I…I just don’t know where to begin with the opening to this article in the latest issue of Esquire. “Pretty lady”? “The new poor part of town”? A noxious martini of mixed metaphors topped with an olive of ridiculous hype. (Forget it–I can’t compete with this stuff.)

If we science writers want to defend our old-fashioned craft against its critics, how do we defend stuff like this?

First thing that happens when you have a heart attack, an unlucky part of your heart turns white. The blood’s stopped pumping to that spot, so it becomes pink-speckled bloodlessness, coarse and cool like grapefruit gelatin.

Continue reading “Annals of Bad Science Writing: Lab-Worn Doctor-Lady [sic]” →

The latest edition of Open Lab, the annual anthology of science blogging, is coming out soon. Here is the line-up. Thanks to the editors for including my post on love and betrayal among the blood flukes. 

Originally published January 11, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.

More thoughts on the origin of life, over at the Year of Science web site. 

Originally published January 10, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.

I moderate the comments for this blog, but only lightly. Over the past five years, I’ve had 8,720 comments posted on this blog. Out of all the people who left comments on the Loom, I can only recall banning two.

I don’t block comments from people just because they believe the Earth is a few thousand years old or have some other non-scientific notion of how the world works. I don’t mind being told I’m wrong (even if I’m right). It’s also fine with me if commenters get fierce in their exchanges with each other. I’m not going police writing style.

But I do get bored with comment threads that wander off far from the original post, into tedious viciousness, purely narcissistic self-justifications, and other pointless enterprises.

Continue reading “Comment Policy” →

Don’t these people know I have work to do? The delectable distractions continue to pile up:

1. After suffering blog burnout, writer David Dobbs has experienced a blog rebirth. Check out his revival, Neuron Culture, for observations on the twenty-first century mind.

2. John Whitfield, another writer worth reading, is blogging his reading of The Origin of Species over the next few days at Blogging the Origin.

Continue reading “Blogs Resurgent” →