*Correction Note: Earlier headline id'd Science Magazine as the platform for the article under discussion. It was its sister AAAS pubication, Science Careers. Copy amended immediately below)
The AAAS's learned journal Science has its own platoon of science journalists who occasionally liven up the news with narrative that is about more than data, hypothesis, error bars and conclusions. One wonders what its members think of their editors (Correction - make that the editor at Science Careers) who published this week a column on the art and craft of science reporting. The column argues that it not only can be dumb, but that it is just awful - the beat most prone to error and on the whole a dreadful irresponsible mess:
- Adam Ruben: The Unwritten Rules of Journalism;
One can see immediately he might not cut it as a science journalist or any other kind of journalist unless hired entirely to write bilious parody. He starts off with a lie about himself. Then he follows up with a string of falsehoods about the nature of typical science journalism. He, after a final salvo of insult, closes by telling any science writers who read it: "And don't invite me to dinner!" I can't tell if that has an embedded lie, too. Perhaps he'd like nothing better than to look down his nose at a lot of science writers laid to waste and self-loathing by his scathingly incisive witticisms. And I'll bet he gets a few invitations to dinner anyway.
The lie he starts with is that he grew up "with the fantasy that anything in print must be true." Well, that itself cannot be true, for he also remembers a childhood in which he already knew aliens haven't abducted Elvis no matter what the Weekly World News said.
So there, gotcha, ha ha ha. Really, this column makes me seriously depressed. That's not so much by the maiming Dr. Ruben seeks to inflict on the corpus of science journalism but by the judgment at Science that led to this composition's being published as anything remotely useful. Now, it is a fact that we journalists tend to be thin-skinned. We are quite aware that we are prone to occasional exaggeration, just plain error, and inability to keep science in perfect perspective. We know our world is flawed so we may lash out in hurt and fury when somebody is so churlish as to point it out and especially so if its done with a sneer. But even allowing for such neuroses on this side of the fence the column is so heavy handed, apparently genuinely hostile, and false in its depiction of what is typical that.... acckkkkkkk!!!
(Late addition: For rebuttal, one offers at more or less random the recent NYTimes Magazine article by Wil S. Hylton on Craig Venter and designer microbes. If one removed from it all elements that entail writer's tactics that at all reflect what Ruben ridicules, one would be left with a stale, flat story of little impact or enduring impression. That is, dreck.)
OK, I get it. The Ruben piece is deliberate provocation and I fell for it. The gotcha is on me. He's just doing to us, via distortion and selection, what he says we do to scientists. Good one! And one more thing. We science journalists are typically all too happy to hear opening remarks by scientists - at events (such as journalism prize ceremonies) rich with those in our trade - on how very very important we are to the spread of scientific information through the general public and what enormous talent many of us have. That's the spirit! We bask in our own importance. But if your head gets so swollen with such encomiums that it's hard to walk straight, read this.
(Thx to Seth Borenstein for making sure we saw this - as you'll see in next post down, Deb Blum got riled too).
Grist for the Mill: Adam Ruben's website. (Where we learn he is sarcastic in every direction, an equal-opportunity ego-puncturer)
- Charlie Petit
Comments
Another P.S. Charlie, did you intend the (Corrected*) headline to still indicate that the article was from Science and not Science Careers?
Thanks Charlie--I fully understand. And I appreciate your gracious response.
Respectfully,
Jim
Jim - Sigh. Not my best day yesterday.
Correction made on the misidentification of Science Careers. It was easy to do, as the Science flag is right on the page, but I wasn't fully aware of what Science Careers is. Thanks for taking the time to comment.
As for the post's structure and theme, my intent was to take readers through my sequence of unfolding awareness. This being, first, taken in entirely by this parody, then realizing I was ruffling my feathers to little purpose. I got huffy out of an overdose of seriousness - specifically, too dim initially to realize that the gotcha was entirely for Adam to say to me, not the other way around. By the end of the piece with its link to Adam's website and comment on the nature of his humor, I got to where I wanted to be. But my route may not have been sufficiently clear.
As a postscript, I thought I'd provide another sample of Adam's writing, from an earlier article, that I hope will show that he understands the value of effective science communication:
>>Many scientists see writing as a means to an end, the packing peanuts necessary to cushion the data they want to disperse to the world. They hate crafting sentences as much as they hate, say, metaphors about packing peanuts.
But there’s a reason scientific journal articles tend to be dry, and it’s because we’re writing them that way. We hope that the data constitutes an interesting story all by itself, but we all know it usually doesn’t. It needs us, the people who understand its depth and charm, to frame it and explain it in interesting ways.
This is, in fact, one of the most appealing aspects of science: We’re more than just the people who push the pipette buttons. We’re advocates who get to construct and tell the stories about our science. I can’t think of a better lone career.<<
If I understand him--and I think I do--he's arguing that scientists themselves should take more responsibility for constructing the narrative that explains their science. It's a radical idea, but one I'd expect science writers to be sympathetic to.
