Introducing Deviations

Michael Greshko

28 Oct 2024 — 4 min read

Hello! Of all the links your thumb could have clicked on, thanks for spending a moment on this one. I’m delighted to announce that I’m launching Deviations: a free, roughly biweekly experimental newsletter that will explore science, art, and the data that describe our world.

Who are you?

I’m a freelance science journalist and contributor to publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Scientific American, Nature, Science, and Quanta Magazine. You can see my latest stories on Authory, which has certified me as a “Long Form Professional” (cool!) and a “Human Writer” (good to know!). I also coauthored the National Geographic Stargazer’s Atlas and am finishing up a book about the global history of magic, which I’m coauthoring with Patricia Daniels and Nina Strochlic.

I’m perhaps best known for my work as a staff science writer at National Geographic, where I covered paleontology, planetary science, physics, and paleoanthropology, among other subjects. In that role, I broke exclusive stories on everything from Dead Sea Scroll forgeries to the mysterious dinosaur Spinosaurus. Along the way, I also wrote features about subjects such as today’s revolutionary advances in dinosaur paleontology, bold efforts to explore and sample asteroids and comets, and NASA’s new Artemis moon program.

The information ecosystem is changing rapidly. Social-media platforms are systematically knee-capping posts with outbound links. Search results seem to be worsening. A tsunami of AI-generated slop is just now cresting. And like thousands of other journalists, I’m finding my way in an industry that’s facing both historic declines in public trust and a near-total collapse of legacy business models.

Amid this upheaval, there must be better ways for journalists and audiences to find each other, collaborate, and build trust. I’d like to be part of building that future. A newsletter seems like a great place to start.

I also hope that Deviations will let me experiment with my writing in ways that would be hard to explore in my day-to-day freelance work. It’s straightforward to pitch a news story about a newfound species of dinosaur — much less so to pitch an explainer on how to spot the world’s most expensive fossils in trade datasets, a screed laying out the case for premium print magazines, or an epic poem summarizing the past week of science news.

Things might get wacky. Hopefully, that’ll be part of the fun.

What’s the plan?

The cadence may ebb and flow, but for now, I’m envisioning a biweekly mix of updates on my latest stories, links to stories and posts I have found interesting, and experimental newsletter exclusives as I come up with them. If you have ideas for things you’d like me to try, questions you’d like me to examine, or unusual forms you’d like to see me write in, bring them on.

Already, this spirit of experimentation has led me to Ghost, the newsletter platform I’ll be using for Deviations. Last year, I wrote a piece for Nieman Lab in which I argued that the future of science journalism rests, in part, on worker-led, worker-owned digital newsrooms. Ghost is now a go-to publishing platform for many such publications: The local New York site Hell Gate, the technology outlet 404 Media, and the online science magazine Sequencer all run on Ghost. So it’s high time I learned how to use it, too.

Why “Deviations”?

For months, I had been racking my brain for a personal newsletter title, in part because I had many conflicting ideas for what I wanted to do with the newsletter itself. I have, shall we say, eclectic interests: Most of my reporting is on the sciences, but I also cover magic (and am an amateur close-up magician). I do a lot of behind-the-scenes work with data to inform my reporting. I love musical theatre and have a long-running fondness of writing parody lyrics to Broadway songs.

“Deviations” seemed fitting for two reasons. For one, I spend the bulk of my journalistic energy examining science up-close, and in science, the difference between a “discovery” and a mere “statistical fluctuation” can come down to how wide of a deviation there is between theoretical predictions and observed data. I anticipate that in this newsletter, we’ll be exploring this enigmatic region: the fog-shrouded valley between human expectations and the realities of nature.

In addition, I want this newsletter to be a home for the ideas and projects that are interesting deviations from my own everyday. I hope what I share with you all will be interesting deviations from your everyday, too.

What will this cost?

For the foreseeable future, Deviations will be free. That said, I’d greatly appreciate your help in covering the costs of running this newsletter (Ghost isn’t free). If you can, please consider tossing a few bucks into my virtual tip jar.

Did...did I make it to the end?

You sure did. Nicely done. As a gesture of appreciation to the brave, hardy few who ventured this far down the page, here are two anagrams I made just for you: