Hey readers,

I’m enjoying a pandemic milestone this weekend. Last night I hopped on my first international flight since Covid started.

As you’re reading this, I've probably passed out from jet lag at a hotel in London, where I’ll be until Monday for EA Global, the annual gathering of the effective altruism community.

I’m now at an age and level of mature boringness where I have a favorite conference to attend, and it’s EA Global. I found my first one, in 2015, so striking I wrote a long piece about it (which prompted some thoughtful replies).

When we were starting Future Perfect in 2018, I went to EA Global again hoping to meet people who would make good writers for our new section. I met a recent college grad working in tech named Kelsey Piper and had some of the deepest conversations of my life. Reader, we hired her.

The next year, Kelsey, our excellent new teammate Sigal Samuel, and I went again and got some more great story ideas. This piece on the wild animal suffering movement, for instance, originated in a talk I saw there in 2019.

We were hoping to make an annual tradition out of our EA Global trip, but as Drs. Crystal Watson and Amesh Adalja had warned us at the 2018 EA Global, massive global pandemics are a serious risk with the potential to massively disrupt human civilization. So last year’s events were virtual, and the nascent tradition was broken.

So I’m happy to be back. I’m also happy to be back at EA Global this month in particular, as October 2021 marks the third anniversary of Future Perfect’s launch.

Three years of Future Perfect, explained

Through the support of a number of generous donors — the Rockefeller Foundation at launch, and then James McClave and Animal Charity Evaluators — we’ve been able to carve out a space to write about causes and solutions to suffering in the world, outside of the normal pressures of the news cycle.

I can't list every piece I'm proud of from our three-year run here, but I can’t resist listing a few. Shortly after our launch, Kelsey Piper turned some of our EA Global conversations about AI risk into the definitive explanation of the long-run dangers of turning over more and more aspects of society to machine learning algorithms.

From this past year, Sigal Samuel's essay on being a good ancestor is both a great explanation of the moral logic of "long-termism" and an exploration of how psychologically and practically difficult that commitment can be.

For our launch week back in 2018, we asked Ron Klain, who had helped coordinate the US response to Ebola in 2014, to write about how the US wasn't ready for the next large-scale pandemic and needed to invest more in prevention. That piece aged pretty well, and Klain is now the White House chief of staff, with the opportunity to put some of the ideas in that piece into action.

One of the best parts of Future Perfect from the get-go has been our podcast, led by producer Byrd Pinkerton, which has run for three seasons so far. Perhaps the episode I'm proudest of is about the Ford Foundation's complicity in mass population control campaigns against the will of Indian men and women in the ‘60s and ‘70s, an incident that’s too often neglected in the history of philanthropy and highlights the way foundation programs can sometimes do active harm.

We also recently launched a collaboration with the Vox video team on the human cost of factory farming, hoping to persuade people who might not be moved by animal suffering that they ought to care about factory farming's harms regardless. We’ve put up the first video in the series, an excellent piece on beef monopolies by Laura Bult.

But the best part of Future Perfect is, of course, its future. Thanks to support from the BEMC Foundation, this fall we plan to bring on three fellows, all of whom are eager to focus on important problems. I can't wait to introduce all of them in the coming weeks and have them write their own entries in this newsletter.

We have other big plans for 2022. We’re looking to expand our staff. We’re looking to increase our freelance output. We aim to grow the Future Perfect podcast and our presence on video. And we want to take our biggest swings and launch our most ambitious projects yet.

Thanks for being with us for the past three years. It’s by far the most rewarding experience of my career in journalism. Let’s make the future a little more perfect together.

—Dylan Matthews, @dylanmatt