The Editor's Letter From The January 2014 Issue Of Popular Science Magazine
Space School Cody Pickens I took a job at Popular Science in 2006, fresh from a yearlong stint as a health and fitness editor. On my first day, in a story meeting, I confidently and casually praised the life-extending virtues of resveratrol, a compound found in red wine I’d been reading about that morning, and suggested we run a story about it. At that point, I’d mostly worked in publishing environments where the staff simply nodded at the ideas of the highest-paid person in the room. But no one was nodding. Instead, they were silent. “Resveratrol is unproven,” Martha Harbison, our senior editor, told me flatly. I opened my mouth to speak, but she was already laying out, in a rising voice, the rickety case I was about to make, and then she dismantled it point by point. She’d seen...