Why Newscripts and Andy Rooney err… Bob Wolke Do Not Mix
January 1st, 2008 by mitch
(424 Views)
| Like any good chemist, I enjoy my C&EN news. The Newscripts section is a particular favorite of mine. I will faithfully turnto that section first to learn some cool new aspect of general interest chemistry. But Bob Wolke keeps ruining it every week. I haven’t read anything remotely interesting from him aside for his rogue half-accusations and his odd self-awareness. Here are the lowlights of his prose. |  (Bob Wolke) |
- December 24, 2007: Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, no chemistry, but has a vague reference to strange-face Hispanic men.
- October 15, 2007: Million dollar Ideas, recounts his inability to eliminate mildew–but, ends with him saying he wasn’t that interested in eliminating mildew anyways.
- October 29, 2007: Martini, insults undergraduate researchers, equating them to sources of error in his words “potential flaws”. Has to retract the heart of the martini story in a follow-up article.
- December 10, 2007: Calculators, discovers Google can do math functions, calculates the energy storage in human fat incorrectly.
- November 12, 2007: Advertisements, threatens us with his nudity twice.
- October 1, 2007: People Hating, I’m not sure what the point of this one is, just general ranting about physicists and the general public at large.
- November 26, 2007: Gasoline, a copy/paste job of an article he wrote in 2000.
To Editors and Staff at C&EN: Please end the pain Bob Wolke has wrought to Newscripts. There is no need to ruin a section that was perfectly fine and well managed by the staffers. May the reign of Andy Rooney writing end!
In the words of the prolific Newscripts writer Ken Reese: “Newscripts traditionally has covered a broad range of topics. The editorial policy, if any, favors the chemical over the nonchemical, the scientific over the nonscientific, the grotesque over the normal.”
In fairness to Bob Wolke, he is a talented writer. My issue is with the substance of his recent pieces and their appropriateness for my beloved Newscripts section.
Mitch
on
Yes! Thank you! I can’t stand his column either. I’m just not interested in reading it anymore.
The first article I read by this guy was “people hating”, which I found so annoying that I gave up reading the column. After a while, when I was thumbing through another C&EN, I saw an article about martini’s. Being a die-hard fan of James Bond movies, I decided to check it out. As a published undergraduate researcher, I felt insulted by his article and was shocked to see that such pure bunk was published in C&EN. If that represents the opinions of C&EN then I worry for the future of the journal.
Yeah, he was three orders-of-magnitude off in his fat calculation. If he’s going to make these kinds of mistakes, he should just start a chemistry blog.
I’ve read about three of his articles, and have no interest in reading his column again. I find his articles boring and uninformative. However, he has managed to upset several people, so there’s one success.