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NOTES FROM THE FIELD
FROM THE EDITORS’ BOOKSHELF
From Mission Control to birth control
BY FREDERIC D. SCHWARZ
WHEN JOHN F. Kennedy challenged America to send a man to the moon and bring him back, he made no mention of what the man might do while he was up there. Early planners envisioned activities appropriate for a beach vacation: Go for a walk, snap some pictures, pick up a few rocks. It took persistent nagging from a group of NASA geologists, physicists, engineers, and others to make sure that the Apollo program would be more than a cruise to nowhere. In Taking Science to the Moon: Lunar Experiments and the Apollo Program (Johns Hopkins, $42.50), Donald A. Beattie tells how he and his colleagues overcame severe payload limits and time constraints, blunt dismissals from NASA administrators (“Who thought up these ideas, some high school student?”), and the unique problems of working in a vacuum (special bits had to be designed to drill rock samples without water or air for cooling), and ended up acquiring a wealth of irreplaceable scientific information.
THE PILL HAS LONG posed a problem for feminist scholars, since something so clearly beneficial to women is hard to fit within the customary framework of male exploitation. Numerous ways around this difficulty have been found, but in Sexual Chemistry: A History of the Contraceptive Pill (Yale University Press, $29.95), Lara V. Marks discredits most of them. Test subjects were not “guinea pigs,” she says; side effects were not ignored any more than with other drugs; nor were oral contraceptives intended to control women or reinforce gender stereo-types or class relations. Marks even manages to muster a little sympathy for the Catholic Church. Along the way she brings up some fascinating facts: The yam that yields a key precursor to the steroid progesterone had been used by Mexicans “as fish poison and for relieving rheumatic pain,” and a 1964 advertisement touting the Pill’s relief of unpleasant menstrual symptoms evoked a parallel in Greek mythology: Perseus freeing Andromeda from her chains.
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THEY’RE NOT STILL THERE
New York City’s school-house coal furnaces meet a surprisingly swift end
In our Spring 2001 issue, this column made reference to an archaic technology: the coal furnaces that were prevalent in New York City’s schools. The reference had been inspired by our 1996 “They’re Still There” column. When that column was written, 322 of the city’s schools were heated with coal. Five years after that figure had been collected, it did not seem necessary to check whether the coal-burning furnaces were still in operation.
In fact, they were—but just barely. Shortly after the issue came out, Gov. George Pataki tossed a ceremonial last shovelful of coal into a Queens school’s furnace, which was about to be replaced with an oil-burning model. Except for one other school building, which was scheduled for closing at the end of the year, it was the last coal furnace in the New York school system. The episode serves as a reminder that even the most elephantine bureaucracy can sometimes get things done—and that people who write for magazines should always check their facts.
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