"Ida Tarbell: The Woman Who Pioneered Investigative Reporting"

"She became well known and respected for her profiles, including a long series she wrote about the life of President Abraham Lincoln for McClure’s Magazine. But Tarbell’s biggest success—and what she is memorialized for in U.S. history classes today—came when she wrote a 19-part series for the magazine on the history of John. D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. When she was 14, Rockefeller had driven her father’s oil company out of business. Clearly the experience had stuck.

Tarbell spent two years investigating the company before her first article was published in 1902. She exposed Standard Oil’s unscrupulous practices and also wrote a biting portrait of the man behind the business. Her work helped lead to the prosecution of the company under anti-trust laws."
http://msmagazine.com/blog/2015/03/24/ida-tarbell-the-woman-who-pioneered-investigative-reporting/

"For cholesterol study volunteer, an unsettling discovery in a Science paper: herself"

"What health information do researchers owe the volunteers in their studies, especially when it’s not clear what it means and whether or how to act on it? And should researchers notify volunteers of publications in which their individual story is chronicled, even if it’s impossible for others to identify them from what’s written? Woidislawsky’s experience shows that “the risks of publishing information about people are not just privacy,” says Christine Grady, chief of the bioethics department at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. “They might learn something about themselves that they didn’t know.”...

Woidislawsky’s story holds lessons for researchers like Rader, for the ethicists who guide them, and even, I came to believe, for journalists like myself who communicate new findings. “In general, we don’t do a good job of giving people who have volunteered in research any feedback on the study,” says Grady, who urges, “give people results more often, even in the aggregate.” Grady wonders, too, whether research volunteers understand that a primary goal of scientists is to publish their results. “There’s a lot of consent forms that don’t say anything about publication,” Grady says...

I began to wonder, as we talked and I felt a powerful urge to reassure her, whether my news story had overplayed Woidislawsky’s individual tale in order to more dramatically suggest that HDL might not always be advantageous. Other reporters had gravitated to this narrative as well. One story described Woidislawsky as a “Jewish grandma” and said that despite high HDL, “her arteries are still as thick and gummed up as an old rusty pipe.” What was in the press about her coronary arteries was enough to induce palpitations in anyone."

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/cholesterol-study-volunteer-unsettling-discovery-science-paper-herself

Hmm - I definitely agree with this, I feel like people should have the finished paper emailed to them at least. And it's interesting, who owns that data? Like, there is a well publicized psych study about note-taking methods that I was startled to realize I was a part of (I wouldn't have remembered it, probably, unless I had happened to read an article that described the methods). I would love to know where I fell in the distribution of data points, especially because it was advising against a study habit that I practice. Do I have any right to this information, especially because that is asking for the service work of the scientists who analyzed it?

"8 Honest, Raw Photos of What Maternity Leave Really Looks Like"

"The myth of the totally fine new family gives us a sense of comfort and ease. It tells us that new parenthood is beautiful and easy, so we don't need paid family leave. It tells us that babies have a parent with them at all times, so we don't need affordable, safe childcare. It tells us mothers and fathers are physically and mentally fine, and not in any way deserving of societal support during one of the most transformative and difficult periods of a family's life. It tells us that new mothers don't need to heal from my physical wounds or that moms and dads alike require time, rest, and support to lower their chances of developing a postpartum mood disorder.

The reality is, well, much more real.

Here's mine."

http://www.elle.com/life-love/a36148/photos-of-what-maternity-leave-really-looks-like/?utm_source=babylist&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=babylist+loves

I think a big part of why millennials are less likely to want children is that there is so much honesty right now about how terrible it can be. I personally don't have any answers about why I might want to put myself through that ^.

"Food tech is just men rebranding what women have done for decades"

"Almost all Silicon Valley food innovation is just rebranding what women have been doing for decades. There’s nothing inherently different about Soylent from SlimFast at all. And yet SlimFast is low-brow, funny and a little sad. Soylent is cool, cutting-edge, brutally efficient and, here’s the key word: innovative, according to Quartz. Soylent gets the FastCompany profile yesterday. When I hear about Soylent, it’s almost as though SlimFast never existed, like Soylent emerged from the ether.

