You have come from Mumbai to teach us about handwashing? 你专程从孟买来教我们洗手？ The villagers couldn't stop laughing at Yusuf Kabir. He works at UNICEF's Mumbai office, in a division with an apt acronym -- WASH, for water, sanitation...
Late-night humor may be particularly effective at debunking scientific misconceptions because it avoids triggering the backlash that traditional science communication efforts can elicit. And late-night humor can spark science engagement as well. A na...
In a 2015 follow-up study, we found that late-night humor can influence how viewers perceive climate science itself. This time, we tested the effects of a Last Week Tonight segment in which host John Oliver and guest Bill Nye hold a statistically rep...
It's not hard to see why the relationship between satire and science would be symbiotic. Late-night hosts may occasionally poke fun at scientists, portraying them as oddballs working on obscure projects. Much more often, however, the hosts promote a...
Many Americans pay little attention to science. Even people who regularly watch broadcast television news or cable news channels receive only scraps of science information in their media diet, because mainstream outlets devote so little airtime to th...
It might have been Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Jimmy Kimmel, or any of the other sharp-tongued talk show hosts of late-night TV. In this instance, it was Samantha Bee, on her program Full Frontal, doing a stand-up routine about opposition to childh...
What's it been like to watch the coronavirus pandemic unfold nearly three decades after I wrote that a pandemic would unfold in pretty much this way? It's induced a strange vertigo, to be honest. It's also sparked an unfamiliar kind of solipsism, eno...
When the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 had not quite reached a thousand and New Yorkers like me were three days into our governor's stay-at-home order, I phoned Morse to see how he was holding up. He teaches epidemiology at Columbia University Mailma...
In the first weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, I couldn't bear to read about our collective early missteps. Not only because the implicit rebuke felt futile -- what was the point in knowing that the grim reality we were living could have been avoide...
Days after Floyd's death, Thunberg tweeted an insightful message to her four million Twitter followers: Devastating to see the development taking place in the USA. Centuries of structural and systematic racism and social injustice won't go away by it...
