Countdown: Amy Cornwall Is Patterson's Greatest Character Since Lindsay Boxer

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I enjoyed the tips, but ultimately, haven't we all heard that you shouldn't microwave plastic? The tips were not very useful for me...maybe other people could use the advice though. The status quo has persisted for too long—and it’s endangering the reproductive health and survival of human beings and other species. The time to correct course is overdue and more important now than ever."

Fast-forward to the summer of 2017 when my latest paper on this subject, written with my colleague Hagai Levine and five other committed researchers, went viral. So that's how you protect yourself as best as you can. As a side note, when animal mothers (e.g. frogs, mice, and turtles) were placed in environments with high percentages of plastics and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals, their children turned homosexual and/or androgyneous. Some had testes with eggs in them. Male turtles start humping other male turtles (how familiar!). Female frogs and fish became masculinized (sound similar to our women?). Other pesticides in the environment made male and female fish not want to mate with one another. They also decreased both sexes' fertility (rise of asexuality, incels). Drug-polluted rivers create intersex fish; minnows exposed to antidepressants spend their blissful lives swimming eternally towards the sun until they get eaten, and also sometimes experience autism-like symptoms (transsexuals, autism). Holy cow, that's a lot of diversity! I have concluded that plastics, fertilizers, and other chemicals have continually homosexualized our species since their rise after WW2. They have disrupted development in utero and led to massive sexual and evolutionary dysfunction. But this is just the beginning of a tangled skein of threads that Weisman weaves, threads which include among many others the story of CIMMYT, the Spanish acronym for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (located outside Mexico City and “considered today to be the birthplace of the so-called Green Revolution”}; a bit about CIMMYT’s former director Dr. Norman Borlaug, who received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for developing a disease-resistant, high-yield strain of wheat (Borlaug has been called “the man who saved a billion lives”); pieces introducing Malthus’ famous 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population and Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb; the disdain which has been heaped on Ehrlich ever since because he didn’t anticipate the Green Revolution; and Borlaug’s own words, from his Nobel acceptance speech, which shoot down those who believe that Borlaug had put Malthus (and Ehrlich) in their places:After these findings were published in 1997, I felt that we needed to ask whether sperm counts were different in different locations, since that would point to environmental factors at play. I’ve spent the last twenty years basically trying to answer that question. After conducting many more studies on semen quality, sperm decline, and related factors, I feel that I have. Not only have I shifted from being dubious to being utterly convinced that a dramatic decline in sperm counts is occurring, I’ve also discovered that various lifestyle factors and environmental exposures may be acting in tandem or in a cumulative fashion to fuel the decline.

Tomorrow. Nepal & India. More a situational report than something having a clear message; interesting, even astounding, but what to make of it?The Sea. The Philippines. A strongly Catholic country which nevertheless is attempting to defy the Church and implement family planning. After reading and rereading what came to be known as the Carlsen paper—named after lead author Elisabeth Carlsen—I was among the skeptics who questioned the methodology and the selection of samples, and I thought of many potential biases that might have distorted the findings. Granted, I was hardly alone; numerous critiques and editorials ensued. But the findings of that study were so important from a public health perspective that I couldn’t put them out of my mind, even though I was busy doing research about the risk of birth defects and miscarriage from solvents in drinking water. Doubtful as I was about the findings of that particular study, I knew that certain environmental chemicals could be decreasing sperm counts, so I wanted to investigate; it felt like a bit of a detective case.

Overall, it comes down to this truth. We don’t read Patterson for realism. We read him for high level thrillers that help us escape our daily grind and enjoy an exciting thriller that makes us forget about all else. This one wasn’t his worst and it certainly wasn’t his best. Basically, it was somewhere in the middle for me, and that is way more generous than I should be. For me, this started off pretty well, then became more formulaic and superficial as it went along, and ended in a literary overblown stink bomb.The reason I gave this book one less star is twofold: one is the topic is depressing and the other is that she really never talked about how the cost of childcare contributes to this issue. I know many people opting to have one child instead of two solely based on the rising cost of raising children in the United States. It is strange that she never delves into this topic as Universal Child Care is a hot button issue whose day has come. Shrink and Prosper.Japan. Japan’s demographers and economists have been worrying for many years about the coming situation in which they will have so many old people relative to younger people of working age. They definitely are not contemplating trying to breed their way out of the problem. Nor are they attempting to encourage immigration, since they are a very homogeneous society and like it that way. It is no secret that the writing and publishing machine that is James Patterson often includes his combining efforts with other writers. This is the case with his latest release entitled COUNTDOWN, which was co-authored by Brendan DuBois. Though I was familiar with the name, I had not personally read anything from DuBois and was looking forward to this title. In the tradition ofSilent SpringandThe Sixth Extinction, an urgent, meticulously researched, and groundbreaking book about the ways in which chemicals in the modern environment are changing human sexuality and endangering fertility on a vast scale.