The Works in Progress Newsletter

The Works in Progress Newsletter

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December 2025

Ten favorites from 2025
Some of the Works in Progress essays that I enjoyed the most this year.
 • Sam Bowman
The first cancer vaccine
Watch now | Hepatitis B is a tiny virus that causes hundreds of thousands of deaths from liver disease and cancer each year. The vaccine against it…
 • Saloni Dattani, Jacob Trefethen, and Works in Progress
2:58:46
Classical statues were not painted horribly
Did the Greeks and Romans have different tastes, paint badly, or have the reconstructors of classical statues been trolling us?
 • Works in Progress and Ralph Stefan Weir
English has become easier to read
It's not because of shorter sentences.
 • Henry Oliver and Works in Progress
Why is South Korean fertility so low?
Every hundred South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren between them. The rest of the world can learn from Korea’s catastrophe to avoid…
 • Phoebe Arslanagić-Little and Works in Progress
Give Works in Progress as a gift
Order by Monday 15 December for delivery before Christmas in the US and UK
 • Works in Progress
The survival of Swiss watches
Quartz helped Japan’s watchmakers nearly drive Switzerland’s watch industry out of business. But the Swiss fought back.
 • Works in Progress and Aled Maclean-Jones
The holy grail of capitalism
A new measure may be the holy grail of economic regulation.
 • Brian Albrecht and Works in Progress
Nature's drug database
Millions of years of evolution have given us genomes that are like giant datasets for drug development. Finally, we are learning how to use them.
 • Works in Progress

November 2025

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