Developmental Editing

When we  announced that Asterisk was doing an issue about development, we started to get questions. Questions like "What kind of development?" and "Do you mean development economics? Drug development? Developmental biology? Development as in charity fundraising?"

To which we'd answer: Yes. 

We wanted stories about how things grow, change, and evolve. That could mean countries going from poverty to wealth, technologies being invented and refined, or children becoming adults. If it develops, we're interested. (Mostly. We're not touching the fundraising stuff — that's still a bit too personal. But e-mail us if you like what we do.) 

We started with a subject we've covered extensively before: global development. Zacharia Kafuko opens the issue with a passionate plea to Gavi and the global health establishment to let African countries choose vaccines they can afford. Dietrich Vollrath suggests that we're wrong to focus on countries as the basic unit of economic growth: Instead, we should take a leaf from Max Weber's 1921 treatise and look at cities. And Karthik Tadepalli zooms in on the firms in those cities to help us find the missing middle in economic growth interventions. 

Meanwhile, Sarah Eustis-Guthrie and Ben Williamson give us a tour of good intentions and broken incentives in the world of development philanthropy.  On the government side, we spoke to veteran diplomat Andrew Herscowitz about his experience at USAID, the Development Finance Corporation, and, most importantly, leading Power Africa: an anomalously successful presidential initiative that brought together a few dozen squabbling federal and international agencies — and, more importantly, brought power to almost 200 million people. 

Our next set of stories are about technological advances. Constance Li reports from the annual Animal AgTech Innovation Summit in San Francisco, where the talk of the industry is Precision Livestock Farming: a suite of sensors and machine learning algorithms that could alleviate some of the inhumanity of factory farming — if we apply enough pressure. On the other end of the AI industry, Lawrence Chan explains how leading labs habitually fudge the performance of their latest models, and how the discerning reader can cut through the hype. 

In the world of medicine, Greg Justice predicts the future of anti-obesity medications like Ozempic. Georgia Ray wanders through the vast, invisible world of microbiology, from folktales about yeast to Van Leeuwenhoek's first microscope and the modern magic of metagenomics. And Sarah Constantin takes on more than one kind of development in her essay on the future of human reproduction. Will your children be genetically engineered super-babies gestated in artificial wombs? Read on to find out. 

Either way, once you have the kids, you'll still need to educate them. Henrik Karlsson compares two unlikely pedagogical approaches: the Montessori method and the Jesuit college in early Modern Europe. Ignatius of Loyola and Maria Montessori had many important differences, but they shared one thing: an understanding of the importance of shaping the cultures in which children learn. And how are children faring today? Matt Reynolds looks at the evidence that kids across the Western world are less happy than they used to be — and, more concerningly, that this might shape their mood for the rest of their lives. 

One of the great pleasures of editing a magazine is watching a set of common themes emerge as an issue — yes — develops. Talking to Andrew about the challenges of getting power to African businesses informed our conversations with Karthik. Sarah's observations on the unique challenges of studying human reproductive biology resonated with Greg's analysis of the barriers to bringing new GLP-1 drugs to market. And on, and on. We've grown as editors through the process of shepherding this issue to print. We hope you grow through reading it.