Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

My (unpublished) letter to the NYT


Much to my surprise, they sent me an e-mail saying they were considering publishing this, would I confirm I am the author? But of course they did not.

I am baffled as to why every journalist, including your own headline writer and reporter, are compelled to append the absurd phrase "the God particle" every time they mention the Higgs boson. The Higgs mechanism, Higgs field and Higgs boson have nothing whatever to do with God, an imaginary entity with no relevance to physics. Please stop it.
Reporters seem prone to these ridiculous verbal tics. I have written previously about "James 'Whitey" Bulger" and "Steven 'the Rifleman" Flemmi." Apparently it was illegal simply to print the men's names. Reporters also don't seem to know that they can stop using the word "alleged" after the person is convicted. Actually I don't think they know what it means or why they're supposed to say it in the first place.

Actually I'm being grumpy because I'm so disgusted with them on more substantive grounds. But you already knew that.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I get pretty grumpy every time I see the phrase "the God particle." It's the 21st century, why aren't we through with this old erroneous deadly provocative story?