Blog
Time to Clear the Air on EUR Smokefree Policies
From Erasmus Magazine’s misrepresentative title "Smoke-free campus: responsible decision or counter-productive?” for the very pro smokefree campus comments from students actually interviewed in the article to the irresponsible and juvenile “Free to Smoke Zone”...
Decolonization Matters
An short article I wrote zooming out on the Black Lives Matter movement - "Decolonization Matters" - has just appeared in the journal Kosmos: Journal for Global Transformation. There I write The “white fragility” fear that the oppressed will become the new oppressors...
Bee-washing
It's a thing. Like greenwashing, whitewashing, or astroturfing. Bee-washing is big business. It's how companies fool us into consuming more: by appeasing our sense of guilt beforehand. It's almost like they tried to reverse engineer our resistant points against buying...
Bread and Roses
I'm a jazz fan and player, and during the corona quarantine I started reaching beyond my normal playlist, and found the amazing work of Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah after stumbling across his stunning NPR Tiny Desk Concert. (If you don't know this pioneering...
Milton Friedman – “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs”
https://youtu.be/IK35cxb3rkA?t=1473 @24:37 Friedman quoting/paraphrasing Lenin. Classic. In a film created by Johnson and Johnson heir Jamie Johnson. Irony doesn't get sweeter than this.
International Federation of Medical Students Association – Netherlands webinar
I'll be giving a webinar lecture Friday May 8th for the International Federation of Medical Students’ Association - the Netherlands as part of their Youth Delegate Programme masterclass series in collaboration with the Dutch ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports...
Not getting the message of coronavirus
We’re sheltering in place. We’re not going out. In some places in the world, like India, Italy, and China, their quarantines were so effective that for the first time in remembrance, one could see the Himalayas from 200 kilometers away, the canals of Venice were...
Interspecies Prosperity: What it is and why it matters
I have a new blog post over at the Erasmus University Rotterdam initiative I'm a part of, the Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity. This interdisciplinary research team from law, business, and philosophy brings together mavericks who work across disciplines, and are both...
BMJ Podcast “Big Tan – is the sunbed industry targeting research?”
https://soundcloud.com/bmjpodcasts/big-tan-is-the-sunbed-industry-targeting-research?utm_source=feedburner-bmj.com+download&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bmj%2Fpodcasts+%28The+BMJ+podcast%29 Senior author Eleni Linos, as well as CTCRE director Stan...
BMJ article on conflicts of interest in the tanning industry just published
Working at the CTCRE at UCSF allowed me to meet all sorts of medical practitioners aware of the influence of industry on the health of their patients. One of those people I happened to meet, was Eleni Linos (now at Stanford), a dermatologist who had noticed throughout...
Changing Hearts and Minds: Jan 30-31 conference at EUR
As co-organizer of the Positive state obligations concerning fundamental rights and 'changing the hearts and minds' conference at Erasmus University Rotterdam January 30-31, 2020, I cordially invite my colleagues working on cognate topics to attend. The conference is...
Designing cities for silence
As an academic, I crave silence. In fact, without silence, I can't think. And since thinking is my job, in our current media blitz steal-your-attention economy, I'm often miserable. When I don't wish to work from home or my office, or am on the road, there are scant...
Charla en la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 17 de diciembre 2019
Queridos compañeros académicos, Si estén en Santiago de Chile, porfa venga a esta charla que voy a dar en ingles martes, el 17 de diciembre. El Instituto de Ciencia Política, invita a la charla “The Promise and Perils of Carbon Taxes for Inclusive...
The Failure of COP25
I recently read - from afar - the sorry state of the UNFCCC #COP25 in Madrid. According to 350.org, instead of barring fossil fuel companies from engineering the COP, the security guards at the UNFCCC forcibly removed hundred of activists and scientists who aimed to...
Stanford Talk on Industrial Epidemics
Today I gave a talk at the Stanford History of Science and Technology Workshop on Industrial Epidemics. It was a pleasure to discuss the ins and outs of public health, corporate malfeasance, and glyphosate in particular with the students and professorate of the...
National Geographic and Guardian Articles about Ecigarette Waste and EPR
In the flurry of the semester starting, I've been remiss in updating this blog with a couple important articles that have come out in the press discussing the environmental harms of electronic cigarette (ecig) electronic waste (ewaste). Both The Guardian and National...
Fuel emission standards
Who is fueling the Alice in Wonderland media world which slowly is infecting and deceiving people around the world, spreading the ignorance virus? Let’s take the way that Trump wanted to roll back the Obama-era federal fuel emission standards as an example. While...
Hypocrisy at the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology
The ISEE, or the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology, is an organization that one would expect to walk its talk. After all, it has been around for 31 years with its annual conferences, and is one of the most sophisticated and cutting edge of the...
Resources
Many colleagues and students ask me what books or authors I would recommend. So, I've decided to start an archive of the best tools on the web, and the most impactful books I know of for social and personal evolution. (this is a work in progress, that I will be...
San Francisco BART’s Unpleasant Design
Introducing: The inverted guillotine Having lived for the better part of my life in the San Francisco Bay Area, I have put in my time on the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system. From it's loud, overcrowded, clunky, and infrequent trains, to the spate of BART police...
Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, Big Vape
About a decade ago, the "American Vaping Association" railed against RJReynolds (later RAI, now part of British American Tobacco (BAT)) for attempting to persuade the FDA to "ban the sale of open-system e-cigarettes, including all component parts." Now that pretty...
Rearranging Glaciers in the Anthropocene
The Rhone Glacier has been wrapped in blankets for the past 8 years by the Swiss. For the last 8 summers, Switzerland has been wrapping glaciers in blankets to stop them melting. These desperate strategies are increasingly becoming more common as our ecosystems...
Talk: Berkeley-Tartu biosemiotic summer seminar July 11 2019
After a successful 2019 Biosemiotics Gathering in Moscow, I'm happy to be sharing a deeper look at my project at the University of Tartu, in Estonia, giving a talk on Multi-level semiosis – and the impact of supernormal stimuli in the human superorganism and...
Environmental Philosophy on Let’s Talk Trash Podcast
https://www.eshub.nl/podcast-2/ I gave a talk a few weeks ago for the Erasmus Sustainability Hub which is now online. I had a great time being interviewed by Wallerand Bazin. They did a great job too in assembling a set of links to some of the major themes I covered....
A semiotic analysis of WSJ article on Bayer’s glyphosate problems
The original article, published here, takes a rather pro-industry "we'll engineer our way out of this" approach. Rather than observing a fundamental problem in putting artificial inputs unsustainably into agriculture, the article plays to the upbeat agribusiness...
New Publication: Financial Conflicts of Interest and Stance on Tobacco Harm Reduction: A Systematic Review
My colleagues Manali Vora, Jesse Elias, and Pam Ling and I at the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco just Financial Conflicts of Interest and Stance on Tobacco Harm Reduction: A Systematic Review. (Also...
2018/19 Biosemiotics Gatherings
My review of the 2018 Biosemiotics Gathering that Terry Deacon and I organized at UC Berkeley is now a Featured Article and Open Access at the Journal of Biosemiotics. The Biosemiotics Gathering this year will be in Moscow.
Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense
In doing some background research for my book, I remembered that I had read about a year ago of a US Congressman who was working to get rid of the imperative for US health insurers to take patients with preexisting conditions, who shortly thereafter was diagnosed with...
Islands of unsustainability
John Rawls's (1971) notion of national self-sufficiency in terms of resources is about as far from our current globalized world as we can get, in terms of theory aimed at non-ideal applications. Globalization is a fact of life. And yet, with each displacement in our...
Lunchtime Talk at Erasmus School of Philosophy on Advertising and Agency
Advertising and Agency: An ethological account of how social infrastructure compromises or sustains our autonomy May 16, 2019 12:00 - 13:00 Bayle Building, J5, Erasmus University RotterdamHumans like to think of ourselves as autonomous agents, freely making our own...
Smoking as Acceptable Rebellion.
Notes from a debrief of Philip Morris’s 1998 Litter Focus Group read: “Non-smokers tend to give smokers a lot of slack about throwing down a butt,” claiming that “throwing it on the ground eliminates fire risk,” and that litter is a “natural result of outdoor smoking...
Aphorisms
With research, be as exhaustive as possible without it becoming exhausting. (March 13, 2019) Superstitions are killing the planet. (Viz., the idea that we need x in order for y to happen or not to happen; that we need more bunkers, armor, weapons, food, etc., in order...
Every day should be Sustainability Day
In Erasmus University Rotterdam's weekly online magazine Erasmus Magazine, a condensed version of my speech I gave Monday March 4th, 2019 for the Opening Ceremony of the Erasmus Sustainability Days is now published. It's also available in Dutch [in Nederlands].
Erasmus Sustainability Days Keynote
March 4th, 2019, I'll be giving a keynote to 1500 or so students at my home university, Erasmus University Rotterdam, as part of their Sustainability Days. They asked me to be fiery and inspirational, so I'll try my best. The paper will be put online afterwards on my...
Science and Politics of Glyphosate Workshop June 6, 2019
My Erasmus University Rotterdam colleague Alessandra Arcuri and I are organizing a day-long workshop on the most used pesticide in the world: glyphosate. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in RoundUp, Monsanto's flagship herbicide, has been linked with cancer by the...
Welcome Lecture at the Erasmus School of Philosophy
I'm pleased to be giving my welcome lecture to the students and faculty of the Erasmus School of Philosophy, where I have been an Assistant Professor since November 2018, on March 13, 2019. In this lecture, I will survey my research career thus far, in light of the...