Scientopia!

ScienceBlogs bloggers live on in very spiffy new digs.

Many of my favorites from the old place have reorganized themselves here, at Scientopia.org.

Most wonderful, from my perspective, the interaction/conversation between blogs and bloggers that was one of the best (and occasionally worst) of the Seed Megalith’s science blogging aggregation is reproduced here, with much good fellowship and very sharp intelligence.

An evolution to be watched…

Image:  Anicet-Charles-Gabriel Lemonnier, “The Salon of Madame Geoffrin” 1812.

Tasty Blog Bits/What Good Young Journalists Can Do In The Right Kind of MSM

I’ve long been a fan of the High Country News, not least because they’ve given good work to some of the wonderful students at the best science writing program in the country (I’m supposed to say that, which doesn’t make it untrue).

But these lines from a post reminded me of what makes HCN such bright spot in my MSM reading these days

If natural gas was going to try and pick me up at a bar, the encounter would likely go like this:

Gas: “I’m low-carbon, cute, and widely available.”

Me: “You’re not that cute.”

That’s from a post by HCN Social Network Editor Stephanie Page Ogburn on the marvelously named The Goat Blog, and it is just a treat of journalistic writing in the context of old+new media.

Smart, funny, instantly engaging and all that you need to read on to get a nuanced reaction, backed up by actual real data, to the prospect of natural gas as a bridge fuel from the high to low carbon emission energy system I devoutly hope my son will see.

It can be done; journalism is not dead — and the seeds of its next incarnation can be found, often, far, far from the Bos-Wash corridor.

Image:  Filippo Palazzi, “Hay Car Attacked by Goats,” 1857

A quickie Saturday post with a brief answer to the question: how do I become a (better) science writer?

It’s reasonable, I guess.  My day job has me running what I can confidentyl say is one of the best science writing programs in the country.* So I often take part in some version of this email conversation I had recently with a graduate student in one of the physical sciences.

This student told me that “Though I am currently studying experimental science, one career path I am interested in is science writing or journalism.”

To which I said, in effect, “Great!”  We need good science writers more than ever, and someone committing to the field from a base of advanced training as a bench scientist is a clear win, from where I stand.**

The next question is the one they always ask…beyond or until they can sign up for a class or a program, “If you have any other advice as to how I could learn more about this field I would greatly appreciate it.”

So, just in case anyone out there may also wonder, here is what I wrote back, the short form of a theme on which I expand (as my students can certainly tell you) at much greater length when I have a captive audience:

The most immediate way to learn about writing about science for the public is to read a lot of it.  I’d go to the “Best American” series of science writing — there are actually two, Best American Science Writing and Best American Science and Nature Writing, published every year. While one can argue about some of the selections, the worst of the pieces there are not bad, and some are superlative.

Read like a pro — don’t just focus on the content, what you are learning — but try to analyze how the pieces are written. What’s the structure involved.  How do the different writers use sentence length and rhythm; what kind of voices do different writers employ.  How present are they in the piece — how present do they demand their audiences be — and so on.

You could pick up a copy of A Field Guide For Science Writers, edited by Deborah Blum, Mary Knudson, and Robin Marantz Henig.  That gives you a  good overview of the field and some basic techniques.  Though it is a bit long in the tooth, I like Elise Hancock’s Ideas Into Words. Follow the Knight Science Journalism Tracke, http://ksjtracker.mit.edu/ — a good aggregator blog that offers some commentary on good and bad science writing.

I’d add that there a bunch of excellent science blogs out there on which one can see others honing their craft (and talking a ton of science).  But actually, I think blogs are better to read as you write one, or are working on traditional articles.  I’d say that for someone first trying to get one’s ear and eye in on the forms and styles of good writing about science it’s better to read pieces crafted with a view towards a longer life than a blog piece.  Perhaps this is just projection, for though I do spend quite a bit of time on much of my writing for this blog, I also know that I don’t work the prose the way I do when I’m writing a book or an article intended to stand on its own, without the fabric of the ongoing conversation of the blog to sustain it.

But in any event, the core message is to read and read and read — but always like a pro.  There’s an old joke:  Q: What do writers talk about when they converse among themselves?  A: Money.  What else?

Within that truth, this one — writers as writers don’t read for pleasure.  They read to learn, to steal.  If you want to be one, in any genre, start taking apart your pleasure.  It will be less short-run fun to open a book, but much long-term gain to come.

