This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
Virginia Heffernan wrote a piece in today's NY Times Magazine. She writes:
Science blogging, apparently, is a form of redundant and effortfully incendiary rhetoric that draws bad-faith moral authority from the word "science" and from occasional invocations of "peer-reviewed" thises and thats.
and
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Does everyone take for granted now that science sites are where graduate students, researchers, doctors and the "skeptical community" go not to interpret data or review experiments but to chip off one-liners, promote their books and jeer at smokers, fat people and churchgoers?
It's just not that simple or straightforward. And she's mostly wrong.
Of course the easy thing to do would be to recommend that she read David Dobbs's response, or Doctor Zen's. Or any of the post's mentioned in Bora's PepsiGate linkfest, or his farewell post, or in his thank you post, or in his networks post. Or this, from Scott Rosenberg, author of Say Everything. Or she could go check out any of the previous four editions of Open Lab (she could even download digital versions for less than $10 apiece). Or she could surf on over to Research Blogging (which, yes, is also funded by Seed Media Group) to check out all the awesome research blogging from all over the science blogosphere.
Virginia Heffernan did the easy thing by picking on some of the larger blogs here at Scienceblogs, and in doing so, fell into the old no-science-on-scienceblogs trope.
So I'm going to do her work for her.
Here, Virginia, are links to blogs in this here network which contain all or nearly-all purely scientific blogging, which should be interesting to the general public (here, I'm generally avoiding awesome blogs like Adventures in Ethics and Science and Drugmonkey, which have more narrow audiences of scientists and academics):
I'll start with my own blog, The Thoughtful Animal, which covers animal behavior and cognition and the evolution of the mind. Of course there's the occasional music video or picture of my dog, and there's some musing on the craft of science blogging, but it's still more "content" and less "fluff."
How about Aardvarchaeology? Here's a link to some of the best posts from this blog.
Aetiology discusses diseases and epidemiology.
Class: M writes about climate change.
Developing Intelligence, which has recently come back to life, writes about cognitive psychology.
Want some accessible writing about physics? There's Dot Physics and Uncertain Principles. For astronomy (and awesome pictures), you can't beat Starts With A Bang.
For neuroscience, there's Neurotopia and Neurophilosophy.
During the Eyjafjallajokull eruption several months ago, the Eruptions blog was THE place to go. Of course, it continues to feature awesome writing about geology, tectonics, volcanoes... that sort of thing.
If you want to learn about synthetic biology, which has been all over the news lately thanks to the Venter Institute, Oscillator is among the best.
Lately, I've been enjoying Genetic Future, Tetrapod Zoology, and Guilty Planet, as well.
Observations of a Nerd is, well, just awesome.
There's lots more, of course. And even more awesome science blogs outside of this particular network.
Oh, and I should mention that while I don't have the time to read every post at Pharyngula, I do read all of the "purely science" posts in Google Reader, by subscribing to the "science" category: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/science/