About

A researcher I respect once told me that the only interesting questions in science straddle the border of the known and the unknown. If a question is merely an enclave of uncertainty within the known, it is unlikely to be interesting. If it is too far out in the uncharted frontier, nobody can say anything interesting about it. The great scientists are the ones with an intuition for the interface — a sense of the questions that are both answerable and worth answering.

Reviewer, too is a growing pile of postcards from the scientific border marches. More concretely, it is a newsletter about big questions at the frontiers of science written by Elise Cutts, a PhD-dropout science journalist.

Weekly postcards from the frontier of science

Subscribers get one post a week delivered on Thursdays. There are a few different types of posts that alternate on a regular schedule:

• Paper roundups arrive at the end of each month. I monitor more than 100 journals and every major preprint server using a combination of custom search filters and good ol' human eyes to hand-curate a list of the most noteworthy new papers that come out every month. (Patrons can subscribe to the RSS feeds I've set up to monitor research on key topics like the origin of life and exoplanet astronomy.)
• Q&As with researchers arrive in the middle of every month. I do my best to highlight researchers with big ideas who aren't already well-known or well-established — or whose work is a big deal among scientists but hasn't yet been translated well for a general audience.
• Wildcard posts round out the monthly rotation. These could be anything: essays, discussions of classic papers, profiles of historical scientists, book reviews, breakdowns of major recent papers, commentary on science drama, 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.

What are these "big questions" you talk about?

There's no set list. But these questions run through most of the topics I cover here:

• How do patterns and order emerge in nature?
• What is life, how did it begin, and where is it found in the universe?
• Why are humans the way that we are?
• What lies in the deep past and the far future?

To be a bit more concrete, topics that come up often include astrobiology, planetary science, the origin of life, artificial life, consciousness, cognitive science, language and music in the brain, complexity science, emergence, cosmology, human origins, evolution, and Earth science.

I also occasionally write about science journalism and science more generally.

Long-term goal: journalistic reviews

I started this project in the hope of building a community that could support a whole new type of science communication: journalistic reviews blending format of a traditional academic review paper with journalistic elements. The idea is to create resources that are both highly readable (and enjoyable) by motivated laypeople and 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.

I'm not writing journalistic reviews yet — as a freelancer, I unfortunately can't devote the necessary time to a project like that without getting paid for it. So if you like the idea, consider becoming a paid patron. It really makes a difference!

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?

Reader support is what keeps this project running. As a freelancer, there's only so much time I can devote to projects I'm not paid for. The more people support R2, the better it'll be. That's especially true when it comes to journalistic reviews — 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).

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?

It's a pun on an academic inside joke. Before a research paper is published, it goes through "peer-review," a usually anonymous process in which 1-3 other scientists decide whether or not a paper deserves to be published in Annals of Communications of Transactions in Advances Report Letters or whatever. When scientists get bad results from peer review, the culprit is always "Reviewer 2" (even if they're actually Reviewer 1 or 3).