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by 2skep 3683 days ago
This article is a very good example of the genre of science reporting I find very uninteresting and even boring. The way the writer builds up to the punch line by weaving in his own life and by overemphasiaing the trope of the 'maverick scientist challenging group think' is so contrived that it probably wrote itself.

Maybe I am different that I want to read science articles to learn new things and not to be entertained. The writer proves how hard it is to do both.

3 comments

I read pieces like this and I can't help but think that the writer is creating prose, and I want reporting. one of us is in the wrong place.
Let me counter: I found the article very readable, engaging and informative. There's a lot of context in there that the top-rated summary above misses (who the researcher is, and what he's worked on, how allergy theories have changed over the years...) It would have helped to have an abstract, but that's not a failure of the article itself.
The article is basically unreadable in today's attention economy.