journal features

arsenic in the food, and a half-eaten baby

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2014.06.24

So it turns out that rice from the US, which we've been eating daily for years, contains way more arsenic than it should. We'd been told this by a neighbour but it turns out that the story's been widely known for years. What's been done, and what will be done? Nothing!

And today, some Toronto city workers found half of the corpse of a baby in a storm drain.

It's days like this that make you want to just put your head down, ignore the news, and un-subcribe from the species.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton