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Chris Mooney

Chris Mooney is a Prospect senior correspondent and, most recently, author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatened Our Future (with Sheril Kirshenbaum).

Recent Articles

Congressional Malpractice

Chris MooneyMar 28, 2005

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist -- or "Bill Frist, M.D.," as his Senate Web site proudly proclaims -- is on the defensive lately. In recent days, Frist has been skewered for delivering a Senate floor speech in which he challenged Florida doctors' careful diagnosis of Terri Schiavo's "persistent vegetative state," a reinterpretation that Frist apparently based on little more than "an hour or so" of video footage. "As a physician, I was astounded" by Frist's display, Howard Markel recently wrote in The New Republic. "Long-distance doctoring is problematic on many levels but especially for a doctor who has not practiced much medicine for more than a decade."

Dreckonomics

Chris MooneyMar 14, 2005

On matters of environmental protection and regulation, free-market conservatives have two chief principles to which they claim to adhere: "sound science" and "cost-benefit analysis." As John D. Graham, cost-benefit guru and director of the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, has put it, "The Bush administration supports federal regulations that are based on sound science and economics."

Junkie Science

Chris MooneyMar 07, 2005

In science or in economics, one occasionally comes upon a "natural experiment" -- a real-world event or confluence of events that fortuitously allows for the testing of one key variable. In a sense, "natural experiments" occur within the realm of politicized science as well.

Libertarian Rhapsody

Chris MooneyMar 02, 2005

It's so hard to teach New Yorkers," says
columnist John Tierney of The New York Times, lowering his binoculars
and shaking his head. "I try twice a week, and it never works." It's morning in
Manhattan's Riverside Park, and Tierney and I are standing near 89th Street,
spying on dog walkers on the promenade below us and counting how many leash their
pets upon leaving the enclosed dog run, as city law requires. We're in the
data-collection stage of a mock scientific experiment conducted for Tierney's
twice-weekly column "The Big City." Here is the protocol:

On Another Planet

Chris MooneyFeb 28, 2005

You won't believe it until you read it. With its recently released report titled "Mercury in Perspective: Fact and Fiction About the Debate Over Mercury”, the GOP leadership of the House Committee on Resources has brought scientific debate on an already politicized issue to a new low.

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