Delighted to partner with Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, Cloudflare, Google, and many others, to introduce Open Standard, a new stablecoin designed for scale: joinopenstandard.com.

Today we're launching Intercept: a $500M philanthropic initiative to make respiratory infections, like the common cold and flu, a thing of the past. We treat respiratory infections as a minor nuisance, but that’s really not the case. Most of us will spend 5% of our lives (!) sick from these viruses, they kill 1M people a year, cost $600B annually in productivity, and periodically threaten civilization through pandemics. So, if they’re such a big problem, why haven’t we dealt with them yet? Last year we convened ~40 leading scientists, pharma R&D leaders, biotech investors, and regulatory experts to better understand that. We heard two main reasons: (1) First, it’s just technically very challenging: respiratory viruses represent hundreds of distinct, mutating strains across several families. Fortunately, recent breakthroughs make this newly possible. (2) Second is a lack of funding: broad-spectrum solutions have historically been underfunded, in part because they’re not a great fit for most philanthropic or commercial funding (and while COVID generated a burst of activity around preventing and understanding respiratory infections through an influx of new funding, that hasn't been sustained). We think that with enough focus and funding, this might be solvable. Intercept is a $500 million philanthropic initiative that will take advantage of new tools to catalyze the development and deployment of two types of products: broad-spectrum preventatives and air cleaning technologies. This problem is undoubtedly difficult. But it’s more tractable now than it’s ever been. We think we should give it our best shot. We’re enormously grateful to our anchor funders: @stripe, @AnthropicAI, @TheFluLab, @FoundationOAI and individuals from Jane Street. And, I’m very excited to be building this with @incredutility and the rest of the team.

Every website you’ve ever used is broken in a way you never noticed and it’s been this way for 30 years... A Midjourney engineer finally just fixed it. It’s called Pretext: A tiny library that lets websites lay out text the way magazines and newspapers do, with text flowing around images, wrapping into columns, and fitting perfectly into any shape, all at 120fps. This has been basically impossible on the web for 30 years. Every website you’ve ever used relies on the same clunky system from the 90s to figure out where text goes on screen. Pretext bypasses it entirely. 500x faster. The demos look like they shouldn’t be possible in a browser. Go look.

After @stewartbrand described rust as slow fire during our first call about the website, we had an idea: if you stay on the page long enough, rust consumes the background. And it becomes your job to scrape it off.

Cover evolution for Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One. “The cover of the book honors the idea of Kintsugi, the Japanese art of basically repairing broken pottery with a kind of a gold glue. And so it not only fixes it, but it makes it more beautiful. And you honor the mistake that broke it, and you honor the repair . . . So Kintsugi is a way of kind of just honoring the fact that things do break. But nobody actually wants things to break.” —@stewartbrand Design @pablodelcan, Art direction @devinjacoviello

Out now: press.stripe.com/maintenance… @stewartbrand's Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One—about the continuous repair work that keeps complex systems intact, spanning stories from a round-the-world sailboat race, to the restoration of the Statue of Liberty, to the Model T’s rise.