Brooke Borel
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Articles Editor @undarkmag • Instructor @nyu_journalism • Books: Infested (2015) & The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking (2016 & 2023) • She/Her • 🏳️🌈
Articles by Brooke Borel
Book Review: This Relationship Shaped Rachel Carson’s Environmental Ethos
NONFICTION Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love by Lida Maxwell. Stanford University Press, 2025 ($25) On a summer night in the mid-1950s, two women lay side by side on Dogfish Head, a spit of land on Maine’s jagged coast where a river meets the ocean. They took in the dazzling stars, the smudged filaments of the Milky Way, the occasional flash of a meteor.
The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking, Second Edition
Recognize what information to fact-check Identify the quality and ranking of source materials Learn to fact-check a variety of media types: newspaper; magazine; social media; public and commercial radio and television, books, films, etc.
This biologist panned a “mosquito eradicator” product. Its maker bit back.
Membership Ticker MOTHER JONES NEEDS YOUR HELP Straight to the point: Donations have been concerningly slow for our hugely important First $500,000 fundraising campaign. We urgently need your help, and a lot of help, over the next few weeks so we can pay for the one-of-a-kind journalism you get from us. Learn more in “Less Dreading, More Doing,” where we lay out this wild moment and how we can keep charging hard for you.
This biologist panned a “mosquito eradicator” product. Its maker bit back.
Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. In 2019, Colin Purrington, an evolutionary biologist, was scrolling through the internet when he came across something that would change his life.
Bed Bugs and Influencers Spark Pest Panic in Paris. Here’s What You Need to Know
It was hard to miss the dire headlines: bed bugs were reportedly all over Paris during the city’s Fashion Week, from the metro to a high-end restaurant. As fashionistas made their way home—and in light of the fact that Paris has been preparing to host the Olympics next summer—people asked, why did this happen all of a sudden? Why did it occur here? And are we headed for more outbreaks worldwide?
Discussing Vaccine Conspiracies With ChatGPT
Against the backdrop of a still-accelerating pandemic in 2020, researchers at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California published a paper describin g their work with GPT-3, an early iteration of the language model that was used, in part, to animate the now-ubiquitous chatbot known as ChatGPT.
Talking to ChatGPT About Vaccine Conspiracies
ChatGPT. Representative image. Photo: Focal Foto/Flickr CC BY NC 2.0 Against the backdrop of a still-accelerating pandemic in 2020, researchers at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California published a paper describing their work with GPT-3, an early iteration of the language model that was used, in part, to animate the now-ubiquitous chatbot known as ChatGPT.
How Does ChatGPT - and Its Maker - Handle Vaccine Conspiracies?
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How Does ChatGPT - and Its Maker - Handle Vaccine Conspiracies?
Against the backdrop of a still-accelerating pandemic in 2020, researchers at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California published a paper describing their work with GPT-3, an early iteration of the language model that was used, in part, to animate the now-ubiquitous chatbot known as ChatGPT.
As Olympics Open in Japan, Covid-19 Cases Rise
The opening ceremony for the 2020 Olympics, delayed by a year due to Covid-19, kicked off Friday just before 7 a.m. Eastern Time in a restrained performance in Tokyo. That the Games would start at all was not a guarantee as recently as Tuesday, when Tokyo 2020 CEO Toshiro Muto told reporters that officials would not rule out a last-minute cancellation. “We cannot predict what the epidemic will look like in the future,” Muto said.
To stay afloat in the pandemic, doctors turn to GoFundMe
A few weeks ago, I received an unsettling email. The staff at my daughter's pediatrician's office — a family-run private practice in Brooklyn that serves more than 3,800 patients — was shifting to part time. The practice had applied for the Small Business Administration's Paycheck Protection Program, meant to help small businesses weather the economic turmoil brought by the Covid-19 pandemic. But the money wasn't coming, at least in the initial round of funding.
How the pandemic pushed my daughter’s pediatrician to crowdfunding.
In America, we’ve grown used to people crowdfunding their own medical care. Now, doctors are crowdfunding to stay afloat, too. A pediatrician performs a routine checkup on a baby in Oyster Bay, New York, on April 13. Lucas Jackson/Reuters The Anger Over a Virtual IndyCar Crash Exposed the Fragile Facade of Competition What Will Air Travel Look Like After the Pandemic? The Workplace-Surveillance Technology Boom The CDC Has Been on a Steady Decline. We’re Just Finally Noticing.
How the pandemic pushed my daughter’s pediatrician to crowdfunding.
