I’m not in the habit of sending year-end newsletters full of personal and family news. And yet something this year told me I needed to write one. 2022 felt more pivotal, somehow. So if you’ll indulge me, I want to spend a few pages talking about the things that were important to me this year, and how events in the larger world overlapped with my little sphere.

Just when you might have thought podcasting and rich radio storytelling couldn’t get any hotter, along came 2016.

Here’s a short list of exciting developments---and this is just what’s happening here in Boston and Cambridge:

— WBUR and WGBH, rivals since WGBH switched to an all-news-and-talk format in 2010, are both rising in the local ratings. WBUR climbed from 10th in Boston-area audience share in May to 9th in July. WGBH climbed from 14th to 13th. Together the stations claim 6 to 7 percent of the broadcast audience share in Boston—the nation’s single largest cluster of NPR listeners.

— The Public Radio Exchange (PRX) spun off RadioPublic, a new public benefit corporation developing new mobile apps for...

Today Cognoscenti, the op-ed website run by Bostons's NPR station WBUR, published some thoughts I've been developing about the emergence of science denialism and NIMBYism as paralyzing social and political forces, and how people who'd like to see the emergence of healthier forms of public engagement should respond.

The piece is called Beyond the Science Wars: Stories of a Shared Future. 

In some ways the piece is a mini-manifesto for the project I've been working on this year at MIT, the proposed Center for Science Engagement...

Today I'm giving the closing talk of the semester to students in an MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science course called 6.S977 - Technical Communication for Graduate Students. The course is mostly about how to write scientific papers, talks, posters, and grant applications, how to prepare for VC pitches, and the like. But the question for today's wrap-up class is "how to engage the public," and I'm going to spend part of my talk reviewing fun examples of public science outreach and communication by young scientists. 

Today is the 30th anniversary of the fatal, final flight of the space shuttle Challenger. To mark the occasion, I wanted to re-share a short essay I wrote in 2008 for Graham Gordon Ramsay's book A Creative Guide to Exploring Your Life: Self-Reflection Using Photography, Art, and Writing. The piece was republished in slightly different form at Xconomy in 2011. When the disaster unfolded, I was a 19-year-old freshman studying astronomy and physics at Harvard.  The piece focuses on the disaster's personal meaning for me at the time...

At the invitation of my old friend and colleague Michael Fitzgerald, I wrote a piece published today by Nieman Storyboard, a publication of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard that focuses on the craft of journalism.

The article takes a look at some of the technical, logistical, and journalistic decisions that went into the making of The Displaced, a dazzling virtual reality film about refugee children, released for mobile and Web platforms in November 2015 by the New York Times Magazine. 

Following Nieman Storyboard's "Annotation Tuesday!" format, I interviewed Jenna Pirog, the NYT contributing editor who...

Six times a year for the last several years, staff from the MIT Alumni Association have interviewed top MIT faculty in a series of live, registration-only webcasts from MIT under the title Faculty Forum Online. It's one of ways the association keeps MIT alumni up to date about the latest R&D on campus and how Institute researchers are helping to find solutions to important problems around the world. 

In March 2015, MITAA's new director of alumni education, Joe McGonegal, introduced a variation on the webcast formula called Faculty Forum Online, Alumni Edition. The main differences were that the new show would feature MIT alumni rather than faculty, and would use Google Hangouts rather than more expensive and elaborate live webcasting technology.

Joe wanted to find a journalist to host the series, and he invited me in for a tryout. I've since hosted all but one of the sessions. They occur every month or so and typically feature a panel of three researchers who did their undergraduate, graduate, or postdoctoral fellowship work at MIT and are now teaching and researching at other universities. We start with introductions and a short dive into the topic at hand, guided by...

After closing out my year as acting director of the Knight Science Journalism program last May, I plunged straight into producing the massive ScienceWriters2015 conference, held here at MIT in mid-October.

After that extravaganza, which ended up being the largest meeting in the history of the National Association of Science Writers, my life settled down a bit, allowing me to focus full-time on my new role as outreach officer for MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society.

