Front and Back Covers, Volume 41, Number 6. December 2025

Front and back cover caption, volume 41 issue 6 Front cover caption, volume 41 issue 6 Midlife crisis In this issue, Hadas Weiss examines the midlife crisis as a middle‐class malaise. These paired images from American Beauty (1999) illuminate why this film became the definitive visual reference for suburban entrapment. Together, they reveal the totalizing nature of the trap: confinement exists in both professional and domestic life. The office scene shows spreadsheet columns transformed into prison bars. The fluorescent lighting and corporate sterility capture what Weiss identifies through digital ethnography: decades of career investment producing only ‘the same day on repeat’. The numerical data filling the screen visualizes the tyranny of measurement and accountability. Workers grow exhausted. Constant reinvestment never delivers genuine security. This image has continued to circulate widely online because it gives material form to an otherwise abstract predicament. The domestic image extends confinement into private life. Window bars mirror the spreadsheet's vertical lines. The house, that quintessential middle‐class investment, offers no refuge. Those experiencing this crisis question whether demonstrating that ‘the way to go through life is to be miserable and tortured, just for a nice house’ justifies the cost to selfhood. The paired images reject conventional narratives of dramatic rupture or reckless escape. They reveal instead a pervasive condition where professional and domestic domains operate under identical capitalist logic. This analysis shows what anthropological method can reveal. Weiss's digital ethnography of Reddit testimonies captures the complex whole of contemporary middle‐class experience. She connects individual testimonies to structural conditions. Thousands of anonymous posts reveal patterns that isolated individuals cannot see. This holistic approach shows how the midlife crisis emerges from specific economic arrangements rather than personal failure. Ethnographic attention to everyday digital discourse reveals the contradictions embedded in contemporary capitalism. The method documents how people name their predicament using available cultural resources, including these iconic film images. Back cover caption, volume 41 issue 6 The Moulds at the End of the Corridor In this issue, Jamie Cross examines how moulds reveal multispecies life entangled with inequality and austerity politics. Mould colonises a wall in UK social housing. A narrow corridor leads to a wall overtaken by common indoor moulds such as Stachybotrys or Aspergillus, which thrive on damp, poorly maintained substrate. Peeling paint and discoloured plaster evidence chronic moisture ingress from neglected infrastructure. The article uses such scenes to interrogate recent interest in ‘metabolic politics’: the governance of the transformative capacities of non‐human life in the Anthropocene. Indoor moulds expose the limits of celebratory narratives about human‐fungal collaboration, revealing instead how microbial life is patterned by classed, racialized and climatic inequalities. By examining microecologies in the UK, from scientific spaces to social housing, the article expands the scope of environmental anthropology, medical anthropology and science and technology studies, offering new ways to trace the politics of exposure and the atmospheres we inhabit. By focusing on indoor environments rather than exterior ecologies, it challenges anthropology's recent fascination with forests, farms and ‘wild’ multispecies encounters. Our most intimate relations with fungi unfold not in matsutake forests but in corridors like this one, where poor tenants inhale spores that middle‐class anthropologists can study from a distance. In a warming world that creates new conditions for mould species to thrive, these corridors expose how multispecies theory risks romanticizing entanglement while overlooking who actually lives with, and suffers from, fungal intimacy.