In America, we’ve grown used to people crowd-funding their own medical care. Now, doctors are crowd-funding to stay afloat, too. A pediatrician performs a routine checkup on a baby in Oyster Bay, New York, on April 13. Lucas Jackson/Reuters The Anger Over a Virtual IndyCar Crash Exposed the Fragile Facade of Competition What Will Air Travel Look Like After the Pandemic? The Workplace-Surveillance Technology Boom The CDC Has Been on a Steady Decline. We’re Just Finally Noticing.
Doctors are turning to GoFundMe to stay afloat during the pandemic
By Brooke Borel—UNDARKlong Read A few weeks ago, I received an unsettling email. The staff at my daughter’s pediatrician’s office—a family-run private practice in Brooklyn that serves more than 3,800 patients—was shifting to part-time. The practice had applied for the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program, meant to help small businesses weather the economic turmoil brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. But the money wasn’t coming, at least in the initial round of funding.
Your Guide to Fertility and Getting Pregnant
This guide was originally published on Oct. 8, 2019 in NYT Parenting. The early scenes of “Private Life,” a 2018 Netflix film about a New York City couple who are trying to conceive, present an unsettling scenario for anyone pondering their biological clock: A 40-something woman wakes up after an infertility procedure to find that things can’t progress as planned. Her doctors successfully extracted her eggs — but they also realized that her partner can’t produce any sperm.
Nonfiction Book Proposals and the Publishing Process - ONLINE CLASS
Taught by Sarah Lohman and Brooke Borel Sarah Lohman is a culinary historian and the author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed book Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine. She focuses on the history of American food as a way to access stories of women, immigrants, and people of color, and to address issues of racism, sexism, and xenophobia.
Manipulating the Unseen Microbial Ecosystem-The Future of Hospitals?
Receive emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related content, as well as featured reporting about current events through a science lens. A hospital room may feel sterile, with its recycled air and scrubbed smooth surfaces. But underneath that antiseptic veil is a teeming, invisible world of microbes, the composition of which constantly changes.
The Quest for Everlasting Agriculture
It’s a cycle nearly as old as human history. Plow, plant, harvest, and repeat. It worked for our ancestors, and it’s working for us now, though with ever more problems, from obliterating soil nutrients to encouraging erosion.
Editing Out Pesticides
This summer, more than a million tons of chardonnay grapes are plumping on manicured vineyards around the world. The grapes make one of the most popular white wines, but their juicy fruit and luscious leaves are also targets for diseases such as downy mildew, a stubborn fungus-like parasite. If left unchecked, downy mildew coats grapes in white fuzz and strips the plant’s leaves, which means any surviving fruit won’t produce enough sugar to make good wine.
Your Guide to Fertility and Getting Pregnant
The Gist Doctors define infertility as the inability to get pregnant after one year of regular, unprotected sex (if you’re a woman under 35) or after six months of trying (if you’re a woman 35 or older). Age has a significant impact on fertility; especially for women, whose fertility tends to drop after age 35.
Non-Fiction Book Proposals and the Publishing Process
Taught by Brooke Borel and Sarah Lohman Brooke Borel is a journalist and author. She's a contributing editor at Popular Science and she has also written for the Guardian, the Atlantic, BuzzFeed News, Aeon, and PBS's NOVA Next, among others. Her books include Infestedand The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking.
How Professional Truth Seekers Search for Answers
Nine experts describe how they sort signal from noise The Physician Credit: Bud Cook The answer to questions about human life isn't a certain thing, like measuring how a stone drops to the ground in exactly so many seconds. If it were, it probably would not be life. It would be a stone. Within biomedicine, it's tricky finding out if an effect is real—there are different standards across different fields.
How Not to Get Bed Bugs from Hotels
Travelers have enough to worry about: getting the best deal on flights, packing, and finding a place to stay. But what happens when you arrive at your hard-won mountain getaway to hear a rumor that it's housing not only fellow bikers and hikers but also bed bugs? As a survivor of three apartment bed bug infestations — as well as one run-in at a hotel — I'm here to tell you what I would do. First things first: Stay calm. Rumors are just that, and they won't, by themselves, give you bed bugs.
Of mice and women
In a lab in Sacramento, California, a wall of plastic boxes lined with corncob bedding holds around 800 mice. Even in this clean and bright room, the smell of so many mice concentrated in one place is overpowering — pungent, and familiar to anyone who has spent time with a pet hamster or gerbil. Most of the boxes hold four adult mice, which flit about, noses twitching as they stare out at the humans staring in.
