𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗

Several times a year random people come up to me and ask if I am Stephen King.

Every aspect of this story is jaw-dropping and it seems to be spreading into more areas and getting worse.

A medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are, in fact, fiction A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer: The cases described are fictional. Paediatrics & Child Health, the journal…

Fallout continues from one of the most appalling cases of scientific misconduct I've ever come across: journal retracts 138(!) case studies as fictional. (Incredibly, it may have to un-retract one that is not fake.)

(New Yorker piecethat set off the current furor: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...)

He seems to be on his way to winning.

Al Jazeera chart shows that the US has bombed 10 countries since 2001: Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Iran.

Chart from Al Jazeera showing the number of countries each US president has bombed by year since 2001.

• Tied for No. 1: Trump (2017, 2025) and Obama (2016).
• No. 1 in new countries bombed: Trump (2025).
• Fewest countries bombed since 2002: Biden (2022)

www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/...

Screencap of Trump post on Truth Social from March 3 saying "if necessary, the United States Navy will begin escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, as soon as possible."

I am no military tactician, but wouldn't packing a whole bunch of US military vessels into the narrow Straits of Hormuz make them incredibly vulnerable to the sort of mass drone-boat attacks that Iran and its Houthi proxies have already used to sink tankers?

You could do much worse than spend your downtime clicking on some of the National Magazine Award-nominated articles on this list.

The magazine business is flailing, but magazine *writing* is still going strong.

Amy Harder at Axios energy: America's natural gas bounty is acting like a moat, largely shielding the U.S. from price spikes while much of the world reels from escalating unrest in the Middle East. 1/

The front cover of A Pox on Fools: The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines." The cover shows a black circle with the title and the author's name (mine!) in white. The bottom right of the circle is indented, pushed by the needle of a pre-WW2 syringe, held in someone's left hand. In the space between the hand and the spine of the book, there's a blurb by geneticist, author, and broadcaster Adam Rutherford: "Brimming with righteous anger, this book should infuriate you for all the right reasons, and arm you to take on the grifters and their war against science."

With all the horrors around us, talking up a book seems...weird.

But I have a book coming and it is, I believe, an important one—one hope help persuade the vaccine hesitant (those who've heard the noise but aren't yet consumed by anti-vax BS).

Anyway, here's the latest iteration of the US cover:

What it is Like to Accidentally be Trapped in a Country at War

By Zack Davisson

Hey! You seen on the news of evacuation orders for Americans whose vacation was suddenly disrupted by a little war as a treat? Well, it happened to me too.

Gather round for story time! Destination, EGYPT!!!

(1)

Vince Musi did fantastic work in what were (for reasons not of his making, or of the archaeologists) very difficult circumstances.

Thanks for the article, which I hadn't seen.

I can imagine that the constant calls from global media and the encroachment of tourism were a pain in the neck (thanks for being patient!). But part of me also says, "Well, this is what happens when you find something of global importance!" :)

Thanks for the article, which I hadn't seen.

I can imagine that the constant calls from global media and the encroachment of tourism were a pain in the neck (thanks for being patient!). But part of me also says, "Well, this is what happens when you find something of global importance!" :)

The West has been in a 32-year drought. But it may be worse than that A drought has a beginning and an end. What's happening in the West doesn't seem to have an end, so what is it?

'After 30 years, is the West's drought still a drought?' - Arizona Republic's long piece on aridification and its consequences for Arizona, featuring the LTRR's Dr. Margaret Evans and her research on rising temperatures and changing forest dynamics www.azcentral.com/story/news/l...

Trump promises to refill the Great Salt Lake as Utah leaders poo-pooh conservation Lawmakers want to spend $1 billion on pipelines and desalination rather than asking Utahns to use less water.

This sardonic piece from Axios about the Utah legislature's flailing efforts to avoid making hard choices adds more to the picture.

Could a 550-Mile Pipeline From the Ocean Save the Great Salt Lake? Scientists Say Probably Not New research suggests the electricity costs would exceed $300 million per year and carbon dioxide emissions could approach one million metric tons annually

The idea was floated, but seems to be dead (see article).

