The Benshi

The world of science has something new — the first significant film festival specifically for science-related films.  It’s called The Imagine Science Film Festival.  It occurs in October in New York City.  Alexis Gambis is the Director of the festival.  The first year they had roughly 500 audience members.  This year they had 3500.  It appears to be a smashing success, but there’s one catch. Putting together a film festival is an incredibly difficult endeavor (I know, I’m close friends with a co-founder of the Los Angeles Film Festival and I’ve heard his war stories).  And I’m concerned that so far the science community neither knows the difficulty of creating such events, nor the long term importance of film festivals.

Read the rest of this entry »

Happy New Year and welcome to this new “on-line journal” which will be a collection of essays.  It will be sort of a continuation of thoughts from my book, “Don’t Be Such a Scientist:  Talking Substance in an Age of Style.”  In the essays, which will be roughly twice a week, I will be making reference to parts of the book from time to time.

The book is reviewed this week in Science and last month in Nature.  In both cases they paired it with Cory Dean’s, “Am I Making Myself Clear,” which is not only an honor to be in her company (she of the NY Times Science Section), it’s also a great combo because the two books fit together well.  Her book is more of a practical guide in communicating science to the public, mine is more conceptual — sort of like “ways to align your brain before you even start thinking about what you’re going to say.”   

Both reviews are positive, but there are things that Peter Kareiva said in his review in Science that are so important and well stated they actually go substantially beyond the book.  I’m going to explore a few of them in the first few essays I write here, so let me start with the idea of addressing critics of the book (or actually NOT addressing critics), and his comment along those lines.

Read the rest of this entry »