Works in Progress @WorksInProgMag

worksinprogress.co/print/

Read it in Issue 24 of the print edition, landing on doorsteps around the world this week.

Mike Bird @Birdyword

22 hours ago

Love this story about how the Squamish Nation did what seems almost impossible for everyone else, and managed to densify a portion of Vancouver, one of the most regulation-constrained cities for housing anywhere in the world

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The race to discover a new drug is often less important than the race to test it in humans. American medical research is falling behind China due to excessive barriers to conducting clinical tests. @RuxandraTeslo and Amol Punjabi recently wrote for us on the story of CAR-T therapy, an extremely promising treatment for some of the world’s most painful cancers: invented in America, developed and perfected in China. worksinprogress.co/issue/the-bloo…

Ruxandra Teslo 🧬 @RuxandraTeslo

6 days ago

China is winning the drug discovery race. There's no better example of this than multiple myeloma. worksinprogress.co/issue/the-bloo… It's one of the most painful cancers, destroying bone from within. For decades, patients endured cycles of brutal treatment and relapse. Then came

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It was great to meet so many of our NYC subscribers, where WiP Art Director @thinkaboutglue gave a talk on how she designs the graphics to illustrate the world's most important ideas. We're looking forward to seeing more of our readers this week in Washington DC at the Issue 24 launch party!

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Flags designed by modern vexillologists are clean, simple, and utterly banal. @Ned_Donovan writes in praise of the flags that tell you exactly where you are, by violating every rule of design. worksinprogress.co/issue/the-flag…

Ned Donovan @Ned_Donovan

5 days ago

Each autumn in early modern India, certain men drifted out of the central provinces to take up a trade. A Thuggee would join a caravan on the road as a merchant glad of company, or a cook looking for work. He played the part for days, sometimes weeks, earning the trust of the men

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“The most clearly authoritarian features of 19th century cities are streets and drains.” Samuel Hughes explains why private enterprises were great at providing public transport, and much less good at providing road networks for them to travel through.

AI is the future, and Europe is missing out on it. We’re delighted to have Simon joining us, to write about how Europe can become a genuine force for good in the development of AI.

Simon Grimm @Simon__Grimm

6 days ago

I’m excited to share that I’ve joined @WorksInProgMag as an editor, where I’ll be focusing on AI and European progress. At Works in Progress, I’ll focus on a topic that is both important and underrated: how Europe should grapple with the changes brought by artificial

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I’m excited to share that I’ve joined @WorksInProgMag as an editor, where I’ll be focusing on AI and European progress. At Works in Progress, I’ll focus on a topic that is both important and underrated: how Europe should grapple with the changes brought by artificial intelligence. Europe is in a challenging position. But I also believe it is crucial that Europe remains able to influence how the coming years and decades play out. It is one of the world's most liberal regions, and has been central for the world's moral progress. Right now, the number of people working on European AI policy is really low. Many things need to happen for the continent to be adequately equipped for what's to come: data center construction, ensuring frontier AI adoption in governments, better risk-tracking across European capitals, and a broader policy agenda that ensures Europe can capture more of AI’s surplus. I’ve recently started writing up my thoughts on AI in Europe at simongrimm.substack.com, with a much larger piece coming out soon. Works in Progress is an amazing home for this type of work. It has published many canonical pieces on big challenges of our time, economic stagnation first among them. But it has also covered lead elimination, far-UVC for pandemic prevention, organ donation, and many other important ideas. If one wants to paint a picture of how Europe can succeed in the age of AI, Works in Progress is the ideal place to do so. (If you haven't subscribed yet, do it; you'll be in great company.) Joining Works in Progress also means leaving the US, and the project I’ve spent the past three years working on: the Nucleic Acid Observatory, now SecureBio Detection. At MIT and SecureBio, we built a pathogen early warning system that I’m incredibly proud of. The people I was lucky to work with in Cambridge were among the smartest, most mission-driven, and most focused people I’ve ever spent time with. The impact SecureBio is having on biosecurity is immense, and we are all safer for it. I’m proud to be joining Works in Progress as the next step in my career, and I’m looking forward to working with such talented colleagues during such a turbulent, fast-moving time.

If you read one thing this week, let it be this piece on China's development of a superior treatment for a blood cancer called multiple myeloma by @RuxandraTeslo & Amol Punjabi: worksinprogress.co/issue/the-bloo… Carvytki (right), a CAR-T treatment developed by China's Legend Biotech, proved to be much more effective than Abecma (left), a US-developed alternative. After promising early-stage trials, Legend partnered with Johnson & Johnson to develop and commercialize the treatment, which is widely used today. While much of the foundational research was originally done in the US, it was a Chinese biotech firm that was able to get out in front, thanks in part to a faster regulatory process for early-stage clinical trials.

