Author: Bobbie Johnson

An editor’s guide to giving feedback

October 28, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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Work

I’ve been a fan of The Open Notebook for a long time—a great resource for science writers specifically, but full of useful, practical advice for anyone who is trying to share complex information with non-academic audiences. They recently ran a roundtable conversation as “A writer’s guide to being edited”, which is stuffed with information and wisdom. Things I absolutely agree with: talk it through up front, don’t be defensive, think of editing as a conversation—not […]

Infinite jest

October 19, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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books

I haven’t read Going Infinite, the new Michael Lewis book on Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX. I’ve enjoyed some of his past work. Clearly there have been some major questions raised about previous stories, and I do wonder about the speed at which these semi-biographical tomes are being turned out across the industry: for example Lewis’s pandemic book, The Premonition, came out in May 2021… which feels a little early to be declaring […]

“There’s a lot of trust involved”

October 18, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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Media

When I posted recently about fakes and forgeries and my shock that United Airlines had discovered counterfeit parts in aircraft engines, one commenter pointed out that there is a long history of fraudulent parts in the airline industry. (A friend in the trade would tell him about “fake brake liners in authentic looking boxes”) Well, that’s even more terrifying. But to get an idea of the scale of where things are at right now, it’s […]

Creative couples

October 16, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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Media

Alison Gill and Peter Smithson were just a couple of kids from Northern England when they met as architecture students at university in Durham in the 1940s. They had a lot in common: their obsession with buildings, of course, but also their politics and their vision for the future. Their attraction and mutual sympathies turned into love; enough to draw them together, to get married and have three children; enough to drive them to become […]

Ghosts

October 9, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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Media

Writing is many things, and one of them is channeling. As a writer you are a conduit, a crucible. You are a voice, whether you are interrogating your own ideas, bringing life to characters fictional or real, or simply reporting what you have seen so that others can understand. When you write you are often channeling other people directly, and when you are not it is because you are doing it indirectly: building on the […]

Mind’s eye

October 5, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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As somebody with no real ability to visualize, I am fascinated by the fact that other people can actually see things in their imagination: the existence of an actual mind’s eye. (Those of us with some form of aphantasia always remember when we discovered that this wasn’t just a metaphor, but a lived experience for some people—usually when they read this New York Times piece that went viral in 2015.) And I’m not the only […]

Peak vs decline

October 4, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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Currently reading Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, By America and happened across a statistic which made me sit up: the number of undocumented immigrants living in the US peaked in 2007 and has been slowly declining ever since. Here are the numbers according to Pew, from 2019—remember that when the politicians get their blood up.

Fake news

October 1, 2023
by Bobbie Johnson
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Newsletter

A man in Florida pleaded to guilty to selling $16 million of fake HIV drugs to pharmacies. A German museum worker was convicted of swapping expensive artworks for forgeries and then selling the originals to fund his lavish lifestyle. And it was revealed that some United Airlines had discovered counterfeit parts in some of their aircraft engines. Barely a day goes past without news of counterfeits, forgeries, pirate material, copycats, plagiarists and imposters. We can’t […]