Welcome to the first edition of the White Pill, Pirate Wires’ brand new really-cool-sci-fi-shit-that’s-actually-real-and-happening-right-now digest. The aim is to highlight fun, inspiring, and evocative developments in tech, engineering, physics, astronomy, space, and medicine with a regularly scheduled link blast and brief, lead story. Here, because we want this to be an email you look forward to, we’ll never include depressing doomerism, culture war bullshit, or clown links.

Honestly, there’s only so much “bomb the data centers” and “respect my frog/frogself pronouns” a man can take before he inadvertently pills himself into extreme, tribalistic critique. The red pill, I mean. The black pill, I’m talking about. Sure, some critique is necessary. The doomers do need to be given space, and faced. The clown links do need to be shared, laughed at, woven into art. But we also have to remember who we are, and what we actually want: connection, growth, human potential. In other words, white pills.

Brandon, lead editor on the pill, plans to test this digest for a few editions. If there’s enough interest to justify a regular feature, we’ll make it official.