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FiveThirtyEight’s Top 103 Commenters

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I recently wrote a story for FiveThirtyEight about why people leave comments on the Internet. I surveyed a bunch of commenters (as well as some people who don’t comment) and the results yielded some interesting insights, which I discussed in the story. (You can hear a dramatic reading of some of the comments left on my FiveThirtyEight stories here.) I also wrote about how journalists think about comments at my blog, Last Word On Nothing, and the post includes data about how journalists think of and respond to comments. For these stories, I spoke with a few of our most prolific commenters at FiveThirtyEight.

Enough people asked about the list of top commenters (my story only listed the top ten) that I thought I’d go ahead an share the top 100 list, which is actually a top 103 list, since there were some ties. The list, created by my colleague Dhrumil Mehta, is based on comments made on FiveThirtyEight articles between March 10, 2014, and Nov. 17, 2016.

RANK NAME  Number of comments
1 Warren Dew 552
2 Norman Shatkin 360
3 James Deedler 308
4 Fel Martins 269
5 Joseph Michael 252
6 Glenn Doty 247
7 Django Zeaman 234
8 Harold DePalma 230
9 Nealy Willy 217
10 Davey Williams 214
11 Janet Stockey Swanborn 198
12 Robert Lash 196
13 Dan Frushour 193
14 Joe Schmitz 183
15 Aaron Baker 181
16 Bill Wild 175
17 James C. Higgs 163
18 Jack Springer 161
19 Samuel Xavier McPherson 161
20 Joshua Long 160
21 Frank Lee 159
22 Andrew Lang 157
23 Judy Konos 153
24 Morgan Alexander Mikhail 152
25 Robert Jensen 151
26 Brian Silver 150
27 Robert Davidson 148
28 Steve Olson 146
29 Williame Harrisone 145
30 Simon DelMonte 145
31 Rob Ross 141
32 Mike Stanley 139
33 Alan Snipes 137
34 Andrew Jones 137
35 Luís Henrique Donadio 131
36 Keith Bloomquist 128
37 Rutger Colin Kips 128
38 Don Incardona 127
39 Steve High 123
40 Richard Cowgill 121
41 Tim Thielke 119
42 Jason Turner 117
43 Don Wilber 116
44 Shi Gu 113
45 Steve Evets 108
46 Daniel Warren Curtis 107
47 Steve Veasey 106
48 Robert Grutza 105
49 Brandon Butcher 104
50 Matt Silver 103
51 Shawna Walls 102
52 Jeff Seifert 100
53 Jeremy Bailin 98
54 David Reid 97
55 Stellar Generali 97
56 Kevin McRaney 96
57 Tyler Cooper 95
58 Charlie Pluckhahn 95
59 George Craig 95
60 Jeb Makula 93
61 Robert Rio 92
62 Martin D. Kilgore 92
63 Adam White 92
64 Tim Blankenhorn 90
65 Sigmund Menbrodssen 90
66 Will Bishop 89
67 Mark Lantis 89
68 Brian Tucker-Hill 88
69 Peter Wolf 88
70 Pat Ziegler 87
71 Johann Holzel 86
72 Biff Guiznot 83
73 Antoine Guéroult 83
74 Grant Saw 82
75 Dave Barnes 82
76 Michael Brotzman 81
77 Tom Davis 81
78 Kar Nels 80
79 Barb Campbell 80
80 Dan Schroeder 80
81 Mark Charles Salomon 78
82 Julius Fazekas 78
83 Tatiana Romanova 78
84 Garrett Weinzierl 78
85 Brian Hess 77
86 Rupert Barker 76
87 Ed Gruberman 75
88 Jeff Maslan 75
89 Ben Slowen 75
90 Alex Whitworth 75
91 Steve Gibson 74
92 Robert Weller 74
93 Edward Chik 74
94 Dan Bruce 74
95 Jon Worley 72
96 Manny Longfellow 72
97 Daniel Song 71
98 Sayeeshwar Sathyanarayanan 70
99 Abiatha Swelter 70
100 Beverly Ray 69
101 Mark Jorges 69
102 Aaron Allermann 69
103 Ken Kornfeld 69

 

WHYY interview: Every Time You Fly, You Trash The Planet — And There’s No Easy Fix

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Earlier this month, I wrote a FiveThirtyEight story about aviation’s climate problem, Every Time You Fly, You Trash The Planet — And There’s No Easy Fix. (A companion story, Some Airlines Pollute Much More Than Others, examined a new study that measured the relative efficiencies of U.S. carriers.)

This week, WHYY’s science show, the Pulse, interviewed me about the story, in a segment titled, There’s Nothing Green About Flying. You can listen here.

