Nearly any topic can be engaging with the right approach. That said, here are some of the fields where I have particular passion to share.

Medical Science

Let’s be honest: there’s a lot of questionable health writing out there. Will wine give you cancer or prevent it? Are dairy products an essential food group or a poison? Is every second study really a “breakthrough”?

Readers can be forgiven if they get the impression that medical research is a contradictory mess. A lot of the confusion comes from journalists failing to communicate probabilities, scientific uncertainty, effect sizes, the fact that not all evidence carries equal weight or the incremental nature of science.

This all sounds like it would make for heavy reading, but it doesn’t need to. For example, conveying a sense of the incremental nature of science could be as simple as saying, “The purpose of small pilot studies is to see if a treatment shows enough promise to warrant any serious time, attention and research dollars. Cod-liver oil has passed this first hurdle. The next step will be larger trials, to give us a better sense of just how effective it is—if at all—for alleviating bloating in people with irritable bowel syndrome.”

That’s much more informative than “Cod-liver oil is great for bloating!”

Health is one of my unofficial beats: I write a monthly columns for Reader’s Digest summarizing recent medical-research news (“News From the World of Medicine”). Before that, I wrote one offering evidence-based advice for managing common ailments (“Health Column”) and another one (“Uptick”) about conditions that were on the rise in Canada or around the world. I have fact-checked many a medical story and, as a journalism student, I was a research assistant for the Concordia Science Journalism Project’s “New Models in Science Journalism” initiative, which aims to develop strategies for improving the quality of health and science reporting in Canada.

Religions

My undergraduate degree in Religious Studies gave me an appreciation for the wealth of the world’s traditions. In addition to the “Big Five” (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism), I’m also interested in First Nations spirituality, individual spirituality (the “spiritual but not religious” crowd), Voodoo, Zoroastrianism and more.

In my opinion, religion and spirituality should not be considered niche subjects. All of us, including the non-religious, live in a world that is heavily influenced by religiosity. Nearly every geopolitical news story has a religious dimension — and may in fact be impossible to understand without considering it! Many local stories and personal profiles have this dimension as well.

Religion and spirituality are among the core motivating forces in human life, and I am equipped to report on them respectfully (which isn’t the same as reporting uncritically: sometimes, harmful things happen in the name of religion and nothing should get an automatic free pass) and accurately.

Samples: The Gospel of Secularism
Campus Clergy

Books

My master’s degree was a deep dive into the Icelandic sagas. I enjoyed the challenge of analyzing these complex texts, just as I now enjoy writing book reviews. I have worked part-time for a book-publicity company, writing press releases for new offerings and distributing them at BookExpo America in New York. As the assistant editor at Reader’s Digest, I kept up-to-date with the latest in Canadian non-fiction and selected excerpts to pique the interest of our readers. I’m interested in contextualizing my readings, putting them in conversation with other books, films and cultural currents.

Music in Everday Life

I grew up in a family where making music was just as natural as cooking a meal. My mother taught music to elementary students in the school system, my sisters and I played piano, and everyone sang. We sang at church, at the dinner table, in the car to pass the time, and around the piano to entertain ourselves and guests.

I know: we sound as cheesy as the Von Trapp family. But at the time, I thought that making music belonged in the fabric of normal life.

I now know that many people believe it’s best left to the professionals. But I think that’s a pity. I love listening to professionally produced music, but those of us with mediocre skills—or even poor skills—should also get to enjoy this basic human activity without cringe or shame. People who would never qualify for the NHL can play a casual game of street hockey, so why should music be different?

There are many contexts across cultures where amateur-music traditions still thrive. I’m exploring the prospect of developing a podcast to showcase some of them, and the professional music they’ve inspired. Possible episodes could include: lullabies, the music of solidarity (labour-movement songs), sacred music, work songs and music for social dancing. If you’re interested in collaborating, let me know!

To explore these topics or others, get in touch!

Images by Stefan Schweihofer, NoName_13 and Lubos Houska from Pixabay; Mike Maguire from Flickr.