Anna Blaustein Archives - Knight Science Journalism @MIT

by Anna Blaustein / May 27th 2021 / KSJ News & Events

In KSJ’s Science Editing Webinar Series, a Masterclass on Climate Journalism

When Neela Banerjee and her colleagues at InsideClimate News set out to report on Exxon’s knowledge of the dangers of burning fossil fuels, they began with a question: “What did large fossil fuel companies know about climate change, and when did they know it?” That inquiry grew into a 2015 exposé that prompted states and cities to sue fossil fuel companies for their knowing role in causing climate change. Journalists around the world began digging into similar questions about how much other fossil fuel companies knew about the havoc they were wreaking.

“All of those articles taken together have changed our understanding of the responsibility that fossil fuel companies bear for climate change,” Banerjee said, recalling the investigative series during last week’s KSJ Science Editing webinar, “Covering Climate Change and the Environment.” The anecdote underscored a recurring theme of the 90-minute session: That climate journalists have an opportunity — and a responsibility — to speak truth to power.

Banerjee was joined at the event by Fenwick Montaigne, a senior editor at Yale Environment 360, and Lyndsey Gilpin, founder and editor-in-chief of the award-winning magazine, Southerly. Hosted by Joshua Hatch, co-editor of the Knight Science Journalism Science Editing Handbook, the webinar provided an illuminating crash course in climate reporting. (A recording of the event is available here.)

Montaigne kicked off the session with a recap of the state of climate-related science. He reminded the audience that the science on the climate crisis is settled. As such, he encouraged journalists to disregard skeptics, unless the skepticism is part of the point, as it is in stories about climate-change-denying politicians or articles describing public opinion in the US, for example. Otherwise, he said, there’s no reason to give airtime or credibility to deniers.

Montaigne also emphasized the importance of covering local climate stories, politicians, and the private sector, focusing on how climate change affects people, and situating stories within the context of global changes and the unprecedented rate at which these changes are occurring. He cautioned against sensationalizing developments in climate research. Being straightforward is imperative, he said, as he advised against putting too much weight on any one new study.

It’s important not to exaggerate promising developments in technology, either, Montaigne said.

This last statement came with another note, though: the climate beat is a bleak one right now, and it’s helpful to cover solutions in a responsible and measured way. “Keep hope and keep the faith,” he said, “because it is, right now, a pretty grim story.”

“Keep asking questions of the powerful people and institutions in your communities that are responsible for cutting emissions and keeping us safe from climate change.”

During her presentation, Banerjee focused on investigative climate journalism. She talked about finding stories and using journalism to hold those in power accountable. “The best stories are just lying in plain sight,” she said, adding that “the most interesting questions about climate change have to do with accountability.” Banerjee defined accountability, insofar as it relates to the climate crisis, as “the gap between what scientists and independent experts recommend we do to reduce emissions or adapt to climate change, and what politicians, government agencies, and corporations are actually doing.” Right now, she said, that gap is enormous. “Keep asking questions of the powerful people and institutions in your communities that are responsible for cutting emissions and keeping us safe from climate change,” she urged.

The last presentation of the event came from Gilpin, who spoke about the importance of taking a collaborative and intersectional approach to climate and environmental reporting. “A climate story is about power and equity and justice and race and class and gender and healthcare,” she said. “We have to give context to what other systems are at play that cause a certain population to be affected by a storm …. We have to talk on race and class in all of those ways.”

Gilpin also had a suggestion for getting people to care about climate change: Write place-based stories that meet people where they are; connecting the changes someone sees in their own surroundings to the effects of climate change can help people acknowledge and begin to understand the issues. Find out what people are observing in their communities and build partnerships with people who are familiar with local issues, Gilpin suggested. “People are experts of their own lives.” Whether or not they are able to talk about climate change or environmental policy, she explained, they are aware of changes affecting their communities. Gilpin argued that journalists need to make a concerted effort to include local people in the process of finding and telling climate stories about their communities. “More listening on that front can lead to better stories that are really serving the population that you’re trying to reach,” she said.

Climate change is real, but current policy isn’t proportional to the magnitude of the threat we’re facing, the panelists argued. And climate journalists can hold people in power — from politicians to polluters — accountable for protecting the public through investigations and consistent coverage. Another takeaway message: By telling stories at a local level and listening to community members, climate journalists can reach a wider audience and capture the urgency of the global changes that are unfolding in communities around the world.

