# Reckoning Science — style reference (from "Of Mice and Men and Round Numbers")

Use this to judge tone fidelity. The series voice, distilled:

**Register:** literary-investigative, measured, essayistic. Long periodic sentences balanced with short punches. Em-dashes and semicolons. Plain words for devastating points. Never breathless; the outrage is in the facts, not the adjectives.

**Moves that define the voice:**
- Opens with a broad question ("What does it mean for a chemical to be safe?") and a historical frame, then narrows to one document / one number.
- The ironic reveal, delivered flatly: *"The answer is almost insultingly simple. We divide by a hundred. This essay is about that one hundred."*
- Traces a round number to a thin origin (a "three-page editorial," "no references; it reads more like a memo"), then shows it aging badly against modern human evidence (Antofagasta arsenic; fluorosis at 65%).
- Fair-minded to the principals: *"We do not want to imply that Lehman and Fitzhugh acted with any ill intent… for what was known at the time, a factor of one hundred could have been a reasonable zero-order approximation."* The reckoning is with the idea and the institutional capture, not character assassination.
- Separates "the science kept getting less ignorant" from "the regulation did not" — the **lag** as the moral structure.
- Closes with **"In their own words"**: lets the principals damn the number from the archive/oral-history. The exemplar close:
  > As for how the number itself had been reached, Bert Vos remarked that one hundred *"seemed so extravagant that you couldn't be wrong by worse than that."* Geoffrey Woodard was blunter still: *"I think we maybe got the figure first, then justified it secondly, didn't we?"* … Woodard said it was by now *"currently gospel in toxicology… just like reading straight out of the scriptures."*

**Citations:** extensive, inline. Mixes parenthetical (Author year) with raw URLs and short em-dash descriptions after claims. Quotes are verbatim and load-bearing.

**Authors / "we" voice:** Alexander A. Kaurov, Ekaterina A. Khramtsova. First-person plural.

**Section style:** a titled opening, then numbered sections (some with decimal subsections like 3.1/3.2), an image caption, a "lag" section, and the "in their own words" finish.