Contributors—Asterisk

Aella is an independent sexologist. More of her writing can be found at Knowingless. → Half A Million Kinksters Can't Be Wrong, Issue 04

Scott Alexander is a writer and psychiatrist based in Oakland, California. He blogs at astralcodexten.substack.com. → Is Wine Fake?, Issue 01 Through a Glass Darkly, Issue 03

Avital Balwit is Communications Lead at Anthropic, an AI lab. She has worked in grantmaking in AI safety and biosecurity, and was a research scholar at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. She is also an Emergent Ventures winner and was selected for the Rhodes Scholarship. → How We Can Regulate AI, Issue 03

Xander Balwit is a writer and wildland firefighter from Portland, Oregon. Unremittingly interested in what kind of future will befall us, Xander explores the plausible, dismal, and hopeful in her work. → They May as Well Grow on Trees, Issue 01

Beth Barnes leads ARC Evals. She designs ARC’s evaluations of generative AI models and oversees a growing technical team carrying them out. Beth previously worked on alignment at DeepMind and at OpenAI. → Crash Testing GPT-4, Issue 03

Tamay Besiroglu is a Research Scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and AI lab and Associate Director of Epoch. Tamay focuses on the intersection of economics and computing. → The Great Inflection? A Debate About AI and Explosive Growth, Issue 03

Sam Bowman is a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, where he leads a safety research team, and an Associate Professor at NYU, where he leads a lab that works on evaluating and, more recently, aligning language models. → Intelligence Testing, Issue 04

Ozy Brennan is a researcher at the Shrimp Welfare Project and a former researcher at Wild-Animal Suffering Research. They blog at Thing of Things. → The Virtue of Wonder: Martha Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals, Issue 02

Christopher Leslie Brown teaches history at Columbia University. He is the author of Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism, which was awarded the 2007 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. → Making Sense of Moral Change, Issue 01

D. Graham Burnett is a professor of History and History of Science at Princeton University. He is the co-editor, with Justin E.H. Smith, of Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses (Columbia University Press) out this Fall. Together with collaborators in the “Friends of Attention” coalition, Burnett co-authored Twelve Theses on Attention (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022). He is associated with the non-profit, Brooklyn-based Strother School of Radical Attention, which he helped create. dgrahamburnett.net → Fracking Eyeballs, Issue 04

Juan Cambiero is a Superforecaster. He placed first in multiple forecasting tournaments, including the IARPA FOCUS 2.0 COVID Forecasting Tournament, and is a biosciences analyst at Metaculus. He is also a graduate student in epidemiology at Columbia University and can be reached at juancambeiro1015@gmail.com. → What Comes After COVID, Issue 02

Matt Clancy is a research fellow at Open Philanthropy. He writes a living literature review on academic research about innovation at New Things Under the Sun. → The Great Inflection? A Debate About AI and Explosive Growth, Issue 03

Sarah Constantin is the director of corporate development at Nanotronics. She holds a PhD in mathematics from Yale and blogs at Rough Diamonds. → The Transistor Cliff, Issue 03

Jeffrey Ding is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. He writes the ChinAI newsletter, a weekly translation of writings from Chinese thinkers on China's AI landscape. → What We Get Wrong About AI & China, Issue 03

Ranil Dissanayake is a senior fellow in the Sustainable Development Finance and Europe programmes at the Center for Global Development. His work focuses on the future of development cooperation, economic development in poor countries, and bridging the gap between research and policymaking. → Between the Lines: A History of the Most Important Concept in Global Poverty, Issue 04

Dynomight writes about science and dispenses life advice at dynomight.net. → My Primal Scream of Rage: The Big Alcohol Study That Didn't Happen, Issue 02 You're Invited to a Colonoscopy!, Issue 04

Jake Eaton is the managing editor at Asterisk. → Cows vs. Chemists: The Health Debates Over Plant-Based Meat, Issue 02 Mysticism & Empiricism, Issue 04

Karson Elmgren is a Research Analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), where he works on the AI Assessment team. → China’s Silicon Future, Issue 01

Kevin Esvelt is an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Sculpting Evolution Group in studying how ecosystems evolve and advancing biotechnology safely. → How to Prevent the Next Pandemic, Issue 01

Michael D. Gordin is the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University. His books include A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table and Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey. Twitter @GordinMichael → How Long Until Armageddon?, Issue 03

Stephan J. Guyenet, PhD is a former researcher in the fields of obesity and neuroscience and the current director of Red Pen Reviews. His book The Hungry Brain was named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly and called “essential” by The New York Times Book Review. → Read This, Not That: The Hidden Cost of Nutrition Misinformation, Issue 02

Jordan Hampton is a McKenzie Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne and a veterinarian with broad research interests in wildlife management, animal welfare, toxicology, public health, and ethics. → Animal Welfare in the Anthropocene, Issue 02

