Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

Former New York Times Editor, Wife Publicly Tag-Team Criticism of Cancer Patient. Ugh.

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image; Rebecca Barray (CC), Flickr

Back in 2011, I was researching a story about the under-appreciated toll of foodborne illness. Through social media, I met Lisa Bonchek Adams, a mom of three in Connecticut who had suffered an extended, bad bout with antibiotic-resistant Campylobacter. She was a great interview — thoughtful, funny, frank — and she had an extraordinary story: She was a survivor of breast cancer and aggressive treatment for it — double mastectomy, preventative removal of her ovaries and chemotherapy — but, she said candidly, foodborne illness had made her sicker than her cancer treatment ever did.

After confirming her story via physicians and factcheckers, I used it as the opening of a long investigative piece that was published in June 2012. After that, we stayed in touch on Facebook and Twitter, and I watched as her already substantial following expanded, responding to that same forthright voice that I had found so compelling. Within a few months, though, her fortunes changed — and subsequently, so did her online circle. In October 2012, Adams learned that her cancer had returned and metastasized elsewhere in her body. It was judged Stage IV, incurable. She wrote:

I am at the beginning of what treatments are available for me.

Don’t you count me out yet. Far from it.

Just because this disease can’t be cured doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of life left in me; there is still so much for me to do.

In the 2 years since, I’ve watched in admiration as Adams has spoken directly and realistically about her treatments, family relationships, symptoms, hopes and fears. She is uniquely not a treat-at-all-costs cancer warrior, not a Pinktober booster, not a believer in miracle cures. Carefully and patiently, even when in pain (she has been in the hospital since Christmas for pain management), she commiserates with other patients and their families, urges people via her #mondaypleads hashtag to get regular checkups, and starts every day on Twitter with this mantra: “Find a bit of beauty in the world today. Share it. If you can’t find it, create it. Some days this may be hard to do. Persevere.”

So you’ll understand why I, and numerous other bloggers and tweeters, object to two first-person essays about Adams, published over the past few days by a New York Times editor and his wife, and consider them gratuitous, mean-spirited attacks. (A sample of reaction: Xeni Jardin, on Twitter (Storified); Megan Garber, The Atlantic; Greg Mitchell, The Nation; Cecily Kellogg, Babble; Adam Weinstein on Gawker.)

[Read more…]

Science online and Science Online: A (Possible) Way Forward

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image: Doctorow (CC), Flickr

I mean this post to address the convulsions in the science-writing community that arose this past week in the wake of the problems faced by writer Danielle N. Lee, PhD regarding her Scientific American blog. That situation was resolved to good effect and quickly; if you’d like to catch up on that, the posts are here and here.

(Constant Readers, bear with me. I’ll get back to scary diseases and food policy next week.)

As most in that professional community know, but other readers and members of my other networks may not, Lee’s experience inadvertently triggered a cascade of revelations in which Bora Zivkovic, the blogs editor at SciAm and a very powerful and outspoken gatekeeper in science writing, was accused of sexual harassment by an aspiring writer. (Not Lee.) Over several days, additional accusations with and without names attached tumbled around the blogosphere and Twitterverse until, on Friday, one of his bloggers — the third woman to come forward by name — published a searing account of her experience which included quotes from sexually explicit emails he had written. Within hours, he resigned from his SciAm post. (The best wrap-up is Laura Helmuth’s at Slate.)

As a SciAm columnist and contributing editor, I am grateful that Zivkovic has been separated from the magazine and institution. But I think it is important to emphasize how wide the impact of his bad behavior has been. So I want to address the continuing ripples in the community, especially surrounding the forthcoming beloved and very hot-ticket conference, Science Online, which he helped create.

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Follow-up: On Clarity, Dignity, Apologies and Moving Forward

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image: Snigl3t (CC), Flickr

This is a follow-up to my post over the weekend on the #StandingwithDNLee situation that enveloped Danielle N. Lee, Ph.D., her blog at Scientific American, SciAm’s partner organizations, and — by extension — the many thousands of people who expressed support for her. While the situation is sure to have a long tail, some significant things happened Sunday and Monday, so I want to update and note those to close the loop. (If this story is new to you, have a look at my last post.)

