November/December 2021 updates

Hi everyone,

Writing

• My low-demand, worry-free, and healthy diet (spoiler: it’s Athletic Greens, muesli with kefir, and MealSquares)
• Why I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown
• Thinking of writing about my experience with getting an O-1 visa to work at New Science. Let me know if you’d be interested.

New Science

• We raised >$1m from Jaan Tallinn (co-founder of Skype), Vitalik Buterin (creator of Ethereum), and more (reminder: a 501c3 nonprofit)
• Sasha Targ joined us as Head of Research and Chris Lakin as Operations Manager
• Applications for our summer fellowship are due January 19th!
  • We are looking for early-career scientists (we expect mainly graduate students and very advanced undergraduates) in any area of the life sciences to come to Boston for 12 weeks over the summer of 2022 and work on a high-risk basic science idea of their own, with us providing the fellows with lab space, a $6k/month stipend, $5k/month for project costs, mentorship, and more. We aim to give fellows both complete intellectual freedom to pursue and to direct a project of their own creation and as much on-the-ground support and mentorship from New Science as possible.
  • If you know a really talented young scientist interested in biology who you think would be a good fit, let them know!

We are super excited to start to directly enable the next generation of scientists to pursue basic research and are looking forward to running a longer program after the summer fellowship, starting to build our own scientific infrastructure in ~2023 and starting to support scientists at bigger scale, while being part of and supporting the broader ecosystem of new organizations reimagining how science should work.

See more New Science updates and subscribe to them here.

Links

• Economic reflections on the Fall of Constantinople
• Compare and Contrast Comments on Offense
• The story of how Kanye became a billionaire

Also: Best of Twitter archives for the last two months.

Have a great January!

Cheers,
Alexey