Daniel Fromson

Daniel Fromson is a writer living in Washington, D.C. A former...

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:59:00 -0400

Daniel Fromson is a writer living in Washington, D.C.

A former associate editor of The Atlantic, he has also written for Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Slate, and The Wall Street Journal Europe, among other publications. In addition, he is a beer columnist for The Washington Post and Washington City Paper, and he has worked as a fact-checker for Harper’s, Grantland, and Discover Magazine.

Dan is a graduate of Yale University, where he studied English literature and nonfiction writing and edited the Yale Daily News Magazine.

Email: daniel.fromson [at] gmail.com

The Washington MonthlyDisclosed Encounters: Why UFO buffs think...

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:58:00 -0400

The Washington Monthly
Disclosed Encounters: Why UFO buffs think Barack Obama is their best hope for the truth about ET
January/February 2010

“It’s a hell of a challenge,” says Stephen Bassett as he saws through his chicken Caesar salad at a restaurant in the Key Bridge Marriott in Arlington, Virginia. “But the reason we’ve made progress is because this isn’t just any issue.” After logging thirteen discouraging years as a lobbyist in Washington, Bassett is finally feeling optimistic. Compared to Barack Obama, Bill Clinton was “utterly unacceptable,” and there were “huge problems” with George W. Bush. “They did what was necessary to contain the issue,” he says.

“They had to do that because it wasn’t a secret,” he adds, leaning in, elbows on the table. “The ETs are all over the place. They’ve been flying around our skies for sixty-two years.”

Bassett is Washington’s only registered UFO lobbyist. …

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Lapham’s QuarterlyThe Milkman ComethAugust 25, 2011 It’s...

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:52:01 -0400

Lapham’s Quarterly
The Milkman Cometh
August 25, 2011

It’s quite possible that America’s modern fear of unpasteurized dairy products would not exist if it weren’t for a long, narrow building that was opened on June 1, 1893 at the foot of Manhattan’s East Third Street Pier—the heart of the tenement district—by Nathan Straus, the co-owner of Macy’s. It was divided into four rooms where milk was poured into sterilized bottles, lowered into hot and cold baths, stored in ice water, and sold, subsidized by Straus, for four cents a quart or a penny a glass. The customers, many of them women from the tenements, could lounge under nearby awnings and feed their babies while enjoying the East River’s fresh air.

“This process,” wrote The New York Times, describing the workings of Straus’s so-called milk depot, which resembled similar establishments in Europe, “is called Pasteurizing, being named for Pasteur, who determined that this heat was sufficient to destroy the disease…”—the tuberculosis and other pathogens that thrived during the summer months. Straus’s words were more dramatic. “I am asking nothing for myself,” he wrote, “but I do ask, for the defenseless babies that they be shielded from the milk that kills.” …

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New York 116 Minutes With Planned Parenthood President Cecile...

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 18:41:06 -0400

New York
116 Minutes With Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards
April 15, 2011

Cloaked in a zebra-print makeup cape, Cecile Richards is sitting in a brightly lit dressing room and having a hard time finishing her sentences. This is partly because she keeps stiffening her upper lip so a staffer for The Rachel Maddow Show can paint and pencil it, and partly because her mind is elsewhere: She’s about to go on-air to continue fighting the biggest battle she’s faced since joining the Planned Parenthood Federation of America as president in 2006. “It’s kind of a whole new deal,” she says. “I mean, the fact that they would hold up the federal budget over birth control”—she pauses—“or women’s … I think that was …”

It is now just past 9 p.m. on a day Richards began with a 3:45 a.m. wake-up call, a 6 a.m. flight from New York to D.C., then nearly four straight hours of satellite-radio interviews. (“I love that brush—it feels great,” she exclaims to the makeup artist. “I feel like I could just take a nap.”) The Maddow appearance will not be her last appointment. “We’ve got a ten o’clock call tonight because we’ve got our big vote tomorrow—obviously, the big vote tomorrow.” The big vote, of course, will determine whether the government eliminates Planned Parenthood’s federal funding—and though the bill is predicted to die in the Senate (and does), Richards and her team have been endlessly canvassing the Hill, just to be sure. …

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The New York Times Hop Farmers Reviving Heady Days of...

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 18:25:00 -0400

The New York Times
Hop Farmers Reviving Heady Days of Brewing
November 7, 2011

Cazenovia, N.Y.

NEAR the farm that grows the pumpkins for his pumpkin ale and the ranch that raises wagyu beef for the brewpub he owns, David Katleski parked his S.U.V. in the middle of an empty field. “What we’re going to recreate is old hop barns,” he said, surveying a grid of wooden stakes. “Stone hop barns.”

“Are you familiar with the hop barns of Madison County?” his wife, Karen, asked from the back seat.

