Search Results for: Science

‘There Are Some People Who Don’t Wait’

Longreads Pick

On May 7th, Robert Krulwich gave the commencement speech to Berkeley Journalism School’s Class of 2011. That’s Robert Krulwich, who hosts the singular radio show Radiolab, one of the most accomplished pieces of science broadcasting in any nation. Robert Krulwich, who won a Peabody Award for broadcast excellence a few months ago. Robert Krulwich, whose blog Krulwich Wonders should be on everyone’s reading list.

Source: Discover
Published: May 12, 2011
Length: 23 minutes (5,825 words)

This Tech Bubble Is Different

Longreads Pick

After a couple years at Facebook, Jeff Hammerbacher grew restless. He figured that much of the groundbreaking computer science had been done. Something else gnawed at him. Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google, and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he says. “That sucks.”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Apr 15, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,966 words)

Change We Can (Almost) Believe In

Longreads Pick

The American obsession with transformation isn’t new. In the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson preached about tapping into the “infinitude of man.” In 1879, Mary Baker Eddy founded the religion of Christian Science, premised on the limitless power of faith and mind. Norman Vincent Peale was an early best-selling self-help author with The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952. But it was Werner Erhard, a lean, wolfish former salesman, who created the first modern transformation empire when he founded EST seminars in 1971. His courses were legendarily uncomfortable. He paced and cursed at his students. He had them writhe on the floor and scream out all their anxieties. He challenged participants to control their bladders so they didn’t have to leave the long sessions. (“You are not a tube,” he preened in the documentary Transformation while sipping water at the end of a seven-hour session. “You have transcended peeing.”)

Source: Time
Published: Apr 3, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,302 words)

Walking the Line Between Good and Evil: The Common Thread of Heroes and Villains

Longreads Pick

Mythology, science fiction and comic books are chock full of stories of heroes and their battles against the ills of society—the eternal struggle between good and evil. We are meant to view these two main characters—the Hero and the Villain—as opposites on the spectrum of ethics and morality. But are they really so different when you look at their individual traits and behaviors?

Published: Mar 30, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,837 words)

Plasticize Me

Longreads Pick

“Bodies… The Exhibition” is a for-profit traveling display of human cadavers that have been treated with a process that plasticizes tissue, allowing them to be manipulated and viewed in various states of artful dismemberment. Ostensibly the exhibition is scientific and educational in character, but given that there are no longer many mysteries within human anatomy, the most pressing questions it raises are ethical: Is posing a dead man with a tennis racket wrong? Is a failure to make specific provisions for the treatment of one’s remains the same as giving one’s body to science?

Published: Mar 3, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,549 words)

Shaken-Baby Syndrome Faces New Questions in Court

Shaken-Baby Syndrome Faces New Questions in Court

Shaken-Baby Syndrome Faces New Questions in Court

Longreads Pick

This is how science progresses: One researcher comes up with a hypothesis, which others question and test. But shaken-baby cases are haunted by the enormous repercussions of getting it wrong — the conviction of innocent adults, on the one hand, and on the other, the danger to children of missing serious abuse. In one study, researchers looked into the deaths of five children who had head injuries that initially were misjudged to be accidents and found that four of them could have been prevented if an earlier pattern of abuse had been detected.

Published: Feb 2, 2011
Length: 32 minutes (8,175 words)

Mike Bloomberg Will Save Us from Ourselves If Only We Let Him

Mike Bloomberg Will Save Us from Ourselves If Only We Let Him

Mike Bloomberg Will Save Us from Ourselves If Only We Let Him

Longreads Pick

Mike Bloomberg has become important because he represents a great American dream, not the one about owning a home or becoming more successful than your father but the one beneath all of those, the foundational American dream — the dream of freedom from politics. Bloomberg is the ultimate independent, the calm modern technocrat rooted in metrics and cleansed of ideology, come to drain the swamps of government with his amazing modern business-management techniques … unless he’s actually just an old-fashioned autocrat looking down on us from above and tinkering with our lives like a science experiment, stripping our noisy polis of all its native poetry.

Source: Esquire
Published: Jan 24, 2011
Length: 29 minutes (7,356 words)

AIDS and Media Coverage, the Early Years: A Longreads List

Logan Sachon is a writer and editor based in Portland.

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Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals 

1981. New York Times. Lawrence K. Altman. 

903 words / 3.5 minutes 

No mention of AIDS, no utter of HIV, but this is where mainstream media’s coverage of AIDS starts, with the New York Times first mention of a new disease in 1981. 

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AIDS in the heartland

1987. St Paul Pioneer Press. Jacqui Banaszynski. 

21,000 words (est) / 84 minutes (note: not Instapaper-friendly)

This Pulitzer-winning three-part series follows Dick Hanson — farmer, political activist, and gay man — from diagnosis to death. The writer describes the piece as such: “I wanted to be able not just to write about a disease, but THIS disease and all that went with it … the prejudice, the fear, the distance, the judging, the legal, financial and moral consequences, the lifestyle and the love …” Many people cite this article as the first time they were really drawn in to the AIDS crisis. 

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Fighting AIDS all the way

1989. New York Times Magazine. Larry Josephs. 

3,695 words / 15 minutes

The harrowing plunge 

1990. New York Times Magazine. Larry Josephs. 

5,905 words / 24 minutes 

Larry Josephs, 34, writer about AIDS, dies of the disease 

1991. New York Times. Alessandra Stanley 

360 words / 1.5 minutes 

In these two essays, Josephs writes first about his diagnoses and treatment and then about what happens when he gets very sick. Heart-wrenching personal voice coupled with details and research from someone who desperately wanted and needed to know everything about the disease. Honest, brave first-person journalism. 

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Out of control: AIDS and the corruption of medical science 

2006. Harper’s. Celia Farber. 

12,163 words / 48 minutes 

From 1987 to 1995, Farber wrote a column in SPIN about AIDS called “Words from the front.” (Those articles can be found here.) She was one of the first and only journalists to cover scientists who questioned the link between AIDS and HIV and questioned the use of AZT to fight it. These scientists — including National Academy of Sciences member and Berkeley researcher Dr. Peter Duesberg — were labeled “AIDS denialists” by the scientific community, and Farber’s coverage of them put her in that pot, too. This article was published in 2006, but Farber had been writing about its topic for nearly 20 years. The piece provoked heated responses, including letters from the scientists who are credited with discovering  HIV. This response from the Columbia Journalism Review is in line with the criticism of the piece, the author, and its thesis.