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Health Risks of Wildfire Smoke: New Study Insights
We know a lot about the effects of industrial smoke on health, but not much on wildfire smoke. Here’s why wildfires can be so fatal, even years later.
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Air Pollution Crisis: The Risks of Regulatory Rollbacks
What effects will Trump’s continued rollbacks of air pollution control regulations have on our health?
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Why I Love Moral Dilemmas
Apparently I’m most interested in writing true stories about events that, in essence, center on moral contradictions. My first trade book, Donora Death Fog: Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town, was about a group of people forced to endure a disaster that could have been foreseen but who largely supported the…
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Why It Wasn’t Just Gray’s Anatomy
No, not the TV show, the anatomy textbook. Known far and wide as Gray’s Anatomy, and still published today by Elsevier, Henry Gray could not have found success without his artistic partner, Henry Carter. Here’s their story. Henry Carter self-portrait Henry Vandyke Carter had been keeping a diary since he was fourteen. He was now…
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What Happened to Residents’ Health Long After the Donora Death Fog?
“Our scientists tell us that the Donora episode was a rare phenomenon. We hope and pray it will never recur. This study by the Public Health Service into the Donora episode, the most exhaustive ever made on a problem in air pollution, is a step toward positive assurance that such a thing will not happen…
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From Boom to Bust: What Happened to Little Webster?
Cuddled along a bend in the Monongahela River in southwestern Pennsylvania, across from the industrial town of Donora, Webster once boasted a population of about two thousand. Anyone traveling up the Mon around the turn of the twentieth century would have seen a charming village at the base of
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What Happens to Residents’ Health When a Coke Plant Closes?
Just south of Careopolis, Pennsylvania, the Ohio River splits at the northernmost tip of a long skinny island and joins together again about five miles later. The island, Neville Island, contained at its southernmost tip the Shenango Coke Works, a sprawling industrial complex built around 1930. Shenango processed coal for steel mills and had been…
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When Writers Can’t Write
Lots of things going on in the McPhee household lately, so much so that I haven’t been able to write for a few months, and I absolutely hate it. I feel unmoored on a lake during a storm. I can see land all around me, but I’ll be damned if I can get there. I…
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One Woman’s Story of the Deadly Smog
When you write a true story of an event, you always gather information you’d like to include in the final version but just can’t. Such was the case with one of my interview subjects for my book, Donora Death Fog: Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town. I interviewed Donora native Edie…
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What That “It’s My New Book” Feel Feels Like
Seeing and feeling your newly printed book isn’t the same as saving someone’s life, but it’s close.
