[Note: Emily Anthes and Dan Fagin are friends of mine, and Anthes and I share the same book editor. That would disqualify me as a reviewer, so please consider this merely a notice of books you might find interesting--not a review.]
GloFish, transgenic goats that secrete drugs in their milk, and an...
[Note: Emily Anthes and Dan Fagin are friends of mine, and Anthes and I share the same book editor. That would disqualify me as a reviewer, so please consider this merely a notice of books you might find interesting--not a review.]
GloFish, transgenic goats that secrete drugs in their milk, and an FDA that doesn't seem quite sure what it should do about a new Noah's Ark of exotic, genetically engineered animals are all characters in the new book by Emily Anthes entitled Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts.
Anthes catalogues the wide variety of beasts that might soon become commonplace if the government, animal activists, and the public can somehow decide what should be allowed and what shouldn't. Using monkeys and apes to supply organs for humans is taboo, Anthes writes, but what about pigs? Genetically engineered pigs can be sources of donor organs from which chemical "pig"...
Here's a fellowship that paid off. The winner actually worked hard and made deadline. For, with references to events this very year, just out from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School is s slam-dunk must-read (for people in the enviro-...
Here's a fellowship that paid off. The winner actually worked hard and made deadline. For, with references to events this very year, just out from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School is s slam-dunk must-read (for people in the enviro-science journalism business) from Matt Nisbet. It is 56 pages long with a load of footnotes . It includes bits on just about everybody who is anybody in the heavy-thinking, celebrity intellectual end of environmental journalism and a few other beats as well.
Nisbet, associate professor of communication and director of the Climate Shift Project at American University in DC,...
I posted my thoughts on the long Steven Brill healthcare story in Time, and now Tabitha M. Powledge at On Science Blogs has put...
I posted my thoughts on the long Steven Brill healthcare story in Time, and now Tabitha M. Powledge at On Science Blogs has put together a nice roundup of comments from other bloggers and pundits, where you can see a range of opinions. Powledge summarizes Brill's 26,000-word article as a tale of "greed, oligopoly, greed, monopoly, and greed."
Health policy expert Uwe Reinhardt is surprised that Americans are "shocked, just shocked" to learn that health care squeezes middle- and upper-middle-class patients "for every penny of savings or assets" they can get. But that misses the point: We might know that, but Brill made clear that the problem is even worse than many of us...
Last Friday, the leftist television news program Democracy Now ended its Women's Day broadcast with an interview with Vandana Shiva, identified as an Indian feminist, activist, and thinker and the "...
Last Friday, the leftist television news program Democracy Now ended its Women's Day broadcast with an interview with Vandana Shiva, identified as an Indian feminist, activist, and thinker and the "author of many books." She talked about the effects on women of what she called "the world's violent economic order," which included, among other things, the sale of genetically engineered cotton seeds to Indian farmers. The transcript includes this comment:
In India...the collection of royalties from seed has led to Monsanto controlling 95 percent of the cottonseed supply, 95 percent through a monopoly, not through the choice of the farmers, as it’s often made out to be. Farmers are getting indebted because the price of seed jumped 8,000 percent, and there’s no option...
Two hundred and...
Among writers who call themselves essayists, creative nonfiction is thought of as a lower form of life. It is defined only by what it is not: not fiction. Tacking "creative" on nonfiction is an attempt to "cloak it with dignity," says the master essayist Phillip Lopate...
Among writers who call themselves essayists, creative nonfiction is thought of as a lower form of life. It is defined only by what it is not: not fiction. Tacking "creative" on nonfiction is an attempt to "cloak it with dignity," says the master essayist Phillip Lopate in his new book, To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction. (Lopate admits that his preference for the term "literary nonfiction" is "a bit of gratuitous self-praise.") When literary awards are passed out each year, he writes, they include "a healthy list of fiction writers and poets" and "one or two nonfiction writers, if that."
What, then, of journalism? Journalism happens to be nonfiction, at least when practiced legitimately, but it...
I'm not sure how many technology writers and commentators would attempt to write a letter to John Stuart Mill concerning the subject of free speech, but Jason Pontin, the editor of MIT Technology Review,...
I'm not sure how many technology writers and commentators would attempt to write a letter to John Stuart Mill concerning the subject of free speech, but Jason Pontin, the editor of MIT Technology Review, chose that as a way to explore the sometimes "vexing" issues concerning free speech in the Internet age. (The Tracker is published at MIT but has no connection with Technology Review.)
Addressing Mill as "pale ghost," he begins by noting that "much has changed since you died in 1873," but "your lucid little book On Liberty (1859) has survived." In that book, Mill lays out the "harm principle," which says that individuals are sovereign except when they must be constrained to prevent harm to others. Free speech, an expression of individual sovereignty, must be...
That's a familiar plot in the illus up top, the familiar Keeling graph from NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii,of rising CO2 levels. And it keeps going up as long as one blurs one's eyes against the yearly cycle's ups and downs. A good story now on the wire has the latest - and also illustrates...
That's a familiar plot in the illus up top, the familiar Keeling graph from NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii,of rising CO2 levels. And it keeps going up as long as one blurs one's eyes against the yearly cycle's ups and downs. A good story now on the wire has the latest - and also illustrates the rewards and sometimes complications of diligent beat checks to see what is going on without waiting for a press release or other note to float in with no work on the reporter's part.
If you will pardon a bit of in-house news from Knight Science Journalism at MIT, we are happy to announce the establishment of a new fellowship that will support a journalist for an academic year in the creation of a publishable, digital science...
If you will pardon a bit of in-house news from Knight Science Journalism at MIT, we are happy to announce the establishment of a new fellowship that will support a journalist for an academic year in the creation of a publishable, digital science journalism project.
