading: Entrances and Exits: If portals are entryways into other worlds, timelines, and relationalities, what does it mean to open a portal—and to close it? How do discourses, representations, and architectures of openings (and closings) inspire and confine access to other possibilities for life? Travel, Space, and Time: How do portals compress, interrupt, and transmute space and time? How do these transmutations generate or foreclose opportunities to remake their very fabric? How do particular technologies/documents/objects/media modulate movement between and through spacetime? Liminality, Thresholds, and Borderlands: How does attention to portals reveal the politics and potentialities of spaces and states in-between, and what does the state of liminality reveal about worlds that it shuffles between? What portals (have) enable(d) entry into worlds so radically different than their “before” that they preclude any return? What are the social, emotional, spiritual, political, or technological preconditions for crossing through a portal? What are the stories of science, technology, or medicine on the cusp of possibility?
February 25, 2025 at 12:07 AM
bachwards.bsky.social
The image in the CFP comes from Der groyser kun­des 1, no. 20 (Sep­tem­ber 25, 1909), p. 5. Alt text below! buff.ly/416QaB1
Rainbow-ified scan of a cartoon and poem from an old Yiddish magazine, titled Ven mashiekh vet kumen. The illustration shows an old-timey airship, with a tzitzit flag and a menora at the front, carrying two religious Jews into the sky while a crowd below waves.
February 20, 2025 at 5:34 PM
bachwards.bsky.social
I'm excited to be co-editing this issue with Dalia Wolfson & Sebastian Schulman. We're looking for: short essays, reviews, interviews, pedagogical materials, and translations (including miniyaturn—original 100-250־word Yiddish mini-sci-fi narratives)—on the themes below, and beyond!
Screenshot of CFP listing: The geographies and empires of Yiddish science fiction worlds. Time-travel in contemporary Haredi Yiddish writing. Utopia, dystopia and heterotopia. Histories and politics of Yiddish science fiction publishing. Intersections of Yiddish techno-imaginaries with Jewish futurities (prophesy, mysticism, messianism). Theorizations of the Yiddish/Jewish science fiction anthology. Yiddish inflections in contemporary non-Yiddish-language science fiction. Material/visual expressions of Yiddish futures.
February 20, 2025 at 5:34 PM