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"Buckeye tigers," a midnight massacre, and missed opportunities

Rough Beasts: The Zanesville Zoo Massacre, One Year Later, by Charles Siebert. Published by Byliner. $2.99. Available on Kindle, Nook, iPad, and Byliner.com.

By Seth Mnookin

On October 18, 2011, a 62-year-old, recently released convict named Terry Thompson freed eighteen tigers, seventeen lions, six black bears, and fifteen other "exotic animals" from a jumble of cages and pens on his 73-acre farm in Zanesville, Ohio. What happened next is not exactly clear, but it appears that Thompson pulled down his pants, smeared his crotch with chicken blood and viscera, and shot himself in the mouth with a .357 magnum. By the time authorities were able to recover his body, Thompson's genitalia had been eaten away; one or more of the animals had also gnawed on Thompson's head.

That those are some of the least remarkable details from the events that transpired that rainy October night should tell you something about the ensuing insanity. The first hint that something was wrong came around 5pm, when a neighbor named Sam Kopchak noticed a bear chasing some of Thompson's horses through a field; seconds later, Kopchak realized he was several feet away from a male African lion, who watched intently as Kopchak anxiously led one of his own horses to safety. By that point, there was barely an hour of daylight left before sunset -- and Thompson's farm was within a few miles of a nursing home, a gas station, a motel, and, most ominously, a school, which, at the time, happened to be hosting a children's soccer game on a playing field surrounded by woods. 

Great Investigations Deserve Great Ebooks

In The Wrong Hands, by Ryan Gabrielson, California Watch/Center for Investigative Reporting. $.99, Kindle Single.

 by Deborah Blum

For well over a year, the investigative reporters at California Watch (part of the non-profit center for Investigative Reporting) have been pursuing a story involving abuse of mentally ill patients in state care -  and of institutional indifference to that abuse.

That investigation, led by Ryan Gabrielson, focused on five state operated centers that house "some of society's most vulnerable citizens - men and women with severe autism, cerebral palsy and other intellectual disabilities living in taxpayer funded institutions." To sum up the results, it found that center residents had been beaten, tortured and raped by staff members. And that a police force, set up to protect resident safety, had apparently helpfully looked the other way.

The stories, first detailed in a series called Broken Shield, are best described as horrifying, a litany that includes the taser burning of a dozen patients, the rape of others, and the death of a quadriplegic patient with cerebral palsy, who died of internal bleeding after three cotton-tipped swabs tore through his esophagus. None of these incidents, as the investigation makes clear, were thoroughly evaluated by the well-paid police force assigned to those centers. In many cases, including the worst ones, no charges were filed.

There's another interesting issue here--the platforms which California Watch used to tell this story--but I'd rather start by considering its importance, its indictment of the way we care for helpless and troubled people, in particular the system in California. And to acknowledge that I'm not alone in this reaction. Everyone from newspaper readers to state officials was appalled. The stories prompted major reorganizations of centers, investigations by outside experts, and new legislation, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, mandating far stricter law enforcement oversight. This month, the state agreed not to seek Medicare reimbursement for care at the most troubled centers. This is a story that matters, one of the reasons I wanted to bring it up here.

These powerful changes are foremost a result of really powerful reporting. But California Watch also amplified that effect by making sure that its findings were heard across multiple platforms. The stories were placed on its website. They were distributed to newspapers across the state, running in all eight of the state's largest newspapers. They were showcased on radio programs, partly through the center's partnership with KQED. Videos were provided to television stations. California Watch even produced a graphic-novel style video, which illustrated the trauma suffered by patients and their families.

And in December, the Center for Investigative Reporting published the series as a 99-cent Kindle single titled In the Wrong Hands: How a Police Force Failed California's Most Vulnerable Citizens. In one sense, the single is perhaps the least impressive part of this approach. It's a workmanlike summary of the original series rather than a uniquely good e-publication in its own right. The story-telling remains in a basic newspaper format;  there's a puzzling lack of illustration, audio, video or really anything would bring additional life to the telling.