In chronological order:

  • Scientific American posted an explanation (though not, publicly, an apology), alleging that legal concerns caused Dr. Lee’s post  — exploring her reaction to verbal abuse by an editor at an organization which SciAm listed as a partner — to be taken down within an hour of its being published.
  • Biology-Online.org, whose blog editor verbally abused Dr. Lee in the process of asking her to work for free, announced that that editor had been fired, and unreservedly apologized to Dr. Lee.
  • Dr. Lee’s post at Scientific American was restored with an editor’s note.

If that’s what you needed to catch up, that’s the news in a nutshell. Out of many, many blog reactions (some curated here by Liz Ditz; 13,600 indexed by Google), I recommend these posts by Kate Clancy, Dr. Isis, Janet Stemwedel, Melanie Tannenbaum and Daniel Lende. If on the other hand you think all this coverage was more than the situation warranted, you might prefer Scott Huler’s post.

That’s the quick round-up. More details and some final thoughts to follow. [Read more…]

On Science, Communication, Respect, and Coming Back from Mistakes

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image: Marc Falardeau, (CC), Flickr

A couple of unpleasant and deeply dismaying things have happened in the science blogosphere in the past 36 hours or so. I’m posting on it, along with a growing number of other science bloggers, in order to stand in solidarity with a fellow blogger and to ensure her voice is not silenced. (If you’d like to catch up to the full story, try the Twitter hashtag #standingwithdnlee, or read this search string here. It will take a while.)

Disclosure up front: This situation involves the blog network of the magazine Scientific American, where I am a columnist and contributing editor (which is magazine jargon indicating, more or less, that they pay me a set amount of money for a certain number of columns per year). I respect the Scientific American name and feel as privileged to be associated it as I do to be here at Wired — but in this case I think the magazine has made a mistake, and I hope they reverse course.

That said, here’s what’s going on.

(This post has been updated — read to the end — and a follow-up appears here.)

[Read more…]

Writing Narratives About Science: Advice From People Who Do it Well

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Flickr: Zen, CC

Starting to catch up after, yup, another set of trips — but with really interesting stuff to talk about very shortly. To start: I spent part of this past week at the biannual World Conference of Science Journalists, which was in Helsinki this time. (Yes, way up north. Yes, midnight sun, almost — disorienting and gorgeous). While I was there I joined the excellent journalists Ed Yong Of Not Exactly Rocket Science, Helen Pearson of Nature, and Alok Jha of the Guardian and the BBC to talk about the craft of writing long narrative features about science. Among ourselves we talked about wanting to avoid being “lost in the Features Dark Place” — which is to say, being overwhelmed by your material to the point where you don’t know where to start.

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The Risks You Don't Think of: A Plea to Pack a 'Go Bag'

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Photo: OnlyAnEgg, CC/Flickr

What if you had 15 minutes’ notice to leave your home, and you didn’t know when you’d be coming back — or what shape your home would be when you did?

Could you find your key documents, medications, ID, devices, cables? Sturdy shoes, suitable clothing, stuff to comfort your kids and control your pets? Mementos, valuables, things you couldn’t live without? While trying to stay calm, keep your family calm, and figure out what’s going on?

I ponder this, sometimes, as an academic exercise: when I’m watching horrific tornado footage, or wondering how far inland a tropical storm is going to come. I’ve lived on a hurricane coast (Texas) and in a tornado alley (Minnesota), and I thought regularly about preparedness while I lived there. But now I live mostly in Atlanta, and sometimes in inland Maine, and my rare thoughts about preparedness extend mostly to keeping documents in a fireproof safe and making sure the flashlights scattered around the house have good batteries.

Last night I learned how shortsighted that was. TL;DR: All’s well, my house didn’t burn down, and I got a useful reminder about how you can be taken by surprise.

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On Writing: Culture Looks Down On These Novels, But You Should Read Them Anyway

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Excerpted from a “science scribe” live sketch of our Science Online session. c. Perrin Ireland (@experrinment)

Dropping out of scary diseases and scary food for a moment, and into the (more) personal: This past weekend I spoke at Science Online, a fantastic conference in the Triangle area of North Carolina that brings together the different tribes of science communication — journalists, bloggers, scientists, public information officers, museum curators, videographers and audio artists, on and on — for an adrenaline- and coffee-fueled weekend of brainstorming.

