Are you a fan of engaging, epistemically rigorous longform writing about the world's most pressing problems? Interested in in-depth interviews with leading scholars? A reader of taste and discernment? Sick of FTXcourse?
Distract yourself with the inaugural issue of Asterisk Magazine, out now!
Asterisk is a new quarterly journal of clear writing and clear thinking about things that matter (and, occasionally, things we just think are interesting). In this issue:
- Kelsey Piper argues that What We Owe The Future can't quite support the weight of its own premises.
- Kevin Esvelt talks about how we can prevent the next pandemic.
- Jared Leibowich gives us a superforecaster's approach to modeling monkeypox.
- Christopher Leslie Brown on the history of abolitionism and the slippery concept of moral progress
- Stuart Ritchie tries to find out if the replication crisis has really made science better.
- Dietrich Vollrath explains what economists do and don't know about why some countries become rich and others don't.
- Scott Alexander asks: is wine fake?
- Karson Elmgren on the history and future of China's semiconductor industry.
- Xander Balwit imagines a future where genetic engineering has radically altered the animals we eat.
A huge thank you to everyone in the community who helped us make Asterisk a reality. We hope you all enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed making it.
Just chiming in with an extra anecdotal data point that (on my laptop at least) I think the design looks great, from colour scheme to font choice - it's clear that a lot of effort has been put into this. I also really like the save highlight function, which I hadn't seen before, and thought it was a neat design choice to use an asterix there too (as well as the blurbs that come up when you hover over titles). I've only skimmed 1 article so far so can't comment on the content, but definitely would not hesitate to recommend this to people based on its current design, and I'd probably also anti-recommend adding dall-e images (at least the 4 that have come up).
Thanks to Clara and the team who have put this together!