I've commented several times here on the surprising run of psychology and health stories in The New York Times Magazine, which has clearly made these a regular feature of the magazine now. But the Times topped that yesterday, with a special issue on health, featuring stories on breast cancer awareness, bipolar disorder, and a case of fraudulent psychological research. 

Interestingly, this has not been matched by a rise in science stories. We're not seeing a similar increase in stories on exoplanets, the Higgs boson, climate change, software, or habitat loss. The Times is observing what has long been the rift between what we would call medical stories (including psychology) and science stories. We might take this opportunity to alert the magazine's editors to the gripping stories they...

This morning, the Discover blogger Keith Kloor filed a noisy objection to a Reuters story on a questionable paper alleging harmful effects from Roundup, the trade name of glyphosate, a widely used pesticide from Monsanto.

As Kloor points out, the paper charges that the illnesses "to which glyphosate could plausibly contribute, through its known biosemiotic effects, include inflammatory bowel disease, obesity, depression, ADHD, autism, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, multiple sclerosis, cancer, cachexia,...

In a commentary in the British newspaper The Guardian, Katherine Stewart asks why state legislatures are moving rightward while the population of the U.S. "continues to trend moderately leftward." 

Her answer: smart, targeted donations from right-wing donors.

She writes:

Alabama, Tennessee, North Dakota, and Mississippi are among the latest to impose unprecedented restrictions on women's access to abortion services. All told, in the first three months of this year, 694 provisions related to reproductive health have come before state legislatures, more than half of them involving abortion restrictions.

We are seeing a similar surge of opposition to science education: in Missouri, Montana, Colorado, and Oklahoma, legislators...

According to an article Tuesday in The Philadelphia Inquirer by Don Sapatkin, the story of the AIDS epidemic's "patient zero" was "sordid tabloid fare" created by a book publicist to hype the 1987 book And the Band Played On by the journalist Randy Shilts. 

Whether or not this charge is fair, there is a bit more to the story.

Patient zero was identified by researchers as a man who had sex with multiple male partners on his travels across the U.S., inoculating them with HIV and accelerating the epidemic. Shilts, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle,...

When the bombs exploded near the finish line at the Boston Marathon, doctors in the medical tent didn't know what to do: Should they run from danger? Should they go outside to help the injured? Should they stay with their patients in the tent?

According to a stirring piece by Sushrut Jangi in The New England Journal of Medicine, a family physician, Pierre Rouzier, 

texted his wife what might be a good-bye message: There's a bomb at the finish line and we have to help. “I didn't want to die,” he said, “but there were people out there.”

One woman "held his arm and said, "I'm going to die right here, and no one is going to know who I am.' Rouzier held her hand and told her, 'You're not going to die.'"

Much of the piece is a mini-profile of...

The Solutions Journalism Network is tired of stories that tell us what's wrong without telling us what might be done about it.

It says its aim is to recognize and support "critical and clear-eyed reporting that investigates and explains credible responses to social problems," according to its website. "The key is to look at the whole picture, the problem and the response (journalism often stops short of the latter)."

And as one of its first projects, it has set up a fund to support stories on climate change with grants of up to $5,000 to cover expenses. The awards will also include "mentorship from leading journalists" and "access to story-sourcing tools," whatever those might be. (If you're interested,...

Tom Shales was a widely admired columnist for The Washington Post where, he says, he "spent roughly 39 varyingly rewarding years, most of those as TV critic."

"Varyingly" is the key word. Shales, in a post on the About Editing and Writing blog by Jack Limpert, former editor of The Washingtonian, explains that much of the "variation" in his rewards came from editors he had, a few of whom were great, and most of whom were awful. There is no room for mediocrity in Shales's universe.

If you're an editor, you might be inclined to stop reading when you get to this, in the third graf:

I regularly denounced editors as a species, insulting them with such disparagements as, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; those who can’t even teach, edit.”  Editors, I liked to say...