Author Archive
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The Observatory
Grace-ful Coverage
July 10, 2009 10:54 AMThe name Libby doesn’t conjure the same images of corporate and environmental malfeasance as Love Canal or Three Mile Island. But it should. This 2,600-person town in Montana was recently the focus of what a former prosecutor for the Justice... Continue reading
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Overload!
Interview with Clay Shirky, Part II
December 22, 2008 12:02 PMClay Shirky teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications program at New York University and is the author, most recently, of Here Comes Everybody, about how new means of communication are changing the social environment. CJR's Russ Juskalian recently spoke with Shirky... Continue reading
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Overload!
Interview with Clay Shirky, Part I
December 19, 2008 12:08 PMClay Shirky teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications program at New York University and is the author, most recently, of Here Comes Everybody, about how new means of communication are changing the social environment. CJR's Russ Juskalian recently spoke with Shirky... Continue reading
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Overload!
Maggie Jackson on the Erosion of Attention
December 17, 2008 11:29 AMJournalist Maggie Jackson is the author of 2008's Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. She recently talked with Russ Juskalian about the dangers of the divided attention span and how we might combat information... Continue reading
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Overload!
Kluge: Gary Marcus on Attention and the Brain
December 16, 2008 11:55 AMGary Marcus is a professor of psychology at New York University, where he studies developmental cognitive neuroscience. In his latest book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, he writes about the clumsy way in which our brains evolved.... Continue reading
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Overload!
David Shenk on Data Smog
December 15, 2008 11:50 AMJournalist David Shenk has been writing about the topic of information overload for over a decade. In his 1997 book Data Smog, Shenk was one of the first to identify the problem, explore it in detail, and propose... Continue reading
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Overload!
How Attention Networks Work: Transcript
December 8, 2008 12:00 PMCognitive neuroscientist Michael Posner is an internationally recognized expert on attentional networks and cognition. CJR contributor Russ Juskalian recently talked to Posner about attention, cognition, and how media consumption affects both. This is a full transcript of their discussion.... Continue reading
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The Observatory
Larry King: Curing Cancer with Consciousness
August 7, 2008 09:54 AMIn the late 1970s, after putting a homemade pyramid on her head, Judy Zebra Knight (neé Judith Darlene Hampton) says Ramtha—a 35,000-year-old warrior who supposedly led an army against the inhabitants of the mythical kingdom of Atlantis—appeared before her and... Continue reading
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The Kicker
China: Just Sweeping People Under The Bed?
August 5, 2008 02:25 PMThe most recent edition of Play, The New York Times's quarterly sports magazine, had an interesting essay by freelance writer Tom Scocca, titled True or False: China is fit to play host, on the coming Olympic games. ... Continue reading
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The Observatory
Book Review: Microcosm
July 31, 2008 12:36 PMIn February 1982, physicians in Medford, Oregon encountered an unknown pathogen that waged a sort of intelligent biochemical warfare against our bodies. After being ingested, the rod-shaped bacteria—small enough to fit 500 of them side-by-side across the diameter of a... Continue reading
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The Observatory
Launch: Yale Environment 360
June 6, 2008 10:20 AMTwo seemingly disparate things dominate the chatter coming from the journalism world these days: coverage of the environment, and the din of confused voices calling for the ascendancy of our favorite wunderkind disruptor—digital media. Yale Environment... Continue reading
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The Observatory
Flogging a “Dead” Climate Bill
May 30, 2008 11:00 AMWashington, vis-à-vis the Bush Administration, has shirked its responsibility to take on global warming for years, so the Climate Security Act of 2008, up for debate next week in the Senate, is a big deal. The bill, co-written... Continue reading
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The Observatory
The Mysterious Epigenetics
May 16, 2008 08:00 AMWhen the Human Genome Project (HPG) was hot news in the press five to ten years ago, there was a flurry of stories about a fascinating field of study called epigenetics. The epigenome, we were told, was a system whereby... Continue reading
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The Observatory
The Early Life of the Gas-Tax Story
May 8, 2008 01:20 PMThe possible suspension of the federal gas tax has become a big issue in the presidential race, and the latest media frenzy surrounding the candidates. As we noted last week, the press aggressively (if belatedly) attacked the idea, which... Continue reading
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The Observatory
The True Color of “Green-Collar” Jobs
May 1, 2008 12:29 PMWhen John Edwards bowed out of the Democratic primary in January, the presidential race lost its most vocal supporter of so called green-collar jobs. His former opponents have carried the mantle forward, however-Senator Hillary Clinton in particular, who... Continue reading
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The Observatory
Gore Wants You!
April 3, 2008 11:35 AMLast Sunday, in a mostly unremarkable 60 Minutes piece hosted by Lesley Stahl, former vice president Al Gore and the Alliance for Climate Protection publicly launched a $300 million campaign to keep the public focused on greenhouse gases... Continue reading
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The Observatory
The Wrong Debate Over Autism
March 11, 2008 10:51 AMBack in 2005, CJR published a story by Daniel Schulman about media coverage of “whether a mercury-containing vaccine” preservative called thimerosal was to blame for an alarming spike in autism cases among a generation of children. Last summer, yet... Continue reading
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The Observatory
The Wind Beneath Biofuels’ Wings
February 28, 2008 09:05 AMAs we've noted before, "green" business articles are tempting for journalists right now. That is doubly so when the story involves a Boeing 747 and a rogue billionaire who wants to save the world. So it was no wonder... Continue reading
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The Observatory
The Bats and the Bees
February 21, 2008 08:09 AMWith all the media coverage of the crash in honeybee populations over the last two years, and in light of the wave of stories about a potential crab-and-shark invasion of the Antarctic shelf (and subsequent population extinctions), it’s surprising... Continue reading
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The Observatory
Is Sustainability Reporting Sustainable?
February 7, 2008 02:28 PMIn November, a study from the National Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University found that green business stories "mushroomed" in America's ten largest newspapers last year; more than half of all those published since 2000 were printed... Continue reading
Desks
The Audit Business
The Observatory Science
- The western frontier KQED Quest, Pacific Standard keep their eyes on the other coast
- USA Today’s oily, gassy rainbow Detailed cover story a bit too rosy about ‘energy independence’
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- What’s the swingiest state of them all? By any measure, Colorado is at the center of the action in 2012
- The over-covered image war Journalists are exaggerating the risk that Mitt Romney will be “defined” early
Behind the News The Media
Blog
The Kicker last updated: Mon 3:17 PM
- The Pulitzer Prize luncheon, storified
- A game of telephone fools the Times
- What Warren Buffett sees in local newspapers
- Don’t take my traditional Internet away!
- Why China ejected Melissa Chan
The Future of Media
News Startups Guide last updated: Wed 2:13 PM
- Missouri Scout Subscription-based niche political news from a stockbroker turned political junkie
- Eye on Annapolis Unadorned, up-to-the-minute news for Maryland’s capital city

