Rachel Edwards

Applications for Invisible College, our weeklong seminar in Cambridge, close next week. If you are 18-22 years old, bright, ambitious, and interested in ideas: apply! Our past students have really wowed us: two of last year’s attendees are currently employed within our network, several have won Emergent Ventures grants, and one led his company to a $180 million Series A raise. The aim is to give students a serious introduction to important ideas, and to put them in touch with other unusually thoughtful and ambitious people their age. Over the course of the week, attendees will take part in lectures, lightning talks, and group work on some of the topics that matter most to us from spatial economics and the Industrial Revolution to scientific fraud.

Coming soon. worksinprogress.co/print/

@RuxandraTeslo @WorksInProgMag @stripe Thrilled to be working with you! 🥰

Thrilled to announce I'm joining @WorksInProgMag and @stripe to continue my research and writing on clinical trials & biotech innovation, with many more articles to come. (If you haven't already, subscribe to the magazine. It's great in terms of content and very beautiful.) My work is driven by a core conviction: in the years and decades ahead, we will be far more constrained by the quality of our culture and institutions than by technology itself. In biology, a remarkable convergence is underway. AI, alongside a wave of other emerging tools, is fundamentally expanding what science can do. But beneath this sizzling potential, something is going wrong in Western biotechnology. China is pulling ahead and companies are increasingly moving clinical trials there, drawn by faster clinical trial timelines and a more dynamic ecosystem. Promising therapies sit in limbo for years. Despite the science being here, personalized cancer therapies are not viable to anyone but a few who can afford to navigate the labyrinthine regulatory apparatus. And pharmaceutical R&D productivity has remained stubbornly flat in the last 10 years, after decades of decline. And I can't imagine a better home for my research and writing on what can be done to accelerate biomedical progress than Works in Progress. This is a magazine that has published some of the most important writing on why the physical world has stopped working, including "The Housing Theory of Everything," which became one of those rare pieces that actually changed how people think about a problem. But this is not just about my desire to study biotech innovation. Biotech is not an anomaly. The same pattern: technology outrunning the institutions meant to govern it, is playing out across society. And now AI is compressing the timeline, accelerating pressures that were already straining the system. When people ask what I worry about when it comes to AI, I tell them it’s not the usual things. I'm not losing sleep as much over AI taking my job. I am more worried that we will lose our appetite for depth and that long-form thought, serious reading, sustained attention, the very things that make culture worth having, will erode faster than we notice. That our collective intelligence will hollow out, gradually. And the very problems we have now will only accelerate. @WorksInProgMag is a resistance movement against that, condensed in the form of magazine. It stands for long-form, in-depth writing. It stands for beauty. It is fundamentally anti-slop. In that sense, it's a natural fit with @stripe. A payments company publishing a magazine might seem like an odd pairing. That is, until you understand what kind of payments company @stripe actually is. It has always been driven by a genuine passion for craft and for getting small things exactly right. I am really proud to be part of something that embodies my own values in such a deep way, especially at a turning point in history.

Articles we would like to commission at Works in Progress. Could you write one? worksinprogress.news/p/more-article…

@AndyMasley 👋

If you're in London and wanna say hi between the 25th and 29th please let me know

If you've spent this morning agonising over the incentive mechanisms affecting the performance of local government, this is the podcast for you!

Local government allows more building because it makes it work for locals. In the UK, it has been nearly completely broken, and elections today will often be decided on national issues. In the US, cracks are showing, with property tax revolts like those that slowed the Californian growth machine. Housing, power plants, and data centres get blocked by neighbors who don't share in the upside. When they do share in it, as Loudoun County does with data centres, or as French communes did during the nuclear build-out, local residents become powerful forces in favour of development. I got a lot of my views on this from @judgeglock, so I invited him on the Works in Progress podcast to discuss why local government is the "missing layer" for cheaper housing, more energy, and better infrastructure. We discuss: - Why a northern Virginia county loves data centres - How 1970s school funding reforms made local governments stop wanting nuclear power plants - Why Main Streets died, and whether Business Improvement Districts can bring them back - How American cities cleaned up their water with no help from Washington - How local government built the Golden Gate Bridge in four years - Whether Thatcher was right to gut British local government Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/46OhzD… Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/wha… YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=UvaHkt…

@bswud Appropriate for today!

