Freelance science journalist
Let’s get this out of the way: In 2012, two independent teams of particle physicists discovered the Higgs boson. Why bother with the obvious? Earlier this week, Ben Recht, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley wrote an article “The Higgs Discovery Did Not Take Place,” a self-consciously contrarian yet serious polemic. In [ ]
For all of Christopher Nolan’s notorious attention to detail, Oppenheimer is a superficial biopic. During the course of the three-hour drama, we learn remarkably little about the life of its eponymous subject. There is no real mention of his childhood; his on-screen relationship with his brother is abbreviated to the point of acquaintanceship, and nearly [ ]
The clearest précis of the room-temperature superconductivity ruckus about LK-99 (no, not that other one)—a viral, meme-laden extravaganza of semi-scientific speculation run by revelers with the patience and rigor of highly-caffeinated three-year-olds—is that it is science as a live sporting event. For proponents, the drama is the draw. Many are veterans of hype, enthusiasts of [ ]
Alice is talking. She is a physicist, and so Bob, a computer scientist, listens. “Do you remember my neighbor—you know, the one who’s always asking about quantum mechanics,” she asks.
There are, in the end, only two types of scientific results worth reporting: those that have self-evident value/importance/beauty/wonder, and those that do not. The vast, vast majority of scientific research worth covering is not self-evident. So it falls on the writer to grab the reader and interpret graphs and jargon which the study s significance hides [ ]
I ve been trying to better familiarize myself with Marxist history/philosophy of science. Explicitly for part of a long-term project; honestly, because I m curious about it and dislike feeling ignorant. To that end, today I skimmed some of Nikolai Bukharin s introduction to Science at the Cross Roads (a collection of papers submitted to a 1931 conference) [ ]
How researchers are using math to predict and understand a global pandemic Note: I researched, interviewed, and wrote the bulk of this in mid-March 2020. Unable to get it published, overwhelmed by the pandemic and the need to finish other work, I left it sitting, untouched from March 22, 2020 until about last week. I ve [ ]
This was not the election of a healthy democracy. A complete list of the undemocratic measures taken before, during, and after this election would stretch for pages. The proximate cause for so many—including the attempted coup—was Donald Trump. Following his lead, Republican voters and officials, all the way up to sitting senators, have conjured up [ ]
Since I ve gotten asked about careers in science writing/journalism twice in the past week, I ve been hunting down basic resources (what is science writing, how to pitch, where a science writing career stats) from excellent sites like The Open Notebook to help get folks started. But this is a particularly basic question—so basic that people [ ]
This is the excerpt for your very first post.