And now, off to drink a very nice bottle of wine with a couple of very smart Harvard Med types…and talk a little science.

*Actually, of course, I’m sure it is the best, full stop — just as I know my son is the most wonderful boy in the world and that my cat is a prince among felines.  These are beings under my care, and if my connection to them is more immediate than that of an institutional responsibility, still, the same emotional logic applies.

**Though some of you know from my exchanges with Bora among others that I don’t think that such advanced training is a requirement for science writers.  This is a long conversation, but the gist is that whether you enter this field as a turn from the bench or towards it, there are distinctive strenghts you bring with you, and particular weaknesses as well.

Image:  Gerald Dou, “Portrait of an old woman reading (also, Rembrandt’s mother reading),” c.1630.

Diary of a Trade Book (Newton and the Counterfeiter) 13.0: Prelude to Science Online 2010′s Book/Blog session.

I’ve been a little slow to update my series of posts about the practice and emotional reality of publishing a (would-be) popular book on science.  (Ya think? — Ed.)

But its time to get back into it for several reasons.

The first is that I’ve got more to say — about what to do in the face of the collapse of serious book journalism within the US mass media; about reviewers and the question of whether and how to respond (no and carefully, if you can go a little Red Queen on me just now); on the kindness of strangers; on the second book crisis, which is a subset of the next book conundrum; and probably some other stuff that will occur to me as I start scribbling all these.

The second is that Science Online 2010 is on hand.  That’s the annual conference that started as a science blogging meeting, championed by the indomitable North Carolina-based duo of Bora Zikovic and Anton Zuiker, and is now, still led by the same pair, with a lot of help, become a vibrant meeting engaging a wide range of questions about the interaction of science and the web.

That’s relevant because Rebecca Skloot (whose book, The Immortal Life of  HEnrietta LAcks, is on the verge of publication, and is fantastic), Brian Switek, (up and running on his first book, born in part of writing to be found here) and I will be leading a session titled “From Blog to Book” at the unFSMly hour  of 9 a.m. this coming Saturday, January 16.

And third, of course, I want to continue to draw attention to the book whose passage to its readers this diary documents.  That would be my true-crime tale, Newton and the Counterfeiter, which as ever, can be found at Amazon, Powells, Barnes and Noble, Indiebound and  across the pond at Amazon.co.uk, Waterstones, Blackwells, Borders, and John Smith & Son — not to mention electronically Amazon’s Kindle store.

As noted above, there’s a lot of stuff I want to cover, and not being sure quite where to start, I guess the context of the Science Online meeting pushes me towards a few scattered thoughts on the enormous problem all of us book-fetishists face in connecting a book to its audience.

As before, any entry on this theme has to be in part a confession of failure.  I began this blog about eighteen months before my book was due to come out, and I did so for several reasons.  Mostly, I felt — and still do, vehemently — that science as a tool for making sense of daily life gets short shrift in the whole range of public and civic debates we have in this country.  My first real post on this blog was on the gap between what neuroscience was telling us about the pathology of mental injuries suffered in combat and the way the US military was dealing with victims of such injuries.

Since then, I’ve written about how important it is to use even the simplest of quantitative tools — grade school arithmetic — to grasp the meaning of reports like casualty levels in Iraq, and the essential nature of a commitment to empirical research to deal with just about any civic issue.

I’ve gotten more purely political at times than I had intended — partly as a result of an almost completely debilitating obsession with the election of 2008. And I have tried to maintain my connection to my core intellectual pleasure, the history of science, but the presenting face of the blog is captured in the tag line:  ”Science and the Public Square.”

But there is no doubt that from the start, I knew that I would use this blog to help bring my upcoming book to folks’ notice in any way that I could.

As an aside:  one piece of advice I do have for writers planning to start blogs specifically to aid their upcoming book projects — don’t.  At least don’t imagine that blog created simply to promote a specific book is going to do much for you.  Either your book is already attracting attention, in which case the blog won’t hurt but won’t add much value for the time taken to do it right, or your book is struggling to find traction, and a brand new blog is not usually an immediately effective way to reach much of an audience.  Especially if the blog is explicitly built around the work that already isn’t getting enough play.

