Next Tuesday at 6 pm, at 20 Cooper Square in NYC, I'll be giving a talk/discussion on blogging and long-form journalism -- particularly on the different demands, pros and cons, possibilities and constraints, and reader and writer experiences those two different modes of writing (and reading) impose and offer.

The event is part of the NYU journalism Science, Health, and Environmenatl Reporting programs's "Inside-Out" series. WSJ science columnist and former NASW president Robert Lee Hotz will sit down with me to discuss this and other topics.

We'll focus at least part of the discussion around my story in this April's Scientific American, "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap." That story presents an argument that the PTSD diagnosis is "a faulty, outdated construct" that is overapplied, particularly to combat veterans, with unhelpful results.

This is a tetchy argument that has raised some hackles. So I should be clear: This event is part of a writing program, aimed to stir student and public discussion of journalism and writing issues; I'm there to talk about journalism and writing and not argue about the PTSD controversy.

Instead we'll talk, at least for starters, about what this story's genesis, development, writing, and publication -- along with the blog reactions afterwards -- suggest about the differences between blogging and long-form, "slow-bake" journalism. Why did I do the story as long-form journalism? What would it have been like if I had blogged it instead? Would it have been the same story at all? Would it have even been done? This -- and pretty much any other writing/journalism issue connected -- is what we'll explore.

If that's your cup of tea, come and join us! It's at 20 Cooper Square, 7th floor, Tuesday, March 31, 6-8 pm; click here for full details. If you're a Neuron Culture reader, by all means introduce yourself.

As the crisis in newspaper journalism grinds on, people watching it are trying to explain how we got here, and what we’re losing as part of the newspaper economy crashes. Some are trying to imagine a new news system. I try to follow this action, and have been sending around the best of these pieces via my Twitter feed. It’s part of my experiment in mindcasting, which you can read about here.

I should say right off that I've long admired the more measured critiques that J. Douglas Bremner, a PTSD researcher and professor of radiology and psychiatry at Emory University, has offered about the pharmaceutical industry's exploitation of the neurochemical model of depression. My regard for this work made his critique of attack on my article about PTSD, "The Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome," all the more disappointing.

I'm not disappointed because Bremner disagreed with my article. I've received several critiques of "The Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome," both privately and in blogs and public letters, that disagreed sharply with my argument. I'm disappointed because while these other critiques have ranged from thoughtful and considered to and savage and threatening, none has been so self-indulgently insubstantial. The others offered genuine arguments or genuine reactions. Bremner -- the third most-cited PTSD researcher on earth, as he's happy to tell you -- offered snark.

So I'm thrilled that, as Eating Well editor Lisa Gosselin kindly informed me today,, my Eating Well story "The Wild Salmon Debate: A Fresh Look at Whether Eating Farmed Salmon is ... Well ... OK.," is nominated for a Beard Journalism Award in the category Magazine Feature Writing With Recipes. (The recipes were by John Ash.)

This utterly tickles me, and I'm not ashamed to say I hope we win, because -- well, winning is fun. On the other hand, that I've sort of won, already as nominees get to go to the awards event, which is a black-tie affair at Lincoln Center, and attend the gala reception afterwards, which is a "walk-around tasting event" that promises to make winners feel even better and reverse any dive a runner-up might feel. One of the co-hosts is Stanley Tucci, whom I adore. If I win, I'm going to beg him to cook me an omelette. Should be a big night!

My competition, I note, is frighteningly formidable: "What is Southern?", by author, chef , and southern-cooking icon Edna Lewis, who published this piece posthumously in Gourmet; and "Mother Sauce: The Ancient Art of the Saucier is Alive and Well in the Kitchens of Paris and Beyond," from Saveur, by James Peterson, who is likewise deeply immersed in his subject,, and who already holds several Beard awards. I'm humbled and honored to be a fellow nominee with these two.

I wish I could say the salmon are doing better. Alas, that's not the case. All the more reason to think deeply about the implications of eating that farmed salmon, dishy as it is.

Too frequently one reads Gladwell's anecdotes, case studies, potted social-science research and thinks: interesting if true. Yet one feels naggingly doubtful about its truth quotient. So much Gladwell writes that is true seems not new, and so much he writes that is new seems untrue. Preponderantly, what he reports feels more like half- and quarter-truths, because they do not pass the final truth test about human nature: They rarely, that is, honor the complexity of life.