Because it’s made by and for men, now we call it tech... 

Tech has become a brand unto itself, a veneer to rub on to otherwise boring, domestic business (protein shakes, a crummy juicer)."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/01/food-technology-soylent-slimfast-juice-fasting?CMP=share_btn_tw&utm_source=Awesome+Women&utm_campaign=8e5861f528-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_5_8_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4a47f5fa43-8e5861f528-121978037&mc_cid=8e5861f528&mc_eid=9189d7f200

Short but pointful. 

FB: "Certainly venture capitalists putting $120m into a juice startup is a story, but the question is what kind of story."

"The Answer Is Never: Rewriting the false narrative of childlessness"

"Spoiler alert: I don’t have a change of heart at the end of this essay. This is a story about not changing my mind and not having regret. To hives lady, the contractors and all the other bodega owners with cats: I am writing my final no-thank-you note...
I sometimes wonder whether the impulse to have children is fueled by our need to create something outside of ourselves. Something that then continues on without prompting, a perpetual motion machine that allows us to always start over and make up for our parents’ and our own shortcomings. But who am I to say why people have children? I can only speak for myself. I can tell you that it is hard to find purpose and surprise just within yourself. As a writer, the question what to do with myself, how to find and keep enthusiasm for a project, particularly in times when everything around me seems to be falling apart, is a struggle. I often wish there were something other than an empty page that would allow me to externalize or, at least, distract me from my fears. On those days, when my attempts to get responses from editors fail and sources refuse to talk, when I am too lazy to conceptualize new ideas and move further into a project, when I am ready to collapse under the burden of the page—on those days, I understand why one might want to push it all aside for the sake of a child. But it seems misguided to devote yourself to someone else instead of dealing with your own struggles."
http://blog.longreads.com/2015/04/02/the-answer-is-never/

I have several male and female friends who don't want children, and the struggle is real.

"The strange, short career of Judeo-Christianity"

"The term ‘Judeo-Christian’ supposedly recognises the deep and ancient common heritage of Protestants, Catholics and Jews. The idea would have sent shivers down the spine of Puritans, who saw a diabolical Catholic ‘Papism’ lurking around every corner. Such a shared heritage would have been news to the authors of Pennsylvania’s 1776 Constitution, which required office-holders to ‘acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by Divine inspiration’, and which effectively banned Jews from public office.

The phrase ‘Judeo-Christian’ first became popular in the late 1930s, when President Franklin Roosevelt began trying to mobilise Americans against Nazism. So Judeo-Christianity was actually popularised to oppose the anti-Semitism of another predominantly Christian nation. FDR’s repeated recourse to religion in public addresses set him apart from his predecessors, who preferred civic principles."

 

https://aeon.co/opinions/the-strange-short-career-of-judeo-christianity?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4/26/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

This is interesting to know. The rest of the article is about the political history of the term through the rest of the 20th century, but it feels like much too pat a narrative for some reason, so I am hesitant to pull more to this blog.

"All Bodies, No Selves"

"If your work concerns sexuality, you will be made a body. You will be reminded — by the media, even if you are part of it, and by the people who make laws for you — that your body constitutes the limits of your contributions.

If you have something political to say about gender or sexuality, you will be expected to voice it through what your body is and what it has done, what has been done to it...

Abortion remains shorthanded as “what women want to do with their bodies.” (Of course, it’s not just women.) Prostitution is (according, mostly, to people who have never done it) “selling women’s bodies.” Rape is (so we are told) the worst thing to happen to your body. If that is going to happen (who makes it happen?) it would be better not to have a body."

https://psmag.com/all-bodies-no-selves-45aa1e61ee1c#.b51fo32rz