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Knight Science Journalism Tracker Home Suggest Stories About Us Staff Contact Us Log In Register to Comment New York Times chooses its new journalism tracker

Here at the Tracker, we like to take note of the comings and goings of trackers everywhere. If we don’t do it, who will?

So I’d like to report that The New York Times has chosen its new tracker. (They call her the public editor, but that’s their loss.) Her name is Margaret M. Sullivan, and she has been the editor of the Buffalo News since 1999. She wants to continue the every-other-Sunday column in the print edition, but her main focus will be on supercharging the commentary and criticism online.

That’s a good thing, although we don’t yet know what that means. Let’s hope the Times lets comments flow and that Sullivan engages with her readers online, creating a dialogue that we would all learn from.

The most important thing we can hope for, in my view, is that, unlike her predecessors, she’s willing to engage in criticism (and praise) of science and medical stories. I had several interactions with the [...]

Ed Yong takes on Oxytocin hype. Yong wins.

In a post this week titled Oxytocin: The Hype Hormone, blogger Ed Yong takes on both the over-selling (and oversimplification) that grows out of the science of neurochemistry:

He writes:

“You may have heard of oxytocin as the “moral molecule” or the “hug hormone” or the “cuddle chemical”. Unleashed by hugs, available in a handy nasal spray, and possessed with the ability to boost trust, empathy and a laundry list of virtues, it is apparently the cure to all the world’s social ills.

Except it’s not.”

The post was apparently partly inspired by a recent interview in The Guardian with American author Paul Zak, who has, in fact, written a book called The Moral Molecule and who, again apparently, likes to be called Dr. Love, a nickname that one would think would normally set off warning flags and signal flares.

But as that doesn’t seem to be always the case, Yong makes an effort to sort out the so-called love science of oxytocin. He [...]

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