This was certainly the case with Blink, as shows glaringly if you consider it side by side with Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide, which covers the same basic topic -- how we make decisions -- in a way that's just as fascinating, just as anecdote-rich, but much more cognizant of the breadth and course of the science on the subject.

It's not just that Lehrer's book comes later and is more up-to-date. It's that he looks at the science harder and more fully. Someone observed of Gladwell -- I can't recall the writer or the publication -- that he seems avoidant of science that is at all technical, lest it gum up the fine simplicity of his sentences and smooth flow of his prose. I think there's something to that, and it explains why he came up with a relatively facile answer to the question of how to make good decisions (in a blink, except when that doesn't work) rather than showing, as Lehrer did, not only that the best mode depends on the situation but that the art of deciding well is the art of recognizing which decision-making strategies and tactics will work best in a given situation.

There are strong lessons about science writing here, or about writing well on any complex subject.

Here's the crew:

the trajectory of the balloon:

And along the way, great excitement and tension: The balloon rises wonderfully, they're getting signals from the GPS and the camera indicating all is in good order ... and then, with the camera and rig well out of sight, the batteries on their laptops start to run out and they have to switch to another laptop:

...but the surprise was great: the Google Earth not working!

I have begun to think of military PTSD as to some extent a civilian problem rather than a soldier problem. To expand slightly here; civilians/politicians send soldiers off to war. They do their jobs. Which are sometimes horrifically violent, living in a world where violence, both by and against soldiers, is a norm, among people who differ in culture, language, and many beliefs, and then the soldiers return home to the US. The civilian population expects them to come home and re-integrate as if they never experienced these things. They want soldiers to become "normal" again. When soldiers fail to normalize to the satisfaction of whatever civilian population is judging them, they are labeled with PTSD. ....

My analogy that I use to explain this in a few sentences is that; a bunch of sheep dogs are sent away to another land to protect the sheep from wolves. While there they essentially become wolves in order to survive. They return to the herd of sheep as wolves but are expected to live as sheep dogs again -- or in the case of National Guardsmen, they are expected to become sheep.

Given the sensitivity of this subject, I should note that Stevens stressed both in that email and later over lunch, when he articulated this again, that he does not mean to say no one gets PTSD, for he knows soldiers who have. Rather he's saying that the culture he's returned to, in its unease with the changes soldiers go through, seems overready to declare those changes signs not merely of change but of pathology.

I think they're being true to "extreme sheepherding". Watch the tiny dots in the Pong game and you'll get a good idea; the tiny dots are the sheepdogs. The walking sheep is speeded up, but yes, it's great sheepdogs and great shepherds, hence the "extreme sheepherding". From what I can see, beyond the shepherds attaching the LEDs to the sheep, shooing them out of a pen, and the individual sheep in the pen being physically rearranged for the Mona Lisa "painting", it's ALL done with dogs being handled via verbal/whistle commands. (The whistle instructions are "verbal" commands as the dog sees it.)

The moving sheep feet are probably done using 4 groups of sheep that don't know (or don't like) the other groups; those little flocks won't mix with each other and would go straight through the other "leg" without mixing. The sheep's head is probably done with the same method. The shepherds may have helped put individual sheep in place for the eyes and pupils of the sheep, but the rest is ALL done using excellent sheepdogs and very knowledge shepherds.

The shepherd and dog anticipate each other's thoughts and actions beforehand and ask accordingly. Not too surprising considering both have to anticipate what a sheep will do and they're the most unpredictable factor! A good team can even turn a sheep's head in the direction they want and can split some marked sheep out from the rest and manage both flocks separately. Both are routinely done in Open class sheepdog trials; the first task is essential to calmly handling sheep and the second is always one of the obstacles to be passed at that level. They're also routinely done by working shepherd/sheepdog teams.

People who've never watched good sheepdogs and their handlers at work tend to think there's no way creating art this way could be done without a wee bit of cheating. Shepherds think that the idea of using sheep and LEDs to create the art is neat; they already think that working with a good sheepdog and sheep is an art in itself.

Watch again and decide for yourself:

Emily Dickinson, poet (1830-1886)

via A Word a Day, 3/17/09

HT: My sister the sheepherder.

[Dobbs] is critical of a culture which "seemed reflexively to view bad memories, nightmares and any other sign of distress as an indicator of PTSD." To critics like this, the overwhelming incidence of PTSD diagnoses in returning Iraqi veterans is not a reflection of the brutal meaningless horror to which many of the combatants were exposed but of a sissy culture that can no longer suck it up.

