📎 A Minimal Quarter

Dear Readers,

The Snipette chat room is usually a beehive of activity, with ten public channels dedicated to various aspects of running our operation — not to mention the dozens of private group chats! Because many of our editors have A-levels, this quarter has been a bit lower on activity, or, dare we say, minimal?

Besides our weekly articles, we usually have a whole bunch of conversations happening at Snipette. It ranges from intense discussions on different things we can post on social media, to ideas for collaboration-articles between the editors, to cats. (A lot about cats).

More seriously, we also have various projects: organising a webinar, trying out author game nights, working on large-scale series, or crowdfunding. This time though, we’ve been doing just enough to keep things going: the bare minimum, as it were.

Edit less, Write More

This quarter hasn’t been all about winding down. neel, who till now has been one of the junior editors-in-training, has stepped up to fill the void and is now handling various articles on his own. Diya has been handling the typesetting for our print edition as usual — the PDF of which you should be getting today if you’ve subscribed!

Meanwhile, Badri has been making sure the article pipeline carries on, and Rhea has returned after a break to breathe a much-needed life into proceedings. She will be helping out till her exams begin in October, at which point many of the other editors will be getting free again.

Last quarter and the coming one feature quite a few articles written by the editors ourselves — including co-founding editor Manasa! We wanted to avoid making authors wait, but for our own pieces it’s a different story.

Crowdfunding update

Our budget numbers just came in, and last June’s crowdfunding event has proven to be a success! We won’t be able to offer a year of colour Snipette for ₹500 ($7) as hoped, but we can provide a low-cost black-and-white edition, at least in India. We are also planning a revamped digital version.

The details of all this will probably be released early next year, when all the editors are back. If you’ve signed up for our crowdfunding campaign, expect an update in early January on how you can send in your funds!

Coming up this quarter

For obvious reasons, we don’t have any new projects planned for this quarter, but we do have many new articles! Stay tuned for Chelsea Iversen writing about the power of magic, Manas Bhardwaj on convincing your procrastinating self to get some work done, and astrophysicist Avi Loeb on preserving one’s youthful spirit.

And, for a lighter break, Abbey will be back with a piece prepared a while ago, about the religious roots of cornflakes!

Stay tuned for all this and more, including a few pieces by the Snipette editors, all of which you’ll receive in our weekly email if you’ve signed up, or better still, in print.

And now, if you’ll excuse us, we’ll take our leave to go get the next article ready!

Cheers,
Rhea, Badri, neel, Diya, Akil, Dee, Anjali, Nia, and Manasa
The Snipette Team, in presentia et absentia