Pseudoscience tells better stories. For now.

There are events you go to and events you wait for. For me, The Power of Storytelling has been in the latter category for years. It's the conference organized by the DoR team, the place where Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, writers, and documentary filmmakers from all over the world talk about how a well-told story can change the way we understand the world. And this week I had two reasons to be happy about it. I told their publication about my job, and in October The Power of Storytelling is coming to Iași.

The interview is called „"Telling the Story of Science"” and it starts from an observation that has been following me for a long time. Pseudoscience tells better stories than science. It's personal, urgent, emotional, exactly what we like in a story. The only solution I see is not to complain about it, but for science to learn to tell stories that are just as good. Even better.

We also talked about the stories that science almost never tells, the ones about failure. Science is built from errors and roads that close, but we only tell the stories of successes, polished and photographed from the right angle. The readers of my newsletter corrected me, by the way. They wrote to me asking about the people behind the research, how they got there, how they failed, what kept them on their way. And, because we are in 2026, we inevitably talked about artificial intelligence, with the question I ask myself before delegating anything to an algorithm. Is it a human decision or a machine decision?

And now, the news I was saving for last. On October 4, The Power of Storytelling arrives in Iași, at the Congress Hall in Palas. The theme of this year's edition is hope. Not the passive kind, which waits for things to resolve themselves, but hope as a choice, the decision to work for change even when no one guarantees you anything. An afternoon with five guests (journalists, activists and artists), with workshops and with that rare feeling of being in a room full of people who believe in the power of stories.

Tickets can be found on Eventbook. I'm already taking my afternoon off. If you've ever wondered what science would look like if it could tell stories as well as pseudoscience, I think the answer begins in rooms like these.