mainstream media
There’s a line from The Two Towers (2002) that’s really stayed with me: I’m on nobody’s side because nobody is on my side. It’s spoken by Treebeard, the Ent, to one of Meriadoc/Peregrin when asked whose side he was on: Saruman’s or the
Cassandra Willyard
What follows is an attempt to process and understand Cassandra Willyard’s post on Last Word on Nothing, about her preferring the humanised stories of science over the stories of the science itself (“Physics writers, this is how you nab the physics haters — human emotion”; my previous post on this
Cassandra Willyard
A post published on the Last Word On Nothing blog yesterday has been creating quite the stir on Twitter. Excerpt: While I can appreciate that this is an important scientific discovery, I still have a hard time mustering excitement over gravitational waves. I would not have read these articles had
embargoes
Seventy! That’s how many observatories around the world turned their antennae to study the neutron-star collision that LIGO first detected. So I don’t know why the LIGO Collaboration, and Nature, bothered to embargo the announcement and, more importantly, the scientific papers of the LIGO-Virgo collaboration as well as
Abel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are too big to fail. Even if they’ve become beset by a host of problems, such as: 1. Long gap between invention/discovery and recognition, 2. A large cash component given to old scientists, 3. Limiting number of awardees to three, 4. Not awarding prizes posthumously,
conflict of interest
I was invited to speak to the students of the annual science writing workshop conducted at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, for the second year (first year talk’s notes here). Some interesting things we discussed: 1. Business of journalism: There were more questions from this year’s
Eric Hobsbawm
A week or two ago, a scientist impressed with The Wire‘s coverage of science recommended that I stick to covering the good stuff (my syntax) and keep away from highlighting pseudoscience and other happenings of questionable footing. Then, a few days ago, a science writer expressed an adjacent set
Arwen Cross
Wissenschaft im Dialog is hosting “a special series about the role of science communication and science journalism in various countries”. At their request, and thrilled for the opportunity, I wrote the India edition, available to read here. The initial limit was 1,000 words but the version that got published
20th century
For someone who reads very slowly (a 300-page book usually takes a week), Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes offered an astonishingly enjoyable experience*. A week after I picked it up at a secondhand books store, I’m 534 pages in and keep going back to it. While Hobsbawm’s
Fountain Ink
If you think a story was not covered by the media, it’s quite likely that that story didn’t feature in your limited news menu, and that it was actually covered by an outlet you haven’t discovered yet. In the same vein, saying the entirety of India’s
Breakthrough Listen
There are different kinds of science stories. I don’t just mean the usual long-form, short-form stuff. I mean there are qualitatively different kinds of stories. They inhabit a hierarchy, and right at the bottom is getting something wrong. Like the way Livemint did on April 20, 2017, reporting that
Ed Yong
How does feel to write a story and then, just like that, have everyone read it as well as be interested in reading it? How would it feel to not have to hope quasi-desperately that a story does well after having spent hours – if not days – on it? How would