@bswud Good day for it!

do these people want gifted designers locked in sweatshops making Mao suits? should beautiful clothes be made for display, never to be worn? the Met Gala is functionally a privately funded art show, and paying for extravagant artistry is one of the most virtuous uses of wealth!

Is there a company that does cheap copies of public domain furniture designs? And if not, why? Who wouldn’t want a Frankl Skyscraper desk (1925).

Here's the link to apply: worksinprogress.co/invisiblecolle…

Applications for Invisible College, our weeklong seminar in Cambridge, close next week. If you are 18-22 years old, bright, ambitious, and interested in ideas: apply! Our past students have really wowed us: two of last year’s attendees are currently employed within our network, several have won Emergent Ventures grants, and one led his company to a $180 million Series A raise. The aim is to give students a serious introduction to important ideas, and to put them in touch with other unusually thoughtful and ambitious people their age. Over the course of the week, attendees will take part in lectures, lightning talks, and group work on some of the topics that matter most to us from spatial economics and the Industrial Revolution to scientific fraud.

@NathanpmYoung continuing my generational streak of always voting for the winning outcome

You are in a room with one other person. They are behind frosted glass. You both have the standard red and blue buttons applying only to the two of you. They seem awake and alert. You are not permitted to communicate. What do you press?

you’re on Very thick ice with me . i love you

@KapilPudin89917 @SCP_Hughes True!

@underthenettle @SCP_Hughes

Most of the world's great traditions of ornamental masonry architecture faded away in the twentieth century. But one remained: the Hindu temple. The classical style of Hindu temples never died out, and in recent decades has grown steadily more vibrant and powerful. Much of the best traditional architecture in the world today is in India, or in places around the world where Hindu communities have settled. Temples still make little use of structural steel or even arcuation, relying instead on trabeated masonry like the ancient Egyptians and Greeks. Because stone does not corrode, these buildings will last for many thousands of years with minimal maintenance, far longer than the fabric of the modern cities that surround them. With the help of temple staff around the world, my friend Tilak Parekh has put together a wonderful review of modern Hindu temple architecture, looking at the ingenuity and sacrifice which created these great buildings. worksinprogress.co/issue/modern-h…

Most houses built in Britain, America, Germany, France, and around much of the world, are built in a vaguely traditional-vernacular style. But nearly all public buildings have been built in a modernist style for almost 100 years. This is as true of churches as it is of secular buildings. Hindu India, and the Hindu Indian diaspora around the world, provides a striking contrast to this development. As time has gone on, Hindu religious architecture has gotten more ornate and elaborate. As such, it forms a 'living tradition', stretching back thousands of years. I remember how impressed I was visiting Neasden Temple in my schooldays. And there are dozens of these around the world at even greater scale! Check out @TilakParekh's article in the latest issue of Works in Progress.

@bswud They look so good 🥺

Oliver VII 👑 Antal Szerb Another banger from everyone's favourite depressed Hungarian writer. Oliver II, king of a small impoverished European nation, carefully orchestrates a coup against himself, and flees to Venice. While there, he falls in with a group of conmen, who propose a daring scam: for their new friend to impersonate the exiled king. Hilarity ensues.

The Social Contract 🤝🏻 Jean-Jacques Rousseau Credit where it's due etc. But I really can't see past Rousseau abandoning his five babies to die & then writing a book about how to raise children. Smug & naive disengagement from reality which shows up also in his political philosophy. His ideal state is like a delicate little orchid that could potentially survive for a few weeks under perfect conditions. x.com/i/status/20411…

2026 book thread 📚