Edited Collections
As the U.S. editor for the global innovation site How We Get To Next, I wrote and commissioned a number of stories around these monthly themes:
- —Brett Scott tackles reversing the lies of the shared economy.
- —Muira McCammon, a war crimes researcher, talks about the ways she and others in her field cope with the trauma they inevitably need to confront.
- —Simon Parkin, on the ideal workweek, according to science.
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How We Learn
December 2016
- —My introduction and reading list.
- —Christine Ro on the current promise of education in U.S. prisons.
- —Duncan Jefferies checks into the science behind brain hacks for supersonic learning.
- —Matt Locke talks to MIT’s John Van Reenen about how we define innovators by what they make, but rarely look at what made them.
- —Duncan Geere busts the “neuromyths” about how we learn.
- —Graeme Anderson charts who doesn’t go to college around the world, and why.
- —Simon Parkin on why the physicality of your classroom is making you fail.
- —Mel Plant finds that the powerhouse generation of millennials in Jordan wants educational reform more than anything else.
- —Steven Johnson on why designing a simple board game with his son rivals anything the average nine-year-old is learning in school.
- —Rose Luckin and Wayne Holmes on the classroom of 2027, and the AI teaching assistants that will change everything.
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Sartorial
September 2016
- —My introductory reading list of the must-read fashion stories around the web and on the shelves of your local library.
- —Daniel Locke’s comic about the fantastic fabrics of our future.
- —Duncan Geere on why the white lab coat changed medical history.
- —Sarah Williams in a retrospective about the acceleration of fast fashion.
- —Emily Reynolds on how to dress for ultimate privacy.
- —Ian Steadman with the story of fabrics lost to history and how we can recover them.
- —Simon Parkin’s look at how fashion trends are really forecast today.
- —Leigh Alexander explores the “Instagram Eyebrow” and other beauty performances for our digital lives.
- —Jean Friedman-Rudovsky on the incredible style of the Bolivian cholitas, which went from stigma to runway phenomenon.
- —Rebecca Moss’s exposé on mass faintings in garment factories and the current state of clothing chemical regulation.
- —Shantrelle P. Lewis talks urban dandyism and Africa’s sartorial roots.
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Vital Signs
June 2016
- —My introduction to Vital Signs, a quick worldwide health checkup looking at decreasing mortality rates — except in the U.S. last year.
- —A reading list with recommendations for what to read and watch on the subject of global health.
- —Duncan Jefferies on Silicon Valley’s radical life-extension therapies and learning to live without death.
- —Duncan Geere’s look at the nearly unstoppable success story of global life expectancy and the shrinking difference between how long women and men live.
- —Greg Noone’s thoughtful investigation of why mental health care is practically nonexistent in developing countries.
- —Duncan Geere on how fixing global health means first fixing the world’s number one killer: air pollution.
- —My story about the evolved street wisdom of drug users, and how overcoming our moralism can stop overdose.
- —Leigh Alexander’s personal narrative about the long string of fad diets in the U.S. that have had Americans eating wrong for years.
- —Darren Garrett and Ian Steadman explain gluten and why everyone seems to hate it with GIFs.
- —Corin Faife takes a trip into the world of psychedelics and their potential as a long-lasting cure for major depression.
- —Natalie Kane shares her long interest in odd babytech — specifically devices that quantify pregnancy and newborns.
- —Delia Grace, an epidemiologist in Nairobi, outlines how to stop the next Zika virus by taking a hard look at the health of global livestock.
- —Ian Steadman explains how artificial intelligence could revolutionize medical research and treatment, but at a cost to our privacy.
- —Mimi Onuoha looks at how we die based on where we live.
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Made of Money
March 2016
- —My introduction essay asked how money and nationhood will intersect in the decades to come, prompting the assertion that “one pretty good indicator of the place we call home is the money we spend.”
- —A reading list with recommendations for what to read and watch on the subject of global health.
- —It is coming, so roll up for the cashless panopticon by Ian Steadman.
- —Dave Birch on who will invent the money of tomorrow.
- —Brett Scott says we must acknowledge that our ideas about the past and future of money are totally wrong.
- —Fanny Potkin thinks that for unbanked populations the future of banking is pocket-size.
- —After his son ran the numbers for a budget and built his own custom computer, Steven Johnson found himself asking: Why aren’t we teaching math for the real world?
- —We simplified these basic economic concepts into infoGIFs explaining where money comes from and what it’s worth.
- —Duncan Geere thinks the concept of GDP sucks.
- —Diane Coyle agrees it is time that we radically rethink it.
- —Duncan Geere investigates what we can learn about happiness from economics.
- —Every new way to pay has its problems — and money’s design matters more than you think, writes Ian Steadman.
- —Kendra Pierre-Louis found that there’s a global war against paper currency and the U.S. won’t join — all because it makes too much money printing and selling paper notes to other countries.
- —There’s counterfeiting, and then there’s an entire underground banking system that moves loads of foreign currency into the world’s most authoritarian state. Foreign correspondent Oliver Hotham on how to smuggle money into North Korea with little more than a cellphone.
- —Julian Sayarer got ahold of the world’s leading expert on setting up currency in failed states and found that much of the process actually involves taxation, neutral banknote design, and a plan for changing out the old for the new.
- —When Ian Steadman began researching money fraud he stumbled upon a real historical gem: Isaac Newton was the world’s original counterfeiter cop.
- —Read Dummies author and finance professor Annie Logue’s debt primer.
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*only selected pieces from the series are displayed due to archival issues