Science journalist Judith Stone worries about causing conflict when she writes about cultural differences aboard the International Space Station.

Judith Stone is the author of Light Elements: Essays on Science from Gravity to Levity, a collection of her award-winning columns from Discover magazine. Her book When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided by Race was named one of the Washington Post’s annual top 100 books. Her work has appeared in the anthologies Mysteries of Life and the Universe: New Essays from America’s Finest Writers on Science and Life’s a Stitch: The Best of Contemporary Women’s Humor, as well as in The New York Times Magazine; Smithsonian; O, The Oprah Magazine and many other publications. She was on the founding board of The Moth, and is currently an instructor in The Moth’s community outreach program. During the Late Cretaceous Epoch, she was a member of The Second City touring company.

This story first aired on April 6 2018 on an episode titled Science Communication.

Story Transcript

When I was a kid, I showed no detectable aptitude for science, but I was very enthusiastic -- until the fifth grade, when I entered the school science fair.  My not-very-pioneering project was a cutaway view of our Earth built in an old aquarium with layers of sand dyed different colors and labeled.  

But I was a little late in applying the food coloring to the sand so it was still wet on the day of the science fair, and the red of the core and the yellow of the mantle and the brown of the crust all ran together causing one of my teachers to quip within my hearing, “Huh!  First time anyone ever entered lasagna in a science fair.”

I was humiliated and it was over between me and science.  In college, I took the two required science courses pass/fail and I’m not particularly proud to report that I passed Geology by writing an epic poem about lateral moraines.  

As a young adult, I was uninterested in technology and intimidated by math, and I was given to making wise-ass remarks such as, “If God had wanted us to use the metric system, she would’ve given us ten fingers and ten toes.”

Nevertheless, my first big job in magazine publishing was as a senior editor at Science Digest.  The editor-in-chief hired me as his specimen humanities person.  I believe he thought that if I understood an article, any idiot in America would understand it.  And I believe that because he said that, jokingly. Ish.

I had doubts about my ability to do the job given my lack of background, but things went very well.  The women and men of science who featured in the articles I wrote or edited, were wonderfully generous about discussing their work, and I really did my homework because I wanted to ask sensible questions.  

I was getting the science education I missed the first time around. I was very excited about what I was learning, and my confidence rose.  Eventually, Science Digest was killed and eaten by Discover Magazine and I became a contributing editor at Discover with a nice, new boss.  I sometimes still asked myself what I was doing writing for a science magazine. Luckily, though I did some serious pieces on subjects ranging from astronomy to genetics, my chief task at the magazine was writing the monthly humor column, Light Elements, which was a mix of gravity and levity.  It was a heavily-reported piece but about the wackier reaches of science.

So, for example, I wrote about a psychology professor at Duke University who studies the effects of smells on mood and behavior.  She had been hired by an undisclosed client to come up with a fragrance that could be sprayed in New York City subway cars to increase friendliness and reduce commuter aggression.  I told her I thought her best bet was chloroform.

So one day, my boss asked me to write about a problem that NASA was facing and the interesting fix they were pursuing.  This was a couple of years before the International Space Station was to be assembled and then inhabited.  Officials at NASA were concerned about possible culture conflicts among the international partners: the U.S., Japan, Canada, and the European Space Agency, initially Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Italy.

So, for the first time ever in NASA’s history, they’d hired an anthropologist to look into the matter and pinpoint potential pitfalls so they could be avoided.  Dr. Mary Lozano and a colleague had given extensive questionnaires to the astronauts and their teams, and they’d done interviewing.  The Russians were going to be partners in the space station but they weren’t part of this inquiry.

Dr. Lozano wanted to know what the concerns of the international astronauts were and she was especially interested in whether they had any preconceived notions about people of other nationalities.  She had gathered some interesting preliminary data and she was ready to share it with Discover.

In the first of many phone conversations that we had -- she was in L.A., I was in New York -- she gave me some highlights from her findings:  The Americans thought the Germans would be pompous, the Italians would be emotional, and the French would be arrogant.  Everyone else thought the Americans would be arrogant.  

The Italians worried that their colleagues, especially the Americans, would challenge their opinions and they’d be forced to defend these opinions which they considered a violation of privacy.  

