The Intersection » Hollywood and Science

Deb Blum’s Great New Book, The Poisoner’s Handbook

Chris Mooney — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:12:41 +0000

I am currently reading The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, by one of our great science writers, Deborah Blum. She will, I hope, be a guest on Point of Inquiry at some point.

Blum weaves a masterful tale of how modern forensic medicine emerged during the era of Prohibition as a doctor-toxicologist team hunt down murderers who use arsenic, mercury, and cyanide, and try to protect the public health from threats like tetraethyl lead, wood alcohol, and carbon monoxide. Move over, CSI Miami–here’s CSI 1920s New York. Just amazing stuff; no wonder Blum is at around # 240 0n Amazon right now….

Reflections from ScienceOnline 2010

Chris Mooney — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:52:34 +0000

I was thrilled to attend this fast-growing conference and get to see great peeps like Sheril K, Darlene Cavalier, Carl Zimmer, Tom Levenson, Isis, SciCurious, Jennifer Ouellette, and many, many more.

I didn’t always attend the panels (and only spoke on one, last minute) but I did have some reflections:

1. Science and Entertainment: Beyond Blogging – Tamara Krinsky and Jennifer Ouellette: Hollywood getting into science = definitely cool. But will Hollywood’s ace marketers ever see a real need to court science bloggers to get the word out about films, given the relatively small size of our audiences and the vastness of their ad budgets? Not clear to me how much *we* matter, at least so far.

2. Trust and Critical Thinking – Stephanie Zvan, PZ Myers, Desiree Schell, Greg Laden, Kirsten Sanford. Yes, science on the web is a total mess. But trying to “certify” good/accurate science bloggers, vs. bad/biased ones, is an idea that poses more problems than solutions. And anyway, bloggers aren’t the gold standard of scientific accuracy–scientific societies, the NAS, the IPCC, etc, are. Science bloggers should raise the profile of these organizations, ...

Unscientific America on KPBS San Diego

Sheril Kirshenbaum — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 12:22:12 +0000

Tuesday morning I was delighted to chat with Maureen Cavanaugh on KPBS San Diego’s These Days. We covered a lot of the central themes in Unscientific America and I especially enjoyed hearing from callers!

The full interview is now available online here.

Scripps SciComm Post IV: Jennifer Ouellette on Science in Hollywood

Chris Mooney — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:45:12 +0000

We started off this morning with a real treat: A talk by Jennifer Ouellette, science writer and now director of the the National Academy of Sciences’ Science and Entertainment Exchange. Jennifer talked about how despite past tensions between the two groups–and occasionally egregious anti-science, like the Eli Stone anti-vaccine storyline–Hollywood now appears to be increasingly interested in real science and the plots it can impel. Granted, there are still plenty of “socially inept nerds” and “literally mad scientists” (as in Fringe) to be found; but such stereotypes are increasingly balanced by really good stuff, like Bones or Numb3rs.

Jennifer’s central point was that scientists have to stop being in full-on criticism mode towards entertainment, and instead, should work to bridge the gap with creative people–who are very open to using as much science as they can to tell a good story. We all just need to take our defenses down, and focus on commonalities rather than differences. That’s what the National Academies started late last year with a gala event bringing together luminaries from both fields, and “they just started talking to each other,” said Jennifer.

“It is not scientists swooping in to correct Hollywood,” she emphasized. “We do not ...

PZ Myers vs. Unscientific America: Part II

The Intersection — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:30:29 +0000

In this post, we continue our response to PZ Myers’ review of our book, Unscientific America. For those who’ve just arrived, we previously laid out the course our response would take here, and began to respond here. This is the third post, and there will be one more after it.

5. American Anti-Science. Myers claims the book “entirely neglects the anti-scientific forces.” This is false.

First, Chris wrote an entire book dealing with this problem. That book, The Republican War on Science, dealt very extensively with the anti-science forces and put them in their place.

Unscientific America tries not to reinvent the wheel, but rather to go beyond its predecessor–and indeed, we’ve been describing it as the sequel to The Republican War on Science. This time around, we don’t structure the book by scientific topic, so you won’t find chapter-length refutations of the creationists, the global warming deniers, and so on. However, Chris has refuted them all at great length elsewhere, and they get more than adequate licks in the new book as well. (Indeed, we’ve added some smackdowns of the anti-vaccinationists this time around!)

