Sindya N. Bhanoo

Chris Gash's Art

I love the illustrations done by Chris Gash, who does the artwork for my Observatory column every week in The New York Times. 

Here are two fun examples of his work, illustrating how young female chimps play with sticks as dolls, while males are less likely to, and another on new fingerprint technology.

The topics are often tricky and complicated, but he always finds a way to make the point, and weave in some humor into the drawings. His blog was fun to look through because it gives me some interesting insight into how he comes up with the illustrations!

On Meditation

I wrote about my husband's experience with meditation yesterday in The New York Time's Well blog.

Since many people have asked, my husband did a 10-day Vipassana meditation, organized by these folks. 

 

Reporting on Electronic Health Records

I have a story on KALW's Crosscurrents today about how Bay Area doctors and hospitals are (or are not) taking advantage of the federal dollars available to adopt electronic health records. It was interesting to compare the thoughts of folks at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, a wealthy, cash-flush provider and the City of San Francisco, which runs the city's cash-strapped clinics and hospitals. 

PAMF adopted electronic health records more than 10 years ago, while San Francisco is only able to thanks to funds available through the stimulus bill. Still, both entities see great benefits to using health information technology, though they have experienced and expect to continue to experience transitionary struggles.

My Year in Review

 

When my husband was working for himself, he wrote up a summary of what he had accomplished at the end of the year. Without a manager and without anyone evaluating your work, it’s easy to think that you’ve gone through the year doing everything right, or worse still, nothing at all. 

So, I decided to try and summarize what I accomplished this year, as well as set a couple goals for next year.

In 2010 I:

• made The New York Times most e-mailed list a few times
• reported from Denmark for The New York Times about their advanced health IT system and contrasted it with the U.S. system.
• wrote a challenging piece about Amish farmers. It was *extremely* difficult to get interviews with the farmers. 
• did a fun story about offshore wind power, and the rivalry between states vying for rights to build the offshore farms.
•  temporarily wrote Henry Fountain’s Observatory column in Science Times while he was off covering the massive BP oil spill. I officially took over the column in the fall.
• was discussed on Rush Limbaugh's talk show for a piece I wrote on gas prices. 
• started writing obituaries on famous scientists for The Washington Post. These are advance obits. So yes, though it’s a little creepy, the people I write about are still alive and the pieces are kept on file until they are needed. 
• did a couple pieces for Yoga Journal, where my friend Carmel Wroth works. They'll be in print early next year.
• started using the funding from my Kaiser Media Fellowship, which is to  study how privacy is affected by developments in health technology. I'm using it to produce stories for KALW. The first of those recently came out. 
• had a few fellowships: Aside from Kaiser, I was also funded this year through a Metcalf Fellowship from the Metcalf Institute in Rhode Island and a McCloy Fellowship from the American Council on Germany. 

Some goals for next year include:

 

•   Doing more local radio, and trying my hand at pieces for national shows.
• Reporting from abroad. I’ll be winding down most of my projects in March for a few months but I’m hoping I’ll be able to do at least one outstanding international piece in 2011. 
• Pitching to magazines. I haven’t really attempted to explore the world of magazine journalism, but I’d like to give it a try next year.

 

Experimenting with Radio

I primarily write for newspapers, and my work can mostly be found in The New York Times and The Washington Post. But I've also been dabbling in magazine journalism, and have some pieces coming in YogaJournal. 

I'm also playing with an entirely new medium - radio. Since I'm rather unfamiliar with radio it takes quite a bit longer to produce a piece than it would a newspaper feature.

I'm able to do invest the time because this year, I have funding from the Kaiser Family Foundation through a generous fellowship to spend time studying how health technology and electronic health records might impact patient privacy. 

The very first story from this work aired yesterday on one of San Francisco's NPR affiliates - KALW. Catch the story here. 

More to come soon!

Brief Glimpses

I recently wrote in The New York Times about Amish and Old Order Mennonite farmers in Lancaster County and the pressure they are facing to change their farming practices. In a separate blog post, I wrote about some of the things I found surprising when I visited an Amish family.

