I read the article yesterday and thought it both biased and too gossipy. To be clear, I suspect that both the asteroid and the volcanoes probably played a role in causing the extinctions, but the author seemed to want to portray it as a morality play and wasn’t interested in explaining scientific details even when they could be explained to laypeople. Kolbert did a good job, for instance, explaining the Signor Lipps effect in her book The Sixth Extinction. On the gossip, we only hear details about the alleged unfairness of the attacks on the volcano advocates such as Officer. She depicts Officer as unfairly hounded from the field when in fact he was wrong twice— first he denied that the iridium layer was evidence of an impact and then when Chixculub was discovered he refused to accept it was an impact crater. Keller wanted to claim that there were multiple impacts based on the fact that impact related layers are separated by meters of sedimentary rock at Chixculub and other places. Smit says those are tsunami deposits. He and others say that in North America, further away, the layers are right on top of each other. Keller says that is due to gaps in the record, but Smit claims these are deposits in coal swamps and there are no gaps. The impact experts say there simply is no evidence of a much larger impact at that time, a claim that Keller has made though I don’t recall seeing it mentioned in the Atlantic article.
A good science writer could present at least some of the scientific arguments from both sides, but this writer wasn’t interested in doing that. I hate this kind of science writing.