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Poet Adrienne Raphel writes about her fascination with typography, including stories about font experiments with her cohort at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a warning about the hazard of choosing the wrong one: "In July 2012, when scientists at CERN announced that they’d possibly found the Higgs boson, their study was nearly undermined by its font: the physicists presented their findings in Comic Sans, the sans-serif scapegoat once reserved for sparkly MySpace pages."

Alana Hope Levinson surveys her colleagues about why women dominate social media positions in newsrooms while they remain scarce in management: "It’s hard not to hear these stories and draw a parallel to public relations, an industry where 85 percent of workers are women." Also, Hilda Bastian on the outage factor in the reaction to Nobel laureate Tim Hunt’s comments on women in science. And is anonymous Internet harassment a civil rights issue?

Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber resigned in February, hours after a newspaper reported that the governor's staff tried to delete a trove of official email from state servers. Nigel Jaquiss writes about what happened next to Michael Rodgers, the state employee who leaked the news: "Rodgers may be the latest casualty of the Kitzhaber scandal, an unprecedented chapter in Oregon political history that has altered much more than the lives of a four-term governor and his fiancee."

Laura Dattaro writes about the establishment of a volunteer board of statisticians to give journalists advice on mathematical and statistical issues via Stats.org: "When a science journalist on a deadline hears a researcher cured cancer, and the paper — if she has time to read the paper — is filled with subtly distorted graphs, she often has to take the researcher’s word for it." Also, a upcoming MOOC on math for journalists.

Reporting on health care can make you wary of fad diets, Google, and excessive medical care, Julia Belluz and Sarah Kliff write: "Medical errors kill more people than car crashes or new disease outbreaks. They kill more people annually than breast cancer, AIDS, plane crashes, or drug overdoses. Depending on which estimate you use, medical errors are either the third or ninth leading cause of death in the United States." More from Beth Skwarecki.

From Jack Limpert comes a discussion of non-English terms like "folie à deux" and reflections on their overuse from the likes of Orwell: "Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones."

More big news from the American Copy Editors Society annual conference. Ben Zimmer writes that purists may be giving ground on the use of "they" as a substitute for "he or she" and other kludges: "English sorely lacks a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun, and 'they' has for centuries been pressed into service for that purpose, much to the grammarians’ chagrin. Now, it seems, those who have held the line against singular 'they' may be easing their stance."

American Hustle's lawyers tried an odd strategy in a libel suit from science writer Paul Brodeur, Eriq Gardner writes. Brodeur claims he was defamed when a character in the film said he'd written that microwave ovens destroyed nutrition. The strategy, from a defense brief: "The statement made by 'unhinged' fictional character Rosalyn in the 'screwball farce' American Hustle is not reasonably understood as a statement of fact." It didn't work.

Forget computers. The birth of data journalism, Scott Klein writes, can be traced to Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. In 1848, with Greeley temporarily sitting in Congress, his paper ran a story suggesting that many congressmen legally padded their mileage: "Among the accused stood Abraham Lincoln, in his only term as congressman. Lincoln’s travel from faraway Springfield, Illinois, made him the recipient of some $677 in excess mileage — more than $18,700 today."

Matt Shipman lists six reasons scientists should make an effort to call attention to the fruits of their research. They include keeping funders happy, finding collaborators, and recruiting grad students: "Publicizing your work doesn’t have to be particularly time consuming. If you work for an institution that has public information officers (like me), let them know about forthcoming findings in a timely way (i.e., as soon as you get your acceptance notification)."