NOVA has an unparalleled reputation and track record for excellence in science journalism on television; no other organization can come close. Yet its attempt to extend its brand to a new science news website--if brand extension is what this is--seems to be off to a very soft start.
NOVA Next...
NOVA has an unparalleled reputation and track record for excellence in science journalism on television; no other organization can come close. Yet its attempt to extend its brand to a new science news website--if brand extension is what this is--seems to be off to a very soft start.
NOVA Next, as the site is called, invited me to review it. On Feb. 28, Tim De Chant, the editor of NOVA Next, welcomed readers by saying NOVA would bring to the web the expertise and passion displayed it displays in its television show. This is how he described the venture:
NOVA Next will be focused on big stories, the sort you’re used to hearing from NOVA. We’ll have some of the biggest names in science, technology, and engineering giving us the inside scoop on...
If you were as impressed and enlightened as I was by Steven Brill's article on American healthcare in Time magazine, you should take a look at...
If you were as impressed and enlightened as I was by Steven Brill's article on American healthcare in Time magazine, you should take a look at the conversation he had on March 7th with reporters and editors at ProPublica about the origins of the story, how he put it together, and how it came to be published in Time. It's a short course in the practice of journalism at the highest level.
The conversation--which you can listen to or read a transcript of--begins with ProPublica spokesman Mike Webb complaining, mildly, that Brill got a story that ProPublica would dearly like to have had. "We were a little jealous," he said. "After all, longform journalism is our bread and butter at...
Reporters who cover science and medicine often make the mistake, early in their careers, of reporting that somebody who has responded to a treatment has been "cured," or that some medical advance or other is a "breakthrough." After we've made a mistake such as that, or more than one, we...
Reporters who cover science and medicine often make the mistake, early in their careers, of reporting that somebody who has responded to a treatment has been "cured," or that some medical advance or other is a "breakthrough." After we've made a mistake such as that, or more than one, we generally learn that many, many things called "cures" or "breakthroughs" are anything but.
Medicine generally advances in incremental steps, not breakthroughs. And there are many treatments that improve the lives of patients but don't wipe out illness in the way that we might call a cure.
So it's notable that scientists have used the word "cure" twice in recent weeks in regard to treatments for AIDS, something we've generally been told is likely to be, at best, a chronic, manageable disease--but not one that can be cured. Many people with AIDS are now living reasonably healthy lives thanks to a cocktail of...
[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"...
The cover story on last Sunday's New York Times Magazine is the latest in a rather remarkable string of medical and psychology stories, including two covers, since the beginning of the year. I don't normally think of medical and science stories as regular fare for the Times magazine,...
The cover story on last Sunday's New York Times Magazine is the latest in a rather remarkable string of medical and psychology stories, including two covers, since the beginning of the year. I don't normally think of medical and science stories as regular fare for the Times magazine, but lately they have been. And that's not counting the columns by the food writer Mark Bittman, which often deal with science and nutrition.
Here's a quick review of recent stories:
Mar. 10: The Allergy Buster (cover).
Feb. 24: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food (cover).
Feb. 10: Why...
[Corrects that victim of apparent suicide was lead author, not lab director.]
Peter Whoriskey's...
[Corrects that victim of apparent suicide was lead author, not lab director.]
Peter Whoriskey's tale of a whistleblower who was fired by Johns Hopkins Medical School drew me in right from the start.
The story, published on the front page of The Washington Post, began:
The numbers didn’t add up.
Over and over, Daniel Yuan, a medical doctor and statistician, couldn’t understand the results coming out of the lab, a prestigious facility at Johns Hopkins Medical School funded by millions from the National Institutes of Health.
I love stories like this, and Whoriskey's lede promised a fascinating and disturbing mystery tale that I was looking forward to. I was...
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...
The American College of Cardiology has a story it doesn't want you to cover.
Last week, in anticipation of its annual meeting, it put out a press release that began, "Drinking grape juice improves heart health!" And then it immediately backed off:
Does this seem too good to...
The American College of Cardiology has a story it doesn't want you to cover.
Last week, in anticipation of its annual meeting, it put out a press release that began, "Drinking grape juice improves heart health!" And then it immediately backed off:
Does this seem too good to be true—maybe it is. Results of medical research, especially research that finds health benefits in common foods or activities, can be big news and highly publicized. But not all medical research is as simple as a headline makes it seem. The American College of Cardiology encourages consumers to be proactive in researching medical claims they hear about in the news and discuss such findings with their doctors before making drastic changes.
The release said that a presentation at the meeting "found that 'healthy' smokers who drink Concord grape juice have improved endothelial function." The endothelium is a lining inside blood...
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...
On Sunday, a story published in USA Today flagged this problem: "The EPA has not revised key hazard standards that protect children from lead poisoning since 2001,...
On Sunday, a story published in USA Today flagged this problem: "The EPA has not revised key hazard standards that protect children from lead poisoning since 2001, despite science showing harm at far lower levels of exposure than previously believed."
The story, by Alison Young, cites an array of evidence that EPA's standards are some five times higher than what many scientists believe is a safe level; experts also note that "no blood threshold level" has been identified as safe in children. Yet, as the story also notes, realtor associations have fought hard against stiffening the standards, putting political pressure on the agency. Perhaps, not surprisingly, the EPA refused to grant Young an interview for the story...
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...
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...
Eliza Strickland isn't the first journalist to undergo experimental genetic testing, nor the first to write about the advent of faster, cheaper sequencing machines that could one day become part of routine clinical testing and care. But in...
Eliza Strickland isn't the first journalist to undergo experimental genetic testing, nor the first to write about the advent of faster, cheaper sequencing machines that could one day become part of routine clinical testing and care. But in an article in IEEE Spectrum, where she is associate editor, she weaves her personal story together with reporting that addresses the ethical, business, scientific issues surrounding personal genome sequencing. It's a nice piece.
"I want to learn my own biological secrets," she writes. "I want to get a look at the unique DNA sequence that defines my physical quirks, characteristics, and traits, including my nearsighted blue eyes, my freckles, my type O-positive blood, and possibly some lurking predisposition to disease that will kill me in the end."
Not everybody wants to know that sort...
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...
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