Mother Jones pitch

Dear Marianne,
Hope all is well with you! So nice seeing you late last year. I'm finally coming out of the book launch phase and am writing to pitch you a feature story about a little known phenomenon:

Our 21st century faces are the result of civilization. Crooked teeth, overbites, narrow jaws, and crimped nasal airways are a modern invention. Three hundred years ago, humans displayed straight, perfectly aligned teeth, wide jaws, flat palates and the large nasal passages that signal habitual healthy breathing. What went wrong?

A motley crew of scientists and health care professionals are tracking problems in the development of young children’s jaws and airways, not only for aesthetic reasons. Modern facial structures can cause hard-to-detect sleep difficulties that can then exacerbate behavioral issues, anxiety, depression and even cognitive decline. They’re working to treat and improve screening for these problems, guided by the skulls of pre-Industrial Age humans and dental practice from 50 years ago.

Here’s a paragraph from the lead of the piece I envision:

Kevin Boyd, DDS, twisted a wire retainer that looked like a torture device: tiny metal prongs held the space where a child’s tooth would fit; a strand of metal poked into the air, capped with two swirling loops that would anchor around molars. After an adjustment, he replaced the device in the mouth of the 10-year old boy in the chair. The boy struggled a bit and moaned. “I hear ya, buddy,” Boyd said, pressing hard for just one more second, and then removed his purple-gloved fingers. He’d just deployed a pre-World War II orthodontic solution, which disappeared from most dentists’ repertoires a half century ago. A few minutes later, he used the most up-to-date imaging software to show a patient and his mom where the little boy’s airways were compromised, indicated by a black void where brilliant white should be.

I propose writing a feature story for Mother Jones in three parts:

· First, about the risks facing very young children who experience sleep and breathing problems, signaled by symptoms as minor as snoring. These include behavioral and mood disorders, delays in school and lower IQ. Half of children two to five years old experience sleep problems that could raise these risks.

· Second, about the possible reasons for the eruption of this jaw and breathing developmental issue, from the back-to-sleep movement to processed food, toddlers sucking on food pouches, and bottle feeding; and

· Third, about the disparate scientific disciplines and practitioners coming to work on a solution, from maternal health, dentistry, anthropology, speech language pathology, and epidemiology to orthodontia. They’ve had some successes: for the first time last year, the American Dental Association recognized airway health as a vital component of oral health. A large-scale public health campaign aims to educate parents about risks for sleep problems via Head Start centers, and a smaller pilot study enlists speech language pathologists to screen for sleep problems. But they also face skeptics, who dismiss early stage orthodontia as a money-making bid and question whether modern feeding practices could really reshape our faces.

The piece will interrogate the question of nature vs. nurture and how we as a species sustain knowledge – given that effective World War II-era remedies to this problem seem to have disappeared from medical practice in the last half century. I’ll explain scientific truths, such as the importance of nasal breathing and the strength of our tongue, which can carve out a cavern in the palate of our mouth, if teeth aren’t aligned properly. I envision the article being illustrated by images of 300-year old skulls from the cone beam cat scans that a pediatric dentist-orthodontist-anthropologist team is using to guide the treatment of modern-day children. These images tell a powerful story when juxtaposed with the CB cat scans of today’s pediatric orthodontia patients. See here This piece is especially timely given the current national focus on sleep health and the damage caused by too little sleep for both children and adults.

I have exclusive access to the Chicago dentist, Philadelphia anthropologist, New York City epidemiologist and her speech language pathology team, Los Angeles myofunctional therapist and Las Vegas feeding specialist who are working in tandem to address this complex social health issue, with others across the country. I’ve already completed three reporting trips (to Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City) to gather on-the-ground material for a vivid narrative. I’d be happy to share more information about the story or to brainstorm the approach, if you’re interested. (I could even include some first person material, given that Ava is about to undergo orthodontia.)

Thank you so much for considering this pitch. I'd be delighted to answer any questions you may have.

Hope to hear back from you soon.

Best,

Katherine

Slate pitch

Here's one piece I've written but haven't found a home for: What My Middle School Diary Taught Me About Parenting

As a child, I was a typical good girl, eager to excel in school and please adults. I earned straight A’s through elementary and middle school, and remember one B-minus on a math test with vivid shame. When my own daughter received a C in social studies, the first semester of seventh grade, I reacted with horror. This was completely unacceptable and deserved a full-court press at school and home.

Then I discovered my childhood diaries. Audio diaries. Ten cassette tapes packed with the delights, woes and banalities of growing up, dated 1986 to 1992. They covered middle school, high school and the beginning of college. I started recording my diary because I’d always wondered what my own mother’s childhood was like in post-World War II Singapore. I wished I’d heard her voice, or learned the details of what she ate, wore, gossiped about with girlfriends. I wanted my own kids to have a record of suburban American life in the 80s and 90s.

What I heard shocked me. Where was that straight-A good girl I’d remembered being? The entries were packed with talk of boys and shopping trips, not to mention lost items, homework put off, Sunday afternoons squandered when I could’ve been studying. Then, the kicker: “I got a C in chemistry.”

Could it be that my children aren't that different than my teenage self? Perhaps that C in chemistry in my sophomore year of high school was the lesson I needed to buckle down. It certainly hadn’t derailed me from studying science, or kept me from attending Harvard, where I earned a bachelor’s degree in physics.