My job this year is to plan a new STS/MIT initiative  aimed at promoting public engagement in technology and science. Much more on that soon.

Already, though, I can share my hope/plan/prediction that  podcasting will be part of the initiative. Which means...

I was thrilled to be the guest this week on the Inquiring Minds podcast with Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari. 

It's a production of Climate Desk, the groundbreaking climate-reporting collaborative backed by The Atlantic, the Center for Investigative Reporting, Grist, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Mother Jones, Slate, and Wired. Previous guests have included folks like Steven Pinker, William Gibson, Adam Savage, Mary Roach, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Mark Ruffalo, and Sylvia Earle.

Indre asked me about all my favorite questions: How disasters (both natural and technological) shape public understanding of, and attitudes toward, science and technology, and why...

One of the drearier memes in media circles today is that it’s a great time for journalism, but a rotten time to be a journalist. Thanks to the Internet, which gives a platform to millions of new voices, readers have more content to choose from than ever before. But the new ways of paying for it—the revenue from cat-video listicles and advertorials supplied by “brand publishers,” plus the semi-philanthropic impulses of owners like Pierre Omidyar or Jeff Bezos—aren’t likely to provide a living wage for large numbers of full-time journalists.

Or so the meme goes. And it’s partly true. The economic challenges facing the news industry are real, and they are particularly acute for specialists, including journalists who cover science, technology, and health, and the environment. 

But they are just that: challenges. Problems have solutions, though their forms may be hard for us to see until they’re upon us. 

It may seem at times that the market is indifferent to our craft. But while there are lingering questions about who will pay us to ...

Last month I received a note that turned out to be just about the best piece of fan mail I've ever received. 

It was from Timothy Jackson, a Technology Review reader who said that my 2007 cover story "Second Earth," which was about the potential confluence of digital mapping tools like Google Earth and virtual worlds like Second Life, changed his own life, providing him with a new career and even leading him into a long-term relationship that's been going on for five years now.

The note was so amazingly nice, not to mention gratifying, that I wrote back to ask Tim if I could share it here. It's reproduced in full below.

To understand Timothy's e-mail, you need a little background about Second Life. Opened in 2003, it's one of the earliest and most extensive online virtual worlds, with about 1 million regular users overall and about 50,000 people online at any given time, according to the company that built it, San Francisco-based Linden Lab. It's a vast, unstructured, user-driven environment where...

I got back to wet and chilly Boston Sunday night after a mind-blowing weekend in Phoenix attending Newsgeist, the future-of-news unconference sponsored by Google and the Knight Foundation. At events like this, there's often admiring buzz around a recent project, product, or company that's seen as the potential model and savior for journalistic storytelling. Back in 2010, at the first iteration of the conference, all the talk was about mobile apps like Instapaper and Flipboard. So, what was hot this year? It was Serial, the new podcast from the team behind This American Life at WBEZ in Chicago.

Over and over again, Newsgeist attendees—and we're talking about 160 of the country's most daring thinkers about the overlap between technology and journalism—said they were completely hooked on Serial, a true-crime story spread across a nine-episode season. Everyone seemed a little surprised and bemused by the idea that...

If you’re a journalist and you spend too much time listening to magazine editors talk about falling advertising and subscription revenues, or checking Columbia Journalism Review or Romenesko for updates on the latest newsroom downsizing, it’s easy to get discouraged about your career choice. 

But now is not the time to lose heart—and in this post I’m going to tell you why. 

First, though, a word of congratulations. If you’re reading this blog, that probably means you chose science, health, environment, or technology reporting as your career. So: kudos to you. It’s a noble calling, and one that will...

Farhad Manjoo is disillusioned. In two recent New York Times posts, he's wondered aloud whether there is a real place for tablet computers in an era when phones are getting bigger and laptops are getting more portable. "Tablets have lately been suffering and identity crisis; there doesn't seem to be much to do on a high-powered tablet that you couldn't do better on a phone or computer," he writes.

Really? How quickly the advent of something shiny and new (<cough>the iPhone 6</cough>) makes us jaded about the previous coolest-thing-ever...