Perhaps Myers would have preferred a book that contained nothing more than entertaining skewerings ...

PZ Myers vs. Unscientific America: Summary

The Intersection — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:23:41 +0000

We’ve thoroughly read, and now plan to respond in detail to PZ Myers’ review of our book.

But first, some throat clearing. It may seem odd for authors to respond so extensively to their critics. In the olden days, such exchanges happened very slowly, if at all, through letters to the editor, and usually they weren’t very long. But this is the Internet age, and there are very different circumstances here:

The People Want It. Hordes of commenters are demanding that we respond to PZ.

PZ Asked For It. Myers did not write a balanced review, an indifferent review, or even a negative review. Rather, he misrepresented our book, got its arguments wrong, assaulted its authors (“their hypocritical and ignorant paean to mealy-mouthedness”), and finally ended by concluding that our labor of over a year is “utterly useless.”

We may not be capable of objectivity judging our own work. But we’re also receiving many supportive emails from people who like the book, are seeing it spark constructive dialogue about solutions on places like Chad Orzel’s blog or RealClimate.org, and are witnessing the careful weighing of its arguments’ strengths and weaknesses at places like Neurotopia. How could a book that is ...

Salon.com Adaptation of Unscientific America

Chris Mooney — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 09:33:04 +0000

Today is the official publication date of Unscientific America, and the first of our articles related to the book is out, in Salon.com. It’s a piece focused on the entertainment industry and its role in perpetrating negative images of science–with a central focus on Michael Crichton, who also perpetrated outright misinformation about global warming.

The article starts with the film Angels & Demons, and the story of CERN, wrongly thought to be carrying out all manner of dangerous science–and then gets to the big thesis:

The experience of CERN is, more broadly, the experience of science in our culture today. It is simultaneously admired and yet viewed as dangerously powerful and slightly malevolent — an uneasiness that comes across repeatedly in Hollywood depictions. As science-fiction film director James Cameron (“Aliens,” “Terminator,” “Titanic”) has observed, the movies tend to depict scientists “as idiosyncratic nerds or actively the villains.” That’s not only unfair to scientists: It’s unhealthy for the place of science in our culture — no small matter at a time of climate crisis, bioweapon threats, pandemic diseases and untold future controversies that will surely erupt as science continues to dramatically change our world and our politics. To begin to counter this ...

Unscientific America on Bloggingheads With Carl Zimmer

Chris Mooney — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:56:38 +0000

Here it is, and I think it may be the best diavlog we’ve done yet:

These are the different segments of the conversation, and we actually had some significant disagreements about the role of education in solving our problem, and other matters. I think it was a great talk:

Science Saturday: The War on Ignorance
Chris’s new book, “Unscientific America” (02:23)
Carl vs. Chris on how to fight scientific illiteracy (16:03)
A brief history of science’s image problem (09:10)
Do we need another Carl Sagan? (04:46)
If bloggers can’t make science cool again, who can? (09:17)
The culture gap between Hollywood and the scientific community (08:38)

Carl is also going to be introducing me when I give a book talk in New Haven, CT, on July 21. ...

UP With Pixar!

Sheril Kirshenbaum — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:35:52 +0000

As if this marine biologist needed any more reason to adore the folks that brought us one of the greatest ocean themed films of all time…

I not only thoroughly enjoyed UP, but must also commend Pixar for the distance they went to help little Colby Curtin. So on the summer solstice, we celebrate the amazing animation studio with a clip from Finding Nemo. (Watch for the shout out to sea cucumbers):

Randy Olson’s Forthcoming Book: Don’t Be Such a Scientist

Chris Mooney — Sat, 30 May 2009 16:59:15 +0000

Olson, a scientist and filmmaker whose work we much admire, has a book coming out in September that dovetails with many of the things we’ve also been saying about the problem of science communication. It has this provocative title: Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style. A book website has just gone up, and the table of contents are thusly described:

Introduction – The need for a new approach to science communication in an age of information overload. In the words of communication theorist Richard Lanham (“The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information,” 2007), “style and substance, and our expectations for them, have changed places.” It’s not about “dumbing down,” it’s about using style as a means of communicating substance.

Chapter 1 – Don’t Be So Cerebral – The need to draw ...