Xander Balwit
@AlexandraBalwit
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Editor-in-chief at @AsimovPress. Well-fed vegan. Currently reading: The Checklist Manifesto
Joined March 2022
Thrilling to see a little coverage of my future food dinner in the @TheEconomist! People can invoke a future of GLP-1s and meal replacement shakes all they want, but I am pulling for the Food Abundance Agenda.
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The Pantone color of the year is giving “Sydney Sweeney has good jeans”
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A cheeky footnote is a great way to practice non-attachment in writing. Place your little darling at the bottom of the page and see how it feels. Maybe she is needed, and you are witty and oh so smart. Maybe no one would ever know she was gone. 🤷♀️
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I think @StuartJRitchie and @TomChivers (my favorite Bayesian) are making magic. The number of times I’ve chortled my way through the panhandle this year while learning how egregious controls can be… It’s simply amazing stuff. Thanks @WorksInProgMag for supporting this
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This fee for people who don’t have a Real ID is putting all the neurotic Jewish mothers on tilt. My family group chat just blew up.
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Year 3 is when @JacobTref finally cracks and writes for us
Asimov Press has been a wonderful part of my reading experience over the last two years. Prolific and accessible magazine-length pieces. If you’re interested in science, I recommend subscribing!
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It has been such a treat to write and edit @AsimovPress for the past two years. I have learned an inordinate amount about the mechanisms and structures that underlie biology and the craft of long-form writing. There really are no words.
Today marks a major milestone at @AsimovPress: Our two-year anniversary! We formally launched the magazine in December 2023; a tiny team of two operating from inside @AsimovBio. In 2024, we published 49 articles, including a History of the Micropipette, an argument about why
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I think my dad needs to apply to this. He just sent me an essay that begins "The tensile strength of a waffle is underappreciated. What do you think all of those little squares are all about? It is the classic lattice, the lozengal quincunx so admired by the ancient Chinese."
Hiring a writer for the podcast. Fundamentally, I’m looking for a clear thinker who has great taste. $100-225k, full time, open to remote. The reason our podcast has grown is not just the quality of the interviews; it’s the story we tell (through titles, clips, tweets, etc)
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It's me, one of the 427,821 girls in San Francisco (as per the 2020 census). If you can't find more than 7, you don't know what you are looking for.
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As y'all roast your Brassicaceae this Thanksgiving, I hope you raise your glass to another member of their party. The laboratory's premier plant model - Arabidopsis
Arabidopsis thaliana, plant biology's ubiquitous model organism, came from the Harz Mountains of northern Germany. It was discovered in 1542 by Johannes Thal and, over the next 500 years, spread through labs around the world. @AlexandraBalwit tells the story in a new essay.🔻
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We have a few scientific mysteries in the works right now at @AsimovPress, and it's an incredible genre. Think you sequenced something? Think again! Serenpiditous discovery? Unlikely. When a narrative sounds too neat, or perhaps too improbable, it probably is.
Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin is unlikely to have happened in the way he described. It's almost certainly a myth. For decades, scientists and historians have puzzled over inconsistencies in Fleming’s story. The window to Fleming’s lab was rarely (if ever) left
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What is the best book/podcast/article to convince me that space is cool or interesting? It is likely a lack of exposure and not a character flaw that I find it so interminably boring. Or maybe next time someone is going, I could tag along.
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I love the idea of real purpose-built augmentations, which is exactly what @Spencer_Nit nails here. Eyes to see magnetic fields? UV? Infrared? But what happens when these "purposes" stray into areas best left unseen?
New fiction alert: "How to See the Dead." 🚨 A retinal implant designer is asked by a grieving widow to help her see her dead husband again. By @spencer_nit
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Until @NikoMcCarty had to go and ruin the illusion, I was with Leeuwenhoek that microbes moved around with "little paws." IDK, seemed right. Turns out, it is wacky, highly-evolved and hyper-efficient motors. Damn.
New essay: Animalcules and their Motors A recent surge of research is revealing how flagella, the whip-like tails that bacteria use for locomotion, are not all created equal. An E. coli flagellum spins around nearly 20,000 times per minute, whereas the flagellum in a microbe
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"When someone gets an injury in hot girl yoga, they often just want to be seen."
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A fittingly beautiful piece from @ulkar_aghayeva on what makes an experiment beautiful. The shift from the 18th/19th centuries into the 20th is especially compelling. Early scientists marveled at nature's inherent beauty; later, their own experimental design took center stage
What makes an experiment "beautiful"? Scientists rarely put it into words. But a Nobel laureate, Frank Wilczek, did. He said that in a beautiful experiment, "you get out more than you put in." Our latest essay by @ulkar_aghayeva tries to answer this question even more deeply.
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What do tennis balls have in common with the citrus tree in front of my house? You can find out in the latest edition of @mold_time's "The Loop"
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This is such an incredible project "Think, Transactions of the Royal Society + People Magazine + a lot more shitposty"
@a_m_mastroianni @AlexandraBalwit @dreamyweather digital version of THE LOOP, Volume I, Issue 2, can be found here: https://t.co/E7zYVhfEey
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