Ever have one of those stretches where everything seemed unusually vivid, profound, funny, and terrifying. Oh sure, smoking dope, but I haven’t done that in more than 40 years. Also the occasional lucid dream. This morning it came from reading the latest edition of the erstwhile gray lady, the New York Times. I found myself saying wow a lot. It has by some confluence of weather, weird fortune, rampant human frailty, and dog days of summer become this morning a dog’s breakfast mixed up from the distressing and diverting – esp.  for those with the interests that inspire the ksjtracker site.

It started with reading the utterly sober, worthwhile, and perhaps alas ultimately ineffectual, p.1, above-the-fold story of the day by Campbell Robertson. It is on the Gulf of Mexico’s long history of misuse by industry and disdain by local and federal governmental regulators. Prominent in it is the dead zone – the nearly anoxic depths off the Mississippi Delta where over-stimulated algal blooms, sinking,  are consumed by bacteria that in turn absorb and metabolize the water column’s oxygen into various organic  compounds. So fish die, or flee. I re-learned, near the end of it, that agricultural runoff is exempt from the Clean Water Act. Looks like an easy fix for the dead zone. This story is superb, even though one suspects it won’t change things all that much. It presents the recent, horrid oil spill as merely a large punctuation mark on a long history of neglect and abuse. And, like an algal bloom, it starts small with a vignette on a discouraged oysterman in its one-column wide, small-hed front page start. Inside it balloons into a richly illustrated tapestry of statistics, observations, and examples of a regional disgrace occurring right out in the open where hardly anybody should avoid noticing, but many do so anyway. Good reporting, remarkably all under one byline.

Then the psychedelic hopscotch started, reminding my why this is truly the nation’s greatest remaining newspaper, a scary or amusing thrill at every turn of the page. Examples that pertain to this site’s interest in environment, science, and medical news.

• William Neuman: Added to the Recall List; Millions of Frozen Mice ; It’s about frozen, newborn mice (mostly) as food for snakes. Tens of thousands of pet snakes worldwide fed thawed pink mice, many from one operation that appears to have had a salmonella outbreak, sickening children across much of the world. Wait till you read, late in the going, the scale of the secretive company that produces these mouseburgers. PETA may be at its door at this moment. (And speaking of dead mice, on this strange day, they also come up in A. O. Scott‘s film review of Dinner for Schmucks: What? We Might Be the Real Losers? in Weekend Arts.
• Anemona Hortocollis: In Medical School, Without a Pre-Med Degree ; Ostensibly, it tells us that a New York med school is pioneering the idea that to be a good doctor does not require science training, much, before medical school, and that creative arts, literature, etc. majors can catch up and do fine. No MCATS, organic chem, etc. Real message: the practice of medicine has never been intensely scientific (albeit, more so than “alternative medicine” such as herbal therapy, homeopathy, chiropractic….)
• Clifford J. Levy: As Russian Swelters, Even the Fish Can’t Escape ; Pity the poor trout, dead, and “drifting like buoys.”
• Sam Roberts: As Population Keeps Rising, Low Births are a Worry; A succinct summary of what we once called the population bomb, and its contradictions. It reminds me to wonder why, with China so often vilified, justly so, for environmental recklessness, it gets no occasional recognition for its singular enviro achievement, however brutally it was enforced: the one-child policy? India is poised to supplant China as world’s most populous. Nobody would have expected that, 30 years ago. (Actually, I noticed after writing this bullet, and prompting this parenthetical note, a letter writer  mentions the one-child policy today – second on this list ).
• John Schwartz: Lawyers, Far From Gulf, Skirmish on Spill Claims ; Who else sent a reporter to Boise for a hearing on where to have the BP trial? Napoleon Dynamite comes up. So does speed dating. Schwartz has a talent for spotting the absurd in every day situations.
• Emma Graves Fitzsimmons: Regulators Warned Company on Pipeline Corrosion ; A follow on that other spill in the US – along the Kalamazoo in Michigan.
• David W. Dunlap: A Workhorse of a Vessel That Helped Build the City ; About the old ship, suspected to be a brigantine, found at the World Trade Center site in Manhattan. I’d heard of trunnels – but didn’t know that’s a derivation of “tree nail,” a type of wood peg.
• Denise Grady: FDA Links Hormone Spray to Breast Growth in Children ; In National Briefs, and she writes this as briefly as possible. I have no questions, either. This is plenty ’nuff.
• William J. Broad: Report Sees a Weaker U.S. In Nuclear Forensics Skills ;

And one more that’s about journalism, if not science. It dovetails with  previous posts, here and here , on the new aggression by science and environmental reporters in China:

• Andrew Jacobs: Police Toss Out Arrest Warrant For Chinese Reporter in Hiding ;

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 11:25 am and is filed under About Journalism, Environment & Energy Stories, Health & Medicine Stories, Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.