March 19 – 23 This week:
Sally has profound doubts about technology, choice, freedom, and those things on her lawn.
Heather grieves her lost stories and admires a young writer who reclaims one of them.
Erika says that nonfiction writers who lie hurt the causes for which they lie.
Virginia argues with her charming family about the value of meeting 5th cousins.
Erika, on a hot roll, argues that yes, dammit, the world is ready to pay for long-form science writing. From her mouth to God’s ears.
Last month, two journalists launched a new science and technology journalism project called Matter. Using the crowd-funding Web site Kickstarter, Jim Giles and Bobbie Johnson asked donors to help them raise $50,000 to start a venture that, every week, will publish “a single piece of top-tier long-form journalism about big issues in technology and science.” Giles and Johnson met their initial goal in less than two days and have now overshot it by a mile. By the time Matter’s Kickstarter campaign closes tonight, its total haul will have exceeded $128,00 in pledges from more than 2,400 backers – a phenomenal sum.
Now what?
It’s been almost a year since I wrote about my genetic testing results from 23andMe. That’s because, despite paying $5 a month for the site’s mandatory Personal Genome Service®, I rarely look at it.
It’s not that I’m scared of the data (been there), and not because I forgot — every six or eight weeks I get an email from the company saying things like, You have 8 new results from 23andMe! New discoveries have been made about your DNA! I hadn’t visited the site because, frankly, I was bored of it. How many times is one expected to look sort-of-interesting, sort-of-meaningless risk calculations and ponder healthier ways to live?
Then at a conference last week, while trying to make small talk with a scientist, I mentioned my 23andMe subscription. Turns out he has one, too. “Isn’t it funny when you get those messages from your distant relatives?” he said. I told him I didn’t know what he meant. “I get them all the time,” he said, shaking his head.
Continue reading
A lie told for good purposes is not inherently wrong. And besides, Mike Daisey didn’t lie.
That’s been Daisey’s defense in the fallout of revelations that he fabricated key details of a now-retracted radio piece on working conditions at a Chinese Apple supplier.
Can a person really lie and still believe that he’s telling the truth?
Absolutely, says Daniel Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University and author of the book Predictably Irrational.
One of the hardest things about being a freelance writer is seeing a great story— the kind of story you’ve always dreamed about writing—slip through your fingers. Your editors fail to see the beauty or the tragedy. No one shares your obsession; no one wants to put you on a plane to Miami or Lima or Mobasa, say, and pay for expenses while you throw yourself into the reporting. The pitch falls flat, eyes look away in embarrassment, and a half beat later, a kindly question. What else have you got?
Thirty years of freelancing and I can pretty much remember each and every one of these failures, these lost stories. They continue to dog me, and I sometimes think that this will be the last thing on my mind when I die. It won’t be my life flashing in front of me; it will be stories, particularly these stories, the ones that never saw light of day. Continue reading
You remember the late 1990s. Money grew on trees, and if your money-picking arm got sore, you could just hold out your skirt to catch the falling sky-money. Take my friend X, who made $90,000 one year freelancing as a PowerPoint guy. Masters of the universe who didn’t understand caps lock threw bags of cash at X to do Microsoft makeovers on their overhead projector transparencies. Do a little light typing, add a shutter click here, add a whirly effect there, collect $90,0000.
It’s been more than 10 years, but my bitterness is still fresh as a daisy. At the time I was dutifully rounding out my higher education. He had dispensed with the whole thing at 16, taught himself how to negotiate the internet before AOL had sent its first free CD, and off he went into the stratosphere while I ground out essays and sweated through exams. The worst part is that those exorbitantly expensive PowerPoints often didn’t even see the light of day, he told me, because sometimes the meetings would start and no one knew how to open the program. My esophagus burned.
My traumatic history was resuscitated a few weeks ago when I saw that e.p.t., the pregnancy test, was following Christie on Twitter. Continue reading
March 12 – 16
This week, Ann explored closed system sibling knowledge, which just turns out to be another of nature’s subtle tricks to make sure we don’t kill each other
Cassie did the internet a favour by saying something original, interesting and nuanced about Marilyn Hagerty
Michelle wondered where the secret gardens have gone
Abstruse Goose reminded us that science is as deep a magic as any art
And Greg Miller stopped by to tell us what to do when your country doesn’t have enough money for psychiatrists: make your own.
One day last fall I stood in the middle of the meunasah, or community meeting hall, in a remote Indonesian village trying to explain who I am and what I was doing there. A few dozen people sat on straw mats sipping bottled water and snacking on fried plantain strips, watching me expectantly. The village leader, a thin man with intense brown eyes and bushy mustache, had asked me to address them, and in an act of hospitality, or perhaps sensing a comedic opportunity, he’d given me a smoked duck egg to eat while I spoke.
Through a translator, I told them I was a journalist from America, and that I was working on an article about the community mental health program that began here in Aceh province after the 2004 earthquake and tsunami. The idea of this program, which I describe in more detail in today’s issue of Science, is to shift much of the work traditionally done by psychiatrists to less specialized health workers: general practitioners, nurses, and even ordinary villagers. Continue reading