Inside the Experiment That Could End Infertility – 2069 – Medium
The year is 2069, and you and your partner are ready to become parents. But like millions of others, you need reproductive technology to help make it happen. So you head to your local fertility clinic to drop off some samples. After a long wait in reception, a technician calls you into a private room.
Inside the Experiment That Could End Infertility
In the future, we may be making eggs and sperm from our skin. A lot has to happen first. Credit: KTSDESIGN/Science Photo Library/Getty The year is 2069, and you and your partner are ready to become parents. But like millions of others, you need reproductive technology to help make it happen. So you head to your local fertility clinic to drop off some samples. After a long wait in reception, a technician calls you into a private room.
Clicks, Lies and Videotape
Artificial intelligence is making it possible for anyone to manipulate audio and video. The biggest threat is that we stop trusting anything at all In April 2018 a new video of Barack Obama surfaced on the Internet. Against a backdrop that included both the American and presidential flags, it looked like many of his previous speeches.
How Fake News Will Get Worse
This past April a new video of Barack Obama surfaced on the Internet. Against a backdrop that included both the American and presidential flags, it looked like many of his previous speeches. Wearing a crisp white shirt and dark suit, Obama faced the camera and punctuated his words with outstretched hands: “President Trump is a total and complete dipshit.” Without cracking a smile, he continued. “Now, you see, I would never say these things. At least not in a public address.
Scientific American Volume 319, Issue 4
Credit: Mark Ross StudiosCurrent Issue Scientific AmericanOctober 2018Volume 319, Issue 4Purchase To Read MoreFeaturesDepartmentsFrom the EditorLettersAdvancesForumThe Science of HealthThe Science AgendaTechnoFilesRecommendedSkepticAnti Gravity50, 100 & 150 Years AgoGraphic SciencePurchase To Read MoreExpertise. Insights. Illumination.Discover world-changing science. Explore our digital archive back to 1845, including articles by more than 150 Nobel Prize winners.Subscribe Now!
Weeds are winning the war against herbicide resistance
For farmers, protecting fields from pests and plagues is a constant battle fought on multiple fronts. Many insects have a taste for the same plants humans do, and pathogenic microbes infect leaves, shoots and roots. Then there are the weeds that compete with crops for soil and sun.
Weeds Are Winning in War Against Herbicide Resistance
Weeds Are Winning in War Against Herbicide Resistance For farmers, protecting fields from pests and plagues is a constant battle fought on multiple fronts. Many insects have a taste for the same plants humans do, and pathogenic microbes infect leaves, shoots and roots. Then there are the weeds that compete with crops for soil and sun.Read Full Article »
Weeds Are Winning in the War against Herbicide Resistance
For farmers, protecting fields from pests and plagues is a constant battle fought on multiple fronts. Many insects have a taste for the same plants humans do, and pathogenic microbes infect leaves, shoots and roots. Then there are the weeds that compete with crops for soil and sun.
Weeds Are Winning the War against Herbicide Resistance
For farmers, protecting fields from pests and plagues is a constant battle fought on multiple fronts. Many insects have a taste for the same plants humans do, and pathogenic microbes infect leaves, shoots and roots. Then there are the weeds that compete with crops for soil and sun.
Verifying Facts
Fact-checking is a vital way to build trust, defend our work, and check the creep of biases. It means asking, “What do we know, really? And how do we know it?” This collection offers practical suggestions for bulletproofing your work on deadline, plugging holes in a long-term project, and testing a data analysis. It also includes writing about the fundamental ideas behind verification as well as why it is so important that we make time for fact-checking our own work.
Chicago Guide to Fact Checking
"A column by Glenn Garvin on Dec. 20 stated that the National Science Foundation 'funded a study on Jell-O wrestling at the South Pole.' That is incorrect. The event took place during off-duty hours without NSF permission and did not involve taxpayer funds." Corrections such as this one from the Miami Herald have become a familiar sight for readers, especially as news cycles demand faster and faster publication.
Do Your Genes Predict Your Wine Preference?
Last October, an argument broke out on the Internet between two wine experts: What matters more, nature or nurture? Wine journalist and author Jamie Goode and Tim Hanni, MW, entered a debate about how influential genetics are for wine preference. Hanni contended that we’re programmed to like certain flavors. Goode agreed to an extent, but he said it was a more complex mix of genetics and acquired taste.
