No, Mr. Penn, That Is Not Why We Hate You

By: | January 19, 2016

shutterstock_309953711Like every foreign journalist living in Mexico, I’ve been watching the Sean-Penn-interviews-notorious-drug-lord with a mix of humor and mild disgust. It’s like some kind of adolescent game of Mad Libs. El Chapo meets Sean Penn in the mountains to talk about farts and penises.

I tried to read the article but could only force myself through about half of the horrible, self-indulgent writing. I’m a science writer – unlike my war correspondent colleagues, I don’t have to read every narco story that comes out. And so I forgot about it.

But when he appeared on 60 Minutes the other day and hinted that the real reason journalists reacted so negatively to his “article” was that they were jealous, I finally snapped. The American journalists who work in Mexico covering the drug war are some of the most dedicated, thoughtful and selfless writers I have ever met. Their passion and courage is surpassed only by their Mexican counterparts who also cover the drug war.

Mr. Penn lives under the delusion that the reason so many actual journalists hated his Rolling Stone screed was we are somehow jealous of the scoop he landed.  And I’m sure in his head that makes sense. So let me just clear that up right now before it goes any further.

I am a journalist working in Mexico and I can guarantee you I’m not jealous that I didn’t get to interview Mexico’s most notorious criminal while hiding out in the mountains of Sinaloa. I wouldn’t want that interview. Put another way, there’s no way in hell, heaven, purgatory or anything in between that I would take that interview, even if it was offered.

Continue reading →

I Take Up STEM, I Drop It Again.

By: | January 18, 2016

5076455215_de28db190f_oSTEM is acronymic jargon for the education of kindergarteners through college seniors in Science, Technology, Engineering, Math.  Apparently the education is inadequate and uneven and seen as appropriate for nerdy boys but not girls or persons of color – something like that.  It’s discussed in hushed and worried tones and if you’re interested in science at all, you hear a lot about STEM.  I’m all for it but I leave it to other folks.

I’ve spent a lot of time around African nurses lately.   They come from a lot of countries, mostly sub-Saharan.  They are educated and smart as they want to be; they work 12-hour shifts and most of them have two jobs; they’re tired a lot but are not allowed to be sloppy or cranky.  I admire them greatly.

I was telling one of these nurses that I was a science writer and she said, “Oh, my son is so interested in science!”  He’s in middle school, she said; he’s in science club.  “How are the science classes?”  I asked.  “Ok,” she said, “they’re ok.  It’s astronomy he loves and they don’t do astronomy.”  I told her I wrote about astronomy.  “He reads about it all the time,” she said, “he knows everything about it, he tells me and I don’t even understand what he’s saying.”  I saw my opportunity to do my part for STEM. Continue reading →

Blinded by the light

By: | January 15, 2016

4075828759_d6f7dccbd7_zAt the end of the year, the New York Times Book Review featured the Year in Poetry, covering 2015 collections by poets here and abroad, and other poetry features, including well-known people who talked about their favorite poems. The section’s Letters department always brings a range of opinions; the comments on the poetry issue followed in this vein. Some people were thrilled, others less so. But one interesting letter took issue with the cover itself, which spelled out The Year in Poetry in a series of colored dots.

This letter writer couldn’t read the issue’s title. He is colorblind. Continue reading →

Memories in My Kitchen

By: | January 14, 2016

colorful stack of towels

It was a year and a half after my internship at NPR, and I was in the habit of calling Joanne Silberner, who was then on NPR’s staff, for advice whenever I got a terrifying new assignment. I suppose this makes her one of my first journalism mentors. At the time, I’d convinced the magazine where I was an intern to send me to Switzerland for a story. I’m sure she gave me practical advice on how to report in the field and get what I needed for my story in a foreign country. But the piece of advice that’s stuck with me was this: Get a souvenir you will use in your daily life.

This led to a pleasant afternoon in Lausanne, in which I went from shop to shop, asking, “Est-ce que vous avez des montres de Tintin?” I used my dictionary and my lousy middle-school French to cobble together the question: Do you have any Tintin watches? Tintin, boy reporter, hero of the Belgian comics I devoured (in translation) as a child, was just the thing to commemorate my first time reporting overseas. Continue reading →

In the Oregon Standoff, Science is a Hostage

By: | January 12, 2016

523679850_1df25124a0_zIn the mid-1990s, when I had half a biology degree and precious few practical skills, I was hired as a field assistant on a desert tortoise research project in southwestern Utah. It was a strange and wonderful job at a strange and not-so-wonderful time: In order to protect the tortoise, a threatened species, the federal Bureau of Land Management had recently limited grazing in tortoise habitat. While most ranchers had accepted government compensation for the restriction of their grazing privileges on public land, a few had refused to accept payment—or move their cattle.