This is less of a problem in a gorgeous narrative or exceptionally fun-to-read story. But this is neither of those things. In the Wrong Hands reads like what it is --a repackaged newspaper series rather than a well-articulated book. It's dense enough and dark enough to occasionally be a challenge to read--exactly the kind of story that benefits from other kinds of media--perhaps even some of California Watch's own novelistic video. I suspect that with a little more time and care, this could have been  a more substantial and more meaningful e-single, one that would have reached  an even wider audience (when I checked on January 21, its Kindle single standing was 364,414).

I respect--and even admire--the California Watch model for distributing news and for solvency in a digital age (briefly outlined here at the Nieman Journalism Lab). But as someone who also has hopes for the e-publishing age that we are growing into, I'd like to argue for setting a high professional standard for e-books, both short and long, one that really moves them beyond old-time print. If we're building a new model of story telling then there's nothing wrong wanting it to be a really good one.

And, after all, a great investigation--which In the Wrong Hands was--deserves a great platform.

Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner's Handbook, published her first e-single, Angel Killer, last year. She writes for numerous publications, blogs about chemistry at Wired, and teaches journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Flatland: Rediscovering A Multidimensional Classic

Flatland, by Edwin A. Abbott. Originally published in 1884. Free. Google Play. Project Gutenberg (numerous formats).

Guest review by Jaime Green

When I was about twelve years old, I saw the shadow of a four-dimensional cube. It was in a special exhibit at the New York Hall of Science on geometry and topology, the math of surfaces and shapes. And for some reason, it's stuck with me. A three-dimensional model built of angles and lines, square and trapezoids, like a metastasized cube. It was hung in mid-air, just above my tween eye level.

I can't quite picture the three-dimensional shadow now. So many years have passed. It's also the sort of thing that hovers just beyond your understanding, so it's fitting that the memory flits out of reach, too. Much of trying to understand advanced math can be like that. You understand the analogy, or you can read the equation, but you can't really picture the concept. You know it's there. Maybe if you sit very still, maybe if you hold your breath, something will flash into your mind. Imagine a four-dimensional sphere. Just try.

The best pleasures of Edwin A. Abbott's classic book, Flatland, are the moments in which Abbott draws you a little closer to that flash of insight, impossible as, for a layperson, it may be. Through analogy and explanation, Abbott makes you feel like you are a hair's breadth away from understanding, from being able to see in four dimensions. It's a book about math and yet, even despite its short length, it's much more.

Darwin In the Age of Ebooks

The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits , by Charles Darwin. (Free: available on iBooks and Kindle)

Reviewed by Virginia Hughes (guest reviewer)

Charles Darwin wrote many books and many types of books, the most famous of which you can download for free on iBooks or Kindle . How to choose?

If you want a really good story, go with Voyage of the Beagle, the charming journal Darwin kept while working as a naturalist on a ship that went from England to South America, Tahiti, Australia, the tip of Africa and back. The first sentence is enough to pull you in:

The neighbourhood of Porto Praya, viewed from the sea, wears a desolate aspect.

If you’re looking for scientific import, nothing beats Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the book that outlined his theory of natural selection and would forever change biology. You might also try The Descent of Man for provocative ideas about race, gender, and sex, or The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals for its lively photographs of faces that would inspire a future science of lie-detection.

It’s hard to think of a reason to read Darwin’s last book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits, unless you’re curious about exactly those things. But for all you vermiphiles, there’s probably no better format for this volume than an e-book.

Darwin began thinking about worms in October of 1837, a year after disembarking the Beagle, when his uncle Josiah told him a curious story. Three years before, Jos had spread a layer of cinders on a field near his home in the English countryside. Since then the cinders had sunk several inches and been replaced with a layer of fine and uniform particles of soil known as vegetable mould. Could it be the work of the worms?

