I haven’t seen the movie Babe in years, but there is one part of the piglet’s story that has stuck with me. Early in the film the heroic little ham is told that there is a certain order to life. There’s nothing an individual can do to change the role they have to play on the farm. Babe’s destiny to wind up as bacon is, as one of the film’s anthropomorphic mice squeaks at the beginning of one chapter, simply “The way things are.”

“The way things are” could also serve as an alternate title to Ananyo Bhattacharya’s Guardian science blog op-ed “Nine ways scientists demonstrate they don’t understand journalism.” Bhattacharya, the chief online editor for Nature, presents a