FINE, I'll write again

A mini life update

In spite of having approximately 44 drafts in various states of completeness in my queue, I haven’t been able to make myself finish writing anything that feels coherent enough to publish since I killed my dog (if you’ve been following along, that happened nearly 9 months ago! Time flies! I’m still not okay!) I have felt adrift intellectually and emotionally ever since. Thank goodness I told y'all to expect an insane degree of inconsistency when I launched this thing. Natalie Cargill recently told me to get my act together so to get out of my legendary rut I’m just going to yeet some words into a post and hit publish and then please for the love of God someone yell at me if I don’t publish anything for eight months again. I need accountability.

Here’s a few things!

1. Life has been very dense. I now live in two cities (NYC and SF, because my response to the endless debate about which is superior is simply “por que no los dos?”). If you live in either and think you have a good enough reason to, hit me up for a coffee. I’ve been on two life-changing retreats (Groundbreakers of the Joe Hudson cinematic universe, and ISTA of the possibly-a-cult cinematic universe). I’ve started a new job (in which we’ve launched 4 companies in the past 3 months, NBD), been on a lot of wild travel adventures (including my first trip to Berghain and a trek through the Costa Rican jungle), and learned how to juggle (literally, albeit quite poorly).

2. I’m still working on climate, but also on a lot of other science-y things, at Convergent Research.

   1. On the climate-ish front, I just helped launch Echo Labs. You should read their post about what they’re doing because they have smarter things to say about it than me, but my tl;dr is: the entire natural world has been subsidizing human civilization for millennia and we've been managing it with ~vibes~, so Echo is building the data infrastructure to make it measurable and legible. This is exciting for many reasons about which I’ll wax philosophical in a future post. Promise!

   2. On the health-ish front, I just helped launch Meridial, which is doing synapse-resolution mapping of functional neural circuitry in living brains (aka in vivo connectomics); more on that soon. I’ve also joined the board of EvE Bio, who are mapping the full drug-target landscape (aka, the pharmome) because drug side effects are mostly a data problem we've been ignoring. They recently announced a partnership with the Open AI Foundation, who are betting that Alzheimer's drug design has a similar data problem and tapped EvE to build the open datasets to prove it and make it model-ready.

   3. The aforementioned “other science-y things” include biosecurity, longevity, neuroscience, environmental toxins/microplastics, and more, so stay tuned for more nerdy Contents on each of these topics. AND, if you have a compelling/weird technical angle on any of these areas, reach out! I would like to find things that are interesting in these areas (and then possibly find money to make them happen, because part of my job is to make science funding go brrrrr.)

3. I’m hiring people. So my life can be less chaos, I need a person in DC and a person in the UK to help spearhead some very important work on the future of science in these respective places. If you are (or you know anyone who is) excellent for one of these roles, apply directly / DM me on X dot com / send a carrier pigeon. If you’re well-suited to the role you’ll probably know which of these approaches is likely to be the most successful in getting my attention.

OK thanks, be safe, make good choices, and please yell at me aggressively if I don’t write again for too long.

image created with midjourney, words written by me :)