Are all years in science and science writing this weird? Just on my own self-assigned beats, I found myself writing and thinking about bad science and bad writing about vaginas; madness and murder; a psychiatric manual that actually accelerates psychiatry's race into the weeds; and the media's insistence on simple, clean fables about both neuroscience and genetics at a time when most fields are increasingly recognizing how very little they actually know.

Probably most years are this weird — but the weirdness sure jumps out when you sit down and chat about it with some other people who keep track of these things. So I did when Maggie Koerth-Baker, Maryn McKenna, Brian Switek and I sat down last week to talk about the year in science with Skeptically Speaking's Desiree Schell. The topics run the gamut from the DSM to dinosaurs, abortion to zoology, pandemics to poison and punditry, as Schell tries and mostly succeeds in herding the cats that be our brains. Got to be something you like. You can listen via the link below; any trouble here, grab a listen at the episode's page at Skeptically Speaking.

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