Many people wrote in saying they enjoyed the piece, adding that they had gone on field trips to Amish country, or had a fascination for the simple Amish lifestyle. I visited Lancaster County about three years ago as a tourist and I was myself both charmed and fascinated. But the brief visit left me wondering what life is really like for the Amish and Old Order Mennonite, and on that trip I didn't get to actually talk to anyone. Someday, I thought, it would be great to do a story here.

It was an amazing experience for me to visit a farmer named Matthew Stoltzfus and meet his family. It's not something that is easily done. On my first day there, I had been rejected by several farmers and was feeling a little hopeless. Even Matthew took a night to think about it before agreeing to talk to me. 

But when I did interview him, he answered all my questions readily, as we stood in front of his coal stove.  He welcomed the opportunity to share his perspective, he said. He showed me around his home, and I met his wife, two of his young children and his newborn twins. His five-year-old was talking to his mother in Pennsylvania Dutch and peered at me  curiously when I stepped into the house.

I'm glad I kept at it, and I'm happy with the way the story turned out. The best part about being a journalist are the brief glimpses you get into people's lives every time you write a story. Hopefully some of those glimpses get conveyed in the writing.

Tragic Endings

In recent weeks, two people that I've done stories on were killed.

The first is Tam Tran, a 27-year-old graduate student at Brown University and an activist for undocumented students.

I was working on my Master's thesis about the undocumented when I met Tran, who had illegally entered the country as a small child with her parents. She told me the remarkable story of how she had no nationality. 

Her parents were boat refugees that fled from Vietnam to Germany, where she was born. The family then immigrated to the United States. She had entered the United States illegally, so though she had been here for most of her life, she had been unsuccessful in all attempts to obtain citizenship.

But, she was also denied Vietnamese citizenship because she hadn't been born there, and she was not able to obtain German citizenship. Though she *was* born there, citizenship in Germany is generally based on ancestry.

When I met Tam, she had graduated from UCLA despite all odds and was working in California, making documentaries and fighting for the DREAM Act to be passed. It failed to pass in 2007, but the act would have offered young people in her situation a path to legal residency in the United States. She had bravely testified before Congress also, telling her story and urging politicians to consider the plight of young people in her situation.

She was smart and articulate, and I remember thinking that she was destined for greatness, despite her difficulties. I'm not surprised that she was getting her PhD at Brown.

Alas, her time came too soon. On May 15th, she and a friend were driving in Maine when an oncoming car crossed the center line and crashed into them. Tam was airlifted from the scene but died shortly later.

The other person I did a story on was Brian Betts, a very beloved principal in Washington D.C. who was killed in his own home. There's an ongoing investigation happening, as well as some controversy about how the story was covered.

I wrote about Brian and several other principals for a back-to-school issue for The Washington Post. I distinctly remember how friendly and frank he was, and how dedicated he seemed. Although he had been working at an affluent suburban school for a while, he told me he had joined the D.C. public school system because he wanted effect positive change.

Brian and Tam both died far too young  - may they rest in peace.

The Big Apple

I'm spending this year as a reporting fellow at The New York Times. I'll be working for a newly formed group called the environment pod - writing a variety of stories with an environmental angle. I'll also be blogging for Green Inc. and Dot Earth, two of the paper's blogs.

Meanwhile, I also recently came back from reporting trips in Denmark and Germany, funded through a journalism fellowship from the American Council on Germany. Stay tuned to see my work from these reporting trips!

Do you wash your hands before lunch?

My piece in The Post's health section today is about how we should all be washing our hands before we eat lunch - it's something too many of us skip. And with the availability of many ethnic cuisines, which require more touching than traditional American fare, it's more important than ever before.

Job Market

I have a piece this month in Khabar Magazine about the struggles new grads are facing in trying to find a job in this tough market. I don't envy this year's grads, but I did find that many of them are taking a "when life gives you lemons make lemonade" attitude. They are looking into doing service work, traveling around India, studying arts or taking up non-traditional jobs as a way to ride out the recession. Good for them!

Here's the full piece.