After 20 years of popular science online and a first annual magazine, Futura continues to grow and launches the quarterly version of its Mag’. True to our fundamentals, we want to accentuate, with this new paper format, immersion in the field at the heart of science and our commitment to the crucial issues of our time.
Superlatives seem threadbare: everything has been said about the seriousness of the current ecological disasters, about the ontological upheavals caused in a generation by the digitaldigital. So much so that recalling the crucial moment that our era has become, emphasizing the decisive importance of our present choices for the future of humanity, resembles a cliché. The urgency to act, however, has lost none of its sharpness.
At the heart of these challenges: science. By its prodigious efficiency, by the incredible progress on the knowledge of the world that it brought us, it was also, reluctantly, the engine of our growing hold on the Planet and its destruction. Supreme ambivalence, it is still she who alerts us to the mortal perils of the Anthropocene and constitutes our best guide to fork towards a lasting future.
A Mag’ for all and for the future
This double face leads us to an observation: science cannot be self-sufficient. Let us be clear, the scientific approach remains the best means available to humanity to tend towards an ideal of objective description of reality. But science – like its armed wing, technology – becomes a citizen issue when it comes to discussing the best way to use its results. Which is rather good: equipping citizens to help them seize the debates of the future, decipher science and put its long-term challenges within everyone’s reach is the mission that has given itself The Mag’ Futura.
After a first adventure last year, resulting in the publication of an ambitious annual issue, we want to come back in January, with a redesigned formula and the desire to become quarterly. We remain faithful to our fundamentals: praising science and the long time that characterizes it, embodying it through reporting as close as possible to researchers, taking advantage of the virtues of the paper format to offer you a step aside, outside from the hustle and bustle of everyday life, and direct your gaze towards the horizon, a source of wonder and revealing of the priorities to be preserved.
Amaze and engage
Our conviction is also that understanding the world, the complex and fragile beauties of its arrangements, is the prerequisite for the desire to save it. Deciphering science, therefore, and paying particular attention to the aesthetics of the magazine to convey this taste for wonder. By trying to contribute to renewing the image of science through the artistic diversity of our illustrators, by varying the formats (comics, reports, photo galleries, etc.) and by making heard an original voice of scientists who will tell us what moves and fascinates them in their daily lives.
To build this beautiful object while giving it strength in substance, we will offer each issue a central file of unprecedented size, 60 pages, to dissect an important scientific question in large widths. Starting from the basics, to be accessible to all. In addition, each magazine will open on another file, exploring a fundamental ecological issue, a vulnerability of the biospherebiosphere highlighted by science. New educational events, such as “Mechanics of beauty”, “Praise of error” or chronicles of partners, will allow the most eager readers to enter The Mag’ Futura with more lightness and speed.
We were particularly touched last year to count so many of you supporting our first steps in the world of publishing, by your participation in our fundraising campaign and by your encouragement. To perpetuate our ambitions and move up a gear, we are calling on you again this year on Ulule. We can’t wait to meet you in kioskkiosk from January and every quarter to continue telling you through science the inexhaustible wonders of our good old Earth and the cosmoscosmos !