Van VanderMeer is about to celebrate an anniversary that he’d probably rather forget. In December 2009, VanderMeer thought he had caught his annual winter cough; for a few years in a row, he’d developed a chest cold around this time of year. But this one lingered. VanderMeer was competing in a mixed doubles tournament in […]
Health/Medicine
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 […]
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 […]
Last Sunday, the day before the world’s population hit 7 billion, I went to a scientific meeting on the future of contraception. I had expected to hear, and did hear, about a slew of labs trying to develop a birth control pill for men. What I did not expect: one pill was shown to work in […]
As a journalist, I tend to be wary of people trying to assign me stories if they’re not an editor, and sometimes even then. Public relations types try to do it all the time. They send press releases with pre-packaged quotations for the deadline-driven writer or call up with some brilliant story idea […]
Happy Halloween! I want to tell you a scary story. A decade ago, the planet had six billion people. Today, according to the United Nations, we have seven billion. The UN has chosen Halloween as the symbolic day when the seventh billion person will come screaming into existence. Not scared yet? Maybe these words from […]
Earlier this month, I gave an Ignite talk at the National Association of Science Writers meeting. (I also organized a panel on covering scientific controversies–click here to listen to/download mp3s of my interviews with panelists Gary Taubes, Jennifer Kahn, Jeanne Lenzer and Brian Vastag.) I’ve had numerous requests to share my Ignite talk, and so […]
The death of Steve Jobs is unfolding as a morality play between mainstream and alternative medicine, with doctors and bloggers blaming Jobs’ untimely demise on his decision to delay surgery while he tried acupuncture and herbal remedies. The reality is that Jobs’ story tells us as much about the limits of conventional science and medicine […]