Works in Progress issue 16 is out now! - Wiping out malaria with gene drives 🦟🧬 - How we learned to grow diamonds 💎 - The bitter history of inflation measurement 💹 - How pour-over coffee got good ☕️ - What the Vesuvius Challenge might teach us 📜 And more!

You've heard of lab grown meat, but how about lab grown diamonds? They're now purer, cheaper, more ethical, and even more beautiful than natural diamonds. We have a new piece on how they're grown in the latest Works in Progress: worksinprogress.co/issue/lab-grow…

The long-awaited sequel to my earlier piece on espresso, on the promise and perils of pour-over coffee. worksinprogress.co/issue/how-pour…

99% of ancient texts are lost, & the few we have shape our understanding of history. Each new discovery, like the scrolls at Villa of the Papyri, could dramatically alter that understanding. Great dispatch on efforts to read the scrolls Works in Progress: worksinprogress.co/issue/doom-scr…

The Works in Progress links post is one of the best links posts on the internet. Oh, and Issue 16 is out! worksinprogress.news/p/issue-16-i-d…

Works in Progress's roundup of some interesting links you might have missed lately is live now too. worksinprogress.news/p/issue-16-i-d…

Pieces like this are why Works in Progress are one of the best to have ever done it

Realization at the end of this piece: Our descendants will use diamond as a semiconductor, and we're using sand like a bunch of Neanderthals. worksinprogress.co/issue/lab-grow…

The latest issue of the world’s best digital magazine is out! (Check out the article on the science and significance of rediscovering lost classical papyri.)

The earliest surviving piece of the New Testament is a fragment from the Gospel of John known as P52. This fragment is about the size of a credit card. The earliest estimates for its origin date it to around 125 AD.

How pour-over coffee got good: worksinprogress.co/issue/how-pour…

Did you know that lab-made and lab-grown diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and about three times cheaper than mined diamonds? worksinprogress.co/issue/lab-grow…

I'm curious what people think of an addition I made to the "Precision" digression in my MAINTENANCE book. It's an expansion of my point that "Tinier always means faster." Four new paragraphs, two images, at the very end of this section: books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenan…

This is one of the wildest things I have EVER learned: Crispr and Cas9 allow us to genetically edit something – say a mosquito – with a gene they will pass on, but ONLY for two, or three, or four generations. A daisy chain edit. Science fiction. worksinprogress.co/issue/the-ultr…

It took nearly 100 years from the invention of the first inflation measure in 1764 and the creation of an official index – for political propaganda purposes. Some indices still have propaganda use today! worksinprogress.co/issue/where-in…