Intrigued, Darwin spent a few weeks closely observing his uncle’s fields. Sure enough, he discovered that the grass was littered with tiny cylindrical castings of worms. The next month, he formally presented his uncle’s idea to the Proceedings of the Geological Society of London: The digestive process of earthworms, en masse, is responsible for creating the vegetable mould that helps crops grow. In this way, Darwin said, the lowly worm is a “geological power.”

That short paper planted a seed for a more substantial book about worms but, because of his many other writing projects, Darwin didn’t get around to finishing it for 44 years. The book isn’t terribly long—some 222 pages on my iPad—but after reading a few pages I thought it might take 44 years to finish.

For better or for worse, the first two chapters—Habits of Worms and Habits of Worms Continued—feel like a transcription of Darwin’s laboratory notebook. Some of his experiments are fun to read about, like when he exposed his potted household worms to the noise of a metal whistle, a bassoon, piano banging, and shouting, all to prove that the critters were deaf. Other observations are not so fun, like the 23 pages describing which end of a leaf a worm pulls into its burrow (for English plants: 80 percent were tugged from the tip, 9 percent from the base, and 11 percent from the middle). Even in the tedious sections, though, the narration has a satisfying intellectual payoff. For example, Darwin uses the worm’s leaf-pulling methods—which are neither random nor instinctual—to argue that the animals have some level of intelligence.

After 86 pages of worm habits, Darwin finally gets into the meat of the theory, describing in detail the soil observations that he made at his uncle’s house and in the decades since. The next chapters are more historical and thoughtful, asking how worms may have played a part in the “burial of ancient buildings” and the “denudation of the land.” It may have been no coincidence that Darwin chose decomposition as his final scholarly subject. By that time he was old, sick and beginning to talk a lot about his own death. He died in April 1882, six months after Worms was published.

While slogging through the book, I kept wondering how it could have been so popular, selling thousands of copies within weeks. Not only that, but Darwin apparently received a lot of fan mail. Readers sent him all sorts of their own stories and questions about earthworms.

Perhaps, rather than a well-paced narrative meant to be read cover to cover, Worms was bought as a handy reference book. Back then, after all, if you saw a strangely shaped worm mound in your backyard garden, you couldn’t do a Google image search to diagnose it.

Thinking of it that way, maybe Worms was a proto-Wikipedia. Darwin constantly references the worm writings of other naturalists, just like Wikipedia’s numerous footnoted citations. Each chapter begins with a paragraph of disjointed clauses that outlines the ideas within, just like the hyperlinked contents box at the top of every Wikipedia page. And you can read the book’s chapters in practically any order—easy as scrolling down a browser window.

Actually, reading Worms the e-book is arguably better than reading about worms on Wikipedia. Unlike Wikipedia, I could bookmark multiple pages, highlight passages and write notes in the margins. Best of all, I was never left wondering about the validity of the source material: This is the authoritative voice of one of the greatest biologists of all time.

So if you’re into worms, by all means download Worms and crawl into its deep, sleepy passages. If you’re not into worms, just read the Wikipedia summary.

Virginia Hughes is a science writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Nature, New Scientist and Popular Science, and her blog Only Human is part of National Geographic magazine’s Phenomena. Follow her on Twitter.

Fear and More Fear in Central America: An Ebook Look at John McAfee

John McAfee's Last Stand by Joshua Davis. Published by Conde Nast. Kindle, $0.99, or as part of Wired's Nook ($4.99) and iPad ($3.99) editions of the Jan 2013 issue.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

When the Belizean government announced on November 12 of last year that they were seeking John McAfee for questioning about the murder of his neighbor on the white-sand island of Ambergris Caye, it was just the latest, grimmest installment in one of the strangest tech stories of 2012. The former anti-virus tycoon's Central American escapades had become news six months prior, when his jungle compound had been raided by the government on suspicions that he was manufacturing meth.