This essay follows my transformation after finding and listening to my childhood diaries, interrogating the vagaries of memory and the double standards we hold for our children. It explores the value of imperfection and failure in helping us all develop into responsible adults.

If you think this might be a fit, I’d be delighted to send you the full piece for your consideration. I also have audio from the diaries that I’d be happy to share for publication online, if that’s of interest.

Best,

Katherine

Accepted MoJo Pitch

Final story here: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/05/the-best-viral-news-youll-ever-read-antibiotic-resistance-phage-therapy-bacteriophage-virus/

Pitch: At the end of 2015, University of California professor Tom Patterson abruptly fell grievously ill on a vacation to Egypt, so seriously that he had to be medevac’d to Germany and then home to the United States. He had somehow become infected with a multi-drug resistant bacterium that defied all treatment. No antibiotics worked: He slid into septic shock, heading toward death from drug-resistant infection, which claims more 700,000 people around the world each year.

His wife, infectious-disease epidemiologist Steffanie Strathdee, refused to accept that this was the end. She is the director of the Division of Global Public Health at UC San Diego, and she called on her vast network of connections to help her find a last-ditch cure. They answered. Researchers in California, Maryland and Texas clubbed together to concoct a remedy that has roots in a discovery made 100 years ago this year: a cocktail of phages, viruses that infect bacteria, that could attack Patterson’s infection in a way that antibiotics could not.

The treatment was long and difficult, and several times Patterson almost slipped away. But his eventual recovery — he was discharged from the hospital in August 2016 — has been hailed as proof that the long-neglected remedy of phages should be revived to help hold off the advance of drug resistance.

And it’s true, they should be. But what Patterson’s story shows isn’t just that phages are powerful and neglected. It also shows why the Food and Drug Administration has been unable to figure out how to license these potentially lifesaving treatments, and how far phage treatment has to go before it can become a routine part of medicine in the United States.

It’s ironic that the FDA finds this so difficult, because phages have been a routine part of medicine for decades in what we would probably consider a much less high-tech part of the world — in the Republic of Georgia, in a research center called the Eliava Institute. When Joseph Stalin took control of the Soviet Union in the 1930s and closed it to the West, he also rejected Western science as decadent, including the brand-new compounds known as antibiotics. He pressed researchers in the new USSR to find their own answers to the historic menace of infectious diseases, and George Eliava, a microbiologist who had studied in Paris under phages’ discoverer, selected the viruses as his institute’s priority. Phage research flourished there, and still does; to this day, people with recalcitrant infections will self-fund trips to Tbilisi to seek treatment.

But the essence of phage treatment is that it is tailored to each patient, and also, usually, that it is composed not of a single virus but of a cocktail that may change as treatment goes on. That is antithetical to the FDA’s requirements. To approve a new drug, the agency wants to see an unchanging formula that produces the same effects across very large clinical trials. Phages are not that. In the past decade, a half-dozen biotechs enthusiastic about the viruses’ potential have tried to wriggle around the FDA’s requirements, tuning them to fit testing of their products, and have failed.

What is particularly surprising about this is that the FDA has approved some phage treatments, but not for humans — for food. There are now three phage preparations on the market in the United States that are sprayed on meats or added to dairy foods to prevent the growth of foodborne bacteria. But at the FDA, the bar for approving food-safety compounds is much lower than for new drugs, and though phages have leapt the first hurdle, no one is optimistic they will clear the second.

In the United States, that is. Europe’s FDA equivalent, the European Medicines Agency, in 2013 approved the launch of the first full clinical trials for a phage therapy for burn wounds, which are especially subject to infection. Its results are expected soon.

Hypothetically, the United States could follow Europe’s example. But under the Trump administration, almost all science funding is threatened; the draft budget for 2018 proposes a 22 cut to the National Institutes of Health, which grants funds for basic research. Absent an infusion of funds to the small biotechs who want to prove that phages work, and a change of heart by the FDA about how phage trials should be conducted, the lifesaving treatment that rescued Tom Patterson will not become the widespread defense against antibiotic resistance that the world desperately needs.

Accepted Mother Jones pitch described in ASJA market report (PDF above): https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/02/she-started-selling-abortion-pills-online-then-the-feds-showed-up/

Accepted Slate Pitch

Final story here: https://slate.com/culture/2018/07/how-donald-hall-changed-ox-cart-man-from-the-poem-to-the-childrens-book.html

Pitch:

Hi Dan,

I'm writing to pitch a 1500-2000 word culture story on the poet Donald Hall, who died a few days ago. His most well-read poem is arguably the text of the children's book Ox-Cart Man, which won the Caldecott Medal in 1980. An earlier version of this poem was published in 1977 in The New Yorker, and in my piece, I argue that the revisions that Hall makes to the poem -- particularly the addition of the family and the use of a single simile -- change the poem from one of repetitive labor to one of hope and futurity. Towards the end of the essay, I briefly draw on personal experiences of parenting and tie my argument about the poem's investment in making a better world for one's children into conversations about politics happening right now.

I am an Assistant Professor of English at West Virginia University, where I study and teach 20th century American poetry. I received my PhD from the University of Chicago and my website is www.johannawinant.com. I haven't written for online magazines like Slate before, but I've long wanted to, and have been a regular reader for over a decade now.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours,

Johanna