There is no good reason for mosquitoes to exist in wealthy countries today. New technologies can get rid of the mosquito species that cause diseases like dengue, yellow fever, and malaria; and others can prevent them from carrying those diseases. worksinprogress.co/issue/mos… So why do mosquitoes still exist? In a new article for Works in Progress, Maya Rosen explains how state incapacity and risk aversion led to over a decade of delays and billions of unnecessary bites in the United States. Oxitec, for example, engineered an Aedes aegypti mosquito in such a way that its female offspring would die before adulthood. Through sustained releases, they showed they could reduce local mosquito populations by 80% or more, in field trials. They sought approval from the USDA in 2010, which then passed it to the FDA, which passed it to the EPA. In 2020, the EPA allowed them to conduct limited field trials in the Florida Keys. Two years ago, their experimental permit expired, and they still need another review before it can be used routinely. Their proposed field trial in California was withdrawn after public opposition. Another company, MosquitoMate, developed a technique involving Wolbachia, which also suppresses local mosquitoes. They then spent over fifteen years working through the system before finally receiving commercial registration nationwide in 2024. It seems that, sometimes, the barrier to getting rid of diseases isn’t technology at all. It’s policy and political will. New products shouldn’t get stuck in regulatory review for so long, especially if the delays are about basic questions like which agency has oversight over the product, rather than testing for safety. Though some of those uncertainties were being addressed, the broader changes haven’t materialized. After Biden’s 2022 executive order, the agencies planned to update how their coordinated framework was implemented. But Trump rescinded the order last year. Meanwhile, the EPA unit that reviews new mosquito control products is still a small office backlogged in reviewing a wide range of products. Mosquitoes are a policy choice. We can get rid of them. Will we choose to? worksinprogress.co/issue/mos…

Young and old, left and right, rich and poor: survey after survey shows that most people prefer traditional buildings to modern ones. @robertkwolek on the striking gap between public taste and what actually gets built: worksinprogress.co/issue/do-…

In Washington DC? Join me, @pietergaricano, @Simon__Grimm and some special guests for the launch party for the next issue of Works in Progress this September 30th! Sign up below, and looking forward to seeing you there. luma.com/tyjgicxs

RT @sapinker: Works in Progress may be the most interesting magazine publishing today. This article on the evolution of horses nicely illus…

Was reading this article from @WorksInProgMag titled "Virtual Worlds".(worksinprogress.co/issue/vir…) and learned about the first MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) game called "Habitat". Was giving it a try just now and at the time I would've loved playing it. Give this a try! habitat.themade.org/

The first graphical MMO game wasn't Runescape, Everquest, or Ultima Online. It came out in the 1980s for the Commodore 64! Habitat, which first went online in 1986, allowed hundreds of players to visit thousands of different locations at once. They invented lots of the things we associate today with multiplayer games: the term ‘avatar’, in-game purchases (!), collective exploit-hunting, and in-game communities that pursued their own objectives wholly unrelated from the design of the game. All this on a platform that had just 64 kilobytes of memory and 100 kilobytes of disk space, using interconnections that could only transmit 30 characters per second. @vpostrel tells the story of the world’s first MMO in the new issue of Works in Progress. worksinprogress.co/issue/vir…

A new guest essay by WIP's @RuxandraTeslo in @nytopinion. 👇 nytimes.com/2026/09/04/opini…

Throwing rubbish in a landfill is (usually) better for the environment than recycling it. With few exceptions, recycling ends up emitting more CO2 and costing more money, while landfills are cheap and secure. - Recycling mid-tier plastics (like plastic bottles or butter tubs) costs thousands of dollars per ton of CO2 saved. It's cheaper to do direct air CO2 capture than that! And there is no shortage of plastic, nor any problem with sequestering it in the ground once we're done with it. - Modern landfills are extraordinarily secure and are *much* more than just big piles of trash. They capture 75%–95% of methane gas. Groundwater contamination is doesn't really happen with landfills built since 1990. A study of 31 landfills built since 1988 in NY found no adverse effect at all on local groundwater quality. - The crusade against single-use plastics has driven us to products that use far more materials and energy and would need to be used an absurd number of times to actually be an improvement. A steel straw needs to be used 150 times to be worth using. A ceramic mug needs to be used 1,000 times to beat a polystyrene cup. A cotton bag needs to be reused 173 times to beat single-use. - Some things ARE worth recycling. Recycling metal saves a huge amount of energy and material – recycling aluminium saves 95% of the energy spent on making fresh stuff. So we do a lot of it already: about 30% of steel worldwide is recycled. Modern, well-run landfills cause minimal environmental damage. We have plenty of space for them – less than 0.01% of the US is used for landfill and only about 0.02% of Germany. We can even build on top of old landfills, so the land area is not spent permanently. New in @WorksInProgMag, @robertwiblin and @chalmermagne on why it's usually best to just bury your trash. worksinprogress.co/issue/jus…

Can Europe catch up in AI? Join Simon Grimm, editor at Works in Progress, in Brussels on Monday to find out.

