In our “Natural Habitat” series, we invite science writers to share their working spaces — offices, spare bedrooms, coffee shops, hammocks — and the accoutrements that help them do their best work. (If you’d like to nominate your office to be featured at Natural Habitat, let us know.) Today, we drop in on Christie Aschwanden, an [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Tools’
Greg Miller examines mental health care in Indonesia
Posted by Siri Carpenter on June 13th, 2012
For many people in the developing world who are mentally ill, psychiatric care is little more than a prison sentence. In one corner of Indonesia, that’s beginning to change, thanks in part to the 2004 earthquake and tsunami that devastated the region, providing a final impetus to develop a mental health system that had long [...]
Posted in Behind-the-Story Interviews 
Tags: Carpenter, Field Reporting, Miller, Notes, Psychiatry, Science, Tools, Writer Interview 
1 Comment »Natural Habitat: Ed Yong
Posted by Siri Carpenter and Jeanne Erdmann on May 23rd, 2012
In our new series “Natural Habitat,” we invite science writers to share their working spaces — offices, spare bedrooms, coffee shops, hammocks — and the accoutrements that help them do their best work. (If you’d like to nominate your office to be featured at Natural Habitat, let us know.) Here, we visit the working lair [...]
Natural Habitat: Cassandra Willyard
Posted by Siri Carpenter and Jeanne Erdmann on May 3rd, 2012
In our new series “Natural Habitat,” we invite science writers to share their working spaces — offices, spare bedrooms, coffee shops, hammocks — and the accoutrements that help them do their best work. (If you’d like to nominate your office to be featured at Natural Habitat, let us know.) In this first episode of Natural [...]
Daniel Engber dissects the ubiquitous laboratory mouse
Posted by Siri Carpenter on January 11th, 2012
When Slate senior editor Daniel Engber took a month off from his usual duties to research a multi-part series on laboratory mice, he had a thesis — that although the ubiquity of mice as model organisms has clear advantages, it is in some ways damaging to biomedicine. What he needed was stories and characters to [...]
Posted in Behind-the-Story Interviews Tags: Biomedicine, Carpenter, Drafts, Engber, Historical Research, Longform, Notes, Slate, Tools, Writer Interview 3 Comments »Taking good notes: Tricks and tools
Posted by Siri Carpenter and Jeanne Erdmann on December 6th, 2011
Whether you rely on a digital recorder or a laptop or a ragtag collection of mismatched notebooks, you need to take good notes. That doesn’t just mean that your handwriting needs to be legible — though that matters too. It means that your notes capture the essence of what you have observed, from the words [...]
Posted in Elements of Craft Tags: Field Reporting, Grimm, Interviewing, Notes, Notetaking, Reporting, Tools 4 Comments »Maryn McKenna describes life as “Scary-Disease Girl”
Posted by Jeanne Erdmann on August 30th, 2011
For nearly all her career, journalist and author Maryn McKenna has written about public health, from Midwest droughts to bird flu to Gulf War Syndrome. While covering the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, McKenna got the nickname “Scary-Disease Girl,” a moniker that befits the infectious disease beat she has [...]
Posted in Behind-the-Story Interviews Tags: Books, Erdmann, Health, Infectious Disease, McKenna, Notes, Pitches, SciAm, Soundslides, Superbug, Tools, Writer Interview 3 Comments »David Dobbs deconstructs “My Mother’s Lover”
Posted by Siri Carpenter (text) and Jeanne Erdmann (Soundslides) on July 8th, 2011
When journalist David Dobbs’ mother was dying, she shocked her children by asking that her ashes be spread in the waters off the coast of Hawaii, so that she could be with her former lover, “Angus,” who had been shot down over the Pacific in the last days of World War II. This unexpected request, [...]
Podcast: Play in new window
Posted in Behind-the-Story Interviews Tags: Atavist, Carpenter, Dobbs, Drafts, Erdmann, Longform, Narrative, Notes, Soundslides, Structure, Tools, Writer Interview 4 Comments »