In the category of bad literary form we have Ed Yong, publishing this awful kickoff to an article in The Atlantic:
In Norse mythology, humans and our world were created by a pantheon of gods who lived in the realm of Asgard. As it turns out, these stories have a grain of truth to them.
Thanks to a team of scientists led by Thijs Ettema, Asgard is now also the name of a large clan of microbes. Its members, which are named after Norse gods like Odin, Thor, Loki, and Heimdall, are found all over the world. Many of them are rare and no one has actually seen them under a microscope. But thanks to their DNA, we know they exist. And we know that they are singularly important to us, because they may well be the group from which we evolved.
The problem is that the assignment of the name Asgard to a class of microbes is random relative to the question of which microbes were first? Word space and reader attention are precious and should be used to economically evoke interesting truths and propositions. While the coincidence is odd, there is no lurking implications, waiting to drag the unwary to their doom, nothing to deduce, no leaps of intuition – or hindsight.
It’s just thoughtless literary masturbation.
