Keep asking, is the motto of a long-winded magazine, Look (since 1968). The first question then immediately: why is science journalist Diederik Jekel guest editor of the third issue of 2022?
A possible answer: to be able to hitch a ride on a TV series that is currently being broadcast on NPO 2 on Saturday evening, jekels hunt† The foreword by the guest editor in Look is largely about the series in which old scientific experiments are imitated.
The concept of ‘guest editor-in-chief’ is a bit worn out and the question is what exactly it will do for a magazine, but Jekel, known for Who is the mole?† Beat the Champions and Willem Weaver, thought it was a lot of fun and a great honor. He (beta) is also interviewed, together with ethicist and Senate member Annelien Bredenoord (alpha).
The last part mentions the c-word. “That Prime Minister Mark Rutte said in 2020 that the cabinet would follow what science says about the corona virus anyway, was a stupid comment,” said Jekel. ‘Because we knew then that there would come times when science would no longer know either.’
Look sets the bar high, for non-scientists. Competitor quest is more accessible. New Scientist is the third magazine to compete for market share. In Look it may happen that the question is asked why a comet’s head turns green as its distance from the sun decreases, and a chemist is asked who scatters words like diatomic carbon, perchlorethylene and chlorine atoms.
Low-threshold, on the other hand, is a play about a mammal that has stimulated the imagination for centuries, the mammoth. The mammoth does not exist; there were — but not simultaneously — primeval mammoths, southern mammoths, steppe mammoths, woolly mammoths, krestov mammoths, and columbus mammoths. Man has finally done it again. Expert Dick Mol: ‘Mammoths were looking for the last remnants of grassland, but at the same time had to be alert to hunters. That combination made them stiff with stress’.
In the section Look answers the question is asked why an app with a period at the end comes across as angry, especially among young people. Because the dot in apps no longer has a function, an ‘internet language expert’ answers. After all, where the message ends, the sentence also ends. A period is superfluous and prompts the recipient to look for another meaning.
Agree. But what about apps that consist of more than one sentence?