Posts by Trevor Corson
Using the old to explain the new
We kicked off the new year with another fantastic workshop, this time with an added bonus: an online art video presented by visiting student Eva Vu-Stern. The piece was inspired by a course at Columbia University, led by one of the world’s most successful living science communicators: theoretical physicist Brian Greene. We enjoyed hearing about…
Read MoreWhat enters us, what changes us
The state of science communication about the environment occupied us this month, through an unusual form of personal reflection on plastic particles that enter us and cloak themselves in dynamic coatings of biomolecules that can then interact with our bodies. Meanwhile, our other text took us into a curious laboratory of inquiry into matters cardiac,…
Read MorePoetry, science, life
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, bestselling author, and popular science writer Amy Ellis Nutt once told NeuWrite Nordic’s director, Trevor Corson, that she got some of her best ideas for science writing from studying poetry. Poetry, she said, had given her the skills to bring the concrete details of science alive and to come up with…
Read MoreParenting on planet health-science hellscape
Parental anxiety around the health of our children was at the forefront of this month’s workshop. This meeting was one of the most packed ones so far, and the quality of feedback given and received by the presenters was extraordinary—a testament to the dedication of the members of this group. Are citizens better science communicators…
Read MoreTracing the scale of the unseen: from trans-species atmospheres to minuscule molecules
This workshop had us look at the world from its two extremes: the macroscopic domain of the invisible yet tangible ethical relationships that entangle researchers with their subjects of study, and the microcosm of molecular cell components that, although imperceptible, we need to see, so we can understand how life keeps humming along. Atmospheres of…
Read MoreWhat does “knowledge” depend on?
Beware of UFO In the consciousness of a scientifically-minded person, UFOs might seem like just another quirky, conspiratorial, psycho-social delusion to be analyzed from the safety of academic objectivity, and that was what we were lead to believe at the beginning of one of the draft essays we read at our September meeting. But partway…
Read MoreWho defines disease, and who gets money to study cures?
At our August meeting we workshopped two draft opinion essays that, from different angles but from within the same field, raised fundamental questions about how we should describe and nurture scientific progress—in this case, in medicine. In our first text, a surgeon began with an anecdote about her mother to interrogate how illness is defined…
Read MoreUnconventional science lessons in health
Embracing uncertainty This tends to be an unconventional public stance for scientists these days, which could be why our first draft text this month felt so fresh when it began by doing just that. The author described working in science for most of their adult life, and having believed, in the past, that after putting…
Read MoreEuropean creative writing conference
NeuWrite Nordic was invited to give a presentation about what we do, and about what writers might learn from scientists, at the conference of the European Association of Creative Writing Programs (EACWP) in Paris in May. The theme of the conference was a perfect match for us: “Writing in the Real World”. NeuWrite Nordic director…
Read MoreEthical dilemmas of genetic testing, and the history behind them
Imagine you are in a hospital lobby bustling with parents and noisy children, and then you take the elevator way up to a quiet prenatal diagnostics center, where no children have yet appeared. You are entering the world of to be born or not to be born. The future is now So began the beautifully…
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