The Canadians were concerned that everyone would automatically assume that they were just like the Americans, and the French were afraid no one else would take the food seriously.

In this first conversation, Dr. Lozano delivered some caveats.  “This is a very delicate situation,” she said.  “You really have to be sensitive.  If you were to insult any of the international partners, it would be terrible.”

I assured her that I would proceed with the utmost sensitivity, and I meant it, but my mandate was the poking of fun and her findings were certainly a gift to anybody writing a humor column. 

So I wrote the piece and it went through fact-checking.  The magazine had a lead time of a couple of months and, during that period, Dr. Lozano started to get cold feet.  At one point, she asked me to completely call off the story.  I told her it was too late for that and I assured her that she had nothing to worry about.

Yet worry she did and, as she grew increasingly anxious, every phone call was a variation on, “I hope you were sensitive,” “I hope you haven’t insulted anyone.  It would be a disaster.”

I assured her that everything was going to be fine, but I was terrified.  I hadn’t said anything really horrible but I’ve been pretty hard on the French.  The lead was “The Japanese think American-style split-second decision-making is dangerous.  The Americans think the Japanese preference for protracted deliberation could be lethal in an emergency.  The Italians are worried about their privacy, and I’m afraid the French are going to make everyone watch Jerry Lewis movies.”  

It doesn’t get any cheaper than that--except that I also made a crack about French astronauts arguing about what wine goes with space food sticks and other cracks of that ilk.  

My confidence plummeted and I went back to thinking, “What is a person like me doing writing about science when the stakes are so high?”  I could vividly picture the disaster that Dr. Lozano had warned me about.  I imagined the Japanese and the Europeans withdrawing from the space station in outrage.  I didn’t think the Canadians would say anything because they’re so nice.

I was actually worried about the space station itself because it wasn’t too many years earlier that creepy senator William Proxmire had mocked NASA’s search for extraterrestrial intelligence and he had actually gotten Congress to de-fund the program.  You know, I thought things were funny when I wrote them but by now I thought they were incredibly rude and incredibly stupid.  I thought, What if my stupid, rude column gets the space station de-funded?  I was miserable.

The second we got first bound copies of the issue back from the printer, I FedeExed one to Dr. Lozano.  This was in the days when my wood-burning computer had no scanning capability.  And I spent a horrible night.  I was sure that I had set the American Space Program back by several decades or perhaps destroyed NASA. 

I tossed and turned and I thought, “What made you think you could write for Discover Magazine?  You entered lasagna in the science fair.”

The next day, just after 10:00 a.m. California time, my phone rang and it was Dr. Lozano and she was happy.  “Thank you,” she said.  “Thank you for being sensitive.  Thank you for not insulting anybody.  It’s accurate, it’s amusing, I’m so relieved.”

Me too.  I was so, so relieved.

After we hung up, I started thinking about what she had said.  “Thank you for not insulting anybody.”  And I realized that besides giving me the gift of peace of mind, she had bestowed another boon, a nugget of life wisdom that could be a mantra in times of trial and it’s this.  When in doubt, trash the French, because nobody cares.

Still, I was really shaken by what I thought was a close call and I had deep lingering doubts about whether I have the skill to cover science the way it deserved to be covered.  

A few months after the space station story ran and NASA remained intact to my great joy, I was interviewing Dr. Neil Postman, the brilliant and much-missed media ecologist and social critic, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death and other fabulous books.  And he said, “Being scientifically literate isn’t just about knowing the current, complicated facts about some branch of science.  It’s knowing how scientists think and how they solve problems.  It’s understanding the scientific method at its most basic: coming up with a hypothesis and testing it through systematic comparative study.  It’s knowing what evidence is and how to evaluate it.”

And then he said, “You know, the great tool for dealing with the world is asking questions.”  

Now, there was a nugget of life wisdom.  Simple, profound, reassuring, very moving, I thought, and empowering.  I could ask questions.  I knew how.  I was already doing it.  I would never, ever be an expert in matters scientific but I could be a conscientious amateur asking good questions.

So ever after, when I’m in a cloud of unknowing and my confidence is flagging and I’m not sure how to proceed, I think about Dr. Postman’s words.  Though I would much rather take the easy way out and just trash the French, instead, I say to myself, “Isn’t this the right time to start asking good questions?”

Thanks.