Anna Blaustein is a research associate with the Knight Science Journalism Program and a student in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing. You can read more of her work at annablaustein.com and find her on Twitter @annablaustein.

by Anna Blaustein / May 18th 2021 / Alumni News

‘Don’t Go With the Pack’: Usha Lee McFarling, on Forging a New Beat During the Pandemic

When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Usha Lee McFarling started writing for STAT five years ago, it meant leaving something behind. Long a reporter who covered topics like space, climate change, and earthquakes, she switched gears and began covering biomedical advances. She wrote about 3-D imaging for the operating room, the big business of concussion testing, experimental surgeries for spina bifida, and other medical breakthroughs.

Then the pandemic hit.

As Covid-19 started spreading through McFarling’s hometown of Los Angeles, it became clear to her that the virus was affecting some groups more than others in the city. The pandemic had thrust into sharp relief the massive inequities in the nation’s health care system. McFarling pivoted again, this time to writing about health care disparities and the disproportionate effects of the virus on marginalized populations.

In the months since, McFarling says, she has come to see more clearly the underlying ways race and medicine interact in this country to produce deep inequities. A new beat blossomed for her. She went from writing about one epidemic plaguing the country, Covid-19, to another: racism in health care.

In a recent interview, McFarling spoke with me about the challenges of finding her footing on a beat where medicine, race, and other factors collide — and where sources’ trust and readers’ attention isn’t always easily earned. (The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Anna Blaustein: Prior to the pandemic, you were covering biotechnology for STAT. How did you change gears to cover Covid?

Usha Lee McFarling: [When the pandemic hit], it was all hands on deck for science writing. I really wanted to jump in. I called around to community clinics, sources I have, and doctors and [asked], “What are you seeing?” They were like, “It’s our poor patients, it’s our Hispanic patients, it’s our working-class patients.” Medically underserved groups were getting hit hardest. That was apparent from the first weeks of the infections here in Los Angeles.

From then on, my radar was out to look for that. I was looking for stories everywhere, and I noticed in obituaries, I was seeing Filipino names when they were talking about the healthcare workers that were being lost. That turned into a major story for us — that Filipino nurses were very much on the frontlines and dying at high rates compared to others. These stories, unfortunately, were everywhere.

This was a pivot for me but I really saw a need. I was first on a lot of these stories, and I was very surprised because they seem so obvious and so important but still under covered.

AB: You mentioned calling clinics, doctors, and other sources when you were starting to cover the pandemic. Where else do you find your stories?

ULM: A lot of times it’ll start [with] a fact I’ll see or a small study. I was talking to a Black reproductive endocrinologist, and she just mentioned how sad she is that she gets women that are almost 50 years old coming to her. She said that their gynecologists have told them, Black women don’t have infertility. Don’t worry, you’ll get pregnant. These White doctors were super misinformed. That just kind of stuck with me as a nugget, so then you have to find people that are willing to tell their stories.

I work really hard to get people to want to read these pieces and stay and finish them. I don’t want to contribute to noise. I don’t want to just tell people what they already know.

AB: What has your recent work revealed or clarified for you?

ULM: It’s so clear to me that there’s systemic racism. I don’t know that anyone can argue about it. This pandemic just tore the blinders off. It’s so clear in anything I look at now, whether it’s Black women not getting infertility treatment or rates of kidney disease, people have been talking about this to some extent for decades. So this is nothing new at all, the pandemic just made it really clear, made it kind of an emergency.

Once you see that the systemic racism is out there, you just don’t get surprised by it. In this recent story I wrote about the lack of interest in papers on racism in JAMA, people were saying, The Black physicians aren’t surprised, it’s White physicians that are surprised. I think once your eyes are open to this, you’re not surprised at all.

What I’m seeing is there’s so much overlap: Politics, economics, medicine, criminal justice, it’s all interwoven. I think solutions are going to have to tackle these really big issues.

AB: You’ve been reporting stories on a range of marginalized groups since last year. How do you think about and approach covering underserved communities of which you aren’t a part?

