Newsletter #1: Updates and More
Hello! I have some updates about how this thing will work, following on from my post ‘A vision for the future’. As I said there, my plan is to try to post something every Sunday. Nothing is changing about that, but I am now going to try to post twice every Sunday. The first post will be a newsletter like this and the second one will be a proper piece. The newsletter will contain updates about this Substack and me and general thoughts about the news and other things as well as advertisements for things I’ve written or am doing. The format will be pretty flexible and, again, it’ll no doubt take shape over time.
Also, the newsletters will be open to all for the foreseeable, while the more substantial pieces will now be restricted to free sign-ups, starting from next Sunday. So if you’re reading this and you want to read my proper pieces, sign up. Again, it’s free, but you have to enter your email, selecting the ‘none’ subscription option (though if you want to pay, I ain’t saying don’t). And my caveats from the previous piece still apply: I might not have anything worthwhile to post every week, and I might post the odd thing irregularly. We shall see, but the Sunday post structure is one I’ll try to keep to.
Housekeeping aside, I haven’t got much else to say. I received my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Friday and have had no side effects, apart from a slightly sore arm. If I start dreaming of Bill Gates, though, I’ll keep you updated. I’m not happy about the blood clot trouble with the Astra Zeneca vaccine, of course, but I’d always wanted one of the mRNA vaccines because they’re just so much … cooler. AZ and the rest are all a bit old hat so far as vaccines go. But the mRNA ones are fearsome pieces of technology, really astonishing feats of ingenuity, ones built atop years of pure research.
So next time you wonder why some scientists are spending time and taxpayer money on arcane pursuits, first, don’t be such a philistine, and second, they might just save the world one day. I recommend Jerry Coyne’s essay from last December which does a nice job of explaining how mRNA vaccines work and celebrating the genius of science that went into their development. So, in a rather odd way, I’m glad I didn’t get the AZ: blood clots be damned, I just wanted that awesome mRNA tech inside me (I use the word ‘awesome’ not in its debased sense but in its proper meaning, viz., ‘inspiring awe’).
Now that university is all but over, I have some free time on my hands. My flatmate and I have planned some trips over the next month, to castles and museums and more, so I might write about those. It’ll be nice just to do touristy things.
Finally, I’m co-hosting an online Free Speech Champions event on 6th July with Inaya Folarin Iman. It’s a discussion with the scholar Jonathan Rauch about his new book The Constitution of Knowledge, which delineates the history and philosophy of the open society and proposes defences of it against mass disinformation and cancel culture. See here for more details and to sign up for your FREE tickets.
For now, all the best,
DJS