Doctor or not, he's seeing politics where my words are discussing diagnostics; I stated quite clearly that the high estimates of PTSD rates are a reflection of an overextended view of how people react to brutal meaningless horror.

He further argues that

Articles such as this, and the research that it depicts, should be seen as nothing but a conservative backlash, an effort to blame the victims. If coping with the scope of PTSD is a problem, deny the reality of PTSD.

And for good measure he accuses me of being "an unquestioning apologist for the untrammeled American imperialist project of power in lawless aggression" and says I argue that we should "mindlessly accept such aggression." He even says my argument is "akin to nothing so much as Holocaust denial."

The stratosphere, as photographed by a group of four Spanish schoolboys, or their balloon, anyway.

Well, okay, maybe it's citizen space photography instead of citizen science. But still. Gotta love this. From the Telegraph:

Proving that you don't need Google's billions or the BBC weather centre's resources, the four Spanish students managed to send a camera-operated weather balloon into the stratosphere.

Taking atmospheric readings and photographs 20 miles above the ground, the Meteotek team of IES La Bisbal school in Catalonia completed their incredible experiment at the end of February this year.

Building the electronic sensor components from scratch, Gerard Marull Paretas, Sergi Saballs Vila, Marta­ Gasull Morcillo and Jaume Puigmiquel Casamort managed to send their heavy duty £43 latex balloon to the edge of space and take readings of its ascent.

Created by the four students under the guidance of teacher Jordi Fanals Oriol, the budding scientists, all aged 18-19, followed the progress of their balloon using high tech sensors communicating with Google Earth.

Team leader Gerard Marull, 18, said: "We were overwhelmed at our results, especially the photographs, to send our handmade craft to the edge of space is incredible."

And I love this part, which reminds me of my own and then my older son's adventures shooting Estes rockets and then tracking them down to find them. Only we used line of sight instead of Google Maps:

Due to the changing atmospheric pressures, the helium weather balloon carrying the meteorological equipment was expected to inflate to a maximum of nine and a half metres as it travelled upwards at 270 metres-per-minute.

"We took readings as the balloon rose and mapped its progress using Google Earth and the onboard radio receiver," said Gerard.

May their names be shouted out and may they all win scholarships.

Full story's worth a read. Apparently the group has a twitter feed but I can't find it. If you have it, please shoot a note in the comments. o

TKTK:

My story in the April 2009 Scientific American story, "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap", just went online. Here's the opening:

In 2006, soon after returning from military service in Ramadi, Iraq, during the bloodiest period of the war, Captain Matt Stevens of the Vermont National Guard began to have a problem with PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Stevens's problem was not that he had PTSD. It was that he began to have doubts about PTSD: the condition was real enough, but as a diagnosis he saw it being wildly, even dangerously, overextended.

[snip]

"Clinicians aren't separating the few who really have PTSD from those who are experiencing things like depression or anxiety or social and reintegration problems, or who are just taking some time getting over it," says Stevens. He worries that many of these men and women are being pulled into a treatment and disability regime that will mire them in a self-fulfilling vision of a brain rewired, a psyche permanently haunted.

The story presents the case -- one being made by a growing number of experts in trauma psychology, psychiatry, epidemiology, and diagnostic science -- that post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is a conceptually flawed diagnosis that is being markedly or even wildly overapplied, especially in veterans, with disastrous results.

The diagnostic criteria for PTSD, [these experts and critics] assert, represent a faulty, outdated construct that has been badly overextended so that it routinely mistakes depression, anxiety, or even normal adjustment for a unique and particularly stubborn ailment.

We are likely overdiagnosing PTSD in veterans by some 300 to 400%. This might be an academic matter if those veterans soon got better. But as the story describes, this flawed construct and overdiagnosis combines with an outmoded, counter-therapeutic Veterans Administration disability system to mire many of them in dysfunction and disability. The number of veterans receiving PTSD diagnoses and disability from the VA has skyrockted over the last decade1999, with a huge surge of new diagnoses in Vietnam Veterans (one that began before the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan) now being joined by growing numbers of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Yet the arcane disability system at the VA so discourages recovery that those receiving VA treatment -- which is roughly similar to treatments that cure 2/3 of civilian patients -- show no treatment effect at all. They're no more likely to get better than are vets with PTSD not getting treatment.