Hello, I have news!
For 18 mos, I’ve been a part-time “Covid correspondent” for @WIRED@WIREDScience.
Extremely thrilled to say I'm now joining the @WIRED staff as senior writer for health, expanding my beat to all aspects of public health, global health, medicine and disease.
This is a chance to *slightly* loosen the pandemic’s grip on my life and fold in all my other obsessions: AMR, polio, STDs, fungi, emerging infections; health policy, technology, politics; and the long reach of unintended consequences. I start 9 Aug, and I can’t wait to begin.
In taking this job I exit 15 years’ freelancing — so from here, this will be an appreciation thread, to thank colleagues and editors who made it poss.
Happy to go out on the high note of writing the June cover story for @SciAm, on the unappreciated threat of deadly fungi — a piece that happened because @jfischman asked what was obsessing me and trusted my answer. scientificamerican.com/article/deadly…
I’m still in awe of the prescient @ambelenky, then at the @newrepublic, who proposed we explore and predict how right-wing nationalism worldwide could ruin public health. (This story ran a year in advance of Covid, and later won a AAAS-Kavli award.) newrepublic.com/article/153264…
Finally, I wouldn’t have been a freelancer if not for @saradaustin, who read what I had done in newspapers, trusted I could handle investigative features for her at @SELFmagazine, and made me believe I could too. I’m never not grateful.
And now a new chapter! As we say: tktk.
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I mean, I shouldn’t be surprised, because I started writing about 1918 in 1998*, and read Alfred Crosby, whose amazing book Epidemic and Peace, 1918 (later reworked as America’s Forgotten Pandemic) documented the hole in collective memory that 1918 had fallen into. 1/x
*when I went to the Norwegian Arctic with a research crew (headed by Canada's recently former Minister of Science) hoping to dig up victims' bodies from the permafrost.
They were not successful.
Yes, this was a long time ago. 2/x
Anyway, Crosby: His extraordinary insight was to realize that, unlike almost every other epidemic visited on humankind, for 1918 — one of the worst ever — there was no public or cultural memorial.
No Journal of the Plague Year, no Magic Mountain, no Angels in America. 4/x
This might turn out to be a thread.
The @BostonGlobe reports that crafters are sewing masks for hospitals. In NYC, @CSiriano, @PariPassu and other ateliers have stepped up.
This is wonderful and they deserve praise. It also cannot be sufficient, and it should not be necessary 1/x
I have been writing about pandemic potential and societal disruption and supply chains for, ugh, a long time. (A few links at end in case anyone cares.) Short version:
We cannot GoFundMe our way out of this.
Pandemic response requires government-scale action. 2/x
It is superb that private businesses are trying to fill the gap.
It is also the large-scale equivalent of a kid standing up a lemonade stand to fulfill lunch debts.
We admire the kid's compassion, and we should.
But the system problem we do not fix is children being hungry. 3/x
NEWSROOMS: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, CENTER YOUR HEALTH AND SCIENCE WRITERS ON #COVID19.
If they're too busy to do all the stories, at least run your copy by them.
Your mistakes are misleading the public. Thread:
Just in the past few days, I've seen:
- a features writer claim that the coronavirus accomplishes airborne transmission (evidence does not support)
- a GA writer claim US cases are "pouring in" (terrible phrasing, and confuses rising case count and increased test results)
This is not even to mention the DC/politics corps who (as @jayrosen_nyu and @froomkin outpointed) insist on construing #COVID19 response as a political-horse race narrative, or the cable networks deliberately choosing inflammatory talkers because they bring the clicks.
My tweet earlier about book fact-checking, occasioned by the challenge to Naomi Wolf’s newest, got wide agreement from fellow authors and 🤔👂🤷♀️from outside the writing world.
So here’s a small sermon on books being reliable, and who pays for them to be that way.
It is not routine in nonfiction trade (= mass market) publishing for books to be fact-checked. Fact-checking is expensive; for a book of 100k words, $10k would be a not-excessive fee.
Who pays that? Surely the publisher, who ought to be invested in the book’s veracity?
In fact: No.
Certainly it’s possible there are authors who have such power that they get fact-check fees added to their contracts, but if they exist, they are rare, and not discussing their good fortune.
When fact-checking occurs, it’s the author who pays.
This looks important. (Pharmacists, physicians, take note.)
Remember how I talked a few weeks ago, at @WIRED, about US medical supply chains, and how many of our drugs and devices are made offshore now? wired.com/story/medicine…
One of the places they come from is China.
1/4
The Office of the US Trade Representative has released the list of Chinese-made products that will be subject to 25% tariffs because their manufacture represents purported competition that is "unreasonable or discriminatory and burden or restrict U.S. commerce." 2/4
The list, which is here, runs to 44 pages. ustr.gov/sites/default/…
Here are some things on it: vasodilators, hormones, antidepressants, antipsychotics, human antibiotics, veterinary antibiotics, blood products, epinephrine, lidocaine, antisera, vaccines, surgery supplies. 3/4
Goddammit fuck. The tiny Charleston Gazette-Mail of WV is in bankruptcy and the likely buyers might lay off ¼ of its 200 employees. My friend @EricEyre won a Pulitzer for them this year, scrapping to tell essential opioid-epidemic stories with no resources.
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Small local journalism is essential. The women's gymnastics abuse scandal? First surfaced by the Indianapolis Star. The Storm Lake (IA) Times, staff of 10, exposed Big Ag polluters. Salmon farming ruining Pacific Coast ecosystems? The (Vancouver BC) Tyee.
I say this as a former employee of both big and small papers: No one knows a local news ecosystem like a local news outlet does. Whenever a big outlet parachutes a writer into a story, they are doing it because they noticed a small outlet writing about something first.