No drugs were found, but after the raid, Joshua Davis, a Wired contributing editor, began investigating McAfee's doings, spending time with the gun-spangled man himself and his array of young female companions. When McAfee went on the lam after the murder, saying he'd be killed if he turned himself in, Wired published Davis' profile as a 47-page ebook, John McAfee's Last Stand. It paints a picture of a fascinating paranoiac whose fear brought him to the top of the anti-virus industry and to the bottom of a hole dug in the sand where he hid, covered by a piece of cardboard, while officials searched for him after the death of Gregory Faull. It's an engaging read, even now that further chapters, including an escape to Guatemala, an accidental disclosure of his location by Vice magazine, and expulsion to Florida, have been added to McAfee's story.

Do we really need to get personal about longevity enhancement?

When I'm 164, by David Ewing Duncan, Published by TED Books (Available for Kindle, iPad, Nook)

Reviewed by Annalee Newitz

Half cultural prognostication and half science journalism, David Ewing Duncan's TED Books longread When I'm 64 explores whether medicine will one day make it possible for us to live forever -- and what would happen to human society if we did. It's a hotly debated topic, and Duncan takes his time tackling every aspect of it in this lengthy essay. Engaging and often fun, the book takes us from the labs where scientists are exploring the genes that control aging, to brain-computer interface demonstrations where paralyzed people are learning to control artificial limbs with their minds. Whether we do it with biology or machines, it's likely that humans will artificially enhance our longevity at some point. Though the prospect of doubling our life expectancy seems crazy to some, Duncan argues it's not entirely implausible. Especially given how far we've come over the past century. 

Still, ethical questions plague the project. While researching his book, Duncan ran a survey online and in his lectures where he asked people if they would like to live beyond the standard 80 years. Most said no, though a significant minority said they wouldn't mind living to be 120 or 164. Those yearning to be immortal represented less than one percent of respondents. Many people felt that living longer than 80 years would mean depleting the Earth's resources even more quickly than we already are. Others worried that young people would have no chance at getting good jobs, since their elders could keep working for decades longer. Some simply felt that living for a long time would be depressing and boring.

Several sections of the book are devoted to Duncan's quest to understand how it would change humanity if we could live much longer than we do now. From the rational world of tissue engineering labs where researchers hope to use 3D printers to make healthy, new organs, he ventures into Singularity University where would-be immortals from Silicon Valley listen eagerly to longevity advocate Aubrey De Gray's prediction that the first person who will live to be 1,000 has already been born. These true believers imagine that science will solve our energy problems and economic difficulties long before overpopulation due to immortality becomes a planet-destroying problem.

As if acknowledging the mostly unscientific nature of the longevity project, Duncan explores its implications by discussing mythology and science fiction about immortality. We may not know what role telomeres play in aging, but we certainly know that The Matrix and Terminator warn against using technology to enhance humans. Given the speculative nature of his topic, Duncan's forays into fiction make a lot of sense, and help provide a cultural frame for debates over longevity enhancement.

Here on Download the Universe, we often discuss how a particular e-book makes use of the medium, whether with enhanced images, video, or even just a good set of links out to more sources. But with When I'm 164, I'd like to talk about a stylistic quirk of e-books that has nothing to do with format: the fact that it's become standard practice for online writing to include a lot of first-person, confessional storytelling. 

Should online writing always be personal? Certainly it's refreshing that online writers try to avoid some of the print media's fake objectivity. But should that always mean authors need to personalize their subjects?

Like a lot of longreads online, Duncan's book veers into the personal. He delves into his sadness at his parents' impending deaths, interviews both them and one of his sons about their views on life extension, and ultimately concludes the book by declaring that he's emotionally torn by the idea of living forever. In some ways, the climax of the book is Duncan's final declaration of ambivalence about scientifically enhanced longevity. I think this personal touch works in some ways -- it helps to draw the reader in, and acknowledges the highly personal responses that many people have to this area of research.  

