Sarah Zhang

So Glad the "Girls" Are Back

Five twentysomethings discuss Season 2 of Lena Dunham's hit series, "erotic capital," and awkward parties.

—By Hannah Levintova, Zaineb Mohammed, Maddie Oatman, Maggie Severns, and Sarah Zhang

| Sun Jan. 13, 2013 11:49 AM PST

Amidst a busy week at the Mother Jones San Francisco office, five of us gathered late-night, burritos in hand, to watch a sneak preview of Season 2 of Girls. Despite all being twentysomethings and female, not all of us feel like we can identify with main characters Hannah (Lena Dunham), Marnie (Allison Williams), Jessa (Jemima Kirke), Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), and the others portrayed in this series about friendship, sex, and ambition in New York City. (Zaineb Mohammed warned us at the start that she hate-watches the show.) Nevertheless, we couldn't let DC-based film critic and infamous naysayer Asawin Suebsaeng be the sole proprieter of MoJo's critical take on Girls. (See his takedown of Season 1, former MoJo fellow Maya Dusenbery's response, and his slightly less acidic takedown of Season 2—though he still considers the show "a crime against humanity." Really, Swin?)

We weren't blown away by the first episode. But sit tight. The series gets better—full of sharp dialogue and humor, awkward intimacy, experimentation with love and drugs, and self-realization or lack thereof—by the fourth episode. Swin thought some of those less glamorous moments came off sleepy: We felt that, even when imperfect, they were thought-provoking—and, at the very least, refreshing. (As Sarah Zhang put it: "Yes, thank you, awkward parties!"). And as you'll see below, the show is fodder for great debate, which in itself makes it worth a view. (Warning: minor spoilers sprinkled throughout).

[Read the full article]

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Leaded Fuel Is a Thing of the Past—Unless You Fly a Private Plane

—By Sarah Zhang

| Thu Jan. 10, 2013 4:06 AM PST

A Cessna 172, which flies with leaded gasoline

If you read our magazine cover story on the long, awful legacy of lead in gasoline, you were probably relieved that toxic metal is now banned from all gasoline. The thing is, it's not.

Some 167,000 piston engine aircraft—about three-quarters of private planes in the United States—are still spewing lead into our air. That's because their fuel, known as avgas, uses the same tetraethyl lead addictive since banned in automobile gas, making it the No. 1 source of lead emissions in America. (The jet fuel used in big passenger planes does not contain lead.) Lead-free alternatives are available for most piston engine aircraft, but the phaseout of leaded fuel has been slow. Last June, the FAA finally created the Fuels Program Office to replace leaded avgas by 2018—24 years after it was banned in automobiles.

Leaded avgas emits only a small fraction of the lead once coughed out by cars, but it disproportionately affects people living near the 20,000 airports where it's used. The EPA estimates (PDF) there are 16 million people living within one kilometer of those airports, and 3 million children attend schools in the same radius. According to a 2011 study by Duke University researchers, kids who live near airports have elevated levels of lead in their blood. And as Kevin Drum wrote in his Mother Jones piece, even low blood lead levels have bad health and social consequences.

[Read more in the Blue Marble blog]

"Just One Lick": The Hidden Lead That Could Sicken Your Kids

An interview with pioneering lead toxicologist Howard Mielke.

—By Sarah Zhang

| Thu Jan. 3, 2013 2:21 PM PST

Next time you inhale, you may want to thank toxicologist Howard Mielke for your lead-free air. Mielke's research helped phase out lead from gasoline in the 1970s—a campaign that was successful in part because he managed to sample the lead-contaminated soil in his legislators' own backyards. But Mielke considers his work far from done. As Kevin Drum writes in his Mother Jones cover story "America's Real Criminal Element: Lead," remnants of the toxic metal, once disseminated by leaded gasoline into the air we breathed, still linger in the soil around us. Now in his 70s, the Tulane University professor and former Peace Corps volunteer continues to passionately campaign to clean up soil in cities.

America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

Is There Lead In Your House?

An Interview With Pioneering Toxicologist Howard Mielke

How Dangerous Is the Lead in Bullets?

Does Lead Paint Produce More Crime Too?

How Your Water Company May Be Poisoning Your Kids

More MoJo coverage of the dangers of lead.

Mother Jones: You've written about when your own daughter had high blood lead (PDF). Has being a parent changed how you felt about lead poisoning and the way it's handled?

Howard Mielke: Oh, for sure! It was a totally accidental measuring of blood lead level for my daughter. She needed an operation to correct her crossed eyes, so during the preparation for all that, they were doing the bloodwork, and I said, "Well, measure the lead." The people were resisting me. They were saying we don't need to measure lead: You live in a nice part of St. Paul, you're white folk. We don't see high lead levels from children in your area. Well I said, "Measure it. Prove it." When it got measured, it turned out it was elevated.

"They were saying: 'You live in a nice part of St. Paul, you're white folk. We don't see high lead levels from children in your area.' Well I said, 'Measure it. Prove it.'"

