"American Hustle" won multiple Oscar nominations for a story of which it advised, "Some of this actually happened." Now, longtime New Yorker science writer Paul Brodeur is suing its makers for libel over a scene that, he alleges, misquotes him: "Jennifer Lawrence's character Roslyn tells her husband, Irving, played by Christian Bale, that microwaves take the nutrition out of food," Austin Siegemund-Broka writes. "'I read it in an article. Look, by Paul Brodeur.'"
Science writing news
David Finkel has won a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur "genius grant" for his reporting on soldiers at war and at home, and on the attempted democratization of Yemen. He spoke to Nieman Storyboard about his methods: "If I’m having problems writing, it’s probably I haven’t organized well enough. If I’m having problems organizing, it’s probably because I haven’t reported thoroughly enough. You take a step back to the previous thing and it’ll solve the thing you’re in."
Tabitha M. Powledge discusses new projections for Earth's population: "If Homo sap‘s birth and death rates remain more or less as they are, we will grow from 7 billion plus today to number 12 billion people by the end of this century, according to a semi-terrifying new model of population growth just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." Also, a requiem for some long-gone word processing software, and more on sex ratios in lab animals.
Bethany Brookshire doesn't have much patience with scientists who say they want to be science writers but don't have time to write: "I didn’t have the time either. I MADE the time. I spent a lot of nights short on sleep. I spent a lot of nights NOT out with my friends … I worked some rough hours in the lab, and then I came home and wrote blog posts. I went to full huge days of conferences, out to the parties, and then came back to the hotel room and wrote blog posts."
Tom Siegfried examines how journalism's ingrained definitions of what makes a big news story can lead reporters to write about studies that are anything but sound science: "Many of the criteria that confer newsworthiness on a scientific report tend to skew coverage toward results that are unlikely to stand up to future scrutiny. Journalists like to write stories about findings that are 'contrary to previous belief,' for instance. But such findings are often bogus."
Poynter's Benjamin Mullin has compiled a list of 37 news organizations that offer internships, ranging in length from a summer to a year, but he warns that delay can be deadly — many of them have deadlines coming right up: "Don’t get left behind. Some of the applications for the most prestigious news organizations are due in a few weeks time, so work up the courage to request that letter of recommendation, update your résumé and figure out how stamps work."
Harvard's Steven Pinker argues that "bogus" rules about grammar are the enemy of good writing, and sometimes of good government as well, as when Chief Justice John Roberts "administered the oath of office to Barack Obama in January, 2009, and un-split a verb in the oath of office. He’s a famous stickler. He almost precipitated a constitutional crisis because it wasn’t clear whether the administration of the oath of office was legitimate in its transfer of power."
Some scientists have been working to make the flu, SARS, and MERS viruses more infective to better study them. At least, Tabitha M. Powledge writes, that was the case until last week, when the U.S. government announced a "pause" on funding such "gain-of-function" studies: "Bioterrorism has been much less of a risk than accidents emanating from well-meant research efforts to protect ourselves," she writes. "Thus the White House has decided to err … on the side of safety."
Cryptomnesia has been defined as “the belief that a thought is novel when in fact it is a memory,” Maria Popova writes, and it's something that can trip up even the best writers as a result: "Helen Keller experienced the repercussions of this phenomenon when she was accused of plagiarism, Henry Miller questioned it when he wrote 'And your way, is it really your way?' and Coleridge often tripped over the fine line between unconscious borrowing and deliberate theft."