This takes me back! I guess I’ve always enjoyed writing and explaining things I was learning about, but I started writing freelance pieces during my masters degree and PhD, including writing about the Covid response in the UK.
Roughly then, Sam Bowman and I had the idea to start a magazine together for long-form writing on science and economics, which turned into Works in Progress magazine.
For one of our early issues, I reached out to Hannah Ritchie at Our World in Data to ask if she was interested in writing a piece for the magazine (How we fixed the ozone layer), since I’d been a fan for a while, and we had also met briefly the previous year. She replied sayjng she was interested in writing for us and, surprisingly, also asked if I was interested in working with them at OWID, which I didn’t expect at all. I remember having the vague thought before that that it would be a very cool place to work but thought they already had enough great people working there and I hadn’t considered writing as a potential career until that point.
I was still doing my PhD at this point though, so could only work with them part time on the side—until a few years ago, when I graduated and decided to take their offer to work there full time.
Some extra questions from Saloni’s twitter post:
This last one might be covered by one of the bluesky questions, but for completeness:
Re: Bad Data Takes’s question:
This takes me back! I guess I’ve always enjoyed writing and explaining things I was learning about, but I started writing freelance pieces during my masters degree and PhD, including writing about the Covid response in the UK.
Roughly then, Sam Bowman and I had the idea to start a magazine together for long-form writing on science and economics, which turned into Works in Progress magazine.
For one of our early issues, I reached out to Hannah Ritchie at Our World in Data to ask if she was interested in writing a piece for the magazine (How we fixed the ozone layer), since I’d been a fan for a while, and we had also met briefly the previous year. She replied sayjng she was interested in writing for us and, surprisingly, also asked if I was interested in working with them at OWID, which I didn’t expect at all. I remember having the vague thought before that that it would be a very cool place to work but thought they already had enough great people working there and I hadn’t considered writing as a potential career until that point.
I was still doing my PhD at this point though, so could only work with them part time on the side—until a few years ago, when I graduated and decided to take their offer to work there full time.