But it often reads as cheesy and unnecessary, as if Duncan were just going through the motions of making his online writing more personal than print.  Of course it's easy to sympathize with his sadness at a parent's decline, but there is nothing particularly insightful or unusual to Duncan's first-person stories about these issues. He paints the scientists and thinkers he's consulted for this book in far more interesting detail than he paints himself. The first person bits just weren't necessary to make this story compelling.

Duncan is at his best when coaxing out intriguing speculations from scientists, engineers and philosophers about their views on life extension. Duncan's observations of their work form the meat of this extremely gripping tale about one possible future -- of enhanced longevity -- that could arise from contemporary medical science.

Annalee Newitz is the editor-in-chief of io9.com, and the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (coming in May 2013 from Doubleday).

Snow Fall: A Gorgeous Ebook Comes to Life on the Web

Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek. By John Branch. The New York Times and Byliner.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

On Wednesday night, a mysterious new article appeared on the New York Times site. News of it began to leak out via Twitter, and people who headed over to read the first chapter of Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, an account of a backcountry ski run turned deadly, found a piece not only grippingly reported but physically gorgeous, laced with soaring animations of the mountain, a looping GIF of the wind over the snow, and haunting audio and video captured by the survivors. Here's a sample of the reaction, from Atlantic correspondent Yoni Applebaum:

That @johnbranchnyt feature on Tunnel Creek? If this is the future of journalism, it looks beautiful: nyti.ms/UGCPpU

— Yoni Appelbaum (@YAppelbaum) December 20, 2012

 

By Thursday morning, the rest of the story--five further sections in all--had been posted, and we'd learned that Snow Fall, a groundbreaking example of journalism enhanced by the web, would appear without multimedia features in the Sunday edition of the NYTimes and be the first ebook released through a new collaboration between the New York Times and Byliner.

I've read the story and examined both the Web and ebook versions, and I'm here to tell you: buy the ebook if you'd like to carry the text around with you, but please, please do yourself the favor of reading it online.

The story starts on the back side of Cowboy Mountain in Washington. Two days' powder lie thick over the landscape, and professional skier Elyse Saugstad and a group of 15 other ski industry professionals and local experts have just joyfully begun the descent of an out-of-bounds run named Tunnel Creek. Standing in a copse of old-growth trees, Saugstad looks uphill and sees something that should not be there: a two-story-high wall of snow. Seconds later, she and an unknown number of others are buried in a river of ice that, if it had not already crushed them to death, would suffocate them within minutes.

These skiers and boarders weren't noobies. Over and over again, you hear, in the survivors' own voices in the embedded videos, that this was a dream team of backcountry skiers with decades and decades of experience between them. They would have known if it had been unsafe to go. But in meticulous reporting John Branch gently teases out the new technologies that have given out-of-bounds skiers enough of a boost in confidence that avalanche deaths have leapt in recent years, along with the cultural effects—the politesse, the bravado of even smart skiers—that clicked together like the parts of a deadly machine in Tunnel Creek.

The comparison that immediately comes to mind is with Young Men and Fire, the last book written by Norman Maclean. Maclean's 1992 masterpiece is a reconstruction of the Mann Gulch Fire, a disastrous 1949 blowup in Montana that consumed 12 smokejumpers, the elite fire-fighting parachutists of the Forest Service, in less than 10 minutes. As I watched the animations laying out the tracks each skier took, and watched the helmet cam videos of Saugstad and others taken just before, and after, the mountain fell, I thought, “This is what Young Men and Fire would have looked like, had the smokejumpers had video on their helmets.”

If the Byliner version, which has only text and a few photos, were the only version, I'd be crowing over it. But having seen the beauty and skillfulness of the web version, I have to wonder why the New York Times did not release Snow Fall through The Atavist, which has made it their business to tell multimedia stories in ebook form. Perhaps there's a business question in play here. After all, the Atavist offers stripped-down Kindle versions of their stories, which sometimes climb up Amazon's best-seller charts. For now, there may just not be enough demand for elaborate programming for these long-form features. And since the Times has already built Snow Fall an online home--and, as of Friday morning, sold most of the advertising slots in it to Sotheby's--they may see the ebook simply as a way to skim a little more cream off what they've already done, without investing too much more work.

