Hi. It’s Mike from Everything Is Amazing.

Ever since this newsletter began in 2021, I had a very simple plan for this thing: make everyone go “woah!” at sciencey stuff.

My favourite podcast for the last ten years has been WNYC’s Radiolab. It’s about how delightfully surprising the world is, if you look at it through the right scientific, medical, philosophical or even spiritual lens. It’s a show about weird ideas that might blow your mind. (And it’s terrifically well-made.)

But the main reason I love it is the way the presenters refuse to sound like experts.

Well, no - I should clarify. What they’re refusing to sound like is the incorrect popular stereotype of an “expert”: a tedious, droning know-it-all who delivers answers as Commandments that you should never, ever have the brazen cheek to disagree with. (“Oh, how dare you, little person. Don’t you know who I am?”)

I don’t quite know how this idiotic conception of expertise took hold. Maybe as a way to weaponize ignorance for the benefit of anti-factual populism? I’m not really the person to ask.

But when I studied Archaeology at the University of York, I learned that in most cases, that’s not how actual expertise works.

In the sciences, an expert is someone who knows a little more than most people about a thing. It doesn’t mean - and it never means - that the person knows everything about it, or that their ideas shouldn’t be questioned, or they shouldn’t try to make themselves available for any healthy, good-faith counterargument - and above all, it doesn’t mean that they never, ever get anything wrong.

(All those things would be examples of really bad science. That is not how the sciencing is done.)

That omnipotent model of expertise is also a recipe for a total bore. Unassailable certainty is so miserably dull. Where are the raw adventures in learning, discovering, exploring, playing with exciting possibilities? Where’s the journey towards wisdom here?

Radiolab gets the importance of ‘journey-learning’ better than anything I’ve ever heard. The presenters - who adeptly pretend they haven’t just spent the last week researching the living crap out of that week’s topic - guide you along a path of discovery and revelation and into those “woah!” moments that make your lower jaw sag. They’re so very good at doing it.

With Everything Is Amazing, I wanted to channel a bit of that energy - even though now, four years in, I still feel like I’m just getting started.

I also have one big advantage over Radiolab: the depth and breadth of my ignorance! I’m not a celebrated science writer or award-winning journalist. I am merely an enthusiast who is sharing everything he’s learning as he goes, trying to convey that joy of discovery that we revel in as kids and struggle to recapture as adults.

The current season of Everything Is Amazing is ending in a few weeks, where we’ll wrap up our look at our planet’s fascinating, life-filled atmosphere, and all the work of all the intrepid/reckless souls who first discovered what’s really up there…

And then we’ll look forward to what’s coming next, in season 8 and beyond. (Spoilers: I’m going to need a tent. *Gulp*.)

There’s a lot in the world right now to make you want to avoid the news: the horrors in Ukraine and Gaza, the worrying state of democracy and science in the United States (and elsewhere) right now, and so on. It’s definitely not all bad, as I try to show in my newsletter, but there is certainly more than enough badness right now - and it’s so easy to feel cynical or despairing about the current state of the world.

In the face of all that, I now feel like it’s my job to regularly show up in your Inbox with something designed to make you go “wow!” - to help remind you that our world is also filled with boundless, mind-blowing wonders that most of us know nothing about.

(And also to point you towards all the people in the world whose work is trying to carve out a better world for us, to restore a little of your faith in humanity.)

Would you be willing to help me do that - and get a little more of Everything Is Amazing in return?

From now until the end of Monday 1st September, if you click the link below, you’d get one-third (rounded up to 34%) discounted from the price of a monthly or yearly paid subscription, for as long as you wanted to stay signed up to it:

Upgrade with a 34% discount!

As well as helping keep this whole project running, this would also give you access to all upcoming paywalled posts and paid-subscriber-only events, and all the articles in the archives (including two exclusive series on how geology affects modern human behaviour and the scientific investigation of human memory).

(There’s also the Founding Member tier - which from today gives you all that and free lifetime access to my new non-fiction storytelling course, Get Your Story Straight, RRP $149.)

Whatever your decision, thank you for reading me this far. It really means a lot.

- Mike