The Last Word

By: | October 20, 2012

October 15 – 19

“People who expose fraud are often ostracized and harassed and may find themselves fired or blacklisted. They have stress-related health problems, including shingles, psoriasis, autoimmune disorders, panic attacks, asthma, insomnia, temporomandibular joint disorder, migraine headaches, and generalized anxiety.” Christie examines why whistleblowers do it anyway.

Cassie explains why people run marathons when they don’t even like running.

“At no other time in the history of science was there a single point at which a whole field could potentially come to a screeching halt”: Ann gives us a preview of Particle Fever, the Higgs movie.

Jessa welcomes Aeon to the science writing world. The world needs more tilling.

“Back then, after all, dinosaurs were amazing, but so were the school bus and the toilet.” Michelle rediscovers dinosaurs, and finds they’re even cooler now than they were when she was five.

Fresh Blood and New Ideas

By: | October 19, 2012

Publications are funny creatures. I’ve worked for quite a few, mostly magazines, and each has had its own personality, its style of groupthink. Unlike a traditionally-structured corporation, its collective identity and mandate is vague, shifting as the names change and migrate upward on the masthead.

The cover above is from the first fledgling magazine I ever had a stake in, starting in the year 2000. Covering Canadian underground culture, from skateboarding to the rave scene, we thought we were pretty badass. We also thought swearing in print was pretty fucking special.

A magazine (online or otherwise) can be as hands-off as a metafilter, collecting content that would interest their reader base, perhaps annotating it like the folks at BoingBoing, but otherwise serving as a curated conduit. Other pubs are so heavily edited and specific in their commissioning assignments that a writer won’t recognize the Frankensteined text under her byline.  If LWON were a magazine, rather than a blog, we’d be a mostly staff-written one, with no editor at all. Continue reading →

Physicist Makes Movie

By: | October 18, 2012

As part of LWON’s unintended series on science and art, or maybe its focus on unexpected behavior in physicists, please meet David Kaplan.  He’s a Johns Hopkins theorist whose specialty is creating the theories beyond the theory that almost accounts for all the matter and energy in the universe.  As such, he was involved in Large Hadron Collider (the LHC) experiment that last summer found the Higgs boson.  But he hadn’t known they’d find it, no one knew they’d find it.  Theory had been predicting for 30 years they’d find it, but no data refuted or confirmed the theory; the large American collider to do the experiment had been cancelled, the LHC was being repeatedly delayed and was so expensive that they’d be given one shot and if no Higgs, then no more big colliders.  Physicists were getting older, their careers were shrivelling, they weren’t sleeping, maybe the very question was dumb.

In the midst of all this, seven years ago, Kaplan was explaining the what-if-no-Higgs story to a friend with a PhD in poetry criticism.  The friend was impressed:  at no other time in the history of science was there a single point at which a whole field could potentially come to a screeching halt.  It sounded like a white-knuckle movie.  Kaplan thought so too, so he made one. Continue reading →

My Daughter, the Dinosaur

By: | October 17, 2012

In August, I took my almost-four-year-old daughter to the dinosaur galleries in the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. The ceilings were lower and the clientele was shorter than I remembered from my own childhood, but the essentials were the same: the bones, the horns, the talons, and best of all, the enormous teeth. The better to eat you with, my dear. My daughter stood next to the disembodied T. rex skull and peered delightedly into its mouth, ready to climb in. “Holy cow!” she said.

As we left, she was quiet. And then she said, to no one in particular, “I don’t know whether to eat or be eaten.”

If you’ve spent any time around children, you know what happened next. Dinomania hit fast and hard, and within a few days my daughter was pronouncing hilariously long Latin words, gnashing her tiny teeth as she stalked the dog, and talking knowledgeably about the plant eaters and meat eaters that lived long, long, long ago — even before Grandma and Grandpa were born. Continue reading →

Blowing the whistle

By: | October 16, 2012

Fiscal year 2012 was a record year for whistleblowers. According to the Taxpayers Against Fraud Educational Fund, the U.S. government recovered more than $9 billion through lawsuits invoking the False Claims Act, legislation that gives private citizens the right to sue those that commit fraud against government programs (and share in any fines that are eventually collected).