ULM: I just think we haven’t valued these populations as a society, or as news organizations. I feel really honored that I was able to write about the Cherokee Nation. I’m not Native American, and tribal communities are very hard to get into because they’ve been mistreated and poorly described by many news outlets. A lot of them don’t want to engage, so it’s very difficult to tell those stories. We need more reporters from those communities to write, and we need larger news organizations to value that coverage.

A number of stories, people did not call me back, did not want to participate. So you just have to not take that personally. I just try to reach out with a lot of empathy, and I try to describe what I want to do and why I think it’s important, that I understand it’s hard.

I also find once I make one connection in a community, they can talk to other people and say that they trust me. Sometimes you need the fixer on the ground to help you connect with people. I use that a lot to try to get in, and then I feel like I’m able now to show people the work I’ve done, and say, This is the kind of thing I want to do in your community. That helps open doors too.

AB: A lot of your previous writing covered widely acknowledged environmental issues. As you said, racism and inequities in the healthcare system are nothing new. How do you approach writing stories on familiar topics?

ULM: With medical racism, I think most people acknowledge that it exists. It’s such a different topic from the series on ocean pollution I worked on, but it calls for very similar skills and tactics to draw in an audience. I would get it if people were like, I can’t read another one of your articles right now. It’s hard and painful, and we’re all exhausted. I work really hard to get people to want to read these pieces and stay and finish them. I don’t want to contribute to noise. I don’t want to just tell people what they already know. I want to tell stories.

I think there’s a message here for young journalists: Don’t go with the pack. Keep digging and looking. Is there a different angle, or is there someone that hasn’t been talked to about this? Maybe you talk to the first-year medical student instead of the dean of the medical school. Look for the stories other people aren’t telling or ways of storytelling that other people aren’t using.

AB: What’s next for you?

ULM: Last year I focused on the pandemic and marginalized communities, and now I’m writing about the intersection of race and medicine. I really like to be working on stuff that other people are ignoring, and hopefully other people are not ignoring this anymore, even if that makes my job harder. But that’s kind of why I started on it, and I want to keep looking for those under-covered areas.

by Anna Blaustein / April 16th 2021 / Fellowship Life

With ‘Baseline,’ John Sutter Examines Climate Change Through a New Lens

Twenty-six years ago, marine biologist Daniel Pauly coined the term “shifting baseline syndrome” to describe how fishermen grew accustomed to catching ever smaller hauls as seas were depleted by overfishing. With each new generation of fishermen, the bounties that filled previous cohorts’ nets were largely forgotten. Scarcity that would have once seemed unimaginable became the “new normal.”

That shifting baseline effect is also evident in the way we perceive climate change: We often don’t fully grasp the scale of change because it unfolds so gradually. We grow used to the ever-encroaching tides, the frequent floods, the droughts.

John Sutter’s documentary project “Baseline” is an ambitious attempt to counter this tendency. Over the next three decades, Sutter will film from four sites at the forefront of the climate crisis: Shishmaref, Alaska, where melting sea ice and thawing permafrost are claiming lives and houses; a community in central Utah parched by intense drought; the storm-battered island of Dominica, in the Caribbean; and the Marshall Islands, a string of low-lying atolls threatened by sea levels rising at twice the global average rate. Each of the communities is a proxy for many more like them.

The project will consist not of a single documentary film but of many; Sutter plans to film in five installments from now until 2050, to document climate change’s gradual incursion into these places and the lives of the people who inhabit them. Think Michael Apted’s “Up” series, but for climate. “It’s my attempt — for myself and for other people — to try to rethink the way we conceptualize time in relation to the climate crisis,” Sutter says. “And to tell stories that cross decades, cross generations, and really try to make sense of the magnitude of what’s going on around us.”

Sutter has been drawn to stories about place since he was a child. He says that when he was growing up in Oklahoma, his grandmother would tell him stories about the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s. She described clouds of dirt that swirled thick in the air, blocking out the sun. “It just sounded truly apocalyptic,” Sutter recalls. He says those stories about the Dust Bowl, and the mass migration it engendered, likely contributed to his present-day fascination with narratives about communities impacted by climate change.

After attending college in Georgia, Sutter returned to Oklahoma, found work at The Oklahoman, and developed a penchant for telling environmental stories. He later joined CNN, where he worked as a senior investigative reporter, producer, and columnist for 10 years. There, too, he gravitated toward stories about people living in places threatened by environmental change. He covered climate migration from Honduras, the effects of coral bleaching on a fishing community in Madagascar, and Hurricane Maria’s impact on Puerto Rico.