Charlie, I won't engage the merits of your argument, or not much, but I will take issue with your headline, which I feel is misleading. As I suspect you know or might have assumed, Science Careers is not Science magazine. It's PART of the Science family of publications, and I--the editor of Science Careers--am accountable to my superiors at Science for my editorial decisions. But I make those decisions, and no one above me--not the Editor-in-Chief; not the news editor--reviewed this column prior to publication. If you don't like the column, blame me, not Science.
For what it's worth, I believe the column was both funny and insightful; I would not have published it otherwise. I've heard from a few very accomplished science writers who found it either funny, or insightful, or both. I think it's safe to say that someone at NASW saw merit in it; otherwise it would never have appeared on the NASW homepage and this conversation probably would not have occurred. I doubt they put it up there just to piss people off.
Humor is very personal, so I won't try to defend the humor of the piece; you either get it or you don't, and if you don't that's fine; not everybody does. But many people do.
I happen to like very much the narrative style of science journalism that Adam skewers, when it's done well--as it was, for example, in Yudhijit's recent Focus article, "A Week in Stockholm"
( http://www. sciencemag.org/content/336/6077/26.full ;
sorry, you'll need a AAAS membership/Science subscription or site license for access, but its worth it). We've been known to practice this style ourselves at Science Careers from time to time.
Yet there are other ways of doing things and other styles, and have been for ages. There are very accomplished science writers out there who don't buy into this style, who reject the idea that when writing about science you need to describe the view out the office window or how many sugars she takes in her coffee. Certainly most scientists (the intended audience of Science Careers) would rather see their work correctly characterized--not that the two things are necessarily opposed--than see themselves colorfully portrayed as a vibrant character. And abuses do occur, as commenters on these blog posts and elsewhere have acknowledged. IMO, Adam's criticisms of science writing are defensible. So are some of the reactions.
Speaking of Adam: I feel rather badly for him, a very smart guy and a perceptive critic who (I happen to know) greatly admires some of you folks, and very much respects what you do. Yes, he is a practicing scientist, with a real job in industry. He is also an unorthodox but talented science communicator with, I believe, a bright future. He probably had a bad night after seeing these blog entries and I'm sure he's doubting himself this morning, but he has much of value to say and write, and I very much hope he'll keep saying and writing it.
Jim Austin, Editor
Science Careers
http://www.sciencecareers.org
###
And just to underscore Charlie's point that Ruben is an equal-opportunity skewerer, anyone who is still feeling personally offended by his column might feel a little better after reading the version he wrote for scientists, on "how to write like a scientist":
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/art...
(Journalists may find this one funnier than the one that's supposedly about us)
In it, for example, one of his rules is this:
"Using the first person in your writing humanizes your work. If possible, therefore, you should avoid using the first person in your writing. Science succeeds in spite of human beings, not because of us, so you want to make it look like your results magically discovered themselves."
By the way, nobody seems to have commented on his penchant for self-deprecation, including his reference to the fact that he writes a regular humor column for "the otherwise respectable journal Science", or the fact that the column in question blatantly violates at least two of the rules he claims to espouse, including opening with the two anecdotes he uses as examples of how not to open with anecdotes.
Boyce's comparison to Dave Barry is apt, I think, and like Barry, sometimes he's funny, and sometimes just silly. I don't disagree that the piece reinforces some bad stereotypes scientists may already have, but I do think the piece is frivolous enough not to be worthy of some of the angst some of my colleagues have experienced.
By the BTW way: The Hopkins Web site lists Ruben as a lecturer in their summer school. He's not otherwise on the faculty but he does have a job at a biotech company.
By the way, although the AAAS/Science Web site describes Ruben as a "practicing scientist," his bio blurb on Amazon.com says this:
"ADAM RUBEN spent seven years at Johns Hopkins University earning his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology. While there, he parlayed his healthy disdain for academia into a stand-up comedy act, which he has performed at clubs, colleges, and private functions from Boston to San Diego, recently opening for Dane Cook's Tourgasm at the Warner Theater in Washington, D.C. and earning second place in the Funniest Jewish Comic Contest at the Laugh Factory in Times Square. For five years, Adam has taught an undergraduate stand-up comedy class that has quickly become one of the most popular January "Intersession" courses at Johns Hopkins University and culminates in a final show open to all students. He's written humor pieces for The National Lampoon and appears weekly on Food Detectives with Ted Allen."
Two points:
1. Ruben's essay struck me as having been modeled on Dave Barry's column.
2. Ruben was two orders of magnitude off to say that a neuron can grow to be as long as 0.00011 football fields in length. (That's in the essay itself, not Charlie's post.) The longest neuron in the human body is one that reaches from the tail end of the spinal cord to the big toe, a distance of around a meter in tall people. That's more like 0.01 football fields in length. Blue whales probably have even bigger neurons.
Conclusion: If Ruben had been serious in his essay (unlike Dave Barry), he would have bothered to check his one fact.