Milwaukee Ads Condemn Co-sleeping

By: | November 15, 2011

The city of Milwaukee is not a good place to be an infant. For every 1,000 babies born there, more than 10 die before their first birthday. Among black families, the number is even higher — 14 out of 1,000. The national average is about 6.5. So it’s no wonder the Milwaukee Health Department is pulling out every tool in its arsenal to curb the number of infant deaths . . . even scare tactics.

Would you put your child down for a nap next to a giant butcher knife? No? Well, why would you let your child sleep with you? They’re equally risky, the ad says. The message is clear: Choose to share a bed with your infant, and you could be risking your child’s life. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Tempus Edax Rerum

By: | November 14, 2011

Think about this one for a while and see where it gets you.  It just got me confused.  Translating AG’s Latin title — Time devours things — doesn’t help.

John Archibald Wheeler was a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and then the H bomb, helped clarify the atom, made up the phrase “black hole,” wrote the textbook on gravitational physics, and happily went down the rabbit hole of the anthropic principle.  As a physicist, he was part poet.  He was friendly, gracious, and deeply unpredictable.  Several years before he died at age 96, he said, “This is the most interesting world I’ve ever lived in.’

That’s no help either.

_____

http://abstrusegoose.com/407

 

The Guys Talk

By: | November 11, 2011

About an hour into a long interview, the scientist relaxes, stops using words that might look good on a funding application, and starts saying things like: “Here’s a picture of our immediate neighborhood.  Here’s the Milky Way, that’s us.  Here’s the Andromeda Nebula, that’s our nearest friend.  And there are a bunch of little guys in our immediate vicinity.  The whole shooting match is winging off in this direction.”

This particular scientist, Princeton’s Jim Peebles, talks about galaxies as though they’re folks he knows personally.  This is anthropomorphising and it’s strictly against scientists’ union rules.  But they do it anyway – not all of them, just certain ones – and they do it regardless of field, almost unconsciously, and with joy. Continue reading →

Do readers grasp nuance?

By: | November 10, 2011

When my editor at Slate asked me to look into the link between statins and violent behavior, I thought the idea was crazy. But as I dug into the issue, I decided that there was an important story there. I’m still not entirely convinced that statins cause aggressive or violent behavior in some small subset of users, but after looking into the evidence, I’m convinced that the FDA system for tracking drug side effects is not equipped to tell us for sure.

The story I ended up writing ran with the headline “Lipitor Rage” and the dek, “If statins carried a rare but serious side effect, would we ever find out?” (In some contexts it was headlined “Lipitor Rage and the Problem of Rare Side Effects.”) The story wasn’t really about statins, but about whether the FDA’s current surveillance system can detect rare drug side effects, such as the purported one between statins and violence.

Continue reading →

Making a Better Heart

By: | November 9, 2011

This fall, I did something that I’ve done only once before in three decades of writing: for two whole weeks I booked off work and took a real vacation. Freelance writers can rarely afford half-month-long holidays. But I had spent a good part of 2010 in cardiac wards, tending to my visibly failing father and watching his fellow patients shuffle down the corridors clutching small oblong pillows to their chests. The pillows reminded them of the incisions from their open-heart surgery, and hence their physical limitations. My father, too, hugged one of those pillows. But open-heart surgery could not fix what was ailing him.

After his funeral, I realized that I needed to take time off and go somewhere far away from the haunted faces of those corridors. So I chose a destination that seemed to brim with joie de vivre, a kind of anti-cardiac ward—the small medieval town of Lucca in Italy. It didn’t hurt that Lucca lay in one of the heartlands—so to speak—of the Mediterranean Diet. I was interested in that diet. A family history of early heart disease increases one’s risk. Continue reading →

What Would John McPhee Do?

By: | November 7, 2011

When I’m thrashing through the brambles of a first draft, no story in sight, I have one reliable lifeline. WWJMD? What would John McPhee do to get himself out of this #%&! mess?

This, after all, is the guy who found fascinating stories in citrus cultivation. And geology. And Switzerland! Some of his writing is now two generations old, and not, shall we say, of smartphone-friendly lengths. But his work holds up. He knows what readers don’t know they want to know, and he knows how to tell them about it. Those gifts don’t expire.

There are a lot of answers to WWJMD, and a lot of places to find them. You can read his books and pore over The New Yorker archives. You can get hold of the charming and instructive Paris Review interview by his former Princeton student, MacArthur-award-winning journalist Peter Hessler. Or, best of all, you can hear from the man himself.

Continue reading →

A Thousand Words

By: | November 4, 2011

 

“Math and graphs are necessary to make a story like this interesting.”

“He doesn’t provide any drawings or graphs, which would have appealed to and been understood by many readers.”

“He tries to describe graphs without using any pictures at all … why? I myself would also have liked some representation of the mathematics, because I believe that many of those interested in this kind of topic has had at least some math & science education, and the others can ignore them.”

Many has, I’m sure. But despite what these online comments about my most recent book contend, the crucial question for someone writing about science for a non-specialist audience is: Will “the others”—readers without the benefit of a math or science education—actually ignore the graphs and charts and equations, or will they, fanning pages in the New Nonfiction aisle or idly clicking “Look Inside!” online, find themselves confronting their inner eighth grader’s greatest nightmare, and go buy The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Subject-Verb Agreement instead?

Continue reading →