In pursuit of the magic Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher describe here, I've made a list of projects that I am seeking creative, improvisational partnership on :)
Most of them are daydreamy writing projects, but I'm interested in brainstorming more science and community-building projects as well.
The actual project matters less than the quality of collaborative flow, so if these don't resonate, but my style and spirit do, dm me!
I want to organize a week long Writer's Retreat in Mill Valley.
Mill Valley is a great location for a writer's retreat. The town is phenomenally cute — there are three laptop-friendly coffee shops with immaculate vibes, all on the same block, there are many hikes amongst beautiful redwoods to clear your mind, trivia night on Tuesdays, the foggy mountains create a feeling of spaciousness and imbues a sense of awe. Perfect for imagination. But the town is small enough that you can easily maintain focus.
Mill Valley's cafes and hours:
The Depot 8am-7pm
Peet's Coffee 5:30am-6pm
Equator Coffees 6am-5pm
and this awesome Public Library 10am-8pm
I imagine renting a big AirBnB or a couple little ones and inviting people to hang out in Mill Valley. During the day we can work at the BnB or go to the cafes to write privately, collaborate on edits, go on walking meetings to discuss our blocks, take a break by strolling the cute town, or go on a hike.
The only problems are that the food is a bit expensive, and the cafes don't have very many outlets.
I would want to run a couple events during the retreat, some one-off, some ongoing:
First Night of the Retreat: 2 minute lightening talks by each author in which they describe what they are working on, why they are inspired to write it and what might be blocking them.
There is a weekly Tuesday Night Trivia at a cute event center in town. Being out in the world together as a team could facilitate a sense of community within the writing group. Its also fun to see your collaborators in a very different, less heady context.
Peer editing of essays - self organized
Walking meetings to discuss blocks or ideas - self organized
Challenge the author or brainstorm how to make an essay or an idea better - volunteer based
A morning hike in the woods
I would hope an event like this could catalyze more, an form a long lasting community of writers.
Plasmid production should be only limited by the biophysical rates of the molecules that string and stitch base pairs together. Can we make a piece of capital equipment that quickly and cheaply produces plasmids?
There's a bunch of experiments happening right now in how science institutes are structured. The Arc Institute, Arcadia, Astera, Focused Research Organizations, and Speculative Technologies to name a few. I'd love to interview and learn about the experience of the scientists in these institutes. It would be a privilege to learn from their anecdotal data of this metascience experiment. It is also really scary to be vulnerable and speak honestly about doing a bold and unproven thing, so I would treat these interviews like precious morsels of learning that brave, risk-takers produced in earnest pursuit of improving how we do science.
Rather than Dr Frankenstein being a rejecting, punishing, and absent Father who sees his creation as a Monster, Dr Frankenstein is a loving, adoring, sheltering, overbearing Mother, who sees her creation as a precious baby she needs to protect from the corrupting outside world.
Analogies — OG Frankenstein : Rewritten Frankenstein
The Monster : The Creation
Creation as hubristic, an unnatural act against higher power, the scientist get punished for it : Creation as a soulful pursuit, a natural act, revered, the most human thing.
Monster appearance is described as hideous : Creation’s appearance is described as innocent, pure, beautiful
As the OG Frankenstein creates his monster, he is motivated by trauma, he becomes sick and obsessive, single minded. In this rewriting, scientific pursuit would be portrayed as holistic, healing, integrated into her life. Not done in an isolated-cold-dark-sad-dungeon of a lab, but rather a sunlit, nursery typa-lab, cultivating cherished life rather than running from death.
Major conflict is that the Creation itself will grow away from how the Modern Creator (the Mother) raised it. She will have to realize that she created an independently conscious creature that experiences the world much differently than she does. She can’t control it. Maybe b/c the Creation grew up in isolation, it really wants to help people, but people just want to use it, experiment on it, study it, and the Creation is happy to oblige because it serves a higher purpose? Through exploitative experiments/applications the Creation becomes abused and tattered, and it is tragic that the Creation (which is a symbol or anthropomorphization of earnest, eager, good science) gets abused and misused. (like nuclear physics being used for a bomb rather than clean energy or genetic engineering being used in the way Monsanto used it). Moralize about scientific stewardship.
Truth through hyperbole.
I've listened to this book twice in the past four weeks. It is incredible and I would happily dedicate years of my life to make more of it exist.