Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

Your Great Idea Here

Human Nature is on vacation and won't be back till after New Year's. In the spirit of the holidays, I'd like to thank each of you for staying in touch as a reader and, I hope, as a correspondent. In fact, I'd like to ask one favor of you: Tell me how you'd like me to do my job differently.

The mission of this column is to explore the ways in which science and technology are changing how we live, what we think, and who we are. It's a huge and growing part of modern life. Traditional media have covered it poorly, I think, because they're too accustomed to the old system of beats. There's the science beat, where you cover the latest studies. There's the health beat, where you cover the human body. And then there are political and cultural beats, which address how we live and govern ourselves.

The problem with the old system is that technology is moving so fast, and transforming society so extensively, that we can no longer adequately cover politics and culture without accounting for science and technology. Nor can we cover science and technology without examining how they're affecting culture and politics. Hence this column.

With that framework in mind, which topics should I be covering more? Which developments am I missing? Which questions am I neglecting to ask? And while you're at it: Which formats do you prefer to read? How often do you want to be updated? Do you prefer the longer pieces of previous years? The quick headline links of last spring? The daily, medium-length blog items of the last month or so? Something else?

Who are your favorite writers on science and technology? Your favorite news sources? Your favorite blogs? Last spring I drew up a list of blogs and news outlets. I'll probably adapt it to run in the right-hand column of this page. Should I add to it? If I narrow it, which links should I keep? Got any good books to recommend?

One thing I've come to admire about science, as opposed to politics, is its humility. Today's proudest theories are always at the mercy of tomorrow's inconvenient data, and today's seemingly straightforward data are always open to being reshuffled by tomorrow's perspective-shifting theories. We have a lot to learn from each other.

So give me your best advice. I can't learn without you. And I'll be back to return the favor in 2009.

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.