As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had the privilege of speaking to a big group of K-12 science teachers recently. One of the many interesting conversations I had at that meeting was with Kelly Melendez-Loaiza, who teaches at Mansfield High School in the southeastern part of Massachusetts. She’s one of a few teachers who have decided to tackle our current misinformation pandemic head-on, by inoculating kids against the threat.

Most people can write. Fewer can write well. Fewer still can write well on demand, day after day, at the rate and consistency required to make a living at it. A handful of people can do all that while also creating great works of art. As a result, writing carries both a well-earned reputation for difficulty, and a largely unjustified mystique. It’s the hardest part of my job as a science journalist, and the most over-glamorized skill I have.

One of the things I learned from living through the pandemic was just how toxic my relationship with the internet had become. Scrolling had turned into doomscrolling, and the more time I spent on certain internet activities, the worse I felt. That led me to start cutting back. Initially I missed the addictive feeds of social media, of course - they are, after all, precision-designed to hold one’s attention. But as I noticed how much better I felt when I was off them, I cut back further.

Different types of journalism have different challenges. In investigative journalism, the reporting is hard but the writing is (relatively) easy; once you’ve finally wrung the facts out of folks who didn’t want the truth brought to light, all you really have to do is state what you found. Science journalism is the other way around: the reporting is usually pretty easy, but the writing can be extremely hard. Scientists love to talk about their work.

Continuing the theme of my previous post, and on the heels of my own departure from the little blue bird app, here are some ideas for things to try if you, too have decided you’ve had enough of that Twit. 1. Enjoy your newfound free time As someone who’s acquired and kicked a few tech addictions over the years, I have some experience with one of the major side-effects of leaving a platform: free time.

This is a lightly edited version of a keynote presentation I gave on 26 October 2022 at the Massachusetts Science Education Leadership Association meeting in Marlborough, MA. Thanks again to Liz Baker for inviting me, and the whole group for being such wonderful hosts. I really like the theme of this conference, “developing intelligent consumers of science.” I’m not normally a big fan of the term “consumers,” but in this case I think it makes sense.

When I started my journalism career 25 years ago, I had some major worries: how to expand my client list, how to keep paying the rent, whether I was even qualified to be doing this kind of work. Amid those existential concerns, seemingly minor issues of file organization didn’t even register. My workflow then was expedient, but not sustainable. I did all of my writing in a semi-legitimately acquired copy of Microsoft Word, saved the files on my Mac Powerbook in whatever folders seemed convenient at the time, and didn’t think the concept of an archive was relevant to my life.

In the process of a major overhaul of my blogs, the details of which I describe on my personal site, I revisited all of my old posts. I’ve been publishing these little essays online since 2006, and my very first science blogging post was a discussion of the then-new hypoallergenic cats from Allerca: Specifically, they’re cats that don’t express the gene for the most significant feline allergen protein. They are not clones, nor are they genetically modified in the same way many of our crops are these days, but they’re also not quite “natural.

Think of a disaster movie. Any disaster movie. Whatever the central threat, from Godzilla to malevolent extraterrestrials to climate catastrophe, there will be at least one scene full of people behaving at their worst: looting expensive luxuries from abandoned stores, smashing windows, screaming in panic, shooting at their neighbors. According to Hollywood, society is just one bad event away from near-total collapse, unleashing the Hobbesian wolves of our worst impulses and setting everyone against everyone else.

A few days ago, the World Health Organization caused a stir by saying that antibody tests may not indicate whether someone is immune from SARS-CoV-2. This led to some understandable confusion, and WHO spokespeople have subsequently walked the comments back a bit. While the messaging might’ve been handled better, the public health experts at the WHO were trying to make a very important point. Several prominent politicians have advanced the idea of issuing “immunity passports” to people who’ve recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection.

On a blustery day in mid-December, TWiV co-host Vincent Racaniello and I, along with friend-of-the-show Islam Hussein, visited the picturesque campus of the Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine in Grafton, MA. Our primary job there was to record an episode of TWiV in front of a live audience, featuring Tufts researcher Jon Runstadler and members of his lab. You can check out that episode now on the TWiV site. Before the recording session, though, we got to tour New England’s only veterinary school, which occupies the former site of a state mental hospital.

In the November 1943 issue of the journal Genetics, Salvador Luria and Max Delbrück settled a long-running but arcane debate among bacteriologists. The original paper is freely downloadable, and is an amazing document to read today. There’s a delightful innocence in the simplicity of the experimental design, the lengthy explication of the theory behind the work, and the humbleness of the authors’ conclusions. There is no hint that the paper is describing the dawn of molecular biology, a field that would revolutionize humanity’s relationship with nature in ways that are still unfolding 75 years later.