Insights

<p><a href="/users/shimmel">Sheila Himmel</a>, an award-winning food writer and restaurant reviewer for the San Jose Mercury News, loved to eat. Then her daughter became anorexic, forever changing Himmel's relationship with food and her identity as a journalist. In <a href="http://sheilahimmel.com/book.shtml">Hungry: A Mother and Daughter Fight Anorexia</a>, Himmel and her daughter Lisa examine how their family coped with Lisa's serious eating disorder.</p>

<p>Let's assume that Dr. Conrad Murray did not kill Michael Jackson.</p>

<p>The worldwide diabetes epidemic <a href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/352/11/1138">threatens</a&gt; to make today's children the first generation to live shorter lives than their parents. </p>

<p>What drives someone with a strong scientific reputation to cut a secret deal with a drug company for ghostwriting help just to have one more paper published? </p>

<p>Let's ask.</p>

<p>In December of 2005, an elementary school in Addyston, Ohio was closed permanently after officials at Ohio's Environmental Protection Agency found enough chemicals in the air to pose a risk of cancer 50 times higher than the regulators considered acceptable. </p>

<p>Matt Goldberg says that he has "hands-down" the best job in the world. He works without times constraints and chases whatever stories he wants. He loves his boss, he loves his team.</p><p>"The only requirement I have is that I have to show up with big stories," he says.</p><p>Which begs two questions: What is this mythical job? And how does he consistently find big stories?</p>

<p>Awareness of the afterschool programs and early intervention -- stories about their importance and effectiveness -- is very important to help combat prejudice, especially on television. But "for some reason, these stories don't sell," says Bennie Ford of LA's BEST, an afterschool program that offers education opportunities and programs to elementary schools in the City of Los Angeles.</p>

<p><a href="http://fugh-berman.com/">Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman</a> has become the go-to source for comments on how drug companies have been using ghostwriters to inject marketing messages into the medical literature, a controversy that prompted powerful Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, to send <a href="http://www.npr.org/assets/blogs/health/images/2009/08/nihletter.pdf">a letter</a> on Aug. 11 to the National Institutes of Health asking, among other things, "What is the current NIH policy on ghostwriting with regards to NIH researchers?"</p>

<p>Sandra Tsing Loh is a Caltech grad (Physics, '83) -- "truly a B.S. degree," so she "truly knows what is means to be confused by science."</p><p>She brought her one-woman show to open the second seminar of the California Broadcast Fellowship as the keynote speaker. Loh is the creative mind behind <a href="http://lohdown.caltech.edu/">The Loh-Down on Science</a>, a radio show that airs on over 100 radio stations, including KPCC 89.3 in Southern California.</p>