Smooth Pebbles

Why I've Gone Back to Seed - or 'Why I Blog More Happily Now'

CHANGE OF VENUE - THIS BLOG HAS MOVED ...

back to Seed's Scienceblogs, and is now under a new name;

NEURON CULTURE

The post below, which is at the new site, explains a bit more about why I moved back into that higher-profile (and higher-traffic) location.

Please change your bookmarks and RSS feaders accordingly:

Bookmark: http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture
RSS/Atom: http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/index.xml

Thanks, and see you at Neuron Culture.

With this post, and with pleasure, I bring the blog formerly known as Smooth Pebbles -- now Neuron Culture (mark your RSS readers!) -- back to Scienceblogs.

Seventeen months ago I said farewell to this Scienceblogs home, at least for a time, because I had not found blogging a comfortable fit. Since then, however, as I blogged off in the hinterland, I've come to better see how this slippery but flexible form can hold a valuable place in both my own writing and in the changing world of journalism.

I've been particularly swayed by the work of bloggers innovatively exploiting the immediacy, constancy, and scalability of this weird form, both in science writing and elsewhere -- among them Carl Zmmer, Jonah Lehrer, Vaughn Bell, Tyler Cohen, Cory Doctorow, Philip Dawdy, the people at Wall Street Journal Health Blog, and Alex Ross, to name a few.

Of all, however, the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, through both his example and his treatises on blogging, has been foremost in helping me see how I might blog more happily and productively,. There's an irony in Sullivan's influence: The biggest page hit I ever got while at Scienceblogs before was when Sullivan blogged my farewell post. It was his post that got me reading him more regularly and closely and thinking about just what he's really doing at the Daily Dish: not just reporting, explaining, and opining -- the reach of most blogs -- but both stimulating and (co-)curating a set of discussions.

Sullivan's blog and others have also shown me that blogging (for which, truly, I wish there were a prettier word) lets you track changing issues in a way that longer-form and more traditional journalism does not. As someone fond of the long form -- of immersing myself in a story and then working it till it's just so before sending it out -- I had (and still have) some trouble getting comfortable with the idea of writing more quickly on subjects I care about. Yet the blog form -- more quickly launched, more scaleable -- lets you examine issues more steadily, repeatedly, and collaboratively than traditional journalism does, and these advantages hold an increasing attraction to me.. Some my key subjects seem especially ripe for this approach.

Consider, for instance, the almost operatic crisis growing within psychiatry right now, as scandals embarrass the discipline and the drug-dominated monoamine hypothesis of depression is transformed from a badge of empiricism to a contradiction of it. I could write a book on the convolutions psychiatry is undergoing right now, and may yet do so. Yet the blogosphere is already shaping public discussion of this issue as much as more traditional newspaper and magazine stories do -- partly because blogs can visit the issue(s) more steadily and (over time) more thoroughly, and partly because the blogosphere can mix both the first-rate, invaluable mainstream reporting of people like Gardiner Harris and the digging, personal perspectives, and inside dish from people like Daniel Carlat, Philip Dawdy, Liz Spikol, and the folks at Pharmalot.

Same thing can be said for the growing momemtum for school reform, health care reform, and universal health care; the conflict in medicine between empiricism and research driven by commercial interests; and the revision of psychiatry's Diagnostic Statistical Manual.

I hope to use this space to track and contribute to all those discussions and also to track the less complicated and laden puzzles pleasures of science and medicine, like how the brain works -- not to mention music, sports, literature, and odd bits of culture.

Enough treatise. You actually came here for links? Okay: Below the fold, a few things I might have blogged on this past week had I not been enjoying the holidays, doing the drudge techy work of transferring this blog over from Typepad, and writing this:

A highly interesting review of Gladwell's "Outliers"

Micheal Nielsen gets swiftly to a problem many scientists (and not a few writers) have with Gladwell's books -- and highlights their redeeming factors as well:

All three of Malcolm Gladwell's books pose a conundrum for the would-be reviewer. The conundrum is this: while the books have many virtues, none of the books make a watertight argument for their central claims. Many scientists, trained to respect standards of proof above all else, don't like this style. A colleague I greatly respect told me he thought Gladwell's previous book, Blink , was "terrible"; it didn't meet his standards of proof. Judge Richard Posner wrote a scathing review criticizing Blink on the same grounds.

Gladwell's gift as a writer is not for justification and proof of his claims. What Gladwell does have is an extraordinary gift to use stories to explain abstract ideas in a way that is vivid and memorable, a way that brings those abstract ideas quickly to mind at later need. This shamanic gift is dangerous, for if you read his books credulously, it leaves you open to believing ideas that may be false. It%u2019s also incredibly valuable, for what you learn you internalize deeply. In my opinion, this more than makes up for whatever Gladwell's books lack in rigorous justification.

Hat tip: Neuronarrative

Technorati Tags:
Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers

Oops -- make that "garters!" Media errors corrected

Via Kottke

Regret the Error has released their annual roundup of media errors and corrections for 2008. The absurd corrections are always the best:

We have been asked to point out that Stuart Kennedy, of Flat E, 38 Don Street, Aberdeen, who appeared at Peterhead Sheriff Court on Monday, had 316 pink, frilly garters confiscated not 316 pink, frilly knickers.

And this:

A film review on Sept. 5 about "Save Me" confused some characters and actors. It is Mark, not Chad, who is sent to the Genesis House retreat for converting gay men to heterosexuality. (Mark is played by Chad Allen; there is no character named Chad). The hunky fellow resident is Scott (played by Robert Gant), not Ted (Stephen Lang). And it is Mark and Scott -- not "Chad and Ted" -- who partake of cigarettes and "furtive man-on-man action."

Sullivan on death of newspapers

Forgive if I'm obsessed with this death-of-journalism thingn -- Andrew Sullivan has a nice piece in the Times of London about dying newspapers. Like Surowiecki, he fears the loss of the deep reporting that newspapers are already doing less of, and for which so far we have no real replacement venue.

Stunning stat from the story: The Baltimore Sun, a pretty big and renowned paper (and the basis for The Wire) gets about 17.5 million page views a month. Sullivan's blog at Atlantic gets 23 million:

The operation largely run out of my spare room reached many more online readers than some of the biggest and most loss-making papers in the country. The economics are remorseless: as news goes online, the economic model for papers cannot survive. If advertising follows page views, the game will shortly be over.

The terrifying problem is that a one-man blog cannot begin to do the necessary labour-intensive, skilled reporting that a good newspaper sponsors and pioneers. A world in which reporting becomes even more minimal and opinion gets even more vacuous and unending is not a healthy one for a democracy. Perhaps private philanthropists will step in and finance not-for-profit journalistic centres, where investigative and foreign reporting can be invested in and disseminated by blogs and online sites. Maybe reporter-bloggers will start rivalling opinion-mongers such as me and give the whole enterprise some substance. Maybe papers can slim down sufficiently to produce a luxury print issue and a viable online product. There’s always a hunger for news, after all.

Technorati Tags:
Andrew Sullivan, journalism

Lost news, who loses, and the end of the world

James Surowiecki gives us the bad news and the bad news about newspapers. After noting that ad revenue dropped 18 percent in the third quarter alone, he gets on to causes and ultimate effects:

People don’t use the Times less than they did a decade ago. They use it more. The difference is that today they don’t have to pay for it. The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn’t the Internet; it’s us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free. That’s a consumer’s dream, but eventually it’s going to collide with reality: if newspapers’ profits vanish, so will their product....

For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime—intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on—and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.