Actually, that’s not really a digression:  one of the points of starting my blog long before my book was out, and of using it to stretch my wings over a wider territory than the book itself was to see if I could enter a community of bloggers and readers who would then be sufficiently interested in my take on the world to respond to the book when it became a major focus.

And in that, this effort succeeded, to a great extent, at least as I see it.  I’ve made a bunch of blog friends over the last two years, and a number of carbon based ones as well, a subset of that group.  I’ve interacted with a bunch of different web presences and audiences, and yes, a number of people responded to my book on their websites over the summer and fall.  (I’m very remiss in posting the relevant links with thanks to all who did so.  I will.)

And it succeeded in another way.  One of the odd things about writing a book is that there are long stretches of time in the production process when you are not writing, really. That’s most true after you submit your rewrite to your editors, and the production process really begins.  I find it hard to do more than preparatory work on a next book while one is still in the making — more on that in a post or two — so that leaves me with a lot of days when I don’t have anything I “have” to write.  So from early on I used my blog as a kind of methadone for book writing addiction; not quite the same thing as working out a long form  narrative, but still, every day a venue to fill with words and thoughts.

But I failed to use my blog to best effect.

I mean, I meant well, and I started out on the right track with my “Friday Isaac Newton” blogging.  But I didn’t keep it up, and if there is one thing every blogger knows, (I say, speaking from my one data point, more or less) it is that the blogging marathon requires the stamina and sheer imaginative will to deliver on such promises week in and week out.

And in that I think I lost a significant opportunity to build a community of readers around the core passions that led me to write my book.  I do know that a couple of the posts I did write in that series remain among the most popular of anything I’ve written — especially the one in which I posted my photographs of Newton’s childhood home and the apple tree that may have been implicated in his first thoughts about gravity.  It still pulls in hits every day, and has had almost 27,000 unique views over the last two years.  And while that’s clearly the best performing such single post, I have no doubt that if I had put up some cool bit of Newtoniana most weeks on Friday, it would have both been fun and useful to the project of publicizing the fact that a book illuminating some truly wild facets of the great man’s career was on the horizon.

If you want to see how it works when someone does get this right, or at least more nearly so than I, check out Jen Luc Picard, AKA Jennifer Ouellette, whose book, The Calculus Diaries has just entered the production process.  She will also be presenting at Science Online 2010, as it happens, and in the post announcing that and other bits of excitement in her life, she gives her readers a partial list of links to the posts she used to develop the ideas in her upcoming book.

That’s how to build long-distance buzz.  And what Jennifer did is exemplary in my view because it was real (as I tried to make my Newton posts as well, certainly) —  by which I mean that what she wrote on the blog materially shaped what she came to think about as she wrote her book.

(In my case it was somewhat different — I used the blog to write some of the Newton stuff I loved but did not fit into the sharply defined (I hope) narrative of the book. But the principle is the same:  this was stuff I was thinking about and wanted to express, and not simply puffery for the book to come.)  And at the same time, each of Jennifer’s posts served to whet appetite for the larger work to come.  Good buzz; smart writing.  So I guess my advice to anyone else would be (as always, it’s worth what you pay for it):  do what I say, not what I did.

In my next post I’ll write about why I think this kind of long range preparation is absolutely essential, and yet may never be good enough.  Hint — it’s because the old channels through which book conversations used to pass have mostly gone…and I’m not so sure the brave new world in which we live has figured out how to replace it just yet. There is an alternative hypothesis…but that’s for yet another post.

(Oh — and I do plan soon  to turn to a specific concern I’ve been getting some questions about promotional videos for books — like this one I made about Newton’s London. (Click on the “video” button on the right side of the page if you’re interested.)

In the meantime, see some of you at the Radisson in Research Triangle.  Science Online 2010, here we come.

Image:  Mathieu-Ignace van Brée, “George Cuvier,” before 1832.

Open Lab 2009!

Now this was a nice bit of news to receive:

The list of posts selected for Open Lab 2009 — a collection of 50 exemplary science blog posts from the last year — was announced earlier this week, and on it you will find this post by your humble blogger.  It’s a look at the rhetorical debt Charles Darwin owes to Isaac Newton, and it’s pretty good, if I do say so as shouldn’t.

You can see the complete selection here.  It is great company in which to find oneself — kudos to all here represented — and my thanks to the heroic team of judges, led by Scicurious of Neurotopia, who worked through more than 700 pieces to reach this conclusion.