That's a bit of a pity. But at least we'll always have the Web.

 

Veronique Greenwood is a staff writer at DISCOVER Magazine. She writes about everything from caffeine chemistry to cold cures to Jelly Belly flavors, and her work has appeared in Scientific American, TIME.com, TheAtlantic.com, and others. Follow her on Twitter here.

Behind the scenes with "Electric Shock," Matter's new ebook on regeneration

"Electric Shock" by Cynthia Graber. Published by Matter. $0.99. Available online and for Kindle, iPad, and others.

by Seth Mnookin

Last spring, Jim Giles and Bobbie Johnson, a pair of British journalists who'd written for everywhere from The New York Times and The Guardian to Economist and Wired, announced their intention to launch Matter. It felt, to many of us in the science-writing racket, like a quixotic effort: Was there really pent-up demand for in-depth, independent reportage that covered breaking news about science within the parameters of long-form non-fiction?

To answer 'yes' to that question required ignoring decades-long secular trends in journalism. Legacy news organizations ranging from CNN to my hometown paper, The Boston Globe, have been jettisoning specialized science reporters since the late 1990s. As profits disappeared and newsroom budgets shrank, "in-depth" projects became rarer and rarer. This is hardly a surprise. Nuanced, investigative reports have always been the equivalent of newsroom money pits: They require (relatively) highly paid reporters and editors, they don't produce a lot of copy relative to the amount of effort needed, and they don't typically deal with subjects advertisers want to be associated with. (Can you think of any companies that'd be eager to pitch their wares alongside this excellent Times series on the abuse of developmentally disabled patients in New York State group homes? Me neither.)

Cold Blooded: A Doping Investigation Primer

Cold Blooded by Jere Longman. $1.99 (Amazon Prime members can borrow the book for free.) Available as a Kindle single.

Guest review by Christie Aschwanden

In early October, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) released hundreds of documents implicating seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong in something the agency dubbed the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen. Jere Longman's Kindle Single Cold Blooded is essentially a Cliff Notes version of the USADA report.

In just 49 pages, Longman's ebook provides a cohesive synopsis of the case. Condensing the material was no easy feat. The USADA report contains 200-plus pages, including affidavits from more than 25 witnesses and hundreds of supporting documents, such as bank records and blood test results. Longman expertly turns this data dump into a readable summary that contains both the most important evidence (Armstrong's payments of more than one million dollars to Italian doctor Michele Ferrari) and the most amusing, such as Armstrong teammate David Zabriskie' parody of the Jimi Hendrix tune Purple Haze,

EPO all in my veins

Lately things just don't seem the same

Actin' funny, but I don't know why

'Scuse me while I pass this guy

The Zabriskie anecdote aside, Longman's writing is detached and uninspiring, no doubt because he pieced the story together from the USADA documents rather than first-hand reporting. The following passage is typical:

Shortly after the 2000 Tour de France ended, French authorities began an investigation into suspected doping by Armstrong and the Postal Service team. An anonymous letter had been sent to prosecutors in Paris. A television crew had spotted two men - Postal Service team personnel - tossing medical waste into a trash container.

For readers unfamiliar with cycling and the Armstrong case, Longman's book supplies a quick yet substantial overview. The work also stands as a convincing example of the ebook format's utility for condensing a bolus of evidence into a useful summary. I can imagine similar treatments for the next celebrity scandal or even the latest IPCC report.

Those familiar with the Armstrong case will find nothing new in Longman's ebook. If you're looking for character development or analysis, you're better off reading From Lance to Landis by David Walsh, or his forthcoming Seven Deadly Sins. Longman's colleague at the New York Times, Juliet Macur, also has a book in the works, and the USADA case report itself makes fascinating reading. Some of the affidavits weave narratives as compelling as you'll find in any novel.

