Are you a person with a master’s degree who wants to work in development? You should probably apply to be an ODI Fellow (by the end of today).
Claudia Goldin is a mensch: “after Claudia Goldin became the first woman to win a solo Nobel in economics in 2023, she received hundreds of invitations and requests. She accepted just three. One of them was advising the WNBA players union as the women prepared to negotiate a new labor deal with the league.”
Niko McCarty launched “Fast Biology Bounties” to surface ideas to “speed up or reduce costs for wet-lab experiments”. He found the experiment more successful than anticipated, and says that “good ideas are cheap and can be surfaced for a small amount of money.”
This makes me want to do something similar with In Development at some point.
On a sadder note: Asimov Press is pausing for now (as Niko McCarty goes to Astera and Xander Balwit to Anthropic). This is a tremendous loss for the scientific community, even as I’m very excited to see what Niko and Xander do next.1
The Good Science Project argues that we need both a macro- metascience and a micro-metascience. Andrew Gerard (who writes Macroscience) wrote up a few thoughts.
The average flat in Manila costs twenty times the median income. This is considerably worse than famously unaffordable London, where the median home is about 14x the median income, or San Francisco, where a home is 10x median income.
An Irish guy created an AI voice agent to track the price of a pint of Guinness across Ireland. Good use of AI.
The national average price of a pint of Guinness is €5.95. The modal price is €5.50. But also: Guinness still isn’t tasty and you’re better off having a nice glass of wine.2
Via Matt Yglesias: “69%3 of all criminal cases in New Haven between 1710 and 1750 were for premarital sex.”
Recommend this thread of British nicknames. Some examples: Keth for a man named Keith missing an eye, an electrician who looks like Elton John nicknamed “Socket Man”, and a man nicknamed “Minty” because he always gets to work after eight.4
I know I’ve said this before, but Asimov Press, Asterisk Magazine, and Works in Progress were all a big part of me deciding to launch In Development; Niko was also exceptionally helpful in thinking through the decision process and my ultimately deciding to Do The Thing.
It’s fine; despite The Hair, I am in no way Irish, I am allowed to say this.
Nice.
For the Americans: After Eight is a brand of mint chocolates.