Meet the Endoterrestrials
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I know the emphasis should be "some", but even then this is a lot of biomatter. How do they come to that number?
There's a nice review here (http://www.pnas.org/content/114/27/6895) but it doesn't have much detail.
What a bizarre section. Would the author ever write about a man like this?
It's not only "possible", it's very common. The snark is not warranted. Almost all e.g. Wired profile stories do the same thing, male or female -- they only fail to add something in those lines when the subject is already known (e.g. Musk or Torvalds, so nobody needs to know how they look).
E.g.:
JAMES ALLISON LOOKS like a cross between Jerry Garcia and Ben Franklin, and he’s a bit of both, an iconoclastic scientist and musician known for good times and great achievements. He also doesn’t always answer his phone, especially when the call arrives at 5 am, from an unfamiliar number.
https://www.wired.com/story/meet-jim-allison-the-texan-who-j...
I tried to check. On theatlantic (okay, I'm too lazy to search harder) there are two other articles by the same author; one is from 2014 (and has no women as major characters), and the other is from earlier this year (and has a woman as the main scientist). I didn't find any physical description of the people in either story. So... not enough evidence to really establish a clear pattern on this person.
Still, even without data, I've a strong suspicion (just from experience) this sort of text is more common when writing about women, and I agree it's bizarre.
I think so. It's perfectly in the style of these crappy mass-produced long read articles, padded with every possible cliché and useless piece of information to sound like exciting stories. I'm sick of skimming through tons of padding text to extract the smallest nuggets of valuable information.
So we get a 5 sentence story that gets turned into this mess.
Edit: yes, please flag me because I upset you by providing helpful information. That's definitely not an abuse of power.
Yet, we not liking it won't change anything. In general, the public like this stile, so journalists will write this way.
You are better searching for media that fits your stile better.
But if you think it's a hill worth taking, go ahead. You won't succeed, but if all you want is to try, you'll get to try.
Duling, who has a bushy white beard, somber blue eyes, and thick hands calloused from decades of labor, hails from a family corn farm in central Nebraska. He led me on a tour of the drill—up and through and under, like walking through the belly of a carnival ride, pointing here and there to give a kind of genealogy of its parts. “That’s a dairy storage tank,” he said as he pointed toward a truck-sized cylinder overhead. “A stirring tank, like out of a cheese factory. I bought it used from Ullmer’s Dairy in Pulaski, Wisconsin.”
The answer is: yes.
I would hope so.
She's a geobiologist. Most people are going to visualize a geobiologist as some pasty, probably fat, person in a lab coat with a microscope deep inside some fluorescent lighted big building doing boring things with rocks (the geo part) that are covered with moss, fungus, or animal shit (the bio part).
The article starts her out driving a "Land Cruiser across the bumpy, rock-strewn floor of Wadi Lawayni, a broad, arid valley that cuts through the mountains of Oman". So right off the bat, no lab and an exotic location in a general region of the world that is troubled.
Later, the section you quoted implie that this sort of thing is common for her. She doesn't just occasionally get out of the lab to far flung corners of the world. The visualization people have at this point is no longer "fat pasty lab kind of scientist".
The kind of scientist they are visualizing at that point is Indiana Jones.
Look at some of the other locations they describe her working at after the above description. Deep undersea. On a thin crust on top of an active lava flow. That expands on the scope implied by the physical description, cementing the image.
That's like 80% of US long form journalism. Everything has to fit into a storytelling narrative and reported like you're reading some biography.
Sure. Describing their subject's look and personal characteristics, narrative style, is one of the most common tropes in long form reporting.