What’s the Point of Poetic, “Gee-Whiz” Science Writing?
Ferris Jabr, shown here in a South Dakota mine, writes about science with poetic intensity. Why? What’s the poetry’s point? I found this photo here.
My buddy Jim McClellan, an historian of science, leads a weekly discussion group at his retirement village in Pennsylvania. The group mulls over science stories in The New York Times.
I asked Jim if I could join a session, and he said sure. They would be discussing a Times Magazine article about bacteria deep inside the earth. I thought, Ho hum, boring. Then I read “The Mysterious, Deep-Dwelling Microbes That Sculpt Our Planet” by Ferris Jabr. Wow.
I’ve met Jabr. Just over a decade ago, after one of Jabr’s NYU science-writing professors raved about him, I asked him to visit my science-writing seminar. Jabr was just a kid, in his 20s, but he talked with a remarkable combination of self-assurance and modesty about his aspiration to be a “literary” science journalist.
And now he’s pulling it off. Jabr’s article is adapted from his new book Becoming Earth. The theme of the article, and book, is that life, and especially bacteria, have transformed our planet in profound ways, so much so that perhaps we should think of the planet as one great meta-organism.
In this column I’ll focus less on the substance of Jabr’s Times article than its style. It is lyrical, lush, dense with poetic flourishes. Jabr isn’t just serving up facts and theories. He is dazzling us, immersing us in emotion-evoking sensations. He is saying, Look at this! Okay, you think that’s mind-blowing? Well, check out this!
Jabr reminds me why I became a science journalist four decades ago. Although I majored in literature [See Note below], I became a science journalist after deciding that science is the most thrilling, consequential human enterprise. I wanted to celebrate science, to tell people about all the cool stuff scientists discover, and I hoped to do that with literary flair.
Gradually my motivation shifted. By the 1990s I decided that science doesn’t need cheerleaders; it needs tough, informed critics, who distinguish what’s legit from bullshit. I wrote critically about physics, neuroscience, genetics, medicine, psychiatry, even mathematics. I dwelled on science’s limits, and I denigrated “gee-whiz” science journalism, which makes readers gush, Gee whiz! Science is cool!
But here’s the thing. Gee-whiz journalism can be good or bad. Bad gee-whiz journalism employs rhetorical flourishes in ways that are gratuitous, even deceptive. It wraps dubious science in hyperbole, flashy language, misleading metaphors. I’m all for exploring scientists’ psyches, but bad gee-whiz journalism depicts the heroic scientist riding a Harley or playing bass in a rock band. Who gives a shit? What does that have to do with the science?
But good gee-whiz science writing… Well, take Natalie Angier, who became the must-read star reporter for The New York Times in the 1990s. Angier can make any topic entertaining, even sexy. Her prose is witty, kinetic, it pops off the page. Here’s how she begins her 1991 ode to dung beetles:
In the vast world of beetles, they have the stamp of nobility, their heads a diadem of horny spikes, their bodies sheathed in glittering mail of bronze or emerald or cobalt-blue. The ancient Egyptians so worshipped the creatures that when a pharaoh died, his heart was carved out and replaced with a stone rendering of the sacred beetle.
Come on, that’s awesome. Angier isn’t always celebratory. Far from it. See for example her legendary 1999 take-down of gender stereotypes peddled by evolutionary psychologists, whom she calls “evo-psychos.” I still tweak Darwinians now and then by calling them evo-psychos.
Angier isn’t to everyone’s taste. After she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991, some of my fellow science scribblers said they found her too show-offy, but I’ve always admired the pizzazz of her prose. She makes me want to up my game, and that’s the highest praise I can give another writer.
Here are other literary writers more or less of my generation who have made me want to up my game: Dianne Ackerman, James Gleick, George Johnson, Michael Lemonick, Janet Malcolm, Madhusree Mukerjee, Dennis Overbye, Margaret Wertheim, Robert Wright, Carl Zimmer… I love their style, even when their work’s substance irks me.
Back to Ferris Jabr’s New York Times report on deep-dwelling microbes. A retired engineer in my friend Jim’s science-discussion group prefers his facts straight; he found Jabr’s prose too “pretty.” But another member emailed Jim: “What poetic writing! [Jabr’s] use of verbs, adjectives, similes, are so varied and colorful (literally, often). Beautiful writing even apart from the content.”
Indeed. And that “poetic writing” ain’t just candy sprinkles topping scientific content. The poetry counteracts our ho-hum jadedness, our tendency to become habituated to nature and to science. Take this passage, in which Jabr describes what he sees and smells in a mine almost a mile beneath the earth’s surface:
The rail cars stopped. We stepped out and walked a short distance to a large plastic spigot protruding from the rock. A pearly stream of water trickled from the wall near the faucet’s base, forming rivulets and pools. Wafting from the water was hydrogen sulfide — the source of the chamber’s odor. Kneeling, I realized that the water was teeming with a stringy white material similar to the skin of a poached egg. Caitlin Casar, a geobiologist, explained that the white fibers were microbes in the genus Thiothrix, which join together in long filaments and store sulfur in their cells, giving them a ghostly hue. Here we were, deep within Earth’s crust — a place where, without human intervention, there would be no light and little oxygen — yet life was literally gushing from rock. This particular ecological hot spot had earned the nickname Thiothrix Falls.
This language conveys an urgent moral message: Nature seethes with marvels and mysteries, and we should cherish it, do all we can to preserve it, to protect it from our own predations.
We should cherish scientists, too, Jabr implies, these oddballs who wrest insights from the depths of the earth and sea, from inner and outer space, to answer questions about what the hell is going on in this weird, weird world. We shouldn’t take scientists for granted, given the cultural forces arrayed against them.
Jabr ends his Times article thus:
Earth is not simply a terrestrial planet with a bit of life on its surface; it’s a planet that came to life. Earth is a rock that broiled, gushed and bloomed: the flowering callus of a half-sealed Vesuvius suspended in a bubble of breath. Earth is a stone that eats starlight and radiates song, whirling through the inscrutable emptiness of space — pulsing, breathing, evolving — and just as vulnerable to death as we are.
Come on, that’s awesome.
Note: My literature degree didn’t go entirely to waste. I teach humanities courses now, and I occasionally write about literature. See my riffs on War and Peace, The Golden Bowl and Ulysses.
Further Reading:
Advice to Aspiring Science Writers: Remember Marx
How AI Moguls Are Like Mobsters
What’s the Point of the Humanities?