John Sutter (right), field reporting in Honduras. Image credit: McKenna Ewen

He also wrote about Shishmaref, where longtime residents — most of them Alaska Natives — recently watched a home slump into the sea due to thawing permafrost. More houses are expected to follow.

Sutter says there’s real value in listening to people who are so tied to places — people who are finely attuned to the changes that are unfolding. They experience and understand climate change much more intimately than he can, Sutter says. That’s one reason that he and the “Baseline” team decided to supply children in each location with cameras, making them documentarians of their own.

The material the kids have captured “is among the most interesting stuff that we’ve found so far,” Sutter says. “I think that there’s something unique about seeing the world from a kid’s height and perspective, and some of them are really pretty stunning photographers.”

The first installment of the documentary series is in its early stages and, like so many other projects, has been delayed by the pandemic. But despite the project’s long timeline, Sutter operates with a sense of urgency. Communities are already feeling the effects of climate change, and the window of opportunity to convince world leaders to act on it is narrowing.

I asked Sutter what he expected the world would look like in 2050, when “Baseline” is wrapping up. He said he’s optimistic that the Biden administration will take aggressive action on climate. “But there’s a lot of inertia in the current system,” he added. “We’ve known essentially the same scary facts about climate science for a few decades now.”

Sutter says he has faith that humanity will find inventive ways to respond to the mounting climate threat but that, ultimately, he doesn’t know how things will unfold. And that, he says, is why he’s making the film.

Anna Blaustein is a research associate with the Knight Science Journalism Program and a student in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing. You can read more of her work at annablaustein.com and find her on Twitter @annablaustein.

by Anna Blaustein / November 20th 2020 / Alumni News

How Environmental Journalism Is Surviving — and Thriving — in an Unstable World

When Meera Subramanian became President of the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Board of Directors last year, she did so at a pivotal moment for environmental journalism — and for the journalism industry at large. Just months into her tenure, a novel coronavirus began spreading quietly around the world. By April, pandemic-driven layoffs were devastating the journalism industry. Then, record-setting wildfires ravaged the American West throughout the summer and fall. Meanwhile, the Trump administration continued its aggressive rollbacks of environmental regulations and formally left the Paris Climate Agreement, abandoning a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. All of this played out against the backdrop of a heated presidential election, one poised to influence U.S. environmental policy for years to come.

But Subramanian and her colleagues at the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) have been working to rise to the moment. She recently spoke with me about the work SEJ is doing to support its members during a time of turmoil, the group’s efforts to foster a more diverse journalism workforce, and the challenges that lie ahead for environmental journalism. (The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Anna Blaustein: The economic fallout of the pandemic hit the journalism community especially hard this year. How has SEJ been supporting environmental journalists during this challenging time?

Meera Subramanian: We have a really strong program, the Fund for Environmental Journalism, that’s been around for ten years and gives grants to reporters to go out and do stories they might not otherwise be able to do. Those grants, they’re the seed money right when many journalists need it.

When the pandemic hit, we quickly pivoted [from funding travel] to [providing] rapid response grants. Instead of having a deadline and an annual cycle, we just said, “Apply for money if you need it. We’ll get it to you even if it’s not for the usual field reporting and you just need it to work on the story from wherever you’re safe.” We totally reconfigured the program in really short order, and we gave priority to stories that were either about or by underrepresented communities. This year, the Fund has distributed $180,000.

Meera Subramanian, taking a break during a reporting trip in the United Arab Emirates. Photocredit: Simon Thomsett.

AB: What is SEJ doing to foster diversity and inclusion in the organization and in environmental journalism more broadly?

MS: As the daughter of an immigrant and as a woman, I was very interested in diversity issues. There’s a possibility for people in my position to be frustrated or to feel like you’re just getting so much pushback that you just can’t fight anymore. I totally understand that, but my hope is always that if there’s frustration, stay there. Stay at the table, stay in the room. Try to just keep making the changes by being present because as soon as you walk out of the room, nothing changes.

