Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

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Superbug Summer Books: BEFORE THE LIGHTS GO OUT

July 15, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

When my book “Superbug” came out two years ago, I found myself talking a lot about the international epidemic of antibiotic resistance, how it incrementally crept up on us, and how it became overwhelming to confront. I often found myself comparing antibiotic resistance to climate change, a similarly “slow drip” problem that took a long time to build — and that now feels so complex that anyone who wants to contribute to putting the brakes on can feel as though it’s not possible for any one person to effect change.

Around the time I started writing “Superbug,” I met Maggie Koerth-Baker, now the science editor of BoingBoing; we were in the same writers’ circles in Minneapolis, and we got to be friends. Not long afterward, she started work on a book. (Disclosure: I read and commented on some early drafts.) “Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before it Conquers Us” (Wiley) has been out since March, and it’s a fantastic read: breezy and clever and at the same time sober, thoughtful and thorough about the complexity of energy generation in the United States, the roadblocks to change, and the possibility of doing things differently.

One of the things I like most about the book — and here’s where climate change comes in — is that Maggie explores how many reasons people have for responding to the energy crisis, and makes clear that people don’t have to believe in the “big idea” of a crisis before they are willing to take action to defuse it. She starts the book, in fact, with a vignette of a man who flatly declares, “Climate change is a lie,” and yet drives a hybrid car and uses only CFL bulbs. That seemed to me an important insight that could be carried over to antibiotic resistance, agriculture — any number of big, tangled policy questions.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: #SBSBooks, Books, Climate Change, Energy, Science Blogs

Superbug Summer Books: DINNER: A LOVE STORY

July 8, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I have a small private belief — for which, despite being a science writer, I can produce no data — that much of the complex difficulty of the American food system would vanish if people knew how to cook. When I say “cook,” I don’t mean mimicking “Top Chef” theatrics, or reproducing the transglutaminase excesses of molecular cuisine; I don’t even, particularly, mean carefully following recipes. What I mean, instead, is getting people to a place where they can walk into a store, or into their own pantries, emerge with a handful of ingredients, and make them into a meal.

If people trusted they could feed themselves, without much effort or advance planning, they wouldn’t be so vulnerable to the lure of fast and processed food. And if sales of those diminished, the market for the cheap products of industrial agriculture would diminish too. This I believe.

To trust that you can feed yourself, it helps to know a few techniques and to have developed a feel for some simple kitchen processes: when it’s appropriate to use a saute pan or a stock pot, and how long it takes water to boil. Most of all though I think it requires not being intimidated by the idea of cooking. Which is why I wish anyone who wants to be someone who cooks — but doesn’t quite know how to get there — could read “Dinner: A Love Story” (Ecco). At first glance, it’s a cookbook, based on a blog, by Jenny Rosenstrach, a magazine columnist and editor who lives outside New York City. But really, it’s a memoir, and also a how-to manual: a smart, pragmatic, warm and thoughtful guide to how two young professionals taught themselves to cook, and then taught their two kids to like food, and then organized their lives so that they all convene at a home-cooked meal, almost every day.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: #SBSBooks, Books, food, food policy, Science Blogs

Great reads: POX — a history of vaccine resistance

April 13, 2011 By Maryn Leave a Comment

A swiftly moving contagious disease threatens children. The government urges parents to vaccinate. But parents are suspicious: They believe the vaccine has unpredictable side-effects and they distrust the government’s motives. When persuasion fails, coercion takes its place. The government demands vaccination — and a showdown looms.

In many aspects, that vignette sounds like today, when pertussis and measles are spreading through unvaccinated children. But what it actually describes is a lost episode of history: not 2010, but 1900, when smallpox spread across the country and life-saving universal — and compulsory — vaccination was imposed on the US population.

In a new book, POX: An American History (The Penguin Press, $27.95) historian Michael Willrich describes what happened next.

I wrote a history of US public health, and so I thought I knew something about vaccines, but I had never heard this story. I asked Willrich, an associate professor at Brandeis University, to answer some questions about it.

Among all the vaccine-preventable diseases, smallpox was uniquely deadly — and so I always assumed there was wide agreement over eliminating it. But POX tells the story of a broad, and surprisingly little-known, resistance movement against smallpox vaccination. Tell us that history briefly. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: Books, Science Blogs, smallpox, vaccines

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