ADP: You recently published a series produced by Lucy sui Mondi on the state of contemporary debate.
Could you tell us about this project and the ways in which it might offer a counterbalance to an increasingly fast and oversimplified public discourse?

SL: Science journalism tends to put you in the middle of some fierce public debates, especially if you report on topics like climate change, new genomic techniques, meat consumption or bioethics. What struck me was that discussions tend to drift toward personal attacks at their worst and data duels at their best. Evidence matters enormously, of course, but data alone can rarely settle disagreements around these topics. That’s because most arguments conceal a deeper clash of worldviews: facts can be marshalled in support of different visions of what matters. Philosophy can help us understand that many disagreements are not really about facts, but about values, and it helps investigating those values. Philosophical reasoning seemed like a skill we need more of today. The team at Lucy sui mondi agreed. So together we created Domande Prime, a debate format that is not agonistic in the traditional sense. What I mean is that the goal of the debate is not for each side to be right, to win, but to think better together, using disagreement to strengthen both sides of the discussion. Each episode starts from an urgent contemporary question that, amusingly, often turns out to be very ancient. We have explored topics ranging from evolution and economic systems to our relationship with technology. So far, it has been a wonderful adventure. Every episode feels a bit like sitting an oral exam at university.

ADP: Together with Silvia Boccardi, you founded Flares, “journalism to be seen”. You just released a new reportage on Muxe, a story on matriarchy and gender freedom in Mexico. What vision of journalism are you working toward, and what is this project built on?

SL: Flares is an attempt at making the journalistic process visible. We tend to trust science because it exposes its methods. Similarly, to trust a piece of reporting people need to understand how journalists came to what they discovered and why they chose to present it that way. What decisions did they make along the way? Reporters are often trained to disappear from the story and present their work as though it emerged from nowhere. The assumption is that good journalism requires separating the story from the reporter. We think the opposite is true. The idea that a journalist can completely remove themselves from their work is an illusion. Every act of reporting involves choices – about what to investigate, whom to interview, what to include, what to leave out – and since those choices are inevitable, we might as well be more transparent about them. With Flares, we publish original reporting and collaborate with newsrooms to disseminate findings in line with this idea.

ADP: You have spent years working on food-related topics, from labour conditions to supply chains. How does this awareness shape your everyday food choices today?

SL: Not in any dramatic way. I eat much less meat than I used to. I try not to make decisions based solely on finding the lowest price and, whenever I can, I shop at local markets. It’s tempting to look for simple solutions, vote-with-your-wallet style. But the deeper you look the more skeptical you become. I think there is a great deal we can and should do as citizens. But people who do my job should resist the temptation to offer easy consumer-remedies. The problems we see in food systems are often symptoms of broader economic and political challenges. Understanding that complexity may be less satisfying than receiving a clear prescription, but it’s usually a better approximation of the truth.

ADP: From climate change to weight-loss drugs, when you take on a new subject that encompasses a wide range of voices and perspectives, how do you structure your approach to working with such complexity?

SL: You said it perfectly, each topic contains a universe of voices. The challenge is figuring out which voices need to be heard. Reporting is, in large part, a process of immersion. For weeks, sometimes months, occasionally for an entire year, you gradually enter a world and try to understand how it works from the inside. That means talking to people who have different incentives and often conflicting interpretations of the same reality. It also means reading up and learning enough about the subject to know which questions to ask. Over time patterns begin to emerge. Some arguments are supported by evidence and some perspectives help explain the system more clearly than others. The work is identifying the voices that can substantiate what they say with evidence and placing those voices in conversation with one another.

Arturo Vicario – With Jane Goodall in Milan

ADP: What advice would you give to young people who want to pursue a similar career path?

SL: One piece of advice that I found useful came from the British environmental journalist George Monbiot. He said something like, don’t assume that if your goal is to do field reporting or investigative journalism, the only route is to spend ten years climbing a ladder working on completely different stories and waiting for permission. Find a way to do the work itself as early as possible. This advice wasn’t so different from that of my editorial director at Corriere della Sera, Massimo Sideri. He said he could have me write dozens of small pieces every month, or one feature a month, a big one. What both pieces of advice had in common was the idea that, early in your career, sticking by your level of ambition matters. Instead of waiting years to be assigned the kinds of stories I cared about, I tried to make them happen myself – although that meant juggling another job for the first two years after graduation, to make ends meet.

PERSONAL

ADP: What have been the most challenging phases of your professional life?

SL: There have been two particularly difficult periods. The first came in the years immediately after graduating. Journalism seemed like an attractive path but I had no idea whether I would ever manage to make a living from it. The second came years later. After spending so much time reporting on food systems and climate, I began to feel trapped by my own specialisation. The market had made its choice, I had become known for a certain set of subjects, and any idea outside those niches started to feel like a weed to eradicate from the brain, like a distraction to suppress. I turned into an infertile monoculture. At some point I decided to scale back some collaborations and take time to think about what to do next. Stepping away from opportunities that are working on paper and diving into uncharted waters was frightening.

ADP: How do you manage feelings of frustration or helplessness when dealing with such complex subject matter?

SL: Sometimes I don’t manage them at all and they overwhelm me. On return from Belém, Brazil, for COP30, the yearly United Nations conference on climate change, a colleague’s wife came to pick us up from the airport and told us that nobody seemed to have cared about what was being decided there. Italians were talking about the court case of an off-grid family whose children were removed by social services. There are moments when the gap between what matters deeply to you (because the story you’ve reported on becomes temporarily the center of your world) and what matters to most people feels unbearable. It also seems we have developed a strange idea of impact. We tend to judge the value of a piece of work by its immediate consequences. But sometimes the effects of one’s work accumulate quietly. When I feel discouraged I try to remember that endurance matters, and that as long as I’ve done my job with integrity and care, I’ve added one solid brick to something larger than myself.