About Christie

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ChristieSquareChristie Aschwanden is the lead writer for science at FiveThirtyEight and a health columnist for The Washington Post. She’s also a frequent contributor to The New York Times, a contributing editor for Runner’s World and a contributing writer for Bicycling. Her work appears in dozens of publications, including Discover, Slate, Proto, Consumer Reports, New Scientist, More, Men’s Journal, NPR.org, Smithsonian and O, the Oprah Magazine. She’s the recipient of a 2014/2015 Santa Fe Institute Journalism Fellowship In Complexity Science and was a 2013/2014 Carter Center Fellow. She blogs about science at Last Word On Nothing and she’s the former managing editor of The Open Notebook. Her Last Word On Nothing post about science denialism at Susan G. Komen for the Cure won the National Association of Science Writers’ 2013 Science in Society Award for Commentary/Opinion, and she was a National Magazine Award finalist in 2011. Find her on Twitter @CragCrest.

Continue reading “About Christie” →

Stalking my dinner

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Photo Oct 25, 8 03 19 (1)A few years ago, I decided to take up hunting. This was kind of a big deal, because I’d spent the first decade-plus of my adult life as vegetarian. I became a big game hunter for the same reason I raise chickens — to know where my food comes from and ensure that it’s raised and harvested humanely. I figure if I’m not willing to kill it myself, I have no business eating it.

I spent last weekend elk hunting. It was an amazing, wonderful, addictive experience that I wrote about at Last Word On Nothing. Read the full story here.

In Which I Review CrossFit’s Gideon Bible

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Today in the New York Times, I review J.C. Herz’s new book, Learning to Breathe Fire, a celebration of a controversial workout called CrossFit. As I write in the review, “What makes CrossFit appealing to members and confusing to outsiders is that it’s more than a workout — it’s a cultural identity.” Herz’s book makes it clear that the push until it hurts culture that critics consider dangerous is exactly what makes this workout so appealing to its adherents. Read the review here.

 

Platelet-rich plasma and the power of belief-based medicine

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I recently wrote a Washington Post column about platelet-rich plasma, a treatment highly touted for sports injuries but without much clear evidence. As I later wrote at Last Word On Nothing, PRP provides a case study in why it’s so important to track outcomes in medicine. If you don’t measure your outcomes, you have no way to really know how you’re doing. Humans are notoriously bad at self-evaluating. A 2006 study published in JAMA found that, “physicians have a limited ability to accurately self-assess,” and a 2012 study found that doctors overestimate the value of the care they provide. And if you have an incentive (money?) to keep doing something, results be damned, then if you’re not careful, an ineffective practice can become fixed as the standard of care. Once that happens, it’s very, very difficult to walk it back.

 

 

Giving suicide attempt survivors a voice

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While researching military suicides, I came across a new movement to give a voice to suicide attempt survivors. I was shocked to learn the extent to which they’d been isolated and shut out of the conversation about suicide prevention. I wrote two stories, for NPR and Dame Magazine about the remarkable people who are standing up to give suicide attempt survivors a voice and the rights they deserve.

Read the stories here:

NPR: Suicide Attempt Survivors Seek A Voice In Helping Others At Risk

Dame Magazine: People Who Attempt Suicide Are Not Criminals

It’s Time to Revamp Our Goals for Cancer Screening

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Since the 1980s, “Early detection is your best protection” has been a mantra of the cancer-awareness community, spurring an insistence on frequent screenings to catch ever-smaller abnormalities. But this approach to cancer screening loses sight of the real goal — saving lives. And it turns out that finding more and more smaller and smaller abnormalities churns out more cancer patients, but this doesn’t necessarily translate into lives saved.

Read the rest of my opinion piece at Popular Science.

 

 

 

Report from the Solutions Summit

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Back in early 2013, an email discussion among friends turned into a realization. We were having the same tired discussions about gender bias, over and over. The details might vary slightly, but it was the same story, again and again, and nothing was changing. It was time to go public and start looking for solutions.

That conversation conversation led to a panel at Science Writers 2013 meeting, which in turn led to a work summit to come up with solutions. The first Women in Science Writing: Solutions Summit took place at MIT on June 13-15. Read my full report of the summit, including data and survey results, over at Last Word On Nothing.

 

 

 

The Value of College Sports

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CUnatChampsAs I’ve followed the NCAA basketball tournament (join me and some folks from Radiolab tonight, as we live tweet the final game), I’ve been thinking about the value of collegiate sports. My first experience with sports in college came as an NCAA division I cross-country runner. I lettered in cross-country at the University of Colorado my freshman year, but a freak knee injury cut short my collegiate running career. Though I had no experience in the sport, I started training with my school’s Nordic ski team, and I also bought a bike and joined the cycling team.

