I slept through the Higgs boson announcement on July 4. Whatever the news that the Large Hadron Collider physicists would be trumpeting in the middle of the New York night, it wasn’t going to change by 9 a.m. No, what I would be monitoring throughout the day were the press releases and media coverage. Would […]
On Writing
Maybe I’ve just been reading too many scientific journals and too many memos from academics but I swear to God when I’m declared empress, my first edict is going to be, “Signal-to-noise! Raise the signal! Lower the noise!” ___________ http://abstrusegoose.com/380
This is a discussion about an uncomfortable subject—an emotion that everyone has felt, but no one wants to admit. Envy—it’s a four letter word. In the rare instances when we talk about it, we do so in whispers amongst our closest confidants. Mostly, we insist it doesn’t exist, because we don’t like what it says […]
A couple of days ago I was sitting at work when my wife emailed me an article by Adam Ruben. He’s a scientist who writes a humor column for Science. This one was about science journalism. I thought: Hey, I’m a science journalist, I like funny things, should be good. But a few paragraphs in, […]
Monday, we marked LWON’s second anniversary. I was not one of the original contributors to this blog, but a year ago this week, Tom Hayden invited me to contribute my first post. Since becoming an official LWON contributor last June, I’ve written almost 30 posts, about one every 12 days. For this work, I’ve received […]
“Listening to a entrepreneurial physicist talking about how to get rich!” Apparently, that was my first tweet. I’ve got no idea who the physicist was, and the get-rich advice must not have been very good—I’m still in journalism. Yet for all my forgetfulness, Twitter remembers the exact moment I came into its life: March 17, […]
It was the first day of spring, and I was on a mission—a fact-checking mission, to be exact. For the past three months, several American Museum of Natural History employees and I had been tracking a Rufous Hummingbird who had lost her way while migrating to Mexico and ended up at the museum, of all […]
I spent the past two days at the Science Writing in the Age of Denial conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The event explored the phenomenon of denial and what it means for science writers. How can journalists effectively convey science when its uncomfortable truths face organized resistance?