Events and activities sponsored by Knight Science Journalism at MIT have popped up in at least three newspaper articles this month.
—On October 17, Bo Peterson of the Post and Courier in Charleston, SC, published a writeup about KSJ Project Fellow Scott Huler and his mission to recreate the 600-mile wilderness voyage of explorer John Lawson in the year 1700. “It’s almost sinful how much fun I’m having,” Huler told Peterson from a stop at Awendaw, a fishing village on the South Carolina coast. It was a strenous sort of fun, though: Peterson says Huler spent much of the first few days of his trip battling strong winds and tides in his canoe, as he followed the early portions of Lawson’s route through what’s now known the Intracoastal Waterway. Lawson never mentioned tides in his published account of his voyage, leading Huler to speculate that “Lawson never paddled his canoe—not once.”
—On October 20, Boston Globe correspondent Rona Kobell published a personal account of her experiences at KSJ’s Food Boot Camp in March, 2014. Kobell says she arrived at the workshop having realized that “what I’d been told my whole life about food was a lie. Specifically, all calories are not created equal.” Following advice from writers like Gary Taubes (KSJ ‘97), Kobell had already stopped eating whole-grain crackers, breads, low-fat sweets, and other high-sugar foods, and by the time she arrived at MIT she’d lost 40 pounds. But at the boot camp, she met Taubes himself and learned more of the science behind her own success; for millions of people, losing weight (and avoiding diabetes) means cutting carbohydrates, not fats. “Food Boot Camp crystallized something I had long suspected: Our weight gain as a nation was in some ways pre-ordained,” Kobell writes. “In many cases, we were doing what we were told; but we had gotten bad information.”
—On October 27, not to be outdone by her colleagues in South Carolina, Martha Quillin of the Raleigh News & Observer caught up with Scott Huler and got him to talk more about the idea behind his Lawson Trek. “It’s not so much slavishly following his steps as just doing what he did: taking a long walk, looking around and seeing what you see, and talking about it,” Huler told Quillin. “Waking people up to what’s out there.”
Quillin also quoted from a phone conversation with me about Huler’s project. “Science journalism is not just stories about cancer cures or nutrition discoveries or space missions,” I told her. “It’s about the impact of science and technology on our lives every day. It’s almost impossible to imagine what life was like before the industrial revolution. Scott’s project has the potential to be a really useful reminder of how much our continent has really changed.”
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