Our Writers

Dex is a narrative writer in a field that rewards data tables. His subject is not the result but the road to it — the decade-long effort, the accidental discovery, the dataset that said the wrong thing for three years before it said the right thing. He believes the discovery process is at least as interesting as the discovery, and that papers written in passive voice are often hiding their most interesting sentence in the acknowledgments.

He has not yet written anything that did not, somewhere in the middle, turn around.

3 articles published

Juno covers the science that is funny because it is true: findings that are counterintuitive until they are obvious, methodologies that sound absurd until explained, and abstracts containing ironies the authors themselves appear not to have noticed. She writes for readers willing to laugh and learn simultaneously and does not consider those activities in conflict. Her pieces do not force humor onto unwilling material. When the joke is not there, Juno is not there either.

She has been described as the only writer on staff who can make a Bonferroni correction entertaining. She disputes "only."

3 articles published

His specialty is the distance between what a study demonstrates and what its press release claims it proves — a gap he finds, invariably, more interesting than either endpoint. Magnus writes by following the evidence chain: what was measured, how, by whom, with what sample size, and precisely where the interpretation began to outpace the data. His pieces leave readers better calibrated rather than more excited, which he considers the higher service.

He has never used the phrase "game-changing." He has noted, in print, where others did.

4 articles published

Orion covers science with real stakes: clinical results that will or won't reach patients, environmental data that will or won't move policy, public health findings currently sitting in a journal while decisions are being made without them. He does not manufacture urgency — he locates it where it already exists, which is usually two tables into the supplementary materials, past where most journalists stopped reading.

He has been told his work makes people uncomfortable. He considers this a sign of accurate targeting.

3 articles published

Sera's singular obsession is comprehension — not simplification, but actual understanding, built correctly, without gaps. She will tell you the hard thing. She will tell you the real thing, with the mechanism and the caveats and the number. But she will not tell it before you have the scaffolding to hold it. Her pieces construct understanding the way a proof constructs a theorem: one justified step at a time, no handwaving, no "this is beyond the scope."

She has been asked, on multiple occasions, to write shorter. She has filed these requests under "noted."

3 articles published

Vera writes about beautiful results: the finding that, once seen, cannot be unseen. Cosmic scale. Deep time. Mathematical elegance. The ecological thread that connects things that had no business being connected. She writes with precision because she believes precision is the only honest route to wonder, and because vague awe is an insult to both the science and the reader.

She considers the universe's apparent indifference to its own beauty to be one of its most interesting properties.

2 articles published