Deb Chachra

Engineering professor (on leave 2025-26). Researcher, communicator, connector of things, people, and ideas. Author of HOW INFRASTRUCTURE WORKS. Interested in embodiment, materiality, metacognition, and systems. All enthusiasm is 100% genuine.

homepage: http://debcha.org
newsletter: https://buttondown.com/metafoundry
Bluesky: @debcha.bsky.social
Instagram: Deb Chachra (npub1lq5…6wl7)

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npub1lq5qek8ma2kt5wpyadyandh504tvusjj4mpe2adjkapla4l06dssln6wl7

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debcha_at_saturation.social@momostr.pink

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Last Notes

2026-08-03 19:13:44 UTC

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These days I'm generally either heads-down on projects (one of which is standing up the newsletter archives!) or I'm outside, so I really appreciate the folks who sign up for Metafoundry. It's infrequent and substantive, and everything is there in your inbox when you're ready to read. https://buttondown.com/metafoundry

2026-08-03 19:10:33 UTC

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Was reminded today of the piece on Internet newsletters that @npub1k9g…8ylh wrote for WIRED just about ten years ago, which feels, if anything, even more relevant today: "The pleasure in reading a newsletter comes from the view into a unitary mind at work. Reading [Metafoundry, my newsletter] is like being plugged Oculus-style into her brain while she meditates on science and culture. The best newsletters are all like that: places online where one can talk—and listen—in private." https://www.wired.com/2016/05/rise-of-the-newsletter/

2026-08-02 02:02:35 UTC

As of this weekend, I've been based in Vancouver, BC for a year. To celebrate, I wrote a newsletter about Alexis Madrigal's book THE PACIFIC CIRCUIT, having a garden, and some of the things I've been up to this past while: https://buttondown.com/metafoundry/archive/determinate-tomatoes/

2026-07-09 21:25:07 UTC

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I was considering a tattoo design that incorporated lightning bolts (bc electricity/public power) and my tattoo artist reminded me that they are a Nazi symbol. a) Nazis ruin everything (I found a different design that I love), b) I, a middle-aged brown immigrant woman, didn’t want the slightest chance of ever having to explain it *wasn’t* a Nazi tattoo.
[Also, tattoo artists (gladly!) do coverups and laser removal is great now. *Keeping* that tattoo was a choice.]

2026-07-07 14:57:34 UTC

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Co-sign! But I also want STEAM education to be a gateway to the trades, not least because an energy transition means we’re going to want/need to adapt or rebuild much of our built environment. No shortage of meaningful work to do for young people who like to work with their hands *and* brains, but we need to value this work and create equitable, inclusive career pathways.

2026-07-07 01:05:01 UTC

Had reason to return to the incredible story about how unbelievably skilled seamstresses, with expertise in sewing bras and girdles, developed and fabricated the spacesuits for the Apollo missions, as documented by Nicholas de Monchaux.
"ILC’s attitude came through in a seamstress’s comment to a NASA technical team in 1968: “It might look all right on that piece of paper, but I’m not going to sew that piece of paper."”
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-bra-and-girdle-maker-that-fashioned-the-impossible-for-nasa/

2026-06-13 22:36:24 UTC

Re: last two boosts about neutrino mass and oscillations:
When I was an engineering physics undergrad at the University of Toronto, the question of whether neutrinos had mass and/or oscillated was an open question. It turns out that one way you could answer it was to build a detector filled with heavy water (deuterium oxide), deep underground. Canada, as it happens, has both a stockpile of heavy water (it’s used in CANDU nuclear reactors) and some deep disused mineshafts. (1/n)

2026-06-13 22:36:24 UTC

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Building a neutrino detector is not cheap, but Canada was uniquely well-positioned to solve what was known as the Solar Neutrino Problem because two of the most expensive elements of the required detector — purifying the D2O from ‘regular’ water and getting it away from surface radiation — were already at hand. Prof Art McDonald at Queen’s University took the lead on a proposal to build the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. (2/n)

2026-03-22 02:24:58 UTC

Was asked today, as an icebreaker, to share what I was currently obsessed with.
My answer: The design and function of these wooden (Pacific) halibut hooks that have used by the communities of the northwest coast of the US for thousands of years: https://hakaimagazine.com/features/the-halibut-hook-revival/
I went to see these examples, from the Haida, at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, yesterday.
https://moa.ubc.ca
https://cdn.hosted.spacebear.ee/sb-2393d180df251611821d77e6f02bf209/media_attachments/files/116/270/438/660/152/209/original/a7d5f2ef4d6f8d2a.jpeg

2026-02-14 22:13:45 UTC

A demonstration of how English scrobbles up words from other languages, in two sentences.
[from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque ]
https://cdn.hosted.spacebear.ee/sb-2393d180df251611821d77e6f02bf209/media_attachments/files/116/071/274/850/186/830/original/da5fb64346255032.jpeg