Illustration: Franz Eugen Köhler “Bay Laurel (Laurus nobilis)” 1887.

We Pause for this Commercial Interruption: Newton and the Counterfeiter/Kindle redux edition

Well, that was an annoying ride.

I mean the seemingly endless saga of achieving the possibilty of Kindle/ebook sales for my poor but honest offering, Newton and the Counterfeiter. (Dead tree versions here:  Amazon, Powells, Barnes and Noble, Indiebound and  across the pond at Amazon.co.uk, Waterstones, Blackwells, Borders, and John Smith & Son.)

Loyal readers may recall that it took more than six or seven weeks between delivering the file to Amazon (a bit late, but not that late, in the context of the hard cover pub. date).  Amazon is, apparently, notoriously slow and creaky around at least some of its interactions with publishers.  (I do know that it took a very long time to get this book-promo video up on the US site…and that the interaction between my British publisher Faber & Faber and Amazon UK went much more smoothly than the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Amazon.com pairing did.)

But then came an email from old friend and former MIT colleague (not to mention tech/net education guru, Phillip Long, who complained that he could not get a Kindle edition of the book until next April, coinciding with the paperback release.

Apparently Amazon got its algorithm in a twist once HMH uploaded data about the upcoming new edition of an existing title.

Somehow — and I truly don’t understand how this could have happened, because it’s not exactly a new phenomenon in publishing to have a soft cover version follow a hard cover one into the wide world — my poor little book, highly praised though it may be, had to be denied the chance to take part in the day Kindle sales beat dead tree versions on the Amazon site.

Not for lack of effort on the part of HMH’s team, I must say.  I notified my peeps over there as soon as Phil let me know of the glitch, and they’ve been working on it for at least three weeks.  And today, I’m happy to say, HMH electronic stalwart Sanj Kharbanda was able to report success.  Now, at last, you can get your Kindle edition of Newton and the Counterfeiter.

So: all of you gifted (that unlovely neologism) with Kindles (or the Kindle app on your iPhone, and soon, on your Blackberry!) in recent memory may now load up your new gizmo with your own personal copy of that thrilling true crime tale that both tracks Newton as he tracks the dapper don of his day — and that tells a tale of how the scientific revolution got mixed up with the financial one — to our continuing gain and sorrow.  Seriously, it’s a great read, I’ve been told, and if you want to test that claim electronically, by all means, be my guest.  (Not for a a moment to disparage dead tree versions of course, for those (like me) that still love that sense of time measured in turning leaves.)

There.  I think I’ve shilled enough for one day.

Image:  Rembrandt van Rijn, “Two Old Men Disputing,” 1628.

Why Friends Don’t Let Friends Read HuffPost “Science”

This.

I confess that I have an instant gag reflex to the work of any author who permits this kind of bio line attach to his/her name:

“Robert Lanza, MD is considered one of the leading scientists in the world.”

But that’s only a symptom of the real problem here.  As are such telling but on one level superficial errors like mistaking the physical unit for energy.*  (It’s joules, not watts, as Lanza repeatedly mistakes.  Watts are units of power:  one watt equals one joule/second.)

There is a critique (demolishment) of Lanza’s “argument” for the nonexistence of death (sic!) that’s pretty easy to construct, of course.  The mush of badly garbled physics and windy speculation on the true nature of time and so on makes both a familiar and plenty broad target.  See this post and thread from PZ Myers.

Rather than recapitulate that hive-tome, (and not to anticipate any physicist with time on her/his hands who can more powerfully than I eviscerate the quantum-and-mulitverse nonsense purveyed by the handwaving Dr. Lanza) I just want to pick up on the implications of the kinds of rhetoric described above.

That is:  this is typical of one of the ways in which scientific illiteracy infects culture — not in the outright denial of obvious truths, but in the appropriation of the language of science to mask idiocy.

You see this often in blunt ways.  In Sarah Palin’s now infamous WaPo op ed. on climate change and the notorious emails, she “writes”*

What’s more, the documents show that there was no real consensus even within the CRU crowd. Some scientists had strong doubts about the accuracy of estimates of temperatures from centuries ago, estimates used to back claims that more recent temperatures are rising at an alarming rate….

…before concluding that

“Without trustworthy science and with so much at stake, Americans should be wary about what comes out of this politicized conference.”

