X-Message-Number: 32715
From: 
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 17:33:12 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: NYT Mag article

On the July 9 Cryonet  Mark Plus mentioned an upcoming  article by Kerry 
Howley, which appeared in the New York Times Magazine of July  11, "Until 
Cryonics Do Us Part," about Alcor member Robin Hanson and his  disapproving 
wife, Peggy jackson. Strangely, no further comment seems to have  surfaced on 
Cryonet, although relatively significant public relations questions  arise. 

The article appeared July 11, last Sunday. You can access it on  line for 
free. It is interesting in several ways. 

First, the piece  itself was not particularly negative about cryonics, 
although the focus was the  "hostile wife syndrome." One of the facts a reader 
might easily overlook is  that, while the wife does indeed express 

disapproval in fairly strong terms, she  does not say or imply that she will try
to 
interfere with her husband's plans.  

Of course there were many sins of omission, neglecting some of our best  
arguments and evidence. On the matter of interpretation of the alleged hostile 
 wife syndrome, the author doesn't mention that one would expect dissension 
in  any family, simply because a huge majority of ANY group at present is 
hostile or  indifferent. In fact, families concur surprisingly often. 

Her  male/female numbers are wrong too. In the Cryonics Institute, about 
one third of  members are female and slightly more than half of the patients 
(52 out of 98).  (I attribute this to the fact that mothers are often beloved 
and tend to live  longer.) 

Interesting also are the comments from readers that the  Magazine has 

published on line. Opinions differ as to the sentiment and  meaningfulness, but
it appears to me that the prevailing sentiment, among those  who commented, 
was not at all unfriendly. The number of comments, I am told, was  also 
somewhat higher than average. Also, the CI web site got a noticeable blip  in 
hits that day. 

All in all, nothing earth shaking, but my impression  of this as a PR event 
is positive. 

Robert Ettinger 


 Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII"

[ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] 

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=32715