{"id":2006,"date":"2007-11-27T08:13:59","date_gmt":"2007-11-27T08:13:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/11\/27\/science-is-not-notable\/"},"modified":"2007-11-27T08:13:59","modified_gmt":"2007-11-27T08:13:59","slug":"science-is-not-notable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/11\/27\/science-is-not-notable\/","title":{"rendered":"Science Is Not Notable"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scott Eric Kaufman draws my attention<\/a> to the fact that the New York Times<\/cite> has posted its Notable Books for 2007 list<\/a>. The list is divided into “Fiction & Poetry” and “Non-Fiction,” and Scott correctly notes that the “Fiction & Poetry” books all have terrible blurbs, but I’d like to point out a much larger problem with the list, relating to the “Non-Fiction” category:<\/p>\n

\n

There is not a single science book on the list of “Notable Books” for the year.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There are books on history, books on politics, personal memoirs, collections of critical essays, but nothing about science. There are biographies galore, but no biographies of scientists.<\/p>\n

If nothing else, I wouldn’ve thought Natalie Angier’s The Canon<\/cite><\/a> would’ve made the list– it got mixed reviews hereabouts, but she works for the Times<\/cite>. But, no. They don’t even list Walter Isaacson’s biography of Einstein, which has drawn raves.<\/p>\n

So, what the hell? Is this some draft version of the list, including everything but science books, or would the Times<\/cite> have us believe that there were no<\/strong> “notable” science books written in the past year? I find that a little hard to believe, given that Amazon managed to find a few<\/a>, and the Times<\/cite> has reviewed a fair number of them<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If you read any notable science books this year, leave the titles in the comments, so if the Times<\/cite> manages to stumble across this, they can see what they’re missing.<\/p>\n

To paraphrase Brad DeLong, why, oh why can’t we have a better Paper of Record?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scott Eric Kaufman draws my attention to the fact that the New York Times has posted its Notable Books for 2007 list. The list is divided into “Fiction & Poetry” and “Non-Fiction,” and Scott correctly notes that the “Fiction & Poetry” books all have terrible blurbs, but I’d like to point out a much larger… Continue reading Science Is Not Notable<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,11,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-science","category-science_books","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2006\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}