Jim Morris of Mother Jones reports on the safety crisis facing the university chem labs:

Sheri Sangji was on fire instantly. The 23-year-old research associate had accidentally pulled the plunger out of a syringe while conducting an experiment in a UCLA laboratory. In the syringe was a solution that would combust upon contact with air. It spilled onto Sangji’s hands and body. 

She wasn’t wearing a lab coat; no one had told her to. The fire burned through her gloves, then her hands. She inhaled toxic, superheated gases given off by her burning polyester sweater, a process that accelerated as she ran and screamed.

Sangji’s supervisor is facing criminal charges in connection with her death. This is the first time a university professor has been charged for endangering a lab worker.

[Photo credit: tk-link, Creative Commons.]

Pam Belluck, the talented New York Times health reporter who exposed the truth behind Plan B labels, talks about her new book, “Island Practice”:

In her new book, “Island Practice,” the New York Times reporter Pam Belluck tells the story of Dr. Timothy Lepore, a quirky 67-year-old physician who for the past 30 years has been the only surgeon working on the island of Nantucket. But Dr. Lepore (rhymes with peppery) is no ordinary surgeon. Life on an island, even one that has become a summer playground to the rich and famous, requires a certain amount of resourcefulness and flexibility. [NYT]

Dr. Lepore’s ecclectic practice as been full of memorable incidents, like the time he reached into a stab wound to massage a patient’s stopped heart because there was no time to get him off the island.

“Island Practice” has already been optioned for TV by the creators of “24” and “Friday Night Lights.”

NYT metro reporter Gina Bellafante critiques Mayor Bloomberg’s claims of job creation in New York City:

Despite job growth in certain knowledge-class and service sectors, unemployment has been rising. On Thursday, the State Labor Department reported that the city’s unemployment rate climbed to 10 percent in June, exceeding the national figure by close to two percentage points. The unemployment rate in the city is now nearly twice what it was five years ago and has been running higher than the figures for Atlanta, Boston, Houston and Chicago.

While it is indeed a very good time to be moving to New York with a Stanford M.B.A. and a business plan to create the Twitter of 2014 (as suggested by the barely post-adolescent tech entrepreneur Josh Miller when he stood next to the mayor at a press event in May), it is a far less auspicious moment to be someone who already lives here and is looking for cleaning work, say, in the offices of the Twitter of 2012.

Bellafante reports that low-wage workers in New York are battling high unemployment and dwindling purchasing power. In the 1960s and ’70s a full time job at minimum wage was enough to lift a family above the poverty line, but that is no longer the case, according to a recent by a local social justice organization. Today’s full-time minimum wage worker supporting a family of three makes just 82% of the federal poverty threshold.

[Photo credit: Shawn Hoke, Creative Commons.]

• Rumors are flying in the wake of the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado. Gawker media reporter Adrian Chen explains why “clues” linking the shooter to the online community 9gag are probably internet pranks   
• Joe Atkins of the Jackson Free Press takes us inside the UAW’s high-stakes battle to unionize Nissan in Mississippi. Hillman trustees Bruce Raynor and Danny Glover are there.
• Katha Pollitt of the Nation takes Jason DeParle to task for his sentimental paean to marriage as a path to economic stability. “Do we really need a front-page story in the Sunday New York Times to tell us that a woman with a college degree and a good solid marriage is better off than a college dropout raising three kids alone?” she asks
• Greg Ousley killed his parents 19 years ago, at the age of 14. Prison officials in Indiana hope he’ll be paroled in a few years. Should he be? 
• “These are my guys forever.“ John Gravois reports on an innovative new program that places disabled veterans in family homes

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]