Redux: Journalists Should Act More Like Scientists

It’s REDUX WEEK! Taking a break from writing, we’re choosing our favorite LWON posts from days of yore. My pick is from Christie and it regards the nature of bending and straightening the truth in journalism. The question of what to write in, what to leave out, and when to apply gentle literary pressure is crucial. How important is the true feel of a story versus the 1:1 veracity of a moment? Every writer has to navigate these perilous waters and after reading Christie’s piece I found myself hoping that we as readers could enjoy subtlety as much as grandstanding, which is after all the scientific way of doing things. As she writes, “Not every story is unforgettable or infuriating. That doesn’t mean they’re not important.” It first ran April 7, 2015.
— Craig

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The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” — Some wise person who wasn’t Einstein.

“I don’t think we need to necessarily institute a lot of new ways of doing things,” [Rolling Stone managing editor, Will] Dana, said. “We just have to do what we’ve always done and just make sure we don’t make this mistake again.”

I’ve never liked that (fake) Einstein quote, because it conflates stupidity with insanity. But I couldn’t help thinking of it when I read the Dana quote in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Report on what went wrong on the now-discredited Rolling Stone story, “A Rape on Campus.” The story recounted a harrowing tale of a University of Virginia student’s alleged gang rape at a campus fraternity house.

I’m not going to rehash all the problems with the Rolling Stone story (you can read all about it in the report). Let’s just say that something went very wrong, and the magazine’s tone deaf response to the report gives journalism another black eye. By insisting that,”Ultimately, we were too deferential to our rape victim; we honored too many of her requests in our reporting,” Rolling Stone editors essential threw the alleged victim, “Jackie,” under the bus.

The problem wasn’t that the magazine gave too much weight to Jackie’s story, it’s that they had settled on the story they wanted to tell before they’d ever gathered the facts. As Jay Rosen notes in his blog, “[This narrative] didn’t start with Sabrina Rubin Erdely. She was sent on a search for where to set it.” Continue reading

Redux: Dog Days by Cameron Walker

It’s a Redux week here at LWON as we take a short summer break. It’s hot and it’s always a good time to think about dogs, as in this sweet post from last summer by Cameron Walker.

 

374px-Close-up_of_SiriusThese are the dog days. Hot as a dog, lazy as a dog, wanting to curl up and take naps like a dog. Please, let us lie, sleeping like them, on these summer afternoons.

But the phrase didn’t originate from the habits of our earthly canine companions. Instead, it came from Sirius, the dog star. In July and early August, Sirius rises and sets with the sun. People once thought that the combined power of our daytime star and the brightest one in our night sky brought the full heat of summer.

Here below, our own dog star’s light has started to dim. We got him from a rescue group nearly six years ago. He’s a strange brew of Labrador and possibly Great Dane—100 pounds with an enormous head—and somewhere between eight and ten years old. We might be seeing the shine from Sirius, 8.7 light years away, from around the time he was born.

He was not born under a lucky star, it seems. Continue reading

Redux: The Art (& Science) of Lefty Portraits

It’s a Redux week here at LWON as we take a short summer break. My holiday reading is Tales From Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience, by Michael S. Gazzaniga. It’s a memoir of the amazing discovery of split-brain phenomena in patients whose left and right brains have been separated. It put me in mind of this guest post by Sam Kean that ran on May 5, 2014. I think it might be my favorite guest post so far. Enjoy!

504179143_1b6093ad22_bIf neuroscientists could pick one idea to pack into a wormhole and expel to the outer reaches of the galaxy, there would be several worthy candidates. Some would probably pick the notion that you can “read” people’s tastes and preferences and even political ideologies on brain scans. Others might banish all talk of “neuroplasticity” and “mirror neurons.” Still others would rejoice to never hear another person ramble on about the “logical” left brain versus the “artistic” right brain, and how you can fulfill your creative potential only by thinking with both halves of your brain at once. Who knew!

All that said, backlashes can go too far sometimes. And in the last case especially, it’s a shame that hippie-dippy pseudopsychology has turned a lot of people off to the fascinating world of left brain/right brain differences. The two hemispheres really do have distinct talents, and while it’s easy to make too much of those differences, they do offer a fascinating peek at how the brain evolved and how it works in certain situations. Take the ability to read emotions on other people’s faces. Continue reading

The Last Word

Boyden_Tripod_Nirvana_01August 3 – 7, 2015

Produce from our lovingly tended gardens is communal property, whether we like it or not, finds Ann. The tragedy of the commons never sounded so joyful.

Erik Vance wishes his sequenced genes could explain everything about him and predict the course of his unborn son’s life. Alas, the crystal ball of genetics is cloudy.

After a summer of extreme forest fires, Michelle reports on an artist who collects charcoal from burnt trees and converts it into printer ink with which he produces photos of those trees.

Office thermostats are set according to a formula optimized for the male metabolism, says Jenny. Just as women get used to shivering at work, along come the hot flashes.

Michael Jackson underwent nightly anesthesia instead of sleeping. It killed him – but otherwise, does it work? My take.

Image: c/o Ian Boyden

Can anesthesia satisfy the need for sleep?

michael jacksonWhen Michael Jackson died, it came to light that he had been receiving an IV drip of the anesthetic Propofol throughout the night for the previous two months. His death was attributed to cardiac arrest, brought on by an overdose of the drug. Clearly, this kind of treatment is a bad idea, and I don’t know anyone who would support it. But in the months that followed, the underlying principle — that anesthesia can replace sleep — was summarily dismissed. I think it deserves a second look.

In the wrongful death suit that followed his private doctor’s trial, a Harvard sleep expert came in to testify:

Q: Is Propofol a sleep medication?

A: No; it’s an anesthetic.

Q: And is there a difference between an anesthetic and a sleep medication?

A: Yes.

 

Continue reading

The Cold Truth

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A little while back I needed a gift for a friend, and I came across some pretty hand-knit gloves at a craft fair that I knew she’d like. They were fingerless but still quite warm and they’d go nicely with the wooly shawl I’d gotten her the year before.

Never mind that it was the middle of summer. I was sure she’d be wearing them every day anyway. At the office.

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Painting Fire With Fire

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The Carlton Complex, the largest wildfire in the history of Washington state, started on July 14, 2014 in the foothills of the North Cascades. When it was finally extinguished, almost 40 days later, it had burned more than 250 homes and disrupted thousands of lives in Okanogan County, a rural county on the northern edge of the state. Over the past year, I’ve been reporting on the county’s recovery from the fire, and along the way I heard about an artist named Ian Boyden.

In the summer of 2007, during a trip to Okanogan County from his home in southern Washington, Boyden decided to hike up an 8,000-foot peak called Tiffany Mountain. He’d read that it was one of the most striking climbs in the Pacific Northwest, and he was not disappointed. “It was probably the most transformative hike of my life,” he told me recently.

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The Brain I Wish I Had

shutterstock_65835514I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about my bloodlines. Perhaps it’s my impending fatherhood, perhaps I’m just at that age. I’ve been tracing my grandfathers’ heritages back through the Revolutionary War and to the Tudor conquest of Ireland. I’ve planned a trip to Norway, which is my grandmother’s homeland, and hope to visit a lighthouse that was once manned by my great great grandfather.

And I had my genome sequenced by 23&Me. I didn’t do it for my family heritage or to find out how much Neanderthal DNA I have (a disappointing 2.7 percent, given the size of my brow and forehead). I wanted to know something deeper. I wanted to understand why I am how I am. I wanted to get the genetics of my personality. Continue reading