Palin’s willed misrepresentation of the emails themselves have been well documented…see this for the latest general response to the really damaging deliberate mischaracterization of what those emails do and don’t tell you about climate change, and see this and this for specific rejoinder to Palin’s op-ed.

But the key here is “her”* choice of language.  “Consensus.”  “Accuracy of estimates.” “Trustworthy science.”  “She”* is asserting a claim of reason here, of the use of the very tools that really trustworthy scientists would employ.

It’s obvious why “she”* does so.  Anthropogenic climate change is the object of specifically scientific inquiry, and unless the claims of scientific knowledge from within that inquiry can be denied in their own frame of reference, those who wish to keep their own oxen ungored would be forced back onto the six year old’s argument:  “don’t wanna.”

It’s clever too.  As the tobacco hacks once noted, the product here is doubt — specifically doubt about what is and isn’t known, to what level of confidence.  Given the provisional nature of most scientific claims, that’s a pretty easy product to manufacture, as the tobacco companies did for decades, and as climate denialists and creationists have managed to do for the last many years.

But at least there is the possibility of correction here.  When the enemies of science argue in the language of science, they are on our turf, and, with effort, it is at least possible to demolish their claims.  In cases where time is of the essence, as in climate issues, that may be cold (hot) comfort — and certainly those of us, like my family, who have lost beloveds to RJ Reynolds (Pall Mall Reds, specifically), the decades of delay won by false claims of  uncertainty are unforgivable.  But still, we’re in with a chance when we fight on home ground.

Stuff like Lanza’s, though is more insidious, if less directly dangerous.  Here is someone asserting not the limits or errors of science, but its expansiveness.  He uses words that sound technical-ish — that “20 watt fountain of energy that is operating in the brain.”  (No, I did not make that up.)

He references grand sounding ideas:  “One well-known aspect of quantum physics is that certain observations cannot be predicted absolutely.”

He talks about specific experiments:  “Consider an experiment that was recently published in the journal Science showing that scientists could retroactively change something that had happened in the past. Particles had to decide how to behave when they hit a beam splitter.” (That this is a drastic mistatement of what’s going on in what I infer is the experiment under discussion (there is no reference) can be glimpsed in this account).

And so on.  The point isn’t that Lanza gets lots of stuff wrong — though that’s material as to why this piece is a crock — but that he weaves his woo in language designed to persuade a reasonably trusting reader that this “leading scientist” really knows stuff, that this pseudoscientific mush is actually embedded in a real and significant research program.

And the damage done there is, I think, obvious.  There is a lot of long term damage to the public’s ability to make sense of our expanding understanding of the material world that doesn’t came from people saying specific things that ain’t so — a la the divine Ms. Palin* — but from the confusion about what science is at all that comes from stuff like this.

Lanza is a man in pain. His speculation on the nonexistence of death occurs in the context of the loss of his sister not long after her marriage.  That’s a horrible tragedy to endure, and I condemn no one for seeking solace in that context.

But the truly human trope of seeking meaning in seemingly random disaster is not in itself a reliable source of general claims about the universe.  And when Lanza turs his private grief into a public and  general claims, he does so in ways that both damage his own authority as a scientist (leading or not) and — more important — he directly and significantly damages his readers’ ability to understand what science does and does not do.

The other culprit here, more culpable in my view, is Lanza’s mouthpiece, his venue.  The Huffington Post wants to be a web-center of cultural discourse.  In its ambition it seems to have decided that science can be covered like its media/gossip page.  Fun stuff is more important than real stuff.  I give Lanza, if not a pass, at least sympathy in his pursuit of some formulation that will make his loss (and perhaps his own fear of mortality) more tolerable.

The HuffPo crew?  Not so much

*I confess to some doubt as to whether the temporary governor actually writes that which is published under her name.

Images:

William Hope, “A photograph of a group gathered at a seance. ” 1920.

Benjamin West, “Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky,” ca. 1816

Newton and the Counterfeiter News: A whole hour of me talking about the book for your pleasure

Here, via MIT World, is the video of my talk in the MIT Writer’s Series to explain the who, what, why of that book I’ve mentioned here once or twice, Newton and the Counterfeiter.  (Amazon,Powells, Barnes and Noble,Indiebound and  across the pond at Amazon.co.uk,Waterstones, Blackwells, Borders,John Smith & Son) Bonus video: a wonderfully generous and over the top introduction by my colleague, Junot Diaz — short story artist and novelist beyond compare, Pulitzerite and all that, and a kind man.

more about “Newton and the Counterfeiter News: A…“, posted with vodpod

It’s not that McArdle can’t read…it’s that she can’t (won’t) think: part one.

