Re. Can You Help?Skedaddling, pronto.
Just a quick reminder that this offer is closing at the end of today! (This is a great relief for both of us, because now I can stop doing tiresome self-marketing like this and get back to telling science stories.) Ta. - Mike ***** Original email: Hello! This is Mike of Everything Is Amazing. You’ve been reading me for something of a while now - and I hope that somewhere in there, amidst the extreme Britishness and appalling puns (I may have just repeated myself there) and my Golden-Retriever-like mad dashing at interesting things in all directions, I hope that I made you go “wow!” at some point, because that really is my whole game here. My biggest personal wow-moments in writing this newsletter have been:
My working hypothesis is: if a science story fills me (an enthusiastic semi-clueless student of science) with enough awe and wonder to stop me in my tracks and feel like actually, the world around me is way more interesting than I could ever have guessed or hoped, then there’s a chance I can make you feel that way too. And as I said last time, when I recalled staring up at a fog-streaked Humber Bridge, modern science is only starting to make clear just how important a regular dose of awe & wonder is for our mental and physical health. It’s not trivial. It’s a basic human need - especially when both our inner lives and the wider world seem to be overloaded with incredibly scary and stressful things. Rebecca Solnit says of hope that it’s “not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency…. [It’s] a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away.” I believe something similar is true for the thrill of amazement as well. (If you can keep reminding yourself that what you think you know & what you think you don’t know are both massively outweighed by the unimaginable vastness of what you don’t know you don’t know - well, there’s a lot of joy waiting for you, and that joy is useful. It’ll help keep you upright and in one piece, when other forces threaten to tear you apart.) That’s my hope with this newsletter, and a major motivation for writing it. Also, because of recent events, I feel even more of a responsibility to highlight the terrific work of scientists, science communicators and educators of all kinds, so I’ll be working harder from now on to highlight the work of those people - which is why I recently started this new series for paid supporters…
…and why it was so gratifying that my take on this fascinating story of international scientific collaboration took off on social media like it did. As a free reader of this newsletter, you’ll continue to get a lot of these pieces as I publish them - but certainly not all. You’ll miss out on all the paywalled articles, both upcoming and in my archives - and everything else I’ll be cooking up for my paid supporters (including exclusive audio versions of newsletters and live events). You also won’t get access to my non-fiction storytelling course hosted at Substack - again, purely for paid subscribers. With all that in mind - would you be interested in becoming one of the nearly 800 people who are helping me keep this project running - and receive into your Inbox the maximum number of my reminders that this world of ours is absolutely brimming with hidden marvels?
Here’s my deal to make that process as easy as possible. If you were willing to sign up for a paid subscription to Everything Is Amazing in the next few days, I’ll discount it by a third (that’s $40 instead of $60 per year, or $4 a month instead of $6) - and that’s recurring, so if next year you decided to renew to keep getting everything this newsletter has to offer, it’d still be at that discounted rate. You can grab this offer by clicking below - but it’s only running until the end of Monday 7th July: Whatever your decision, thank you for being a reader of my work. I promise I’ll keep giving it my best. Cheers! Mike
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