Not dead: a scheme in which Utah pays for desalination plants on the California coast that CA can use to give water to the southern part of the state, in return for which CA gives up some of its Colorado R. water rights to Utah.

Hoo boy. Sorry to hear that. Writing the piece, I was wholly focused on the archaeological work and its implications, and was excited to share a bit of that with National Geographic readers. It never occurred to me that I could play a role in bringing people there.

Can We Refill the Great Salt Lake? The Great Salt Lake has dropped 22 feet since the 1980s. Water leasing reform and cloud seeding innovation may help restore it.

Interesting, if oddly written, summary of the nascent efforts to refill Utah's Great Salt Lake before Salt Lake City gets overwhelmed by the toxic dust on its floor.

A bit? There were already busloads of tourists coming by when I was first there :) Although, to be fair, they were mostly in the early morning--I think they were stopping in GT along the way from Gaziantep to somewhere else (Nemrut Dağ?).

Sorry!

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

Just noticed that 1493 by @charlescmann.bsky.social is only $1.99 as an ebook right now. Highly recommended as a way to get a sense of the breadth of the Colombian Exchange.

bookshop.org/p/books/1493...

Why AI Is 'Not Particularly Good' at Curing Disease (Plus: The Next GLP-1 Boom and Why America Hates Big Pharma) A wide-ranging interview with Dave Ricks, the CEO of Eli Lilly, which makes the GLP-1 drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound and recently became the first trillion-dollar pharma company in history

Striking @dkthomp.bsky.social interview w/ Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks covering the widespread effects of GLP-1 drugs, AI as a bad cancer-cure finder, why people hate Big Pharma, and more.

Gotta say, I often wonder if these drugs will end up having way more long-term impact on our lives than AI.

The counterargument would be that a lot of both Defoe and Twain are brilliantly written but slapdash. I just read "Roughing It." It was hilarious and amazing--but it also would've benefited from Twain going over the first draft and asking himself hard questions about its structure.

State of the Species - Orion Magazine Does success spell doom for Homo sapiens?

I re-read this essay by @charlescmann.bsky.social in February and July every year. It holds. Waiting to see if homo sapiens can turn the biological corner away from self extinction. So far, not looking good.

@orionmagazine.bsky.social
#limitstogrowth
#successfullspecies

Tweet from Michael Tracy shows Epstein in a glamourous black overcoat with a fur neck above a crisp white short, open at the beck and wrists, in the parquet-floor foyer of some urban apartment. Behind him is an open door that frames a chandelier.

The Epstein truthers have entered the building.

I get what he's saying, and generally agree, but I also know there are these weird force-of-nature people who write super-well super-quickly. No tenth drafts for them!

Excerpt from speech: "I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that the great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at the rate of about a hundred words a day—half the length of the selection I read you earlier from Heart of Darkness—for seven years. T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets our country has ever produced, wrote about 150 pages of poetry over the course of his entire 25-year career. That’s half a page a month. So it is with any other form of thought. You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating."

Via @nxthompson.bsky.social , comforting thoughts for those of us who have, err, just taken a %$#^&! long time to finish a writing project.

(Source: a speech by critic William Deresiewicz in 2009, theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and...)

James Webb Space Telescope images showing two views of what looks like a giant glowing brain in space.

Well good morning giant rapturous brain in the sky!
Here a dying star is blowing its mass into space, shedding its hydrogen skin, in clouds of gas expanding beyond that expiring mortal coil perhaps to begin anew, forming and fertilizing generations of new young stars in a rapture of stellar
(1/n)
🧪

How Buildings Learn is indeed a fantastic book. My wife uses it to teach her architecture and engineering students abd it regularly blows their minds.

COVID’s origins: what we do and don’t know Researchers summarize key insights from the world’s first comprehensive investigation into how a pandemic started.

Nature has issued a summary written by 23 of the 27 original members of the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO). Look for some looong perspectives on pandemic origins in June in my Garrison Lecture for @aahmhistmed.bsky.social. www.nature.com/articles/d41... #histmed