People are right to want less police intrusion in their lives. The way to get there is more precision, not less. Ned Donovan makes the cop's case for Flock. worksinprogress.co/issue/a-c…

Built to Grow: A Handbook for High-Performance Sales Teams by Stephanie Friedman is a practical guide to turning early sales into a repeatable revenue engine, and building a sales organization that can take a company from its first customers to scale.

Almost the entire world was colonized by European powers in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Siam (now Thailand) was one of the only countries that resisted successfully. How the small kingdom used clever diplomacy to outmaneuver some of history’s most fearsome powers and stop imperial conquest in its tracks. Read it now on WIP or in Issue 25 of the print edition: worksinprogress.co/issue/how…

Watch @RuxandraTeslo on @MTSlive 👇

Almost the entire world was colonised by European powers in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Siam (now Thailand) was one of the only countries that resisted successfully. It did so in one of history’s biggest PR victories and state capacity-building efforts: the ‘siwilai’ modernisation campaign – its equivalent of the Meiji Restoration – in which the trappings of European civilization were adopted to turn the imperial ‘civilizing mission’ on its head: - Siam hired Belgian lawyers to redesign its laws and royal court along European lines, which worked to stop European powers from claiming that their subjects should be exempt from Siamese laws, a common tactic for creating pretexts for invasion. - They brought in German military advisors and replaced traditional noble levies with a standing army and a professional officer corps designed on Prussian lines. - The state adopted the Gregorian calendar, 24-hour days, censuses, fixed borders, railways, and discouraged betel-nut chewing and promoted wearing Western dress. - Siam’s king Mongkut spoke English and Latin, was a student of Western science and technology, and maintained a library containing everything from scientific works to Sir Walter Scott novels. - The royal heirs were sent to Eton and European military colleges. The king negotiated with British diplomats in English over wine and cigars, in a library filled with scientific texts and Walter Scott novels. By 1907, Le Figaro was comparing Siam with post-Meiji Japan and telling its readers that Siam’s king had the dignity of a European king. The story has been made famous in The King and I, but how it actually happened is not well understood in the West. From the new issue of Works in Progress, how Siam Europeanised itself in just a few decades, divided the coalitions that drove imperialism in Europe, and managed to stand against some of history’s most fearsome imperial powers and win. worksinprogress.co/issue/how…

Behind the scenes of the August cover of @WorksInProgMag , from brilliant artist Lola Dupre

✏️Childcare traumatises children and literally 'shrivels' part of their brain ✏️Childcare reduces knife crime and teen pregnancy later on for kids who attend ✏️Funding for childcare gives a 7x return on investment, comparable to the gains from providing clean water in developing countries ..... are all examples of false claims on the effects of childcare made by mainstream commentators, politicians, and organisations. Childcare has existed long enough, and been studied enough, that if there were large and obvious effects on children, either positive or negative, we would know by now. Parents have enough to worry about already without nonsense about the brain-shriveling effects of their choice of nursery. With birth rates falling further below replacement each year we should be making it easier, not more stressful, to have kids. Please can we all just calm down and be normal about childcare? New article by me and @PMArslanagic - read now in @WorksInProgMag: worksinprogress.co/issue/day…

"The horse began as a terrier-sized, multi-toed forest dweller and, over 55 million years of evolution and a few thousand years of human intervention, became everything from the compact Icelandic pony to the streamlined racehorse. "For most of that history, natural selection shaped horses slowly. Only recently has human ambition taken over, breeding animals for speed, endurance, and docility. "The result is extraordinary diversity in form and performance, but also a dramatic narrowing of genetic diversity." The paradox of thoroughbred, now on WIP: worksinprogress.co/issue/the…

From the @TEDTalks stage in Vancouver: @salonium on why every disease is a policy failure.

If you want to learn why the EU's new rules on recycling are net-negative, read Works in Progress! In our print edition, we have a beautiful piece on why recycling is overrated. Land fills work great, and single-use plastics use many fewer resources than multi-use packaging.