About

What would you get if you crossed science journalism with an academic review paper? Something like this. Reviewer, too is an online publication about complexity science, astrobiology, and origins of life research, written by Elise Cutts, a PhD-dropout science journalist.

My regular newsletter helps you both stay on top of and dig deep into astrobiology, complexity, and origins. Subscribers receive my monthly paper roundup, a 100% human-curated list of important, fun, rage-inducing, or otherwise noteworthy papers that I assemble for you, so you can . No AI-hallucinated papers, guaranteed. Between roundups, you'll also get wildcard posts. These could be a anything: discussions of classic papers, short profiles of or Q&As with leading or emerging scientists, book reviews, breakdowns of major recent papers, commentary on science drama, random essays, recommendations for science podcasts, books, movies or other media, paper roasts, link collections, or, around Valentine's day, attempts at research collaboration matchmaking. It's all on the table.

In the background, I work on the real meat of R2: my journalistic reviews, which synthesize research on a major open question at the frontiers of complexity science, astrobiology, and origins of life research. These reviews blend the format of a traditional academic review paper with journalistic elements. While they're meant to be readable (and enjoyable) by highly-motivated laypeople, my reviews are thoroughly-cited works of academic writing intended to be useful resources for researchers — particularly early-career scientists and interdisciplinary interlopers, but also for senior scientists who might benefit from an outsider's fresh perspective.

Journalistic reviews will be posted both here and on a preprint server, for those of you aren't quite ready to cite a blog post.

Who's behind this?

It's me, hi. I'm Elise, a former bacterial slime enthusiast geobiologist who dropped out of a PhD program at MIT to move to Austria and become a freelance science journalist. Somehow that all worked out fine. These days, I write about science — mostly planetary science, physics, and other fields physicists like to invade — for magazines like Quanta, Scientific American, Science, and Science News. My interest in complexity science, astrobiology, and origins arose through an unlikely series of events that started with a Star Trek parody musical and ended with me joining an origins of life journal club at Caltech as an undergrad in 2015. I've been fascinated by the question of how disorganized, simple parts assemble into organized, complex wholes ever since. Besides science, I like language and birds.

You can get in touch with me via email (elise@reviewertoo.com) or on Bluesky.

Why should I support your work?

I'm trying to do something different here — something between journalism and academic writing, and therefore something neither journalism nor academia really knows how to pay for (there's a bit of an incentives pickle when it comes to science writing that's neither superficial pop sci nor bland academic cardboard). Reader support is what keeps this project running.

You can best support my work by becoming a patron for the price of one cappuccino per month after taxes and fees (€8). For now, patrons don't get any special benefits, but I will add perks as more subscribers join — if you're among the first, you'll have a say in what those perks will be.

You can also help out by leaving a one-time tip, following me on Bluesky, posting comments on this site, or simply spreading the word.

Why is this called Reviewer, too?

There's this stale meme in academia about "Reviewer 2" always trash-talking your papers in peer-review, the anonymous process by which 1-3 other scientists decide whether or not your paper deserves to be published in Annals of Communications of Transactions in Advances Report Letters or whatever. It's that. But it's also a nod to my journalistic reviews: while I'm not in academia anymore, I can still be a reviewer, too.