One of them was a southern Nevada rancher named Cliven Bundy. As he told The Washington Post at the time, he was opposed to the “land grab,” and was “digging in for a fight.”

Dig in he did. In the years that followed, he racked up $1 million in grazing fines and fees, and in the spring of 2014, when Bureau of Land Management contractors finally moved to round up his cattle, he vowed to do whatever it took to stop them. After a tense standoff with armed Bundy supporters, the agency backed down. This past January 2, as the country now knows, Cliven Bundy’s sons Ammon and Ryan led anti-government militants in an armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon.

It’s been more than 20 years since the Bundys and their ideological allies dug in against the law and the public interest—and science and scientists are still in their line of fire.

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Here’s What Happened When a Doctor Fed Infants Whatever They Wanted

By: | January 11, 2016

DavisMealsIn the 1920’s, a Chicago pediatrician conducted an unprecedented study in nutrition. For six years (1), Clara M. Davis oversaw an experiment in which infants were offered a variety of foods and then allowed to eat whatever they wanted. The children, age six to 11 months, were housed in an orphanage and selected for the study because they were just weaned and thus had no previous prejudices or experiences with ordinary foods.

At the time, pediatricians enamored with the newly emerging science of nutrition were locked in a fierce battle with children who apparently didn’t care what doctors wanted them to eat. “One physician of the period estimated that 50%– 90% of visits to pediatricians’ offices involved mothers who were frantic about their children’s refusals to eat… some doctors responded to the children’s hunger strikes by declaring war on children’s aberrant appetites and eating patterns,” wrote journalist Stephen Strauss in his 2006 account of Davis’s experiment.

Davis suspected that children would choose a nutritious diet on their own, if given the chance, and her study was intended to find out if she was right. At meal time, infants in the study were offered a selection of the experiment’s 34 foods. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | January 9, 2016

00120001January 4 – 8, 2016

Three of this week’s five days have been devoted to issues specific to ladies and high time too after all those many, many penis posts.

Jennifer’s sustained rant against peri-menopause, let alone menopause (reminding me of a sign on my agent’s wall, I’m Out of Estrogen and I Have a Gun), ends with a beautifully-thought-out Master Plan.

Craig is in his wayback machine again, going through the Eocene, Miocene, Pleistocene until yes, there in the corner, yes, is a small, armed bunch of the first people.

Cassie ponders an electronic bra that tracks fitness — a technology one never expected to encounter — and decides it’s just the latest gadget that far surpasses our need for it.

Rose finds another technology one never expected to enounter, gadgets for monitoring the flow of your menstrual period.  They make menopause look good.

 

 

 

Redux: Whither the Dorset?

By: | January 8, 2016

Five years ago, I received a fateful invitation to join the Last Word On Nothing. Since then, almost all of the faces have changed, but its maverick spirit lives on. Much like the culture of the Dorset, featured in my first post in 2011…:

 

There’s nothing like a lost tribe to pique child-like curiosity. When an isolated band of Brazilian forest people were filmed this year, the world ogled the ochre-painted men with voyeuristic glee. Perhaps we longed for first-hand access to our own ancestor’s lives. One of these lost tribe stories – of the unconfirmed variety – is set in Nunavut, in Arctic Canada.

Inuit have ruled the Eastern Arctic for many generations, but they were not, in fact, the first inhabitants. When Inuit arrived they found another culture living a very different Arctic lifestyle from their own. For the better part of the last five thousand years, the area has been populated by the shy, peace-loving Dorset, who arrived from Siberia shortly after 3000BC. They lacked the Inuit’s specialized gadgets and whaling tradition, concentrating on walrus and seal instead. Rather than building igloos, they traveled with skin tents, which they banked with snow or sod. The Dorset had the run of the Arctic, with all its fresh resources – centuries’ worth of driftwood and animals unused to humans – for more than three thousand years.

When the Inuit arrived from the West, the archeological record shows no further traces of the Dorset or their unique shamanic worldview.  But rumours abound of Dorset survivors who somehow escaped the mysterious fate of their people. Continue reading →