We’re in the final month or two of working on the strategic plan for the next few years. We have a strong component of focusing on diversity and equity and inclusion within the organization, which has traditionally been very white. How do we foster a new generation of environmental journalists that [doesn’t] look like the last generation? How do we bring people into this field? How do we make sure that the stories are being told both about and by people from communities that are often not being heard? Those are questions that haven’t been asked enough historically. Most everyone in this country is reckoning with that.

When we say we want to foster diversity, equity, [and] inclusion, that looks like getting money and resources to journalists so that they can do their work. We waive fees for people who are coming from affinity journalism groups like the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists so there’s more accessibility to be able to enter the awards and funding cycles.

AB: How has the Trump administration’s environmental policy affected environmental journalism?

MS: There’s a bottomless well of stories to be covering in terms of the unprecedented number of rollbacks. In that way, it’s made it a growth industry! But, at the same time there’s so much noise around politics that it’s very challenging to get [those] stories in front of readers. We talk about environmental stories sometimes being considered slow burn stories, things like climate change that evolve over a long period of time. Those stories are really hard for humans to wrap their heads around. Getting those stories in front of readers when there’s the latest Twitter explosion happening can be really challenging for a lot of science writers these days. There’s more than ever to be reporting on, but there’s also so much noise that it’s that much harder to get people to spend time with the stories.

In an even deeper sense, the emotional toll of being on the environmental beat right now [is significant]. There’s a lot of trauma covering wildfire after wildfire, flooding evacuations, covering species extinction. There are some really emotionally challenging stories. Journalists are always balancing coverage of the tough stories that the public needs to know about with feel-good stories about solutions and optimism and hope. That’s something I think environmental journalists face on a day-to-day basis.

That said, already there is so much happening on a state and local and regional level: governments deciding to move forward with Paris commitments, businesses disregarding [environmental] rollbacks because they want more fuel efficiency and consistency around vehicles. There is other work happening on all these different levels. Those are all stories.

AB: What do you see as the future of environmental journalism?

MS: My belief is that [journalism] will never again be a stable field. It will just continue to change and morph. Year after year, every time we think we’ve gotten used to the new normal, it’s going to change again.

We live in an unstable world. I think technology has a huge role in that and will continue to change how people get their information. Who do you trust? What are dependable resources? Where are people getting trusted information, where are they not, and how do you make that distinction? All of those are big questions that not just environmental journalism but journalism writ large are going to be facing for a really long time, and I hope SEJ can continue to be a positive force that helps keep the public informed about the world we live in.

by Anna Blaustein / October 19th 2020 / Fellowship Life

How Amy Maxmen’s Ebola Reporting Prepared Her To Cover a Pandemic

From the moment Covid-19 began its worldwide march, Amy Maxmen knew she would cover it. Maxmen, a senior reporter at Nature, based in Oakland at the time, was no stranger to epidemics. She’d been covering infectious diseases since she took a job as a science writer for the Journal of Experimental Medicine 12 years earlier. In 2014 and 2015, she reported on the world’s largest Ebola outbreak from Sierra Leone. And in 2019, she traveled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to cover Ebola again. In both countries, she saw first-hand how a lack of resources, weak public health systems, and political instability could undermine efforts to contain an outbreak.

In February, as the new coronavirus outbreak grew into a global pandemic, Maxmen was primarily concerned about the toll it might take on low-income, under-resourced nations in the Global South — a concern that remains relevant today. She had confidence in the United States’ ability to respond to the public health crisis. However, a series of failures and missteps has left the U.S. with the highest Covid-19 death toll in the world and one of the highest per-capita death rates of all developed nations. With outbreaks now spanning the country from coast to coast, Maxmen is spending a lot of time thinking and writing about what went wrong at home — and what the pandemic’s course reveals about the U.S. In addition to covering Covid-19 containment efforts in the Global South, she’s reported on the U.S.’s failure to heed lessons from pandemic war-games and its dismal management of public health data, among other topics.

In a recent interview, Maxmen, now a Knight Science Journalism Program Project Fellow, spoke with me about the lessons she’s learned from her previous infectious disease reporting, the systemic failures that brought the U.S. to this moment, and how she stays positive while covering a beat dominated by negative news. (The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Anna Blaustein: How did your experience in the DRC inform how you’re thinking about and covering coronavirus and the U.S. response to it now?

