There is a certain gravitas to the way the seasons turn. The trees do not shed their leaves in despair. They decide, quietly and with great care, what they can afford to keep. Mother nature is a patient colourist, and she shows her work to anyone willing to look.

Some read this season as a time for study. Others treat it as permission to hibernate. This edition sits somewhere between the two.

Two pieces examine what happens when systems do the deciding instead. One asks who gets to see and who gets seen when states, platforms and corporations settle the terms of the world among themselves. The other walks through Hong Kong’s markets, where chestnut sellers, letter writers and a woman still weighing rice on a wooden beam are being retired by a progress that looks exactly like everyone else.

Read together, they make the same argument from opposite ends. Globalisation promised to make everything legible and interchangeable. What it wore away was the texture that never reached a balance sheet. Culture is not only what we remember. It is what someone keeps doing.