I had been involved in doing lead work already, and I discovered that her childcare center in the state of Minnesota had interiors that were very well maintained, but they let the children go outside in basically a hazardous waste site because nobody had bothered about the outside. She was playing in a sandbox and around the sandbox was soil contaminated with lead from 500 to 1000 parts per million. [The current standard is 400 ppm.] I paid for the cleanup, which involved bringing in Tartan Turf, which is the material used in football stadiums. Her blood lead levels just plummeted very quickly after that.

MJ: How did you originally get interested in the problem of lead in soil?

HM: That came about when I was at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. I was working on the geochemistry of serpertines, and I gradually shifted to looking at lead in the environment. I actually started collecting samples in my own backyard and discovered that the samples had a lot more lead than what you'd expect. In fact, they were close to what was recognized at the time—this was back in the mid-70s—would be recognized as hazardous waste if they were at an industrial site. My students collected samples from the gardens, and since it was a commuter campus, I would gain samples from all the metropolitan area. We kept track of the addresses and marked it on a map, and we started realizing the interior of the city was very highly contaminated.

[Read the full article]

How Dangerous Is the Lead in Bullets?

—By Sarah Zhang

| Thu Jan. 3, 2013 1:33 PM PST

Don't inhale.

The most ubiquitous danger at firing ranges has a lot to do with bullets but nothing to do with getting shot.

It's all in the lead. A recent report from the National Academy of Sciences found that OSHA lead exposure standards are too lax to protect military firing range employees. Repeated exposure to the toxic metal causes a raft of health problems including brain damage, high blood pressure, and anemia.

Lead is found in bullets as well as the explosive that ignites gunpowder. When a bullet is fired, it gets so hot that that lead actually vaporizes. Firing range employees breathe in the lead fumes, as well as ingest lead dust that settles on their body and clothes. OSHA sets the permissible level of atmospheric lead at 50 micrograms/meter², but the report found that level frequently exceeded at military firing ranges, sometimes by several orders of magnitude.

America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

Is There Lead In Your House?

An Interview With Pioneering Toxicologist Howard Mielke

How Dangerous Is the Lead in Bullets?

Does Lead Paint Produce More Crime Too?

How Your Water Company May Be Poisoning Your Kids

More MoJo coverage of the dangers of lead.

The new report also finds OSHA's blood lead level recommendation of 40 µg/dL or lower to be too high. That limit hasn't changed since 1978, but subsequent research has found health problems at blood lead levels as low as 5 µg/dL. Lead is so damaging because it mimics calcium, an ion with essential roles everywhere in the body from bones to nerve cells. (It's especially dangerous for children with developing brains, which is why you hear so much about lead paint.) The report devotes more than 70 pages to detailing lead's many toxic effects in nearly every organ in the body, including the brain, blood, kidneys, heart, and reproductive organs.

How can firing range workers reduce their exposure? The most direct solution is switching to lead-free ammunition or at least jacketed bullets, which have a lead core covered with a coating made of copper or nylon. Lead has been traditionally favored because of its density, but the military has since developed lead-free ammunition that reportedly works just as well.

[Read more in the Blue Marble blog]

Is There Lead In Your House?

The neurotoxic element may be lurking in your pipes, window frames—even garden plants. What to look out for, especially if you have kids crawling around.

—By Sarah Zhang

| January/February 2013 Issue

Especially if you live in a city, it's worth getting professional testing—home testing kits have been found to return up to 50 percent false negatives. If significant levels are found, here's where they might come from.

water 1. Water Water pipes and solder in older homes often contain lead; even new fixtures can be up to 8 percent lead. (A federal law lowering the limit to 0.25 percent takes effect in 2014.) The oft-recommended fix of running the tap for several minutes is wasteful and not always effective; better to install a NSF-approved filter at the tap.

dust 2. Countertops and Floors Dust from paint and soil can accumulate on surfaces. Wipe them down even more often than usual if you have kids of everything-goes-into-the-mouth age.

windows 3. Windows Friction from opening and closing old windows wears down paint and creates lead dust. The safest bet is replacing them. The EPA certifies lead-safe contractors, and some states offer subsidies.

paint 4. Paint Sanding, scraping, and even chemically stripping old paint releases lead; it's better to seal the stuff in with a fresh coat. If you must scrape, wet the paint to keep down dust, or bring in abatement professionals.

soil 5. Soil The most thorough fix is a "dig and haul," in which six inches of contaminated soil is trucked out and replaced with clean dirt. Covering the soil with a carpetlike geotextile and layering clean dirt on top costs a lot less; short of that, mulch or plant grass over contaminated soil to keep lead particles from being blown back into the air.

farming 6. Urban Farming If your soil is lead contaminated (some ag extension programs do free or low-cost tests), be careful what you grow. Eggs from New York City chickens were found to have lead levels up to twice the feds' daily limit for kids under six. Among vegetables, roots like carrots take up the most lead, fruits like tomatoes and squash the least. (Tree fruits are pretty much safe.) One fix: Grow lead-absorbing plants like spinach and mustard, then throw them out; this may lower soil lead levels as much as 200 ppm in three months.

windows 7. Airplane Fuel About 75 percent of private planes still fly with leaded aviation gas; a 2011 study found that children living closer to airports had higher levels of lead in their blood. There are lead-free alternatives, but the industry has been slow to adopt them, and regulators haven't pushed.