There is a lot of writing, especially in the self-declared higher reaches of what passes for public intellectual life on the right, about the need to use the rigor of this or that body of knowledge to see through to the truth of policy choices in areas like health care, climate science and so on.

Much of the actual stuff put out into the intertubes on such technically-infused subjects displays, to my eyes at least, systematic errors, an inability to grasp how science works.

So, even though I swear  I’m not going to make The Atlantic’s Economics Editor (sic!) a permanent obsession, here’s a ridiculously overkill series of posts about what happens when someone uses the scientific literature as a toy.  (And yes, I know this is a post about something that happened aeons ago in blog-years, but my aim is not so much the specific matter under dispute as the habits of mind that lie behind the writing of a piece like the one I’m targetting.)

Via Susan of Texas, I learned of Megan McArdle’s attempt to justify (a) her own prior, much ridiculed argument over the role of big pharma in drug development and (b) her quaint commitment to the idea that the American citizenry should subsidize the rest of the world’s  pharmaceuticals [see especially  pp. 348-349 of the PDF at that link].

Susan points to McArdle’s attempt to pass off as a mere rhetorical device her false claim that the US accounts for more than 4/5ths of drug company profit.  McArdle asserts that her use of this number was merely a “hypothetical” and not repeated justification to preserve artificial barriers to price negotiation within the US health care market, to the detriment of individual consumers and the great profit of the purveyors of pharmeceutical).

And for Susan, I think, the key point is that McArdle makes a lot of stuff up, and hence is untrustworthy across the board:  why should you believe any argument from someone whom, everytime you check closely, gets even the little stuff wrong — and I agree with that.

The argument from authority is always fraught; but the argument from negative authority is much stronger:  if someone has a history of screwing up, it makes sense to anticipate future screw-ups and pay less and less attention to the offending party.  That’s what makes McArdle’s admission that her numbers were in fact pulled out of the ether so damaging.  It is now (some would say (me!) it has long been…) simple prudence to assume that any fact she presents is, as she puts it, “a hypothetical” unless footnoted and checked.  That’s the beginning of the end (or ought to be) for any claim to a seat at the grown-ups table.

But I’m going to focus here on what I see as McArdle’s intellectual sleight of hand at a deeper level.

No surprise, given the provenance of this blog, I diagnose the root cause of this pathology as a fundamental antipathy to and misunderstanding/deliberate misuse of the tools of science.

And what I’m really trying to say — just to give you an out before the tome to come — is that writing for the public about technically complicated ideas is hard.  If you want to do it, you have to understand a few things:  how the discipline(s) you are covering actually advance; how to distinguish between — or when you need to check — good work and bullshit; what any given result might actually mean, in the context of the field and in its application to the real world.  To take a recent example far from the one I’m going to hammer McArdle on, it does no good to report the fact that an HIV/AIDS vaccine trial achieved a 30 percent efficacy if you don’t know why such inadequate protection is so exciting, nor why it remains so tantalizing.

And more:  not only is science writing — or writing about health care, or economics — hard, it’s damned important to do it right.  People talk a lot about scientific illiteracy, about the problem for a democratic society if large chunks of the population don’t know either the facts or the habits of mind of science (I care more about the latter).  But it’s not that folks are dumb, or unwilling to learn — after 25 years in the science writing game, I’ve had ample evidence of the willingness of just about anyone to be interested in important stuff if you give them a reason to read on.

Rather, its crap like the sort purveyed by McArdle here, and many others like her,that do enormous damage, for it makes science and its results into pawns in a game of the sort high school debate teams play.  It’s not the quality of the evidence or the argument that matters in such contests, just the quantity, and the ability to baffle a casual onlooker long enough to achieve the end desired.  This is fine if you are trying to make it to State or Nationals.  It’s not so good — disastrous, I would say, when the success of this strategy kills people, as it does in the current state of American health care.

That’s the opening argument.  Go on to part two to read the details of my bill of indictment against the divine Miss McA.

Image:  Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “Peasant Wedding Feast,”  1568

Good Work Alert: Another MIT Science Writing Grad Student Making Good.

