Most popularizations of science actually do more harm than good. Why? The single most important feature of scientific work is not this or that specific result. Instead, what science accomplishes – and what physics in particular accomplishes so beautifully – is the linking of diverse phenomena, the binding together of a myriad of predictions and explanations. What nearly all popularizations do is systematically undermine the progressive reasoning that links principles, conventions, experiments, and laws. Bad science writing splinters the most interesting feature of science, its long run of connected argumentation, into isolated metaphors that last just long enough to evoke a particular result: black holes are said to be huge funnels and quantum electron orbits are characterized as diffuse clouds.