It’s that time of the month again – time to select ten blog posts for my Science Writer Tip-Jar initiative. For those new to this, here’s the low-down:
Throughout the blogosphere, people produce fantastic writing for free. That’s great, but I believe that good writers should get paid for good work, or at least that people should be willing to pay for good writing. I am.
Every month, I choose ten pieces that I really enjoyed and donate £3 to the author. There are no formal criteria other than I found them unusually interesting, enjoyable and/or important. Pieces where writers were paid for their work are excluded.
There are buttons on the sidebar for you to contribute too if you wish. The “Support Science Writers” button goes to the writers. At the end of April, the chosen ten will get equal shares of the pot. The “Support NERS” button goes to me; I’ll match a third of the donations and send that to the chosen writers too.
So without further ado, here are the picks:
Evelyn Mervine for her continuing series of illuminating interviews with her dad - a nuclear engineer – about the Fukushima crisis
Mary Carmichael for her compelling case for why people have a right to know their own genetic information
Deborah Blum for her stunning three-partseries on the Radium Girls. “It was rather like finding a tiny star buried in the dirt.”
Eric Michael Johnson for thoroughly looking at a great paper on human evolution, while the rest of the media was giggling about penis spines.
Jessa Gamble for Dead world at sunset – still one of the most beautiful things I’ve read all month, and I said that at the very start of it.
Sally Adee for this riveting story that starts with an egg sandwich, continues with mysterious blue powder and ends with mass radiation poisoning.
Carl Zimmer (yes, him again) for a bloggy opus on the human lake – the world that lurks inside is.
Hannah Waters for critically looking at spider-covered trees and spinning her own yarn on the danger of appealing stories and anecdata.
Andrea Kuszewski for her tour de force on Scientific American about evidence-based ways of increasing your intelligence.
Jason Goldman for his evocative piece on digitising Jane Goodall’s legacy
And just in case people are interested, last month, the tip-jar initiative raised exactly US$200, which I have split among the writers I chose in March.