In today’s iteration of this sporadic series, check out some stuff by MacGregor Campbell, the man who is his own clan feud, and the pride of both the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing and The New Scientist‘s SF bureau, where he has interned this summer.

MacGregor, who had to suffer through the experience of being my advisee, is one of those polymathic students that can make their teachers feel both delighted and old.  He came to us as a musician and video artist, with a background in math and the teaching of that subject to high school students.  For a feel for his range and the flexibility of his mind, check out his blog, Main Sequence (a little slow to update just now, in the throes of his internship).

You’ll see there links to much of the work he’s done for the NS, along with his own sparks, but I’d like to draw attention to a couple of pieces.

First a little background.  Y’all may have noticed that the media landscape has changed a bit over the last few years.  One of those shifts has been to expect, increasingly as a matter of course, that prose on its own is not enough; the presentation of stories on the web is both enhanced by the incorporation of video, audio, and interactive elements, and it is transformed, at least in part, into work explicitly intended to entertain as well as inform.

More later, I’d guess, on the tension implied in that last statement, but here, just the practical problem for would-be writer/communicators in this evolving beat and medium.

The basic problem is this:  writing, creating good radio/audio, film making, and interactive design are all highly skilled crafts.  It takes time and practice — and talent, and passion, and habits of mind, and sensibility, ways of looking at or listening to the world — to get good or great at any of them.  The more one tries to master both the technical skills needed to, say, light, shoot and cut video, and to tell stories in the very different grammars of two or three different media, the harder it is to hone capacity in any one.

So, to MacGregor’s work:  check out these two interactives on health care, fine examples of why the web is a better delivery vehicle for mildly-enhanced prose than dead trees.  There is a reason traditional newspapers/magazines are bound for dodo-land, and it isn’t just MSM self-regard and feckless business decisions; the digital domain lets you do new, useful, sometimes transformative stuff with the material that is at the heart of the mission o f traditional media:  provide information within an apparatus that actually enhances a reader’s ability to understand what the writer is going on about.

And then look at this:  MacGregor (and friend’s) video on a development in robotics.

After seeing this, I wrote to MacGregor to ask him if the key point of …not quite dispute, but doubt…he and I wrangled over during the term had settled down for him.  I’m old fashioned about video, about new and integrated media in general.  I believe, strongly, in production and in the value of particular skills.  So when it came time to work with the MIT grad students on creating stories in audio and video, I emphasized a formal production procedure and sequence, the significance of writing your piece at every stage, from first story pitch, through articulated phases of treatment, shooting script, paper cut, and then on through the stages of editing and review.  And I emphasized old fashioned photographic and cinematographic skill, the use of a camera, knowledge of its particular properties, and above all, attention to lighting.  One thing we do differently at MIT than at some other programs is we bring in a national-shooter level DP to shoot for two days with our students — and to teach as the shoot proceeds about how to think about light, color, and motion as story telling tools, and not just decoration.

There is another approach that people use — some very well, which worries less about the formal steps in either the writing process or the shoot, and seeks to acquire the material first, and then cut whatever you’ve got, on the theory that what matters most is the event in front of the camera, and not the art, or artifice of the person behind it.  Both views have their merits, and when MacGregor came to MIT, he was definitely more immersed in the latter approach.

So when I saw his robotics video I asked him if the hoops through which I made him jump in the preparation of this documentary whilst at MIT were of any value to him.

To my great satisfaction, he answered yes, for both axes.  The emphasis on formalizing the production and writing process helped him a lot, he said, and he had found from his experience with our cameraman why one might do the kinds of things he had always disdained as a “catch the moment” documentarian.  So I have to say that the links I’ve sent you too above give me pride as well as pleasure; it’s hard to know, sometimes, if anything one tries to teach actually matters.  Here, generously, from MacGregor, I have some confirmation.

(And, btw, if any magazine editors are reading this:  I strongly suggest you think in two person teams, not one-man-bands.  Find those on your staff or in your orbit who love video, and match them up with writers who love prose story telling.  You’ll get more work done at a higher level than if you ask a good reporter to stop thinking about what’s being said to him or her and start thinking about the lighting triangle and whether or not you’ve got a directional enough mike to make that HVAC outlet in the upper corner an solvable problem.  Just my two cents.)

Illustration:  Movie poster for “The Kid,” 1921