Sixteen Columns

Vittorio over at Labsolutely has a very clever and amusing post up re-imagining the X-Men as chemists.

So what other media genres share cross-over with our field?

The modern art form deemed the "chick flick" shares key features with tactics used to recruit students into graduate school in chemistry. Namely: (1) hopelessly romantic view of the content; (2) focus on idolizing the celebrities of the subfield (e.g. Tom Hanks, Phil Baran); and (3) careful shielding of the subject from reality of life/lab. And of course, both chick flicks and science place an emphasis on diaries.

In a salute to both, here are some chick flicks in the context of science:*

1. How to Lose a Grant in 10 Days
2. Unemployed Going on 30
3. The Proposal
4. Never Been Published
5. 27 Postdocs
6. What's Reproducibility Got to Do with It
7. The Devil Wears PPE
8. Sixteen Columns
9. My Best Friend's Defense
10. What PIs Want
11. Save the Last Authorship
12. Bridget Jones's Lab Notebook
13. When Harry Met Sally at an ACS Regional Meeting
14. The Lab Notebook
15. Out of Academia
16. Sleepless in Grant Season
17. The English Postdoc
18. Gloves Actually
19. How Stella Got Her Glassware Back
20. 10 Things I Hate About U...niversities
21. Pride & PNAS
22. Crazy, Stupid, Reaction Mechanisms
23. Peggy Sue Got Funded
24. P.S. I Love the Combiflash
25. Flashcolumn

* Note: these are in no particular order; the author claims no expertship on relative merits of chick flicks.