Patty's Day Roundup

BoingBoing loves The Open Laboratory: The Best in Science Writing on Blogs 2009, founded/published by the ever-present Bora Zivkovic and edited by scicurious. Nice pointer to four entires on weightlessness, major medical troubles, vampires v zombies, and how poverty affects brain development.  

Slate's Sarah Wideman reports that Insurance companies deny fertility treatment coverage to unmarried women.

The Bay State's AG finds that Massachusetts Hospital Costs Not Connected To Quality Of Care

Ezra Klein asks a good question: Was Medicare popular when it passed? Apparently not.

Jeff Jarvis asserts that The building block of journalism is no longer the article. I'm not so sure. But more on that later.

Savage Minds files a long but interesting post on Questioning Collapse, the book that skewers Jared Diamond over his work in "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and elsewhere.

And I found it quite satisfying to read about what Frank Rich reads about.

It was also fun to read, in the same Atlantic Wire series about notable writers' daily reading, about Susan Orlean's daily reading, and to see how she came to be on Twitter, where she is now a major force.

More like this

First reviewed on June 18, 2005: Guns, Germs and Steel is an excellent book. Collapse is better. When "Guns, Germs and Steel" first came out, I was fortunate to take part in a graduate seminar that was built around it. Along with reading a chapter each week, we also read a number of additional…
While I was on blogcation, I got an email from the watchdog group Stinky Journalism, complaining that prominent science author and professor Jared Diamond (Collapse, Guns, Germs and Steel) was in the hot seat again. (You may remember that Stinky Journalism broke the story about the lawsuit against…
Just when I was wondering why there hasn't been more mainstream coverage of the Jared Diamond/New Yorker lawsuit I blogged about at the beginning of this month, Columbia Journalism Review has an update. And in a recent article in Science, Diamond commented, saying "The complaint has no merit at all…
Unless they've deviated from their normal procedure, the Supreme Court justices have now decided on how they'll rule on the Affordable Care Act - but, as the Washington Post's Robert Barnes points out, we'll have to wait until late June to hear their verdict. In the meantime, this is a good…