Mike Hinge is a Senior Economist at ALLFED — a non profit that researches and prepares for severe and neglected food shocks. His work primarily concerns how countries can prepare for and respond to disasters that disrupt over 10% of global food output, and the economic, political and social implications of such disasters. → Feeding the World Without Sunlight, Issue 02

John Iceland is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Demography at Penn State University. → The Devil in the Details: Matthew Desmond's Poverty by America, Issue 04

Fred Kaplan is the “War Stories” columnist for Slate and the author of six books, including The Wizards of Armageddon, The Insurgents (a Pulitzer Prize finalist) and The Bomb. → The Illogic of Nuclear Escalation, Issue 01

Jared Leibowich is a forecaster for Samotsvety and the Swift Centre. He placed 1st out of 7,000 for the In the News 2021 Good Judgment competition and is currently ranked 1st for the In the News 2022 competition. He can be reached at jleibowich@gmail.com → Modeling the End of Monkeypox, Issue 01

Robert Long is a Philosophy Fellow at the Center for AI Safety in San Francisco. He holds a PhD in philosophy from NYU, and blogs at experiencemachines.substack.com. → Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart AIs Are?, Issue 03

Jonathan Mann is a forecaster for Samotsvety, a Good Judgment Superforecaster, and an INFER All-Star. He has worked as a Data Scientist, a Product Manager, and is currently a Cybersecurity Architect. He lives in New York City and can be reached at jonathan.mann@nyu.edu. → AI Isn’t Coming for Tech Jobs—Yet, Issue 03

Amalia Miller is the Georgia S. Bankard Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia. Her current research examines topics related to gender and family economics as well as healthcare technology and data privacy. → Behind Closed Doors, Issue 04

Prabhu L. Pingali is a professor at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and in the division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University. He is a foreign member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the founding director of the Tata-Cornell Institute. → Beyond Staple Grains, Issue 02

Kelsey Piper is a senior writer at Vox’s Future Perfect. She writes about emerging technologies, global development, pandemics, effective altruism, and what it’ll take to make it safely to the 22nd century. → What We Owe The Future, Issue 01 A Field Guide to AI Safety, Issue 03

Georgia Ray is a biodefense researcher and fish enthusiast. She blogs at eukaryotewritesblog.com. → What I Won’t Eat, Issue 02

Matt Reynolds is a senior writer at WIRED magazine, where he writes about food, climate change and biodiversity. His first book, How to Feed the Planet Without Destroying It was published in 2021. → Salt, Sugar, Water, Zinc: How Scientists Learned to Treat the 20th Century’s Biggest Killer of Children, Issue 02

Stuart Ritchie is a senior lecturer in psychiatry at King’s College London. He is the author of a book, Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science, and blogs about metascience at stuartritchie.substack.com. → Rebuilding After the Replication Crisis, Issue 01

Carl Robichaud co-leads Longview Philanthropy’s programme on nuclear weapons and existential risk. For more than a decade, Carl led grantmaking in nuclear security at the Carnegie Corporation of New York. He previously worked with The Century Foundation and the Global Security Institute, where his extensive research spanned arms control, international security policy, and nonproliferation. → The Puzzle of Non-Proliferation, Issue 03

Nicholas Schiefer is a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, where he spends most of his time building evaluations of large language models with the eventual aim of understanding whether they could pose catastrophic risks. → Intelligence Testing, Issue 04

George Stiffman is the author of Broken Cuisine, a forthcoming book exploring how Chinese tofus can be incorporated into western cooking. Previously, he lived in China, working in traditional tofu production and Buddhist restaurant kitchens. → America Doesn’t Know Tofu, Issue 02

Lyman Stone is the Director of Research for the population consulting firm Demographic Intelligence. → Pew Problems, Issue 04

Dietrich Vollrath is a professor and chair of the department of economics at the University of Houston. His work focuses on economic growth. He blogs at growthecon.com. → Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?, Issue 01

Jamie Wahls has been published in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Nature (kinda). He was nominated for the Nebula award, received George RR Martin's "Sense of Wonder" fellowship, and is a graduate of the notorious 2019 Clarion Class, the "killer bees." His ultraminimalist website can be found at jamiewahls.com, and you can follow him on Twitter at @JamieWahls. → Emotional Intelligence Amplification, Issue 03

Witold Więcek is a statistician and a research consultant in global health and development. He is a recipient of an Emergent Ventures grant for his work on COVID, Consulting Director at the Development Innovation Lab at University of Chicago, and an advisor to 1Day Sooner. → From Warp Speed to 100 Days, Issue 04

Robert Yaman previously led operations at the cultivated meat company Mission Barns, and recently started Innovate Animal Ag, a nonprofit that supports the development and adoption of new technologies that improve animal health and welfare. He blogs at robertyaman.com and can be followed on Twitter. → Is Cultivated Meat For Real?, Issue 02