Greetings, everyone. We’re extremely excited to land here, both to join longtime colleagues like Carl, Phil, Sean, and to find new compatriots like Melissa, the Science Not Fiction guys, Rachel, Eliza, and everyone else who writes on Discover Blogs.
In this inaugural post at our new home, we thought we’d start out with an introduction—or for some, a reintroduction—to “The Intersection.” The blog actually has a long history: It was launched by Chris in 2003, the third of his “blogs.” His first, Tapped, debuted in 2001 when he was online editor of The American Prospect and still exists today as the magazine’s very popular group politics blog. The second was…well, lame and forgettable. And as for the third….
…it focused on politics and science, as its name was meant to suggest. From 2003 through 2005, “The Intersection” became a testing ground for various ideas that would eventually develop into Chris’s first book, The Republican War on Science--and a kind of blog clearinghouse for discussion of the scientific community's mounting frustration with the Bush administration.
In early 2006, the blog moved to ScienceBlogs
, as one of the very first members of what's become a terrific burgeoning community. We've been honored to share the network with such an esteemed community of bloggers--many of whom have become good friends. As for substance, The Intersection
continued to follow the politics of science, but also drifted, with Chris himself, in the direction of his second book, the Katrina-inspired Storm World
, which focused on climate change and its impacts, especially on hurricanes. And, truth be told, the blog got a little sleepy now and again when Chris was on various book and article deadlines. In 2007 something transformational occurred. Chris went away to attend a friend’s wedding in Italy with his now fiance, Molly
, and invited Sheril to take over in his absence. With the background of a scientist and experience of a Senate staffer, she was a huge hit…so big, in fact, that he would have been insane to ever let her leave. And so this became a co-hosted blog, and “The Intersection” came to denote not just Chris’s focus on science and politics, but Sheril’s much-loved blogging about science and pop culture, marine science and global warming, the place of women in science, and much else.
And we started launching other projects together. One of them, ScienceDebate2008, was an initiative we helped co-found with a number of colleagues to try to inject science policy into the presidential race at the highest level. In this difficult endeavor, we both failed and also succeeded—we mobilized an unprecedented number of scientists and science bloggers behind a collective call for a presidential science debate, although we ultimately could not get the media or the candidates themselves on board for an event. However, there’s no doubt that the influence of the ScienceDebate initiative, centrally run by screenwriters Shawn Lawrence Otto and Matthew Chapman, was simply massive, and indeed, we suspect it has had some impact on the Obama administration.
Moreover, the ScienceDebate experience inspired us to write a book together, about nothing less than the troubled place of science in our society—our politics, our media, our culture. The result is Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future
, due out in July with Basic Books. And so in its newest incarnation, our blog now swerves in this broadest of directions: What is the nature of the interaction—the “intersection”—between science and culture? Is it healthy, or quite the opposite? How does science get itself taken seriously (or not so seriously) in the context of politics, of the media, of entertainment, and much more—and what is the much invoked, but little understood, “general public” actually making of all this?
These are big questions, and we’re looking forward—with your help—to exploring them. We’re happy to have arrived, and we hope you’ll check in on us regularly as we carry “The Intersection” along on the next phase of its journey.
