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Whether it is used as an icebreaker in conversation or as the subject of serious inquiry, “the weather” is one of the few subjects that everyone talks about. And though we recognize the faces that bring us the weather on television, how government meteorologists and forecasters go about their jobs is rarely scrutinized. Given recent weather-related disasters, it is time we find out more. This book offers an inside look at how meteorologists and forecasters predict the weather. Based on field observation and interviews at the Storm Prediction Center in Oklahoma, the National Weather Service in Washington, D.C., and a handful of midwestern outlets, the book finds a supremely hard-working, insular clique of professionals who often refer to themselves as a “band of brothers.” In this book, we learn their lingo, how they “read” weather conditions, how forecasts are written, and, of course, how those messages are conveyed to the public. Weather forecasts, the book shows, are often shaped as much by social and cultural factors inside local offices as they are by approaching cumulus clouds. By opening up this world to us, the book offers a glimpse of a crucial profession.

Scientific breakthroughs have led us to a point where soon we will be able to make specific choices about the genetic makeup of our offspring. In fact, this reality has arrived—and it is only a matter of time before the technology becomes widespread. Much like past arguments about stem-cell research, the coming debate over these reproductive genetic technologies (RGTs) will be both political and, for many people, religious. In order to understand how the debate will play out in the United States, this book presents an in-depth study of the claims made about RGTs by religious people from across the political spectrum. Some of the opinions this book documents are familiar, but others—such as the idea that certain genetic conditions produce a “meaningful suffering” that is, ultimately, desirable—provide a fascinating glimpse of religious reactions to cutting-edge science. Not surprisingly, the book discovers that for many people opinion on the issue closely relates to their feelings about abortion, but it also finds a shared moral language that offers a way around the unproductive polarization of the abortion debate and other culture-war concerns.

This book draws on a two-year ethnography of forecasting operations at the National Weather Service (NWS) to theorize decision-making in action. Contrary to popular wisdom, weather forecasters are considerably better than most other so-called expert decision-makers at mastering uncertainty. Following them in their quest for ground truth, therefore, promises to hold the key to the analytically elusive process of diagnosis and prognosis as it actually happens. That is the ultimate objective of this book—by systematically excavating how weather forecasters achieve a provisional coherence in the face of deep uncertainty, how they harness diverse information to project themselves into the future, it endeavors to develop a better conceptual framework for studying uncertainty management in action. Accordingly, the six empirically substantive chapters of the book illuminate key aspects of the process of meteorological decision-making at the NWS: the institutionalized socio-technical environment in which forecasters operate, the forecast production routine; the distillation of atmospheric complexity; the negotiation of accuracy and timeliness in the face of hazardous weather and after a missed forecast; the organization of future anticipation at different time horizons; the tradeoffs of offering expert advice to multiple audiences. The proposed conceptual framework provides the analytic tools to maintain sustained attention to the stable cultural and broader social field of decision-making practice but without losing sight of the situationally-driven micro-context of action and interaction. It reinstates decision-makers as makers of decisions, creatively implementing institutional goals in locally rational ways in order to fashion a workable solution to the decision-making task at hand.

Before news organizations began putting their content online, people got the news in print or on TV and almost always outside of the workplace. But nowadays, most of us keep an eye on the headlines from our desks at work, and we have become accustomed to instant access to a growing supply of constantly updated stories on the Web. This change in the amount of news available as well as how we consume it has been coupled with an unexpected development in editorial labor: rival news organizations can now keep tabs on the competition and imitate them, resulting in a decrease in the diversity of the news. Peeking inside the newsrooms where journalists create stories and the work settings where the public reads them, this book reveals why journalists contribute to the growing similarity of news—even though they dislike it—and why consumers acquiesce to a media system they find increasingly dissatisfying. Comparing and contrasting two newspapers in Buenos Aires with similar developments in the United States, the book offers an enlightening perspective on living in a world with more information but less news.