Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

The Blog and the News

My wife gave me grief a couple of days ago for sending a link to Slate's home page that, when clicked, took people to the Human Nature home page and ultimately to plain old headlines. She was expecting something I'd written instead of something I'd linked to.

I see her point. Let me explain what I'm trying to do, and I'll keep looking for ways to improve it. I'm trying to use the new headline-only links—here for News, and here for Hot Topics—to flag stories I find really interesting. I can't blog or write pieces on all these stories, but I do a lot of scouring and weeding to select them. You don't have to click on any of them if you don't want to. But if you're looking for cool stuff on any given day, I think you'll generally find them the most efficient way to get it.

The thing I'm getting a sense of as I tinker with the new format is that people expect to hear my voice. I'm a bit reluctant to push my voice into everything. By and large, the Internet, and the blogosphere in particular, is way too full of people opining rapidly, ignorantly, and thoughtlessly. I don't want to add to that problem. If possible, I'd like to help rectify it. That's part of why I wrote the old Human Nature news items the way I did: I wanted to lay out the evidence and arguments without injecting my instant opinion all the time. Eventually, I gave in and started adding a line here or there.

I set up this blog in part to create a space for this kind of informal thinking out loud. I'll try to make sense of things. Often, I'll get it wrong, and that'll be OK, as long as you and I keep working to correct the errors and improve the thinking. The lesson I'm going to draw from my wife's complaint, for the time being, is that when I post new headlines to the News and Hot Topics pages, I should write a blog post announcing them and saying at least a little bit about them. So the blog can be the place where a human voice (mine) introduces you to what's new each day. And you and I can take it from there.

Got a better idea? Let's hear it.

About the Human Nature Network

In the right margin of this blog, you’ll see a column of links called “Human Nature Network.” This is the team of pages through which I’ll try to cover developments in the field of science, technology, and life. The home page summarizes the latest updates from each part of the network. If you’re looking for a page to bookmark, that’s the page I recommend, since it can take you almost everywhere else. The news page has the latest stuff, but only as headlines with links. The purpose of this page is to plug you into all the interesting news I see every day that I don’t have time to write about. The hot topics page is for tracking other current commentary on the Web: magazines, journal articles, blog posts, etc. These are the two places to go for regular updates and variety. The blog is for the narrower range of stuff I have something to say about. I expect it to be pretty informal and provisional. The essays section is for the topics I set aside to research and think through more fully. The discussions link takes you to the Human Nature Fray, where you can start or join a thread on whatever topic interests you. The books page lists recent books in this area. The links page shows you where to find the best news in science, tech, and health, plus my blogroll.

We’re trying to set this up so you can get to almost any page on the network from any other. If you think there’s a better way to design anything in the network, please let us know by posting your ideas in the feedback thread.

Revising Human Nature

Slate has always taken an experimental approach to journalism. New formats, new designs, new beats, new media. Human Nature has been one such experiment: a department that covers science and technology from the standpoint of culture and politics.

It's time once again to experiment within the experiment.

If you've followed Human Nature for the last three years, you've seen two formats: essays of around 1,000 words and short news items of around 100 to 150 words. The short items were designed to compress news and debates to save reading time. The downside is that in terms of research and analysis, they've been pretty laborious. And I've often felt that I was compressing and simplifying material somewhat artificially to fit the format. I needed more flexibility to fit the variety of stuff this department covers. So I'm chucking the items. Instead, I'm going to try covering subjects in three ways. I'll still write essays as I come across topics that merit them. For news that's just weird and interesting, I'll supply headline-only links. For stuff that's in between, I'll use this blog. It'll be more loose and conversational than the items were. I'll try to honor the spirit of science, the Internet, and healthy debate: reflective but provisional.

If you're new to Human Nature, here's its basic idea: We live in an age of science and technology. Discoveries about ourselves and the world, coupled with our increasing power to transform both, are changing how we live, what we think, and who we are. Human Nature is a place to learn, think, and talk about these changes. It's not an elite science journal or a medical news digest. It's a place for people who are interested in what's driving politics and society. What's driving them, increasingly, is science.
So let's get started.