When I was a child I hated being dragged around our local indoor market. It felt massive, with lots of places to get lost, plus it always smelled weird because of the mixture of butchers, fishmongers, cafes, smoke and the general hubbub of messy life.
Imagine how child me would cope in Kyrgyzstan’s Dordoi Bazaar. This indoor market spans more than 100 hectares and is built from an estimated 60,000 double and triple-stacked shipping containers. Tens of thousands of people work there in
shops, currency exchanges, health spas, hotels, gyms and beauty salons. There’s even a mosque.
Social anthropologist Claudia Eggart, the author of our latest Insights long read, says Dordoi is “a city within a city” and that every container opens onto its own distinct social world.
Another distinct social world has become an unexpected source of information for scientists specialising in respiratory illness. The “fanciers” of the pigeon racing community are more vulnerable than most to a certain lung condition and their experiences are feeding back into a growing body of medical evidence that is useful for everyone.
And as more and more people fall in love with AIs, a philosopher handles a knotty question: can the AI love you back?
