At their annual conference earlier this month, the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) held a panel called, “What’s in your email, Doc?” From the blurb: Scientists working or speaking out on hot-button topics like climate change and GMO foods are being peppered with open-records requests to see their data and emails. Is this a legitimate…Continue Reading…
My mother-in-law, who lives in New Jersey, recently mailed me a newspaper clipping. It was about a famous person who came to her state to publicly oppose a bill that would make it harder for parents to exempt their children from school-mandated vaccinations. This same famous person had just visited two other states to lobby against similar legislation…Continue Reading…
The Republican political strategy during the past six years has been simple and consistent: If Obama was for it, we had to be against it. No cooperation meant no bipartisan photo ops. The one guy who bucked that was New Jersey Governor Chris Christie during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, when the Governor praised President Obama for…Continue Reading…
In the late 2000s, I spent a year in Boulder, Colorado with my family. At the time, my two sons were four and two years old. The older one was in a pre-school and the younger one attended a day care for the last six months of our stay. My wife and I were pleased with both…Continue Reading…
I suppose you have heard about the recent Disneyland measles outbreak. The story is receiving wide coverage in the media, triggering a fresh wave of angst over the increasing reoccurrence of preventable diseases in the United States–and outrage over the small percentage of parents who do not vaccinate their children. Last year, per the Centers for Disease Control…Continue Reading…
Last summer I was at a party where the guests included a bunch of successful heart surgeons. I spoke at length with one of them (I’ll refer to him as Dr. X) who has known and sometimes worked with Dr. Oz at New York-Presbyterian hospital in Manhattan. Dr. X is in his 40s. He told me Oz had…Continue Reading…
UPDATE: On the same day (August 20) that Kennedy taped a segment on the Dr. Oz show, he was interviewed on Good Day New York (a Fox affiliate), and the Leonard Lopate radio show. Lopate was very skeptical of Kennedy’s claims and challenged him with good questions. *** I was at the Baltimore aquarium with my…Continue Reading…
Earlier this year, two writers at Mother Jones noted: It’s easy to find bad information about the safety of vaccines on the internet. True, that. It’s also easy to find bad information about the safety of GMOs on the internet. What puzzles me is why liberal outlets recognize “bad information” about vaccines but not GMOs. (Grist is now a…Continue Reading…
A liberal publication (which I like and read) has a message for vaccine-hesitant parents. Vaccinate your kids, you ignorant whack jobs http://t.co/ngmTIZWAxp pic.twitter.com/TiBXz99Vxi — Mother Jones (@MotherJones) August 6, 2014 Alas, this is an incredibly ignorant and counterproductive thing to say. Whoever is running MoJo’s social media operation needs to get familiar with the latest…Continue Reading…
My recent Washington Post magazine piece on Robert Kennedy Jr. has prompted numerous reactions in media outlets, on Twitter, and in the blogosphere. Generally speaking, readers have found the story both compelling and maddening. What folks seem to be divided on is how Kennedy comes off in the story. Laura Helmuth at Slate says I…Continue Reading…