November 12, 2025 — Interview with Jeremy Berg — "Fifty Shades of Jay" and Much More!
Today, we’re talking with Jeremy Berg, a former editor of Science, former President of ASBMB, and former Director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) at the NIH.
Earlier this year, Berg grew alarmed at the nomination of Jay Bhattacharya as Director of the NIH, and began a correspondence with him after his confirmation. For a time, he documented this via his Bluesky account, which grew massively as a result.
Striking a calm, evidence-based tone, Berg often received no response from Bhattacharya. When he did, the responses seemed to bristle with political overtones. Berg published these correspondences in late Summer in PDF form under the title, “Fifty Shades of Jay.” He continues to update the document from time to time.
We wanted to talk with Jeremy about this, and given the recent spate of announcements about Director-level “hiring in a hurry” at the NIH — including a new Director of the NLM — we also wanted to discuss other aspects of MAHA-era science defunding, firings, and hirings as the US scientific establishment is turned upside-down. We also talk about diversity issues, with a particularly interesting angle coming to light.
It’s a fascinating interview throughout, which we close with our “Discoveries of the Week.”
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November 5, 2025 — Interview with Nick Evans About Preprints and Science Policy
Today, we’re talking with Nick Evans, who was in the Department of Philosophy in the College of Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and who recently moved to the Department of Political Science, a move he explains in the interview.
Joy met Nick at this year’s Peer Review Congress in Chicago, where he talked about his research around preprints and public policy. With a background in physics, science policy, and philosophy, Nick has a rich lens through which to view various aspects of his research topics, which includes dual-use technologies and gain-of-function in the life sciences. His book called Gain of Function was published earlier this year with MIT Press.
It’s a fascinating and informative discussion, he shadow-quotes Neil Peart, and we also get into “Discoveries of the Week,” which include coffee, cars, and deer.
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October 29, 2025 — Interview with Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, authors of “The AI Con”
Today, we’re talking with Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, co-authors of the book The AI Con, which came out earlier this year.
Emily is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington where she is also the Faculty Director of the Computational Linguistics Master of Science program in the School of Computer Science and Engineering and the Information School. In 2023, she was included in the inaugural Time 100 list of the most influential people in AI.
Alex is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute and a Lecturer in the School of Information at the University of California Berkeley. She is an outspoken critic of the tech industry, a proponent of community-based uses of technology, and a highly sought-after speaker and expert.
We discuss how AI hoodwinks people by exploiting their natural tendency to assign intelligence to things that produce language, how “science is squarely in the hype danger zone,” labor and structural issues related to AI exploitation and extraction, and so much more.
You can get a sense of their witty approach to tackling this by realizing that when they talk about “synthetic text extruding machines,” it reduces to “STEM.”
We also get their “Discoveries of the Week.”
Visit this page for information about contacting Emily.
Visit this page for information about contacting Alex.
For more information about their book, visit this page.
Our book — available for PRESALE — is here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-the-Internet-Disrupted-Science/Kent-Anderson/9781493094400
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October 22, 2025 — Interview with Mike Olson About Library Tech
Today, we’re talking with Mike Olson, Assistant Professor and Cataloging & Discovery Librarian at Murphy Library, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Mike published two guest posts on “The Scholarly Kitchen” earlier this year which caught our eye.
The first was in March, where he wrote about library catalogs as colonization systems with the power to make naming decisions appear neutral and inevitable by disguising bias behind what a former ALA president called “a facade of technical objectivity.”
His next post in August had to do with layoffs at OCLC justified by claims of advances in AI that could lead to efficiency. Mike noted that “the same technological advances celebrated for their efficiency are erasing the human expertise that creates the high-quality metadata these systems depend on to function.”
As fans of human expertise, local and disciplinary control, and skepticism about tech claims, we wanted to bring him on for a conversation.
The interview does not disappoint, as it echoes concerns from earlier interviews about how academia is being appropriated for rents and extractive processes by tech companies without support for the kind of skepticism and support of human expertise we’d expect from universities.
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October 15, 2025 — Interview with Seth Leopold, MD, Editor of "CORR"
Today, we’re joined by Seth Leopold, an orthopaedic surgeon and Editor-in-Chief of Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research, also known as CORR, a top journal in orthopaedic surgery.
Seth and Kent got to know one another through some projects and mutual concerns about scientific publishing, and this year they published a piece with another editor in marine science outlining their concerns about unreviewed preprints. Today we talk about some of the challenges the editorial team at CORR wrestles with on a daily basis, some of the stances the orthopaedic journals have taken collectively, and some of the more recent challenges AI has posed for them.
Show Notes
Preprint paper by Leopold, Browman, and Anderson: https://journal.trialanderror.org/pub/preprinting-responsibility/release/1
Paper about CORR wrestling with AI LTEs: https://journals.lww.com/clinorthop/fulltext/2025/10000/editorial__ai_assisted_letters_to_the_editor_scope.1.aspx
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From the authors of the forthcoming book ”How the Internet Disrupted Science” comes this view of science from where the action is — the scientific claims and publishing space. Hosted by Kent Anderson and Joy Moore, listeners receive analyses of current events, updates about the book, and opinions on various topics of interest. Book pre-sales available now. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-the-Internet-Disrupted-Science/Kent-Anderson/9781493094400
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