Amy Maxmen: I went to the DRC with Tedros [Adhanom Ghebreyesus], the head of the World Health Organization and wrote about the Ebola outbreak. He spent a lot of that trip talking about how inequitable and fractured health systems were in a lot of places. He was saying, “this is just going to happen again, these things are going to keep happening.” It feels [like] there was so much foreshadowing in that trip. There was political instability that was really undermining the response. There was a lot of mistrust among people. A lot of things I saw there are kind of happening here, even though everything is wildly different here. I didn’t know that spending time with Tedros in the DRC would turn out to really inform my feelings and my thoughts right now, but it did.

AB: What went wrong with the U.S. response to the new coronavirus?

AM: The biggest problem was the Trump administration. The most important time period of any outbreak is when it’s small and easier to manage. The Trump administration really failed between January to April; that was the time when we had to act fast. There were many signs that they were trying to sideline the response. Scientists were saying we really need to test people. And we had a government that did not want to push on testing. There’s also the lack of a national plan. If we had a government that said, “Here are all the labs that can possibly do testing, let’s prioritize testing in nursing homes every two weeks,” or “let’s make sure that all health workers get tested when they need it,” we could do that, but we would need a plan.

Now that [the outbreak is] huge, we’re going to see a lot of problems that are going to be hard to fix. There are deeper problems here like under-resourced public health departments and a lack of data management in public health departments. There’s a lack of trust for health systems. There’s the fragmentation of our health systems, the fact that not everybody has healthcare and that hospitals have to compete with one another for resources.

There are huge disparities in health care as it is. We see that in maternal mortality and cardiovascular disease, and now it’s playing out with Covid. There’s a lack of a safety net, so people are afraid to stay home and quarantine, and that’s a huge problem for transmission. We have a mass incarceration problem, and we’re wanting to just shut the door on our prisons when those are the biggest outbreaks in the U.S.

There are all these other deeper problems. And that’s not Trump’s fault. Those deep problems? That’s not just him, that’s been there.

AB: How have your goals for your work evolved over the course of the pandemic?

AM: Until around June, I was motivated to write a ton. In March and April, I was working 12-hour days, every day, including weekends. I was upset, but also really motivated and thinking, “I want to change this, I want to make a difference. If only I tweet more, if only I write these stories.”

I feel like the murder of George Floyd was sort of a pivotal moment. I realized, “Oh, it’s not just that people don’t know about systemic problems in the U.S., it’s that they are very hard to change. Something here is bigger than the news cycle.”

I’m still writing things I think are important. But I stopped feeling like there was going to be some moment where all of a sudden Trump was going to appoint scientists to really lead the response and put money into public health. Which isn’t to say these issues shouldn’t be covered anymore, because they should be covered. One reason that failures in the coronavirus response should be covered is for the record. I want to make it so politicians can’t squirm and say the deaths and economic devastation couldn’t have been prevented. Hopefully it can be one thing that people can look at as a piece of evidence on the record that the U.S. is not a blameless victim of the virus.

AB: You were a regular contributor to a Nature podcast called “Coronapod.” Can you talk a little about that experience?

AM: I’d never spoke regularly on a podcast before this. I don’t have any training in it. The Nature podcast people, Benjamin [Thompson] and Noah [Baker], said, “Just talk about what you’re working on.” And it was so much fun. It was an amazing experience, and it’s really largely because of them. I just talked about my stories, and it was really a relief from writing, where I have to think about every word, and it goes through tons of edits. Often there are things [in my writing] that I or the editors cut. This was a way to add in those other little tidbits and get a little bit more personal through my voice.

AB: What’s on your mind now?

AM: I’m doing a lot of thinking about what Covid reveals about the U.S. and about public health. I was talking with somebody named Graham Mooney, a medical historian at Johns Hopkins, and he was saying historians study epidemics for a reason, and the reason is that they reveal a lot about society and culture and politics. I’m doing a lot of thinking about what exactly this is revealing right now.

AB: How do you stay positive while thinking and writing about such heavy material?

AM: Long walks. Long talks with friends on the phone. That kind of stuff is helpful. It’s nice to talk with researchers who somehow have remained motivated and upset and willing to talk on the weekends. And getting this fellowship was like a light at the end of the tunnel. I think this is wonderful because it gives me a chance to do the kind of deep thinking that I really want to do right now.