Science Is to Journalism As a Fish Is to a Bicycle. At The Guardian site, Martin Robbins has nailed everything that's wrong with science news on "general interest" websites in this pitch-perfect parody.
It gets at the heart of the uneasy marriage between science and newspaper journalism. Mediocrity, timidity and stupidity are some of Robbins' targets, as they are for any satirist ("to pad out this section," runs his generic news article, "I will include a variety of inane facts about the subject of the research that I gathered by Googling the topic and reading the Wikipedia article that appeared as the first link"). More interestingly, though, much of the shabbiness he mocks would not be cured by harder, better work. This is because the industry's standards for "good journalism" aren't compatible with the standards of good science. Newspaper journalism, and its Web descendant, presumes a simple epistemology: there are facts; the reporter finds those facts; the reporter presents them.
Big Think. 483 - The Great European Shouting Match. If Europe has one defining cultural characteristic, it is that it has none.
This may sound like too neat a paradox, but it’s not that far from the truth. There is not a single state, language, religion or ethnicity that even comes close to dominating the continent as a whole - although at least one in each category at some point in history had the pretension to try (1). Europe's war-torn history demonstrates that such diversity is, well, divisive.