NeuWrite Boston 2014: Year in Review

This New Year's marks the end of the first full calendar year that Amanda Gefter and I have been co-directing  NeuWrite Boston. For those of you who don't know, NeuWrite is a workshop for scientists, science writers, and everything in between. I think of NeuWrite as a fun tri-weekly dinner party with some of my most interesting science-inclined friends, where we also happen to do some work (my other favorite thing besides dinner).

Here are some pieces we've workshopped in 2014:

• After workshopping some scripts with us (and doing a ton of other work), Claire O'Connell launched her neuroscience vision online course.
• Sara Watson pitched and published her Al Jazeera column "Living with Data", explaining to people just how their data is being used by others online.
• Alison Hill workshopped a piece "Why There's No Cure for HIV Yet"--and Tim De Chant picked it up for Nova.
• Amanda wrote this Nova piece on the Bicep2 discovery following a NeuWrite discussion with Tim.
• Liz Brown published Starchy Dangers in Human Evolution in Science in the News after workshopping in NeuWrite.
• Christina Agapakis workshopped her ideas for Method Quarterly, a magazine about the scientific research process. She recently launched it!
• Ash Jogalekar workshopped an essay on peer review that will appear in a special issue of the "Accountability in Research" journal.

And this is just a subset of what's passed through our meetings--pieces we've workshopped include a documentary about psychologist and human-computer interaction researcher Cathy Wolf (who has lived with ALS for almost two decades), an essay about the economics of rationality, and a couple of essays about the beauty, art, and craft of chemistry. Our members have also been doing lots of incredible their outside the group. (Amanda's first book, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn--a fascinating physics memoir about nothing and the origin of everything, came out earlier this year! And she managed to keep running the workshops despite flying around and writing related articles.)

Amanda and I feel incredibly privileged to organize a group of such talented and fascinating people! We look forward to seeing what 2015 has in store. We look forward to seeing all the cool things we'll do in the upcoming year!

P.S. For those of you interested in starting your own similar group, I have a forthcoming blog post!