SciO, as it’s called, has been going for seven years; I’ve attended for three, speaking each time on some aspect of writing technique. I love going, even though journalists are a minor tribe within the conference’s loose federation, because attending forces me to think not only about why I write, but about how. The process of writing is something I engage with every day, of course, but I’m not often called on to articulate it outside my own head. Prepping presentations for the heterogenous attendees reminds me to examine attitudes and also techniques that I tend to take for granted.

This year, my Wired colleague and friend David Dobbs, from Neuron Culture over there in the right rail, did a storytelling-technique session that turned out to be really well-received, so I thought I’d reproduce it here for wider sharing. We started from this realization: When we learn to write, we’re told to study the greats. But under our noses — sold in airports and drug stores, argued over in blogs and book clubs — there exists a vast and separate world of published writing to which people are passionately attached. That’s genre fiction — mysteries, thrillers, westerns, romances, fantasy and sci-fi — and it keeps its audiences hungering for more via specific techniques that writers can analyze and learn from.

Our session wasn’t recorded (I should really remember to do that when I speak) but you can find the excerpts we discussed on this wiki page. And here’s a recap, via Storify: “What science writing can learn from crap novels.” We say that, of course, with love. [Read more…]

Science Writing And Denialism: Accuracy, Clarity, Courage

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So if it seemed quiet in the blogosphere this week, it may be because most of science-writing’s all-stars (plus me) were in the same room at the University of Wisconsin, talking about subjects that make many people uncomfortable: vaccination, climate change, evolution. The occasion was a conference, “Science Writing in the Age of Denial,” and the point was to get accomplished people talking about hard questions of verification, communication and belief. [Read more…]

Brief Promo: Superbug is at The Open Notebook

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I’m flattered to say that I’m the latest guest at the excellent site The Open Notebook, where veteran science writers Jeanne Erdmann and Siri Carpenter run deep-dive interviews with writers, bloggers and journalists about what underlies their stories.

We talk about how I got on the scary-disease beat, what journals I read, how I organize my materials — and what the emotional costs of this work are.

As bonuses, we’ve got a copy of my original pitch for The Enemy Within, my April 2011 Scientific American story on multi-drug resistance in Gram-negative bacteria; screenshots of some of the programs I use to keep track of my stuff; and — by far my favorite — a Soundslides of pictures I’ve taken in the field, overlaid with audio of me giving tips and telling stories. (It’s the first time Open Notebook has done multimedia, and we’re pretty excited about it.)

The Open Notebook is a fantastic resource; great science writers including my WiSci blog-sibling David Dobbs, Carl Zimmer, Robin Marantz Henig and Steve Silberman have all unpacked their stories there. I hope you’ll take a look.

Diseases and borders: Potatoes and St. Patrick's Day

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Beannachtai lá le Pádraig, constant readers — or, for you English-speaking lot, Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

In Irish, the way to say “Once upon a time” is O fadó fadó — “Long, long ago…” So, for St. Patrick’s Day, an Irish story:

Long, long ago — or, by the calendar, in 1824 — the territory know as Peru broke Spain’s last hold on the New World. The nascent Republic needed trade relationships, and quickly: It had borrowed heavily from banks in Europe to finance its 3-year war of independence. But after 300 years of colonization, all it had to offer, bluntly, was crap.

No, really, crap. Bat and seabird crap, otherwise known as guano. In the centuries before the establishment of the chemical industry, guano was a precious commodity, a potent natural fertilizer packed with nitrate and phosphates. There were enormous deposits of guano on the Andean coast and offshore islands; they provided the currency that Peru’s new government leveraged into a web of trade relationships with England, the United States, and France. Guano quickly became Peru’s leading export and the basis of its entire economy. In 1841, the government nationalized the guano deposits, selling the stuff to its European and American partners in hundreds of shiploads — tens of thousands of tons — per year. [Read more…]