A thread on the 50 best fortifications to go and visit in the world according to me. They are all fun for at least one in the family. They are listed in reverse rank order as determined by how much fun, unique and awesome they are.

Thrilled to announce I'm joining @WorksInProgMag and @stripe to continue my research and writing on clinical trials & biotech innovation, with many more articles to come. (If you haven't already, subscribe to the magazine. It's great in terms of content and very beautiful.) My work is driven by a core conviction: in the years and decades ahead, we will be far more constrained by the quality of our culture and institutions than by technology itself. In biology, a remarkable convergence is underway. AI, alongside a wave of other emerging tools, is fundamentally expanding what science can do. But beneath this sizzling potential, something is going wrong in Western biotechnology. China is pulling ahead and companies are increasingly moving clinical trials there, drawn by faster clinical trial timelines and a more dynamic ecosystem. Promising therapies sit in limbo for years. Despite the science being here, personalized cancer therapies are not viable to anyone but a few who can afford to navigate the labyrinthine regulatory apparatus. And pharmaceutical R&D productivity has remained stubbornly flat in the last 10 years, after decades of decline. And I can't imagine a better home for my research and writing on what can be done to accelerate biomedical progress than Works in Progress. This is a magazine that has published some of the most important writing on why the physical world has stopped working, including "The Housing Theory of Everything," which became one of those rare pieces that actually changed how people think about a problem. But this is not just about my desire to study biotech innovation. Biotech is not an anomaly. The same pattern: technology outrunning the institutions meant to govern it, is playing out across society. And now AI is compressing the timeline, accelerating pressures that were already straining the system. When people ask what I worry about when it comes to AI, I tell them it’s not the usual things. I'm not losing sleep as much over AI taking my job. I am more worried that we will lose our appetite for depth and that long-form thought, serious reading, sustained attention, the very things that make culture worth having, will erode faster than we notice. That our collective intelligence will hollow out, gradually. And the very problems we have now will only accelerate. @WorksInProgMag is a resistance movement against that, condensed in the form of magazine. It stands for long-form, in-depth writing. It stands for beauty. It is fundamentally anti-slop. In that sense, it's a natural fit with @stripe. A payments company publishing a magazine might seem like an odd pairing. That is, until you understand what kind of payments company @stripe actually is. It has always been driven by a genuine passion for craft and for getting small things exactly right. I am really proud to be part of something that embodies my own values in such a deep way, especially at a turning point in history.

Coming soon. worksinprogress.co/print/

@lvwerra 🕚

Read it for yourself: worksinprogress.co/print

David Caldwell @roodave

a month ago

When I discovered the new periodical “Works In Progress” has a magnificent NatGeo c1950 energy, the peak of western technologically driven advancement enthusiasm, it would have taken little to get me over the line. But a piece on Japanese rail, overshoot. Take my money

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We have many articles we'd like to publish for which we haven't found the right author. Here is a list of some of those ideas. If one of them looks like something you'd write well, send us a pitch. worksinprogress.news/p/more-article…

Read it for yourself: worksinprogress.co/print/

There's a great article on Japan's railways in this month's @WorksInProgMag. It's worth considering a print subscription too, because the design is so beautiful and makes this article even more of a joy to read: worksinprogress.co/issue/why-japa…

Handre @Handre

2 months ago

The Japanese railway privatization of 1987 stands as one of the most devastating defeats ever dealt to statist transportation mythology. The government split the bloated Japan National Railways into seven regional companies, sold them off, and watched private ownership transform

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Issue 23 of Works in Progress is out now! With features on: 🪞 ASML, Europe's AI juggernaut. 🧷 Engineering the disposable diaper. 🛕 Modern Hindu temples, some of the world's most inspiring architecture. 🚌 The invention and reinvention of buses. worksinprogress.co Plus: 👶 Why the best time to freeze your eggs is now 🚄 How America can have Japanese-tier railways ☢️ How Britain forgot to build cheap nuclear power And more! worksinprogress.co

Works in Progress 23 — Title page art (ASML) is revealed when negative space on the translucent page is filled in by the previous page. Delightful! @s8mb @WorksInProgMag

Many European governments have come to regard offshore processing as something of a silver bullet for reducing immigration, on the grounds that it worked for Australia. But, as @AmeliaERWood explains, it is not, in fact, what worked for Australia.

Sam Bowman @s8mb

2 months ago

Europe keeps trying offshore processing for asylum seekers. Britain attempted its Rwanda scheme; Italy is dispatching asylum seekers to Albania; Denmark has passed legislation to process claims abroad. They are trying because of Australia, where small boat crossing are widely

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