In recent years, people have become increasingly concerned about unwanted substances lurking in their furniture and food. These are industrial chemicals we are exposed to every day and that have been found to accumulate in our bodies, “endangering our health in ways we have yet to understand,” CNN asserted in 2007. In 2010, a New York…Continue Reading…
Science journalist Emily Anthes has a book coming out in March that I’m eager to read. Great title, cool cover! Virginia Hughes recently talked with Anthes about her book. Here’s an excerpt from that interview:
In recent years, we’ve seen episodic waves of hysteria over reports of brain tumors and other cancers allegedly caused by cell phones and WiFi. If I had to trace this legacy of electromagnetic fear back in time, I would credit a 1979 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology and a series of articles in the New Yorker (under…Continue Reading…
My eight year-old son is not a disinterested sports fan. He knows as much about European soccer as I do (which is zilch), but when we’re in a barbershop for 15 minutes and Manchester is playing Barcelona, he asks me who we should root for. Ditto for the NBA All-Star game, which I let him…Continue Reading…
Every movement has a discourse that is shaped by people who are passionate, committed, and forceful. Some feel so certain in their rightness that they try to control the discourse and purge those deemed insufficiently true to the movement’s cause. A political example of this would be today’s U.S. Republican Party, which, as David Frum…Continue Reading…
What happens when the ideological agenda of crunchy granola food activists intersects with the religious agenda of anti-abortion activists? You get this (recycled, bizarro) nonsense from a Seattle-based organic food advocacy website: Biotech companies have been using aborted human fetal cells for testing the effectiveness of different flavoring agent in their products. Last year the news came out…Continue Reading…
E. O. Wilson and Jared Diamond have a few things in common. Both are ecologists, popularizers of science, famous best-selling authors, meme creators, and lately, objects of ridicule and academic rage. Let’s recall that Wilson, before he became the bard of biodiversity, had withstood a furious assault on his reputation after the publication in 1975 of…Continue Reading…
That’s not really a fair question, because they’re both vital. But if I was the administrator at a university and a foundation offered me funding to establish a program curriculum for one or the other–which would result in a mandatory class for all in-coming freshmen–I would choose news literacy. I’ll explain why in a minute….Continue Reading…
One of the big reasons why evidence-based arguments so often fail to persuade is that people turn to their own trusted sources for information. For example, I know that Vandana Shiva is peddling a load of horseshit about Indian farmers committing suicide en masse supposedly because of Monsanto and GMOs. (There’s a part of me…Continue Reading…
It’s really not fashionable to call out liberals for their own problematic relationship with science on certain issues. (Trust me on that one.) It’s much safer to just blast away at conservatives, who do provide bountiful material on evolution and sex, among other well-known topics, as Michael Shermer reminds us at Scientific American. But kudos…Continue Reading…