First, Steven Novella is my hero.
Hey, wait a minute: he's MY hero!
Last, I just want to thank you for getting me into this podcast. I started listening a few months ago and I instantly fell in love with it.
I have to second that. Since I found the podcast (and since I happened to have an mp3-radio in my new lease car), I have been listening to them every spare second in my life, it seems. Still more than 70 shows waiting in the backlog, and I'm already feeling depressed that I will be able to listen to them only once a week as soon as I've worked through it, lol.
Although they are fun and entertaining in their own right, Steven Novella is by far the main reason why I listen to them. I've never felt the need to worship anyone in my life, but it's getting pretty close with Novella, lol! I only JUST about don't hang posters of Him on my walls. ;-)
He is SO bright and knowledgable, SO calm and considerate and intellectually honest. I never read or heard a word from him that indicated possible arrogance. It also shines through (in WHAT he says/writes and HOW he says it) that he is a compassionate person, also reflected in his profession as physician. Above that, the clarity of his writing and how he presents his arguments is just of an insanely high level IMO. You know this feeling when you read something and feel the need to debunk it? You have hundreds of ideas, both clear and a little fuzzy, of what to write and how to write it. When you're finished it reads clumsy, you're jumping around like crazy and in the process of writing you forgot half of the arguments. Doesn't happen to Steve. He always seems to address every angle, and finds exactly the right words and the minimum number of words to express exactly what needs to be said, in a logical progression.
One of the wonderful examples of this is the article "Anatomy of Pseudoscience" (
» Page not found), but he approaches this quality even in his almost daily Blog articles.
If talkshow hosts and TV preachers would be replaced by Steven Novellas, the world would be a different place... But of course there wouldn't be anything left to talk about. ;-)