Cross-country and skiing were both division I, NCAA sports, but cycling was governed by its own body, outside of the NCAA system, and was overseen by club sports, rather than CU’s varsity athletic program. The difference was immediately noticeable. As a varsity NCAA athlete, I received special treatment — advance, preferential registration for classes, private tutoring if I needed it, and excused time from class to attend practice and meets, not to mention free tickets to all sporting events. This special treatment fostered a sense of privilege. We were part of the student body, but we were treated as if we were somehow above it.

My teammates and I were good students, and we were there to get a degree, we didn’t expect to make a profession out of sport. Nevertheless, as varsity athletes, we understood that performance was expected of us. Our sport was no hobby — we were there to win.

Things were different on the cycling team. My teammates and I were no less devoted to our sport, and our coaches were every bit as enthusiastic as those in the division I sports. But we didn’t have the same sense of entitlement or expectation. We were pursuing the thing we loved and didn’t assume that our classmates would share our reverence for our sport. The school wasn’t pressuring us for results; it was us who created the expectations.

We were national champions my senior year, and we didn’t need the school’s adoration to enjoy the thrill of victory. We were pursuing the sport for its own sake and had won because we’d worked hard and our luck had aligned, as it must to win a championship. Our victory wasn’t the result of financial incentives that allowed us to recruit a winning team from afar. Instead, we’d pulled together a championship team through happenstance and training. Sure, we had plenty of talent (one of my teammates would go on to become a Tour de France stage winner and infamous doper), but the riders on our team had come to CU for school, not to prep for pro sports. The opportunity to race bikes in Boulder was an attractive reason to attend this particular school, not the sole reason for being there.

Read the rest at Last Word On Nothing.

 

Are You Getting Too Much Medical Care?

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Are You Getting Too Much Medical Care?
First, do no harm—that’s what medical students are taught. Yet unnecessary drugs and tests, along with overly broad definitions of health conditions, can set you up for unexpected damage.
More, December/January 2014

Excerpt:

A shift in the frequency of Pap tests is only one small facet of a remarkable change taking place in the medical world. This new way of thinking contends that our medical system’s “more is better” mind-set has saddled healthy people with costly treatments that might actually hurt them, says Fiona Godlee, MD, editor-in-chief of the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal), a professional publication that’s leading the charge toward a risk-benefit approach to health care. As part of its Too Much Medicine campaign, the BMJ has presented a series of articles outlining how certain conditions, including osteoporosis, dementia, high cholesterol and breast cancer, are being overdiagnosed and overtreated by doctors.

Take osteoporosis. A study published in the BMJ in 2008 calculated that to prevent one woman from developing fractured vertebrae, 270 women with preosteoporosis would need to take osteoporosis drugs for three years. Two out of three of the vertebrae fractures prevented would not have caused symptoms or reduced the patient’s quality of life. So one woman would avoid a consequential fracture in her vertebrae, and the 269 other women would get no measurable benefit but would subject themselves to potential side effects such as diarrhea, an increased stroke risk, gastrointestinal troubles and a rare but very serious problem called osteonecrosis of the jaw, which causes the bone in the jaw to die.

Medical societies are another part of the “more isn’t necessarily better” movement. The ABIM Foundation created the Choosing Wisely campaign, for which 30 physician-specialty societies, such as the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), each developed a list of actions doctors and patients should question. The AAFP list, for instance, includes “Don’t require a pelvic exam or other physical exam to prescribe oral contraceptive medications.” (For more examples, see “Are You Being Overtreated?”. Find each specialty’s Choosing Wisely list atchoosingwisely.org.) The lists are intended to spur conversations between doctors and patients so that together they can choose the most appropriate and necessary treatments.

Read the rest: Are You Getting Too Much Medical Care?

Guns on the Brain

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The big idea behind embodied cognition is that thoughts and perceptions are not confined to the brain, but extend to the body too. As a result, our bodily states affect how we think and our perceptions are fundamentally shaped by our ability to act. The very same object can look vastly different depending on what you intend to do and your ability to perform that intended action. Studies suggest that simply holding a gun changes the way you perceive the world around you. 

Read more about embodied cognition in my Discover magazine story, Where Do Thoughts Occur?

More about embodied cognition and guns in my blog post, Guns on the Brain.

 

How I Found Contentment in My Own Backyard

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201206-omag-way-home-600x411Could You Find Contentment in Your Own Backyard?
Christie Aschwanden spent her youth traipsing around the globe—until she discovered what it meant to find contentment in her own home.
O, the Oprah Magazine; May, 2012

Excerpt:

The walk is not negotiable. No matter how full the day’s agenda, we go—my husband, my cow dog, and I, down our rural western Colorado road, past the neighbor’s property to the dead end, up the old dirt track grown over with sagebrush and piñon saplings, to the top of the hill where the path ends under a red sandstone cliff. I’ve watched sunset after sunset from this private perch, and each is the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.

