Insights

The New York Times published a beautiful interactive earlier this week showing how U.S. greenhouse gas emissions might be reduced if the United States adopted seven of the most ambitious climate policies already in place around the world.

The interactive also beautifully illustrates something else: why researchers who want to make impact on polarized issues can’t just present data or findings. … Read the rest

I hope you’ve seen the new letter in Nature showing that smaller science teams produce research that’s more disruptive than the research produced by larger teams.

The smaller the team, the more disruptive the science it produces. No matter the field, and no matter the comparative sizes of the teams.… Read the rest

​We’re awash in the industry of storytelling:

• Storytelling consultants selling storytelling templates and workshops and webinars and books, all with guidance for the majority of us afflicted with the lack of confidence to tell compelling stories but who conveniently, it turns out, just need a little paid training to unlock and unleash the unique story within us and to recognize the great characters in our lives and turn those, too, into powerful stories, all in order to revolutionize our impact, performance and lives.

[Reading time: 2 minutes]

Like everyone else who lives in DC, I wake up stressed and jangly, irritated that this supposed necessity of sleep (all four hours of it, or three or one) has done nothing but amp up my FOMO.… Read the rest

[Reading time: 106 seconds]

I know probably a dozen scientists who privately confide that they think the idea Earth is in its Sixth Extinction Event possesses a distinct barnyard odor.

So why is the idea we’re in a Sixth Extinction Event so firmly entrenched?… Read the rest

(Average reading time: 105 seconds.)

Let’s say you’re a researcher who wants more impact than publishing research alone gives you.

Or you’re an communicator or marketer who works with those researchers.

Then you should be reading Aaron Carroll’s regular column in The New York Times’s The Upshot and his blog on health economics, The Incidental Economist.… Read the rest

Deep into yesterday’s email, I used the phrase “expertise content” where I meant “authority content.”

Bad mistake. Apologies. Thirty lashes. Will never happen again.

Why do I feel so strongly about this?

Look at this Aaron E. Carroll analysis in The New York Times of the recent meta-analysis in The Lancet that concluded any amount of alcohol consumption increases your risk for all sorts of bad things happening to you.… Read the rest

Yes, I hate that headline, too.

But I clicked on the underlying content (from LinkedIn)— and the list turned out to fit beautifully with the needs of research-driven institutions.

If, that is, they’re read to move past mere research communications.… Read the rest