If you’re looking for an article from the MIT Knight Science Journalism Program’s Tracker blog, well, you’ve come to the right place. The full archive — including all comments and most images — now resides on this server. After February, 2016, the Tracker was superseded by KSJ’s new digital science magazine, Undark. But visitors interested in mining […]
A farewell post: Three reasons why good science writing is worth defending.
After five-and-a-half years as a media critic at the Tracker, I’m more convinced than ever that science writing is thriving. I said that recently to Bethany Brookshire of Science News, and she seemed surprised. I asked why, and she said: “Because of what you write.” I knew what she meant. I haven’t checked this out, […]
Globe story on non-invasive prenatal testing offers murky argument.
An ominous headline in The Boston Globe on Dec. 14 promised a good, tough investigative story: “Oversold prenatal tests spur some to choose abortions,” it read. That seemed to be a story that would indict the marketing of the tests. Or perhaps it was suggesting that the tests are not accurate–prenatal testing does indeed lead some […]
(UPDATED/2*) What Ho? A 2014 List of Lists of best, worst, or otherwisest in 2014
Well, hello again. Charlie here and does time not fly? An unexpected email arrived the other day from Paul Raeburn, head and sole surviving blogger for the KSJ Tracker as the curtain closes on its run of 8+ years. A successor of some sort is promised by the powers-that-be but it is still […]
Cancer & poverty: When a reporter’s journey becomes part of the story.
“I thought I understood poor. I grew up poor in Athens, the daughter of a single mother of five,” Virginia Lynne Anderson wrote recently in a story in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But while working on the story, she “came to realize there’s a big difference between being poor and living in poverty. When you are […]
Malcolm Gladwell faces new charges of using others’ information without attribution.
This paragraph was plagiarized: In the mid-nineteenth century, workers began digging through Hoosac Mountain, a massive impediment nearly five miles thick, for a rail line to connect Boston to the Hudson River. The project would cost more than ten times the budgeted estimate. If the people involved had known that, the line would not have […]