In a recent essay for Asterisk, “Yes in My Bamako Yard,” Africa Urban Lab's Founder & Director, Kurtis Lockhart, outlines a three-part playbook for a continent-wide Africa YIMBY movement:

Athenian Stranger MRJB 🇬🇧🇨🇦 This is by no means exhaustive, but it covers the ground:

One interviewee said, “One kind of cult you can have is when you and ten of your closest friends all live in a house together and you have the blackout curtains drawn and a lot of MDMA, and you sit around and talk about the implications of the whatever.” asteriskmag.com/issues/11/why-…

oh hey, the paper of record (Asterisk Magazine) ran a fascinating article about why the rationalist community seems to be a fertile ground for weird cults

Absolutely terrific ethnography by ozybrennan in Asterisk on a question that's long puzzled me: why are rationalist cults, how do they develop, and what's their relationship to more functional versions. asteriskmag.com/issues/11/why-…

we have a shortlist

Thank you to the many, many of you who applied to our AI Blogging Fellowship We'll be announcing our Fellows next week. Until then, we wrote up some reflections on the process — how we made selections and who we selected for

Nate Silver Something like 1/4 recent top Econ or political science articles have material coding errors, so saying half are wrong isn’t crazy. asteriskmag.com/issues/10/can-…

The story of how Serum Institute of India came to deliver at least 1 vaccine to some 65% of children across the world is one of the most important — and still undersung — in all of global health asteriskmag.com/issues/11/how-…

I hope this piece becomes the starting point for an Acquired Podcast podcast: how a struggling horse farm pivots to vaccines, uses tech savvy to make the cheapest vaccines on the planet, develops manufacturing capacity that outstrips all competitors, and still turns a profit

My essay on how Serum Institute of India evolved to become the world's largest manufacturer of vaccines, by volume, is out.

What a fabulous and inspiring story! There is much more to it than just horses.. asteriskmag.com/issues/11/how-…

In Asterisk, PriyankaPulla writes about SerumInstituteIndia—"the largest, and generally most affordable, supplier of #vaccines around the world." Together, PATH & Serum have developed low-cost vaccines for some of the deadliest diseases in LMICs: asteriskmag.com/issues/11/how-…

Highly recommend the piece by ozybrennan in Asterisk The author's grounded in the rationalist community, interviewed ~dozen principals involved in culty offshoots of CFAR Future work could try to unpack dynamics of wielding "weapons grade ideas" (QC's term)