She was referring not to some steamy romance novel, but to a romantic past: the days when hop barns, those squat, often turretlike structures housing charcoal fires, perfumed the air of central New York with the scent of drying hops. Resinous flowers that give beer its bitterness and flavors of pine, herbs and fruit, hops were a huge part of the local economy in the late 19th century, when New York State grew up to 90 percent of the nation’s supply. But the business withered as beer production became industrialized. …

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The Washington Post Beer: Belgium’s Upstart Innovators...

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 18:18:11 -0400

The Washington Post
Beer: Belgium’s Upstart Innovators
July 12, 2011

Carlo Grootaert wanted to tell me a story, so shortly after 11 a.m., we drove to a cemetery near the coastal Belgian town of De Panne, where, not far from a giant crucifix, he knelt among the tombstones and uncapped a beer. “These fishermen were herring fishermen, and during winter days the women made beer,” he said. “We decided to remake a beer in the same style.”

He handed me a glass. The Pannepot, which Grootaert and his colleagues at tiny De Struise Brouwers created in 2004 after several years of less ambitious brewing, was about as typical as a graveside beer tasting. The syrupy liquid was 10 percent alcohol and combined the dried-fruit flavors of a quadrupel, a traditional Belgian abbey ale, with the roasted-coffee notes common in American stouts. I began to understand why the beer geeks who frequent the influential beer site RateBeer.com rank 13 Struise beers among the 50 best in Belgium — more than for any other brewery, and an astounding number in light of Belgium’s status as the foreign country that U.S. beer lovers seem to admire the most. …

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Slate Cosmic Cookery: How fringe religious groups helped launch...

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 18:07:00 -0400

Slate
Cosmic Cookery: How fringe religious groups helped launch the health-food movement
June 1, 2011

Near the buffet at Annam Brahma (Sanskrit for “food is God”), a white-robed Bengali man played the flute on a muted TV. As I sat down to eat vegetarian curries and a fresh, crunchy salad, I noticed his face on the back of my waiter’s white hoodie. Opposite my table, there he was again: hoisting a barbell that was mostly weight and not much bar. The photo’s caption: “Sri Chinmoy lifts 3½ tons with one arm at the age of 55.” A peace-and-love-preaching guru, Chinmoy died in 2007, but virtually every patch of the airy natural-foods restaurant in Queens, N.Y., was covered with his image, his books, or his artwork. There was even a colorful doodle on my mug of chai—along with the words smiles and dreams and his looping signature. …

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The Atlantic Bug Nuggets: Is the world ready for soy-glazed...

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 17:39:00 -0400

The Atlantic
Bug Nuggets: Is the world ready for soy-glazed mealworms?
September 2011

The dining-room table was set with roses and silver candlesticks. At one end, near a grandfather clock, sat two plates of mealworm fried rice. “So, a small lunch,” said my host, Marian Peters. “Freshly prepared.” The inch-long larvae, flavored with garlic and soy sauce, reminded me in texture of delicate, nutty seedpods. “Mealworm is one of my favorites at the moment,” Peters told me, speaking of the larvae of the darkling beetle (Tenebrio molitor Linnaeus). When they’re fresh, she added, their exoskeletons don’t get stuck in your teeth. …

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Harper’s Magazine Weapons of Mass Distraction: Object...

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 22:22:00 -0400

Harper’s Magazine
Weapons of Mass Distraction: Object lessons from the cyber-mythology
September 2010

In May 2009, Barack Obama delivered his first speech as president addressing the “cyber threat,” which he described as “one of the most serious economic and national-security challenges we face as a nation.” This threat, Obama said, includes acts of terror that “could come not only from a few extremists in suicide vests but from a few keystrokes on the computer.” This February, Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence under George W. Bush, testified to Congress that computerized terrorism “rivals nuclear weapons in terms of potential damage to the country.” Government cyber-security spending, which is now projected to increase by 50 percent by 2014, includes funding for this course curriculum produced by the Cyberterrorism Defense Initiative (CDI) at the University of Arkansas. A “cyber-9/11,” however, seems as much a phantasm as did Bush’s WMDs, a flare-up of national anxiety fueled by politics, stoked by sensationalist news reports, and exploited by eager corporations.

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The Atlantic The Glove That Would Change the Game: The new...

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0400

The Atlantic
The Glove That Would Change the Game: The new science of fielding
April 2012

Tradition or not, all sports will evolve,” the science-fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke predicted: even “the grand old game” of Ruth and Mays would be transformed by bionic-armed pitchers wielding lightweight, non-leather gloves. The cyborgs haven’t arrived, but their catching device has. It has spent the off-season in a display case at the Baseball Hall of Fame, whose curators think they might be witnessing a “historic moment”: the birth of the glove of the future.

Resembling a standard black baseball glove, it is composed primarily of synthetic microfibers. Only 30 or so were made last year, each custom tailored to the owner’s hand. Just a few pros use the glove—it is sold, through a personal Web site, for at least $300—but many early adopters consider it the best glove in baseball, and its inventor is exploring mass production. At the moment, however, his factory is the former living room of a friend’s house. …

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