Category: Culture of science
Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail, recently raising some juicy issues about what it would be like to bring a Media 2.0 sort of transparency to a Media 1.0 (well, maybe, 1.6) "traditional" magazine like Wired. His proposals address questions that I, as a writer mainly in 1.0 venues like print magazines and books, have been mulling over in a back-of-the-head sort of way.
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Posted by David Dobbs at 2:23 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Brains and minds
In my preceding post, about Eli Lilly pressing primary-care physicans to prescribe the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa for elderly dementia, I meant (but forgot) to mention a blog that is following the much wider Zyprexa saga of which this "Dementia is the message" scandal is only a small part.
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Posted by David Dobbs at 1:56 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Medicine
I try to keep on top of controversies about drug companies, but lately it's hard to keep up with all the latest revelations and laundry spills -- and to wrap your head around the variations. Today the New York Times reports that Eli Lilly mounted an organized effort to convince doctors to prescribe its powerful schizophrenia and bipolar-disorder drug Zyprexa for elderly patients with symptoms of dementia -- despite that dementia in the elderly rises from causes quite different than those of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, is far less serious problem than schizophrenia, and that Zyprexa seems cause sometimes serious weight gain and susceptibility to diabetes (for which it is facing several lawsuits).
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Posted by David Dobbs at 3:16 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Environment/nature
The last month or so I've been pondering what to photograph, as I walk around town, to convey the disturbing wierdness of the weather we've had these last months in Vermont. I live in Montpelier, which is the nation's smallest state capital and generally one of its coldest. (Also the only one without a MacDonald's). It's should be damn cold here by now -- it should have been cold weeks ago -- but we've had four months of autumn.
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Posted by David Dobbs at 2:37 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I write on science, medicine, nature, culture and other matters for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, National Geographic, Scientific American Mind, and other publications. (Find 
