About

Reviewer, too is a newsletter about science. It covers the systems, instincts, and incentives that shape what's discovered, what's believed, and what happens when research hits the real world for hundreds of readers who care about science and truth as a forces for good.  

The newsletter is written by me, science journalist Elise Cutts. I write about science for outlets like Quanta, New Scientist, Scientific American, and Science. My background is in geoscience and biology; I earned my B.S. and M.S. from Caltech and MIT before leaving academia to write. I was a 2022 AAAS Mass Media Fellow at Voice of America (r.i.p.), 2026 FRONTIERS Journalist in Residence at the Complexity Science Hub, and 2026 The Open Notebook Early-Career Fellow.

I aim to do four jobs for subscribers:

  • Keep you informed. The Monday edition leads with a short essay on last week's biggest science x society news, followed by a section called Citation Needed — a curated list of links with commentary that puts fresh research, events, and developing stories in context.
  • Spark conversations. There's a lot that pro-science folks have to talk about right now. I aim to provide a space (and occasionally a bit of kindling) for important — and sometimes uncomfortable — conversations about doing, sharing, and acting on science.
  • Report exclusives. The twice-monthly main newsletter features original reporting and exclusive info: think Q&A interviews, magazine-style features, news scoops, reports from conferences or events, and explorations of data.
  • Make things make sense. Through explainers and essays, I give a sense of how individual events and trends fit into big-picture trends and developments. I offer my own opinions and explore and respond to others' perspectives and analyses, too.

The main newsletter posts every-other Thursday and the newsy Monday edition posts weekly. Both go out at 5pm Central European Time.

You can get in touch at hello@reviewertoo.com.

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What does Reviewer, too cover?

You could say Reviewer, too is about science and science communication, but its scope is both narrower and broader than that. Here's a living list of what I cover here, updated regularly: [1]

  • Metascience and innovation. How well is science actually working? How would we know? Where do innovations come from? What has to happen for a discovery to matter? Can there be progress without loss? How quickly is the rate of publication accelerating? Does peer review work? What ever happened to the replication crisis? Are good ideas getting harder to find? Who thrives in science and why? Is interdisciplinary just a buzzword? How do the incentives of science shape research? Are the incentives working?
  • Science under threat. How do anti-science forces work to undermine science and its institutions? Why are so many rich countries slashing science funding? Can the rest of the world really fill the gap if US science collapses? What would proposed policy changes mean for research? Why is US right obsessed with Pluto? What's responsible for the collapse of trust in science? Did trust in science actually collapse? How are scientists fighting back?
  • Truth and the infosphere. Who does fact-based journalism reach? What incentives shape science media? How is the collapse of traditional media and fractured information landscape shaping the flow of information? Is clickbait bad? Is TikTok bad? Is reading dead? What does the research say about what actually works in scicomm? Was there ever such a thing as shared fact-based reality? Does science need to be dumbed down for general audiences? What's the "general audience," anyways?
  • AI in science. Is AI slop going to kill preprint servers? What about journals? The scientific paper itself? How are scientists using AI? What kinds of AI models exist, and how are they being used in research? Are "AI scientist" pipelines any good? What does it mean that AI can make significant discoveries in math? Are professors going to replace their grad students with Claude? How does AI adoption shape scientists' careers — and science as a whole?
  • Bias, attention, and vibes. What shapes belief in spite of evidence? How do beliefs shape policy and action? How do algorithmic feeds, AI, social platforms, and the attention economy shape how we see the world? Was shared reality ever a thing? How do cognitive biases shape the perception and acceptance of science? Why do people trust grifters and inject dubious peptides? Why is conspiracist rhetoric so effective? Is it all really just about vibes?
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Why subscribe?

Subscribers — free and paid — get access to:

  • The Citation Needed link-roundup section of the Monday brief
  • 1 subscriber-exclusive longform article per month
  • Unlocked comments

Paid subscribers keep this project running. I chose to build this newsletter on Ghost because I didn't feel comfortable asking paid subscribers to support Substack.[2] But that means I'm paying a few hundred dollars a year just to keep the site online. Monetary support makes a world of difference. You can sign up for the tip jar tier to automatically tip me 50 cents per post.

Right now, there are no exclusive perks for paid subscribers. But here are a few I'm considering once a few more sign up:

  • Audio editions of each post read by me (top priority)
  • A quarterly opinionated hot take post
  • A quarterly journal club

AI Policy

Nothing you read on this site is written by AI, but I do use AI tools to support my work. You can read my complete AI policy here. As a preview, here are my four golden rules, which apply to my own work and to work by others published here.

Rule 1: Creative work is human work

None of my creative work (writing, images, video, etc.) intended for public consumption or the creative work by others published on my own websites may be conceptualized or drafted using generative AI.

Rule 2: Complement don't replace

I do not use AI tools to replace anything I would realistically a) do myself or b) pay someone else to do in a world in which these tools did not exist. I use AI as a complement, not a replacement.

Rule 3: Time is respect

If I'm not willing to spend my time to communicate with someone else, then I can't expect them to spend their time on whatever I have to say. I therefore do not use AI tools to write emails or otherwise communicate with other people.

Rule 4: The absurdity exception

If a system or task disrespects my humanity, it does not necessarily deserve the respect of a human response. I may use generative AI tools to do "creative work" (writing) for absurd tasks, especially if the entity demanding and/or evaluating the task is itself an AI (e.g. hiring systems).

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Why is this newsletter 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. The mysterious and ever-grumpy "Reviewer 2" is somehow always to blame for negative peer review comments (even if the actual culprit is Reviewer 1 or 3). The name is also a reference to the R2 or R-squared value that reports how well models predict data.

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[1]: Shout-out to the extensive About page of Casey Newton's newsletter Platformer for inspiring the format of my about section.

[2]: I'm on Substack at @elisecutts because that is where other writers hang out and I want to interact with them and their work — and also plug this newsletter. But I didn't want to ask paid subscribers to give Substack a cut, given Substack's choice to platform — and promote and profit from — some truly abhorrent content including neo-nazi newsletters. This was a hard choice, and I do often worry that I'm hurting the newsletter's growth potential by refusing to host it on Substack. Time will tell.