Attention-grabbing anecdote about science-related issue.
Short biographical sketch of quirky researcher working on scientific problem.
Short explanation of the scientific problem’s history and significance.
Anecdote about quirky researcher’s work on scientific problem.
Short explanation connecting back to initial attention-grabbing anecdote.
Pithy summary of What It All Means.
(Repeat steps 2-4 as needed to fill out word count.)
I got a review copy of The Best American Science Writing 2007 from Seed a little while ago, but I haven’t had much time to read lately. I spent six hours on a bus yesterday, though, going down to MIT and back with a group of physics students, and that seemed like an appropriate occasion for reading it. I haven’t finished it (more on that below), but I read 14 of the collected articles in the course of the trip.
Unfortunately, the rattling and shaking of the bus didn’t really put me in the best mood, so this commentary might be harsher than it really needs to be. As you can guess from the above, though, I wasn’t exactly blown away.
There’s a depressing sameness to these articles when you read a whole bunch of them back to back, as if the authors were working from some sort of generic formula. I don’t know if this is a general characteristic of the field, or if it reflects the personal taste of celebrity editor Gina Kolata or series editor Jesse Cohen (see David Foster Wallace’s introduction to the Best American Essays collection for an explanation of how this works), but it wore thin.
It was especially bad in the great wodge of medically-oriented stories in the first half of the book. There are seven consecutive medical/ neuroscience stories in a row, and I made it through five before I couldn’t take it any more. My apologies to Denise Grady and Jerome Groopman, whose stories I skipped, but I was thoroughly sick of Oliver Sacks and imitation Oliver Sacks, and jumped ahead to Matthew Chapman’s story about the Dover Panda Trial.
Chapman didn’t depart from the formula by all that much– it’s still a mix of quirky anecdotes and biographical sketches– but at least he inserts some of his own personality into the story, which gives it a different feel. It’s not all that great– there was a blog by a Pennsylvaia reporter covering the trial who did a much better job with the same material (alas, I don’t recall his name)– but it was a refreshing contrast to the stuff around it.
It also didn’t help anything that the physical science content of this volume is almost nil. One of the twenty collected essays is about physics, and that’s a piece from Esquire about string theory and the LHC. Unfortunately, it’s written with the level of technical sophistication that you would expect from an article in Esquire, so not only is it the umpty-zillionth pop article about string theory and the LHC, it’s not even a particularly good explanation of the issues involved.
Again, I’m not sure if this reflects the tastes of the editors, or if this is just a reflection of the extremely limited range of physics articles available to draw from. I suspect it’s the latter, which is rather annoying, as there’s a lot more to physics than string theory and particle physics. We’re not all sitting around twiddling our thumbs and holding our breath waiting for the next giant accelerator to come along– there are hundreds and thousands of physicists out there doing fascinating work right now, with equipment that actually exists. Many of them are even quirky enough to provide amusing biographical anecdotes.
If you’re a magazine or newspaper editor, and you’d like to expand the range of your physical science content but don’t know how, send me an email. We’ll talk. But enough with the particle physics articles, already.
I don’t want to give the impression that reading this book was unremitting misery. There’s some fascinating science described in these articles, and some of the quirky anecdotes are really well done. The Grisha Perelman piece by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber is an outstanding example of the form. Joshua Davis’s story about face blindness and the role of the Internet in making it a research topic was fascinating. Atul Gawande’s “The Score” includes some great reflections on the history and progress of obstetrics. And Jennifer Couzin’s piece about the experiences of a group of biology students who turned their advisor in for falsifying data ought to be required reading for every discussion on scientific ethics.
But really, somebody needs to shake up the form, because every one of the stories I read had exactly the same format and feel. They all have the same basic elements, in the same basic order, and by the end I was desperate for something– anything– to liven things up a bit.