Unlike the other Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT, which allow journalists to spend the school year studying (and thinking!) at MIT, the new fellowship will put its winner to work. It's an ideal opportunity to pursue a story or multimedia project that requires significant up-front financial support.
The product of the fellowship should be a video, audio, or digital piece, or a written work if it can be published in some digital form. Fellows are encouraged to collaborate with news organizations to develop and publish their projects.
The fellowship begins this August and the final project will be...
Chris Mooney, the adept chronicler of the Republican brain and fierce avenger of science denialism wherever he finds it, is unhappy. The reason? A persistent "bad idea that circulates and recirculates with such frequency that once in a while, you just have to dust off your mallet" and...
Chris Mooney, the adept chronicler of the Republican brain and fierce avenger of science denialism wherever he finds it, is unhappy. The reason? A persistent "bad idea that circulates and recirculates with such frequency that once in a while, you just have to dust off your mallet" and give it a whack.
"I'm talking about the idea that when it comes to misusing or abusing science, both sides do it—a pox on both their houses—and the left is really just as bad as the right," he writes at Mother Jones. The idea's latest incarnation, the one that caught Mooney's eye, is a piece by Michael Shermer that appeared in Scientific American recently under the headline, "The...
While critics are still discussing the decision by The New York Times to cancel its Green environment blog, a Times columnist is demonstrating what can happen when environmental coverage is...
While critics are still discussing the decision by The New York Times to cancel its Green environment blog, a Times columnist is demonstrating what can happen when environmental coverage is left to non-specialists who are not well informed.
In January, the Times announced it was dismantling its environmental reporting team, and last week it said it was canceling the Green blog. Times public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote in January that the demise of the environmental reporting team would make it difficult for the Times to continue to cover the environment adequately. And yesterday, Sullivan wrote, "Something real has been lost on a topic...
Congratulations to Curtis Brainard of the Columbia Journalism Review for sticking around late on a Friday afternoon to get a scoop, if an unfortunate one--The New York Times, Brainard...
Congratulations to Curtis Brainard of the Columbia Journalism Review for sticking around late on a Friday afternoon to get a scoop, if an unfortunate one--The New York Times, Brainard reports, has canceled its popular and important Green blog.
Politicians and government officials who want to hide bad news use the well known tactic of releasing it late Friday, so that it's likely to get nothing more than a small spot in the Saturday papers, which are generally the least read papers of the week. Sunday's paper is by that time mostly filled up with features that have already closed, and by Monday, the bad news is old news. It's considered an underhanded tactic.
It was distressing, therefore, to see The New York Times follow this model by...
A new website devoted to reviewing science ebooks is not so new anymore. Download the Universe is celebrating its first anniversary. And one of its founders, Carl Zimmer,...
A new website devoted to reviewing science ebooks is not so new anymore. Download the Universe is celebrating its first anniversary. And one of its founders, Carl Zimmer, has a dim view of much of what happened with ebooks during that inaugural year.
After mentioning two ebooks he liked, Zimmer writes, "We were also dismayed to discover a lot of wasted opportunities." He takes a shot at a couple of books that grew out of TED talks, which, he says, are based not "on solid science" but rather "a thin cracking skin of ice." He mentions others, not from TED, that also suffered from "absentee editing"--that is to say, no editing.
He likewise mentions some ebooks that he liked, but notes that they are "few in number and small in size."
Zimmer reserves his most...
Hankering for more prominent coverage of climate change policy paralysis and need a quick fix? A clever column on Time Magazine's Ecocentric site by veteran enviro reporter ...
Hankering for more prominent coverage of climate change policy paralysis and need a quick fix? A clever column on Time Magazine's Ecocentric site by veteran enviro reporter Bryan Walsh makes one think one should read stories on the political impasse over easing the US national debt immediately (conservatives) or after the economy perks up (liberals). Only instead of reading words such as deficit and debt, swap in global warming. Surprising, but it sort of works.
In both cases, he explains, the argument features a camp that brooks no compromise or other deal-making that delays immediate, forceful action. The stakes are so high that, these rigid sorts believe, politics as usual must be cast aside. The very existence of civilization and the American way is at stake. Denialists (who either think the federal budget...
In the last week discovery by the Dept. of Energy - and an immediate outcry from Washington Governore Jay Inslee - that several tanks of radioactive sludge at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington Statehave slow but significant leaks stirred up a brief news alarm squall in the region. This is of...
In the last week discovery by the Dept. of Energy - and an immediate outcry from Washington Governore Jay Inslee - that several tanks of radioactive sludge at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington Statehave slow but significant leaks stirred up a brief news alarm squall in the region. This is of course a recurring sort of story. The old tank farm holding leftovers from bomb production early in the Cold War is well-past its intended lifetime. It has a history of leaks and is the focus of the costliest nuclear clean-up in US history. Environmental watchdogs and the public in general do not like to hear its subsurface plume might contaminate, however slightly and damn the dilution, groundwater wells and the bordering Columbia River.
Over the weekend, frequent Forbes.com columnist James Conca...
The second shoe dropped Monday on the saga of the New York Times environmental writer John Broder's road test, over an icy two days, of the Tesla Model S electric sedan. Our...
The second shoe dropped Monday on the saga of the New York Times environmental writer John Broder's road test, over an icy two days, of the Tesla Model S electric sedan. Our prior post took things through a promise by the Times's public editor, or ombudsman internal-critic, Margaret Sullivan's promise to look into vehement charges from Tesla and its chairman Elon Musk that Broder did not drive the way that he said he did in his review, and that his sloppy and perhaps malicious treatment of the car is why it wound up with a flat battery and a trip on a flattbad tow vehicle to rescue at a charging station. The review, along with a report of slightly higher losses in the fourth quarter of 2012, contributed to a dip in the company's stock this week.
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