Journalist Mac McClelland has reported from hazardous locations around the world. She spent three years as a human-rights reporter for Mother Jones magazine. She hunted down a warlord in the Congo. She lived with Burmese […]
The podcast world is booming, and so is its audience. According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of adults who’ve plugged into a podcast has more than doubled since 2008, from 9 percent […]
In her June 2016 Harper’s feature “Hashtag Prescription: The Hidden Costs of Crowdsourcing a Cure,” Helen Ouyang tells the story of Josh Hardy, a boy who is very ill with kidney cancer and might benefit […]
It’s an assignment that evokes equal parts dread and adrenaline rush in a reporter. Go to an American town devastated by a drug epidemic that led to the largest HIV outbreak in U.S. history. Once […]
In her Pulitzer Prize–winning 2014 book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert details the evidence that human activity is causing what scientists call the sixth mass extinction—the loss of as many as […]
In December 2014, after a day of gambling in Atlantic City with colleagues, Steve Mishkin, a mathematician from Brooklyn, New York, somehow fell on a train platform, hit his head, and suffered a catastrophic brain […]
When biologist and Nobel laureate Tim Hunt made spectacularly sexist remarks in a public forum, Twitter was there. When a scientist for the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission appeared on TV in a shirt adorned […]
Most people are familiar with the devastating effects of malignancies and with the so-called War on Cancer, the U.S. government’s intensified focus on cancer research, beginning in the 1970s. But few have witnessed firsthand the […]
Science writers often endure bad weather, arduous field conditions, uncooperative subjects, and other hardships to report stories. And we do it with glee. Most of us love every minute of following scientists into the field, […]
Journalist Brooke Borel had written numerous stories about the science of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) when she stumbled upon a strange discovery about a well-known plant scientist, Kevin Folta, who’d been promoting GMO science on […]
Most of us have experienced the moment of truth when thunder fractures the quiet of an afternoon and a stray lightning bolt streaks across the sky in the distance and we wonder: What are the odds that’s close enough to reach me?
Kathryn Schulz’s New Yorker story “The Really Big One” opens in Japan, moments before the 2011 Tohuku earthquake. American seismologist Chris Goldfinger, who is attending an international conference in the city of Kashiwa, feels the room begin to shake.
Asking for More: Negotiating Rates for Freelance Assignments
Good Beginnings: How to Write a Lede Your Editor—and Your Readers—Will Love
Pitching Errors: How Not to Pitch
Michelle Nijhuis’s Brief Guide to Writing Reported Essays
David Tuller Untangles the Research History of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Tools: Planner Pad, the Funnel of Focus
Office Hours with Douglas Starr
Data Journalism: A Primer for Science Journalists
Trading the Pipette for the Pen: Transitioning from Science to Science Writing
Kathryn Schulz Paints a Chilling Picture of “The Really Big One”
Finding the Science in Any Story
Office Hours with Stephen Ornes
The Open Notebook has earned a GuideStar Gold Seal for our commitment to transparency in sharing information important to donors.
Follow Us