As I pointed out in a recent post, Time magazine's April 1 cover story, "How to Cure Cancer," is sure to raise false hopes among people grappling with cancer. It must also be devastating to those who have just lost someone to cancer, and who might now think that their...

A new report on the state of American journalism found "a continued erosion of news reporting resources" and " a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands."

Those were among the many disturbing...

Congratulations to Curtis Brainard of the Columbia Journalism Review for sticking around late on a Friday afternoon to get a scoop, if an unfortunate one -- the New York Times, Brainard reports, has canceled its popular and important Green blog.

Politicians and government officials who want to hide bad news use the well-known...

Standing beside a large screen displaying brutal comments on Twitter, the disgraced science writer Jonah Lehrer  today delivered a talk that seemed to be aimed primarily at rehabilitating his writing career, rather than offering any insights on his journalistic misdeeds. 

Lehrer was paid $20,000 for his talk by the Knight Foundation,...

When I called in a recent post for better reporting on gun control, I didn't realize how very desperately we would need it this week. 

Newsweek has put its respected brand name on a piece of unsubstantiated opinion the likes of which we haven't seen since Newsweek ran a similar...

Last week, about 40 members of the  CNET.com editorial staff met at the CES trade show in Las Vegas to select the website's official Best of CES product. They chose the Dish Hopper with Sling "because of innovative features that push shows recorded on DVR to iPads," according to...

The January issue of Esquire is out with an almost 8,000-word story called "Thank You for Fracking" by Tom Chiarella, which wants to be a manly, Esquire-ish, ultrahip analysis of a current environmental policy debate. It falls far short of that. Chiarella has a point, but the overheated prose so...

It now appears that Washington will engage in a debate over gun control, and possibly go beyond a feckless "national conversation" and actually do something. Gun control is on the agenda: but beware who is controlling the agenda.

Much of the talk in the first two business days after the...

"Woke up with a hangover?" begins a story by Sumathi Reddy in the Wall Street Journal. It might be caused not by a martini but by "a range of unexpected foods, from cheese to pickles to citrus fruit," she writes.

Sounds interesting. How does that work? Not so well,...

Only a few weeks after Newsweek and Simon & Schuster gave us proof of heaven,  The New York Times now offers us immortality in the form of an article entitled "Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?" It is now online and will appear as the cover story...

On Oct. 11 I wrote that the book Proof of Heaven, an account of a near-death experience by a neurosurgeon, reflected badly on its author, Eben Alexander, and on its publisher, Simon & Schuster, for allowing mystical belief, "visions" and religion to masquerade as science. I wrote then that...

Nate Silver's rational approach to politics seems to provoke highly irrational responses.

At Slate,  Daniel Engber  writes that Silver, author of the FiveThirtyEight blog at The New York Times, "appears to have hit the mark in every state -- a perfect 50 green M&Ms for accuracy." Engber links to

I feel sorry for Dylan Byers, a media blogger at Politico, and, from what I read, an entertaining and competent writer.

I'm embarrassed for David Brooks, a conservative columnist at the New York Times and a smart guy who writes about human nature in addition to politics.

As for Joe...

We've heard the statistic before, but it's useful to be reminded of the exact numbers:

Medicare costs are already expected to reach $830 billion a year by 2017. About one-quarter -- or $208 billion -- will be spent on people in the final year of their lives.

And what...

On Saturday, Linda Holmes of NPR's monkeysee blog watched 14 hours of The Weather Channel. Why oh why? she laments. Why did I do it?

She isn't sure, but her hilarious introspection on that lost day had me howling louder than the winds of Hurricane Sandy (which are swirling around my...

When the Chicago-Sun Times said it was hiring Jenny McCarthy -- Playboy playmate, actress, model, ex-girlfriend of Jim Carrey, and notorious proponent of a vaccine-autism link -- to write a lifestyle blog, it rekindled the ferocious debate over vaccines and autism. (Admittedly, it doesn't take much to stoke that debate.)

The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, created with $3 billion of state taxpayer money, is now facing charges that it meddled with peer review to award contracts to preferred candidates. Its chief scientific officer, Alfred G. Gilman, a Nobel laureate, resigned in protest in May, and seven other...

The conviction of seven people -- six Italian scientists and a government official -- on criminal charges has provoked outrage on both sides of the Atlantic.

The seven, all members of the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks, were sentenced to six years in prison "for...

Jenny McCarthy--yes, that Jenny McCarthy, Playboy playmate, actress, model, ex-girlfriend of Jim Carrey, and notorious proponent of a vaccine-autism link--has been hired by the Chicago Sun-Times to write a daily blog on parenting, dating, and "family issues," the paper reports.

McCarthy's blog will run Monday through Friday. In addition, she...

If you've been wondering, you can now put yourself at ease: Heaven is real. 

That comforting end to a discussion lasting thousands of years comes not from an evangelical group, not from a pastor, not from a mystic or a saint -- but from the cover of this week's Newsweek...