Category Archives: Media

Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011

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Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22, and began chemotherapy soon after. His matchless prose has appeared in Vanity Fair since 1992, when he was named contributing editor.

“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eye retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.

“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue. He died in their presence, too, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly.

via www.vanityfair.com

we're all diminished now. vanity fair has a up a variety of links, photos, and videos of Hitch at his best.

science and the salmon debate

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Tony Farrell schools us on the perils of simplification and media in public debates over scientific questions.  The mysteries of the Fraser River Sockeye, and more broadly the health of pacific salmon, are as heated as they are cryptic, and you need to spend just a little time with scientists in the field to learn that we don't know what the hell is going on with salmon, particularly in the open ocean.  Dr. Farrell:

Scientists routinely agree to disagree, but that doesn't sit well with society-at-large, which increasingly demands instant answers and quick solutions.

Nowhere is this more painfully apparent than in the debate and confusion around the future of salmon in British Columbia, which is the current topic of an expensive federal inquiry, the Cohen Commission.

The problem is that we expect too much, too soon from science. The announcement of an "overnight" discovery is always backed by an awful lot of scientific discovery and testing.

While responsible scientists couch their discoveries with words like could, may and might, prudent caution too often gets lost in translation.

…..

Yet, the public, which is clearly selective in its risk tolerance, demands absolutes from the media when confronted with questions about natural phenomena like salmon.

As Malcolm Gladwell writes in What the Dog Saw: "Rarely is there a clear story – at least, not until afterward, when some enterprising journalists or investigative committee decides to write one."

Have your headlines if you must, because in this fast-paced world we can't always wait for hindsight, but can we agree to not represent hypotheses – no matter how intriguing – as facts?

nerd girl blogs swine

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Jennifer Gardy  notes the seeming disparity between the apparent mortality rates in Mexico and the U.S. / Canada. Since she posted this, a comparative analysis of the genomes indicates that the strains in Mexico and Canada are identical.  So why the Mexican deaths?

Some researchers suspect that pre-existing health factors in the
Mexican population might have influenced the disease's outcome, while one leading theory suggests that the increased mortality has to do with the Mexican patients' delays in seeing a physician.

I would also speculate that the number of deaths in Mexico could be the numerator over a very large denominator.  That is, the number of low level swine flu infections could be quite large among the Mexican population, but underreported due to poor access to health care and other confounding issues like the prevalence of other infectious diseases, with similar symptoms, among the poor.  In populations wracked with chronic respiratory and gastrointestinal infection, would low to moderate swine flu infections be distinguishable?  In that context, the actual mortality rate might be much lower than media reports.Child-licking-pig

Other good stuff in her post about tracking the outbreak by following money, and the sequencing efforts.