I have never wanted for spectacular sunsets. As an air force brat, a competitive ski racer, and then a journalist, I’ve watched the sun go down on five continents. I’ve lived in three countries and more than a dozen cities; trekked up and down the Alps, through Central American rainforests, and along Mediterranean coasts, seeking novelty and adventure. But a kind of loneliness lurked in my perpetual motion. I could fit in anywhere, yet I belonged nowhere.

Read the rest here: Could You Find Contentment in Your Own Backyard?

Interview: Brian Vastag

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Brian Vastag is a science reporter at The Washington Post, where he covers general science, the environment, climate change, and space. Vastag covered the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown for the Post, penning six front-page stories during the height of the crisis and more than a dozen stories overall on the disaster and its political fallout.

Before landing at the Post in January 2011, Vastag spent nearly six years freelancing for some 40 publications, including U.S. News & World Report, New Scientist, Health, Nature, Science, Scientific American, Science News and National Geographic News. From 2000 to 2004, Vastag served as Washington news editor for the Journal of the American Medical Association, operating as a one-man bureau while covering biomedical research and policy from Capitol Hill to the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. Vastag has made live radio appearances on BBC World Service, WNYC, and Public Radio International’s The World, with television appearances on MSNBC and CNN.

Vastag is a member of the panel, Covering Scientific Controversies, that will take place Saturday, October 15th, from 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm at the Wettaw Auditorium at the University of Northern Arizona. The panel is part of the annual National Association of Science Writers meeting.

I interviewed Vastag prior to the NASW panel. In our interview, we discussed his Fukushima reporting as well as an investigative piece about offshore stem cell treatments that he wrote for the Post in 2008, Injections of Hope: Doctors promote offshore stem cell treatments, but some patients cry foul.

Click the following link to listen to the interview. (Or right click the link to download the .mp3 so you can listen on your audio device.)

BrianVastagPt1.output

–Christie Aschwanden

Interview: Gary Taubes

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Gary Taubes  is the author of Nobel Dreams (1987), Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion (1993), Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007), and Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It (2010). He studied applied physics at Harvard and aerospace engineering at Stanford (MS, 1978). After receiving a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University in 1981, Taubes joined Discover magazine as a staff reporter in 1982. Since then he has written numerous articles for Discover, Science and other magazines. Originally focusing on physics issues, his interests have more recently turned to medicine and nutrition.

Taubes’ books have all dealt with scientific controversies. Nobel Dreams takes a critical look at the politics and experimental techniques behind the Nobel Prize-winning work of physicist Carlo Rubbia. Bad Science is a chronicle of the short-lived media frenzy surrounding the Pons-Fleischmann cold fusion experiments of 1989.

Taubes is a member of the panel, Covering Scientific Controversies, that will take place Saturday, October 15th, from 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm at the Wettaw Auditorium at the University of Northern Arizona. The panel is part of the annual National Association of Science Writers meeting.

I spoke with Taubes about his controversial New York Times Magazine story, Is Sugar Toxic?

Click the following link to listen to the interview. (Or right click the link to download the .mp3 so you can listen on your audio device.)

TaubesOnBias

Grief, again.

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Our neighborhood lost a great man this week. Up until a few months ago, Mack Gorrod  was still rising early every morning to feed his cows. Whenever we had a big snow storm, he would drive his tractor over to plow our driveway. He insisted. He always brought a few treats for our cow dog, who greeted him with enthusiasm every time.

The first time I cried for Mack was the day last fall when they cut down his apple orchard. I knew that once his trees were gone, he would soon follow.

Since his death three days ago, I’ve tried numerous times to write about Ol’ Mack. Yet I find myself unable to articulate the depth of my sorrow. So I was interested to see Slate’s first installment of what looks to be a fascinating look at grief. It follows Meghan O’Rourke‘s outstanding series The Long Good-bye. (The basis of a book by the same title.) The series asked readers to describe their experiences with grief and offers a glimpse into one of our most personal emotions.

Mack had a stroke the same day that my 92-year-old grandma died, and when I saw the ambulance go by that morning–minutes after my mom had given me the news about grandma–I was beside myself. Losing Grandma Penner–my last remaining grandparent–was difficult enough. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing Ol’ Mack too.

We didn’t lose Mack that day; he held on for two more months. In retrospect I’m not sure that was what anyone wanted.

Some day when I gain my composure, I hope to write something more about Mack, but for now all I can say is, Mack was the bedrock of this place I call home.

Farewell Mack Gorrod. This place will not be the same without you.