Gene Drives Will Clash With Evolution | Quanta Magazine
Resistance Isn’t Futile Gene drives aren’t exclusively a human technology. They occasionally appear in nature. Researchers first thought of harnessing the natural versions of gene drives decades ago, proposing to re-create them with “crude means, like radiation” or chemicals, said Anna Buchman, a postdoctoral researcher in molecular biology at the University of California, Riverside.
10 animals who’ve ruled the internet
“I make noises for a living, and on a good day it’s music,” says Peter Gabriel in today’s talk. “I work with a lot of musicians from around the world. Often, we don’t have any common language at all. But we sit behind our instruments and suddenly there’s a way to connect and emote.” This made Gabriel wonder: could he play music with an animal?
New Model Warns About CRISPR Gene Drives in the Wild | Quanta Magazine
As the revolutionary CRISPR technology for modifying genomes has taken off in recent years, one daring potential application has caught the attention of conservation scientists, policymakers, public health workers and others: It could be used to create so-called gene drives to eliminate or control unwanted species. Experts debating the wisdom or perils of that approach have often reached very different answers. A new paper being published today makes a case that caution is warranted.
How do we fix medicine? Atul Gawande at TED2012
How do we get good at anything? Doctor Atul Gawande opens his talk at TED2012 by asking that question. He writes as well as practices medicine, and constantly has to confront that question about everything in his life. But there’s a new crisis, the incredible cost of healthcare. The fight is framed as: Is government the problem, or are the insurance companies? “The answer is yes. And no.” It’s more subtle than that.
When GMOs Are the Movie Star
Three quarters of the way into Food Evolution, a recent documentary about genetically engineered food, agricultural economist Charles Benbrook glances furtively around a crowded lobby.
The big idea: What your casual online behavior reveals about you (and what to do about it)
It seems these days, everybody’s getting hacked. With so much of our most sensitive information stored on servers in some remote part of the world, it seems concerningly easy for malicious hackers to worm their way past secure firewalls and into bank accounts, credit card databases, corporate emails and even hospital systems.
Can Scientists Convince the Public to Accept CRISPR and Gene Drives?
In 1999 Robert Shapiro, then head of Monsanto, gave a stunning mea culpa at a Greenpeace conference in London. Monsanto's first genetically engineered (GE) crops had been on the market for only three years, but they were facing fierce public backlash. After a botched rollout marred by lack of transparency, the company, Shapiro said, had responded with debate instead of dialogue. “Our confidence in this technology ...
Fact-Checking Workshop
Want to get a job in fact-checking? Looking to sharpen your reporting skills? How do you know an article is actually accurate -- and what steps should you take to be absolutely sure you know what you think you know? Fact-checking is vital to nonfiction writing.
A CRISPR Mousetrap to Save Baby Seabirds From Invasive Island Mice
The silent black-and-white footage opens on a seemingly tranquil setting: a burrow where an Atlantic Petrel tends to its chick. Then mice begin scurrying in and out of frame. The dark blurs jostle the adult, darting up to the exposed chick and tearing off bloody bites. They’re eating it alive. The horrific scene is captured by nest cams on Gough (rhymes with “off”), a rugged volcanic island about 1,700 miles west of South Africa.
Summer 2017 | Audubon
What compels bird lovers to hunker down in these dark, often cramped structures? An intimate view of avian lives. But as with birds, every blind has its own character—and story.
Getting Published: Nonfiction Book Proposals - Windsor Terrace
This is an! Check out the current classes , or sign up for our mailing list to see if we'll offer this one again. So, you’ve found a killer true story and you want to write a book about it. How do you start? This class is an introduction to putting together a nonfiction book proposal. We’ll go over how to decide if your story is a book or a shorter piece, how to figure out if it’s already been done, what to look for in an agent, the mechanics of a book proposal, and more.
Meet the Harrington Seed Destructor. Could it Curb Herbicide Use?
On a cold, clear day last November, a combine lumbered through a soybean field in Beltsville, Maryland, towing a bulky-looking gray and red machine like a caboose. With each pass, the combine separated the beans from their hulls and then directed plant waste into the smaller contraption, which pulverized the chaff and then shot it back onto the field in a steady stream of dust.
U.S. biotechnology regulations are woefully out of date.
The white button mushroom in question looked like any other in the grocery store, with one imperceptible difference: It was missing a gene that codes for an enzyme called PPO, or polyphenol oxidase, which makes mushrooms turn brown when they’re bruised or cut. Scientists at Pennsylvania State University essentially turned off this PPO gene—one of six in the mushroom—with a new gene-editing tool called CRISPR, or clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.
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