The Lance Armstrong that emerges from the USADA report is a narcissistic bully who becomes increasingly vindictive toward those who dare to question him. He slaps lawsuits at his accusers and at one point, he sends a threatening text to the wife of a teammate who's set to testify against him. The evidence outlined in Cold Blooded leaves little doubt that Armstrong was a leader in what USADA CEO Travis Tygart calls a conspiracy "professionally designed to groom and pressure athletes to use dangerous drugs, to evade detection, to ensure its secrecy and ultimately gain an unfair competitive advantage through superior doping practices." As ESPN sports writer Bonnie Ford wrote following the report's release, "anyone who remains unconvinced [of Armstrong's guilt] simply doesn't want to know."

There's been a lot of deliberate not knowing over the years, and Armstrong was not the first to exploit it. Doping has been a part of cycling since nearly the beginning. The sport did not originate in the Olympic tradition but as a competition to get from here to there as fast as possible on your own steam. In the cycling's early days, racers often took cognac or amphetamines in hopes of boosting their performance. Back then, such practices weren't considered cheating. Drugs were eventually banned to protect rider health, not as a result of ethical qualms.

When U.S. team doctors and coaches blood doped members of the 1984 Olympic cycling team, they broke no official rules. Some of the team's riders refused to participate in the doping scheme, but they came to that decision via their own moral standards. Rules against doping received very little enforcement until the formation of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and its U.S. affiliate USADA in 1999, and even then, cycling's governing body remained more interested in protecting its sport's reputation and its rainmakers than in any notions of fair play. In Cold Blooded, Longman describes how Armstrong paid the UCI to cover up a positive test at the Tour of Switzerland in 1999 and the New York Daily News has reported that Nike, a long-time sponsor of Armstrong and his cancer foundation, helped pay for the bribe. 

Armstrong didn't invent doping, he just did it better than anyone else before him. He understood from the beginning that fans wanted something bigger than life to believe in, and he was more than willing to oblige. His triumph over cancer gave hope to countless patients around the world, and cancer became his shield to deflect criticism. Hope was a product he could sell to his sponsors and the public. He built an empire around a false story. As I've written elsewhere, even his comeback from cancer was not as remarkable as it seems. His fraud succeeded with the complicity of accomplices and bystanders who stood to gain from his success.

Some of these co-conspirators, such as team director Johan Bruyneel and doping doctor Michele Ferrari also face sanctioning in the USADA case. Other participants in the doping culture, like Bjarne Riis and Jonathan Vaughters, remain leaders in the sport to this day.

Cycling was dirty when Armstrong arrived at the sport. The question that remains is, will it remain dirty now that he's gone?

 

Christie Aschwanden is a contributing writer for Bicycling Magazine. She has written about doping for NPR, New Scientist, The Washington Post, BBC Future, and Smithsonian. She blogs about science at Last Word On Nothing.

 

Evolving Fish, A Dying Sea, And A New Genre: Digital Comics Science Journalism

Symbolia. First issue free. Subsequent individual issues $1.99. Annual subscription $11.99. Available as an iPad app or pdf; other devices to come. See web site for details. 

Comics first gained respectability as art, then as storytelling, and more recently as comics journalism. Joe Sacco's celebrated Safe Area Goradze, for example, showed how comics journalism could deliver powerful portrait of life during wartime. Published in 2001, Safe Area Goradze was the product of a pre-ebook age, the sort of printed work that you might buy as a deluxe hardbound edition and display on a shelf. A decade later, comics journalists are increasingly giving up paper and going digital.

A new example of this new genre is Symbolia, a magazine that released its first issue this week. It's been generating a good deal of buzz, with write-ups in venues like the Columbia Journalism Review, Poynter, and Publisher's Weekly. I decided to check it out and discovered a creation that was fit for reviewing at Download the Universe. That's because three out of the five stories in the first edition are about science.