A case against GlaxoSmithKline resulted in a record $3 billion in fines for illegal marketing and other misdeeds, Abbott Laboratories paid $1.5 billion for off-label marketing of drugs and Bank of America was hit with $1 billion in fines for mortgage and bank fraud. These were just the top three False Claims Act settlements of FY 2012, and the thing they had in common is that they were initiated by whistleblowers.

In theory, whistleblowing — calling out clearly unethical and/or illegal conduct — might seem like a no-brainer. When we witness bad behavior, most of us feel compelled to do something. Or at least, think about doing something.

But in real-life, calling out someone’s bad deeds is incredibly difficult, even if that person is a total scumbag. When you point the finger, there’s an implicit assumption that you’re better than the scumbag, and most of us don’t want to put ourselves in that position. After all, who among us is above reproach? (Not me.)

I’ve never been a whistleblower, but as a journalist, I’ve called liars out on their fabrications, and it never feels good. Continue reading →

Why Run When You Can Have Brunch Instead?

By: | October 15, 2012

Here’s my ideal Sunday morning: Wake up at 10 am, drink coffee, read, hit the farmer’s market, make brunch. Here’s what I did yesterday morning: Woke up at 7am, consumed a carefully calculated quantity of carbs, ran 20 miles, and plunged myself, fully clothed, into a bathtub of ice water. That’s what a lot of my Sundays have been like recently. I’m in training. In three short weeks, I’ll be running my first marathon.

A few weeks ago, I received an email from the race organizers. “If this is your first marathon, your body has probably never been so fit,” they wrote. In truth, my body has never felt more broken and decrepit. Every toe is blistered and swollen and my latest run left me with a blister above my belly button. Simple acts like getting out of bed sometimes send pain ricocheting through my hip socket. Training has been brutal. So brutal, in fact, that I’ve been complaining bitterly. After one particularly vicious rant, LWON’s own Christie Aschwanden, a killer athlete, sent me a note. “Why are you training for this marathon? You sound kind of miserable.”

Good question. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | October 13, 2012

October 8 – 12

This week, Christie remembered Karen, and reminded us that the “beating cancer” narrative is pernicious and false.

From his review, I can’t tell if Richard liked Einstein on the Beach, or endured it.

Tom tells us about a book made at scales small that light particles are too fat for perception.

Ginny reviews The Time Cure, a book that purports to hold the cure for PTSD.

“A Buddhist god holding a swastika as evidence of an ancient master race in Asia”: you pretty much have to read Heather’s story about the iron man.

 

A real cancer hero

By: | October 12, 2012

In the photo, Karen is smiling. We’re clowning around, engulfed in a spring day with nowhere to be but out on our bikes. Breast cancer has already pushed its way into Karen’s life, but the demon is on hiatus, and she has gleefully stuffed her bra to announce that cancer can take her breasts but never her sense of humor.

This month marks six years since Karen Hornbostel died. I’ve been thinking of her this week as the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency released 1,000 pages of evidence showing a vast doping conspiracy by Lance Armstrong and his entourage. The affidavits, emails, bank records and other documents paint a picture of Armstrong as a bully and a cheat.

I wish Karen was around to discuss Armstrong’s downfall. She admired Lance, and in many ways, she modeled her cancer fight after his. In 2003, the Lance Armstrong Foundation (now Livestrong) awarded Karen its “Spirit of Survivorship” award. It was an honor she proudly accepted from Armstrong himself. Like him, she vowed never to yield to cancer, and indeed she fought it to her last breath.

The USADA documents show that Armstrong cheated to win his seven Tour de France victories. The evidence is now overwhelming. The heroic, triumphant tale he (and Sally Jenkins) depicted in his books was a fraud. As Bonnie Ford explains at ESPN, “anyone who remains unconvinced simply doesn’t want to know.”

Understandably, the news is difficult for many fans to hear. No one likes to feel suckered, and fairy tales like Armstrong’s appeal to us precisely because they represent the world as we wish it was. When given the choice, who wouldn’t want to believe that something good could come from cancer — that it could turn a punk kid from Texas into a virtuous warrior who fought his disease and his sporting opponents with honor and integrity?

Continue reading →