A few days ago, my colleague Justus Henke and I gave an interview on the topic of science communication and the impact of the pandemic on current trends in this field. We were asked to comment because we are both involved in an ongoing research project examining those impacts and trends.

The interview — conducted in German — was nice and the result reflects extremely well what Justus and I were trying to bring across. It shows that the interviewer Mrs Dreyer is a science jounalist (but works with other foci as well) who knows how to put things into perspective and not bulldoze over the hesitancy typical of academics to talk about results when their research hasn’t ended yet.

This is a marked difference to the less satisfactory result of my dabbling into expertise for a CNN interview some time ago. Granted, the contexts were very different; still, the quality of the result shows the way how interviewers conduct their business.

Anyway, the occasion led me reminiscence my experiences with interviews; and if I’m not mistaken, this was the third time I have been an interviewee. Apart from the two here mentioned, in 2013 the German national broadcaster Deutschlandfunk had asked me to provide background on a fascinating 19th century US jack-of-all-well-many-trades named Ephraim George Squier. At the time I was working on my PhD thesis and well versed in his life and the historical context of his often questionable endeavours. The whole radio interview seems not to have been archived, just a short article by the interviewer with some sparse comments. I’ sure that’s better for humankind.

That makes three, and I wondered if three times is the magic barrier to introduce a new category in this blog, titled “interviews.” Yet, on second thoughts, an three interviews in a decade are clearly insufficient to rattle the cage of blog taxonomy. I guess, I’ll have to speed up my interview frequency for that. Let’s see what the future brings.