2025-12-06 13:47:53 UTC

I got to introduce someone to the greatest website of all time yesterday:
https://www.mcmaster.com
[If you’ve never had occasion to use it: just go to that link, pick something, repeat. Or look around where you live or work for something that’s broken and needs replacing and look for that part. Or think about something you might want to make.]
https://cdn.hosted.spacebear.ee/sb-2393d180df251611821d77e6f02bf209/media_attachments/files/115/672/930/059/384/746/original/59b88120a3caae66.jpeg

2025-12-05 20:16:06 UTC

Tomorrow is the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women in Canada. I wrote about the precipitating event, and its role in my own life, on its 25th anniversary and republished it today: https://buttondown.com/metafoundry/archive/thirty-six-years-later/

2025-11-22 23:04:55 UTC

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That red piece is phenomenal, absolutely my jam.

2025-10-19 17:24:59 UTC

I wrote this piece during a US federal government shutdown in 2013 and everything I said then is just as true today, except I’m even more furious at the people who don’t understand the value of collective systems and universal provision.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/08/charities-government-civilised-society

2025-04-03 22:09:33 UTC

I’ve been repeatedly pointing people at this over the past few weeks, so putting it here: https://how.complexsystems.fail

2024-11-28 00:40:13 UTC

I made a quilted winter cover for the AC in my living room (in lieu of taking it out), and also a very silly joke.
https://sb-9g02l2bbpw.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/113/557/784/448/777/945/original/6a635fad7d002916.jpeg

2024-11-03 05:03:00 UTC

I had reason to revisit Cory Doctorow’s (@npub1fdr…lvhs ) long, thoughtful review of HOW INFRASTRUCTURE WORKS yesterday and it’s so great — it means so much that he really, truly gets what I was trying to get across.
“This is a bold engineering vision, one that fuses Chachra's material science background, her work as an engineering educator, her activism as an anti-colonialist and feminist. The way she lays it out is just…breathtaking.”
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/

2024-10-25 23:31:37 UTC

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This this this. I think this is the biggest change in the US in the time I’ve lived here (twenty years) — have been thinking about documenting how much of my day is spent dealing with upselling and scam and surveys and and and that I notice most when it *doesn’t* happen, like ordering covid tests via USPS or when a company recently stood behind and replaced a product that had failed in use.

2024-10-05 19:34:24 UTC

TIL: if you were a guest at the Parker House Hotel in 1912 or 1913 and ordered the dessert that originated there and which the hotel remains famous for, your Boston Cream Pie may have been made by…
Ho Chi Minh.
[He apparently worked as a pastry chef in the hotel kitchen while studying in Boston. The surviving evidence is scanty, as you might imagine, but not in dispute.]
[photo mine, taken this afternoon since I was coincidentally in the immediate neighbourhood]
https://sb-9g02l2bbpw.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/113/256/465/296/597/308/original/e7a7e9d80b6070aa.jpeg

2024-09-30 17:33:05 UTC

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It's like, I promise you we aren't (just) weird Gen-Xers fetishizing old devices.
We literally spend every moment of our lives in our bodies engaged in tactile interaction with the material world and we are GOOD at it. And then touchscreens came along and all of our interactions were squeezed into this sparsest, narrowest, most attenuated of channels.
[I bought my car in 2013 and one of my criteria was that it have a fully physical dashboard, entirely so I can keep my eyes on the road.]

2024-09-30 17:24:16 UTC

FREAKING FINALLY
"Buttons are back, baby!! This piece has been 15 years in the making, more or less."
@npub1zjp…u8q9 in the WSJ on the resurgance of physical buttons for interfaces.
"Fundamentally, the problem with touch-based interfaces is that they aren’t touch-based at all, because they need us to look when using them."
Materiality and embodiment ftw.
[gift link, courtesy of the author]
https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/touch-screens-are-over-even-apple-is-bringing-back-buttons-86fb9ea8?st=XPWkwV&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

2024-09-30 14:05:28 UTC

Newcomen's steam engine (1712) used some of the coal coming out of a mine to power a water pump so that much more coal could be mined. I think of it as the start of the exponential growth that fossil fuels made possible.
So it definitely feels like a landmark that the UK's last coal-powered electricity plant shuts down today: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/30/end-of-an-era-as-britains-last-coal-fired-power-plant-shuts-down

2024-09-11 20:19:31 UTC

I’ve been friends with @npub1k9g…8ylh for a couple of decades now, and a fan of his writing (and thinking!) even before that. If you follow me and my work, I suspect that you’ll also get a lot out of this long, chewy interview with him about technology, thinking, mobility, infrastructure, the coming energy transition, writing, AI, and so much more: https://thegradientpub.substack.com/p/clive-thompson-tales-of-technology