Retrospective: The Wire Science in 2019
At the start of 2019, The Wire Science decided to focus more on issues of science and society, and this is reflected in the year-end list of our best stories (in terms of traffic and engagement; liste…
science journalism
89 posts
The circumstances in which scientists are science journos
On September 6, 2019, two researchers from Israel uploaded a preprint to the bioRxiv preprint server entitled 'Can scientists fill the science journalism void? Online public engagement with two sc…
Good writing is an atom
https://twitter.com/HochTwit/status/1174875013708746752 The act of writing well is like an atom, or the universe. There is matter but it is thinly distributed, with lots of empty space in between. Re…
An award that isn't
ISRO just put out a call for a one-time space journalism award, named for Vikram Sarabhai, with a cash prize of Rs 5 lakh. Here's the doc with all the details. Pay attention to (4), where it says…
Diversifying into other beats
I delivered my annual talk AMA at the NCBS science writing workshop yesterday. While the questions the students asked were mostly the same as last year (and the year before that), I also took the oppo…
We don't have a problem with the West, we're just obsessed with it
How much do we not know about what Indian researchers are doing simply because Western scientists haven't written to some of them?…
To watch 'The Post'
I read a few reviews of The Post. Based on what the critics are saying, it seems the film has at least the potential to raise the spirits of many journalists today who could use a leg up. That said, I…
Limitations of the Finkbeiner test
This post was republished on The Wire on January 8, 2018. The Finkbeiner test, named for science writer Ann Finkbeiner, was created to check whether a profile of a female scientist published by a mai…
Happy new year!
2017 was a blast. Lots of things happened. The world became a shittier place in many ways and better in a few. Mostly, Earth just went around the Sun once more, and from what we know, it's going t…
A shorter article about short gamma ray bursts lights up little
* Identify a simple and well-defined question * Describe the question and answer it * Get the fuck out Writing with these three rules in mind makes for a good science article. You stick to the poi…
Friends no more
Growing up, watching Friends was a source of much amusement and happiness. Now, as a grownup, I can't watch a single episode without deeply resenting how the show caricatures all science as avoida…
In solidarity with Nautilus's writers
In April this year, Undark published a piece that caught me by surprise: Nautilus magazine was going broke. Actually, it wasn't a surprise that lasted long. Nautilus, to me, had been doing a comme…