Many writers set out to create nonfiction, but go astray somewhere along the way. That’s because when you look long into a story, the story also looks into you.

In a world literally on fire, I was burning large quantities of gasoline for my own entertainment. I don’t do that anymore, and don’t encourage anyone else to, either.

Stories don’t just tell our history, they shape it. Scientists need to start telling better ones.

Whether you’re a radio club, a university, or a biome, you can’t afford monoculture.

We’re throwing billions of dollars’ worth of research on a digital compost heap. This needs to stop.

Two books explore the alluring but pathological business of game development.

A new investigative report by journalists at Science and Retraction Watch lifts the lid on what appears to be a concerted effort by one university to game the current science publishing system.

The story focuses on Saveetha Dental College in Chennai, India, which requires hundreds of undergraduates to write manuscripts on research they’ve done as students. That sounds like a fine exercise for the class. The twist is that these student manuscripts then get published in bottom-of-the-barrel journals. While that alone generated over a thousand publications from the college last year, the real impact of this scheme comes from the students’ apparent habit - likely prompted - of including citations to large numbers of other studies published by researchers at the same school.

Just over a week ago, I stepped out onto a stage in New York City to join a show, in front of a live audience of 130 people. Tickets to the event had sold out almost as soon as they’d gone on sale. It was, of course, a massive ego boost, though the audience wasn’t there just to see me. They were there for the whole cast of “This Week in Virology,” the podcast I’ve been co-hosting for fifteen years.

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.

Specifically, Kelly teaches a full course in her high school’s science department called “Science and the Media.” As described in the presentation (PDF) she and her colleagues gave at the meeting, the course covers a broad intellectual territory. She lays the groundwork for critical thinking, then has her students go through a series of exercises to analyze their own information consumption habits while learning about how the modern social media landscape really works. After that, they explore some major science topics with an eye toward how they’re covered in the news.

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. And 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. Explaining what they said to an audience of non-specialists, however, can be pretty tough.