The Open Notebook – Interviews

Marshall Allen Unearths Waste in Health Care

Experts say the U.S. health care system wastes an estimated $765 billion each year. In a year-long ProPublica investigation, reporter Marshall Allen searched for the sources of these squandered dollars. His resulting series chronicles several cases of needless spending, including a shocking story about a nearly $2,000 ear piercing. Here, Allen tells Rachel Zamzow about what inspired him to tackle this gargantuan topic and how he found real people to make his story come alive.

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by Rachel Zamzow · February 13, 2018 · 1 comment

Maggie Koerth-Baker Explores the Legacy of a Very Prolific Panda

A quarter of the 520 pandas in captivity today are descendants of an individual named Pan Pan. As Maggie Koerth-Baker wrote last year at FiveThirtyEight, “Pan Pan saved his species by being really, really, ridiculously good at sex.” But Koerth-Baker also shows that Pan Pan’s story is as much about conservation’s limitations as its triumphs. In Pan Pan, Koerth-Baker found not only a protagonist, but a black-and-white avatar for an issue that is all shades of gray.

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by Ed Yong · January 30, 2018 · 2 comments

Lizzie Wade Examines a Debate over the Origins of the Amazon’s Biodiversity

In an award-winning 2015 Science story, “Cradle of Life,” Mexico City-based journalist Lizzie Wade tagged along with scientists trying to pinpoint the event that gave rise to the Amazon’s staggering biodiversity. The group trekked through the Peruvian Amazon on a grueling 10-hour hike, crossing three different ecosystems and many microclimates to collect samples that might offer clues to the region’s past. Here, Wade talks about her experience reporting and writing her award-winning story.

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by Rodrigo Pérez Ortega · September 26, 2017 · 0 comments

Maggie-Koerth Baker Untangles the Story behind Trump’s False Claims of Immigrant Voter Fraud

On the campaign trail leading up to last year’s presidential election, then-candidate Donald Trump claimed, based on a debunked 2014 study, that the election was rigged by fraudulent voters, many of whom were illegal immigrants. Coverage of the 2014 study tended to focus on its mistakes. But FiveThirtyEight staff writer Maggie Koerth-Baker wanted to find out why those mistakes occurred. Here, she tells the story behind her May 2017 feature “The Tangled Story behind Trump’s False Claims of Voter Fraud.”

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by Jeanne Erdmann · September 12, 2017 · 0 comments

Sruthi Pinnamaneni and Peter Andrey Smith

Peter Andrey Smith and Sruthi Pinnamaneni Interview a Doctor Trying to Untangle ALS “Reversals”

Almost all patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, die from respiratory failure, usually within two to four years of initial diagnosis. But sometimes, patients get better. Duke University neurologist Richard Bedlack investigates such ALS “reversals,” in hopes of discovering something such people share in common that could offer answers about the disease. In a January 2017 episode of the podcast Reply All, Peter Andrey Smith and Sruthi Pinnamaneni talked with Bedlack; here, they tell the story behind the story.

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by Rodrigo Pérez Ortega · July 11, 2017 · 3 comments

Ross Andersen Writes a New Creation Story

Few journalists tackle mythic topics like resurrection, the biblical flood, original sin, sons making sacrifices for their fathers, and the ultimate fate of humanity. But stories of biblical proportions are what The Atlantic’s Ross Andersen likes best. In July 2016, he traveled to Arctic Siberia to report on a father-son team trying to reestablish an ice age ecosystem—including woolly mammoths—to fight warming that threatens the Arctic. His feature “Welcome to Pleistocene Park” appeared in the April issue of the magazine.

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by Rebecca Boyle · May 9, 2017 · 0 comments

Melinda Wenner Moyer Tracks Drug-Resistant Bacteria from Farm to Table

In a December 2016 Scientific American feature that was a finalist for the National Magazine Award and won first place in its category in the AHCJ Awards for Excellence in Health Care Reporting, journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer wove together the stories of contract hog farmers; the science of antibiotic resistance; the public policies that help perpetuate resistance; and researchers’ efforts to understand how the problem can spread from farm to table, and might spark more drug-resistant infections in people. Here, she tells the story behind her story.

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by Jeanne Erdmann · May 2, 2017 · 1 comment

Mac McClelland Tails Extreme Birders through Cuba

Mac McClelland has reported from hazardous locations around the world. So when her editor at Audubon asked her to tag along to Cuba with two birdwatchers searching for the elusive, likely extinct, ivory-billed woodpecker, she figured that relatively speaking, the assignment should be a walk in the park. But McClelland was in for a rude awakening. Extreme birding, as she related in a story nominated for the National Magazine Award, is not for the faint of heart.

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by Lauren Gravitz · January 24, 2017 · 0 comments

Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley on Cooking Up the Food Podcast Gastropod

“Podcasts are an amazing way to connect directly with your audience, in a different way than print does,” says Cynthia Graber, co-host, with Nicola Twilley, of Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the dual lens of science and history. “People literally hear your voice—they connect to you as a person who’s telling a story, and they come back time and again because they trust you. It’s a way to get into people’s heads—and their living rooms and their kitchens.”

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by Jane C. Hu · December 20, 2016 · 0 comments

Helen Ouyang Studies the Ethics of Compassionate Drug Use

In her June 2016 Harper’s feature “Hashtag Prescription: The Hidden Costs of Crowdsourcing a Cure,” Helen Ouyang tells the story of a seriously ill boy who might benefit from a drug that’s not yet FDA-approved. Leveraging social media to mobilize supporters, his mother pressures the drug’s manufacturer to provide the drug as a “compassionate use.” Though the issue may not seem like a dilemma at all, Ouyang shows it’s not so black and white. Here, she tells the story behind her story.

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by Viviane Callier · December 13, 2016 · 0 comments

Jessica Wapner Knocks at the Door of a Drug Epidemic

Reporting for Mosaic magazine, journalist Jessica Wapner spent a week in Austin, Indiana, a town devastated by a drug epidemic that led to the largest HIV outbreak in U.S. history. Her mission: to try to learn what led to the heartbreaking conditions plaguing this town—and what might help stop the scourge. Here, she shares how she worked up the courage to knock on the doors to ask people whose lives have been torn apart by drugs to share their stories.

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by Kendall Powell · August 2, 2016 · 0 comments

Elizabeth Kolbert Stares Down Mass Extinction

In her Pulitzer Prize–winning 2014 book The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert details evidence that human activity is driving the planet toward a sixth mass extinction. Rather than causing her to feel overcome by the horror of one possible future, Kolbert says, writing the book left her wondering: Will we face up to what we are doing? And what’s next? Here, she talks about reporting bad news, captivating readers with tales of nature, and turning magazine articles into books.

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by Christina Selby · July 26, 2016 · 6 comments