NASW news and features

A Voodoo Lily that surfaces unexpectedly in her yard moves a potter to make shiny purple pitchers that won’t pour, and bumpy, leaky mugs. A child treasures an autumnal butterscotch leaf; its mother refrains from revealing that “when beauty speaks it doesn’t hang around for an answer.” “Deep in a cave, life distills to one question — Which way now?” These meditations on the natural world and our place in it come from Kelly Lenox’s first book of poetry, The Brightest Rock. In her day job, Lenox edits Environmental Factor, the monthly newsletter of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

The nation’s sad state of oral health often gets short shrift in the mainstream press. In Teeth: the Story of Beauty, Inequality and the Struggle for Oral Health in America, Mary Otto explores economic disparities in dental care, the connection between tooth decay and diminished job prospects, the continuing fake debate over the value of water fluoridation, the ethics of cosmetic dentistry, and more. Having focused her reporting on such issues for more than a decade, Otto serves as oral health topic leader for the Association of Health Care Journalists, for which she writes a weekly blog.