February 23, 2009

Anatomy of a Scare

In this week’s issue of Newsweek, reporter Sharon Begley tells the background story behind the vaccine-autism link scare and how bad science for years managed to derail efforts to investigate the true cause of autism. This article is a short...

February 20, 2009

Breast Cancer Cluster in a Building at the University of California at San Diego

The following post is by Geoffrey Kabat, Ph.D., a cancer epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who has conducted studies of breast cancer and environmental factors and is the author of Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily...

February 19, 2009

The Late Age of Print … Blog

Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print:Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control will be published in May but in the meantime you can visit his excellent blog fittingly titled The Late Age of Print. Posts on the site have...

February 18, 2009

Will Corporate Social Responsibility Survive the Recession?

In last week’s The Big Money, published by Slate, Christopher Flavelle examined whether or not corporate social responsibility (CSR) would be jettisoned for the bottom line during these very difficult economic times. While the concept of corporate social responsibility might...

February 17, 2009

The Power of Nonviolence — A Post by Joseph Kip Kosek

The following post is by Joseph Kip Kosek, author of Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy. The concept of nonviolence seems to have little power today. Barack Obama’s inauguration, followed quickly by Black History Month, inspired many...

February 13, 2009

University Press Round-Up

With much of the publishing world’s attention, excitement, and anxiety focused on this week’s “Tools of Change” conference, we also wanted to once again showcase all the interesting posts and books coming from our fellow university presses: Jacqueline Olds argues...

February 13, 2009

Special Court Says Vaccines Are Not To Blame for Autism

“It’s a great day for science, it’s a great day for America’s children when the court rules in favor of science.”—Dr. Paul Offit on yesterday’s special court ruling. Yesterday, we posted about the Times of London story about Andrew Wakefield’s...

February 12, 2009

Links Between Vaccines and Autism Were Fabricated

In Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure, Paul Offit looks at the history of autism research and shows the ways in which some researchers have misled the public by asserting a connection between...

February 12, 2009

Signs of Spring

While the weather in New York City seems to be returning to more February-like temperatures, the fact that our Spring 2009 books are shipping out to store is perhaps a sign that Spring is just around the corner. We had...

February 11, 2009

A Portrait of Mississippi

Mississippi has long had the reputation for being one of the poorest and most stratified states in the United States but how accurate is that assessment in 2009? According to the just published A Portrait of Mississippi, the state ranks...

February 10, 2009

The International Film Guide Launches at the Berlin Film Festival

Amid the movie stars and acclaimed directors populating the 52nd Annual Berlin Film Festival was the launch of the The 45th edition of the International Film Guide: The Definitive Annual Review of World Cinema. The International Film Guide includes a...

February 9, 2009

One Hundred Fifty Years Without Darwin Is Too Long!

The following post is by Donald Prothero, author of Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. You can also read his earlier post, Evolution: The Fossils Say Yes. As we mark the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth on...