Mary Stone
I am an adjunct writing professor at St. John Fisher University and Rochester Institute of Technology in NY, where I teach students how to use research in their college writing.
I'm a former newspaper beat reporter and magazine editor.
On the side, I am a freelancer for local print publications and interpreter for patients, mainly from Africa and the Caribbean.
That's the short version.
The long version starts in my twenties. I spent them in France as an undergrad, then in England getting my MBA and then back to France, where I became a naturalized citizen. I worked in Paris, first as a freelancer for fashion and cosmetic trade magazines at Condé Nast and later as a project manager for a communications agency serving mainly European luxury brands.
By 30, I wanted to come home, which at the time felt as impossible as moving to France had been a decade before...
I was looking for a position where I could use my business and journalism degrees. I landed the perfect job at the Rochester Business Journal, where the editorial team at the time helped me develop my skills as an investigative reporter.
At the RBJ, I covered technology companies, architecture and engineering firms, the local media and publishing industry, the environment and half a dozen other beats, in addition to a handful of Rochester-based, publicly-traded companies. I became skilled at translating complex technologies and concepts to non-experts.
At 40, I was channeling my energy and skills into POST magazine, a publication I helped develop to tell the story of an emerging economy in Rochester, post-Eastman Kodak, post-Bausch & Lomb. As downsizing left workers to chart their own paths, POST showcased the creativity of new small businesses and insights from research at growing local universities.
With a team of passionate journalists, photographers, designers and illustrators, we published more than 25 print editions. Using photography and online video to complement the print edition, POST employed a documentary approach to capture the lives, perspectives and work of locals in the context of Rochester's larger problems--poverty and homelessness.
As a quarterly magazine, POST folded in late 2018, but I continue to use the magazine’s intimate style in my writing, when assignments permit.
While occasions are limited for me to write about the experience of poverty in Rochester, where nearly half of children live below the poverty line, the subject is central to courses I teach at St. John Fisher. In this way, students shed light on the problem through their own research and writing.
Good writing, like research, is a recursive process. We research, think, write, rethink, rewrite, revise, refine and repeat. My aim, among others, is to show students that good writing follows almost inevitably from a commitment to this process.
Writing, especially once I’ve written my lede, and I’m three or four paragraphs down the page, is my favorite thing in the world. I’ve been doing it professionally for more than 25 years, mainly as a journalist. I write about people: their life lessons, their professions and insights, their passions, their families. I write about cities and neighborhoods; I write about the problems and opportunities facing them.
I feel an urgency to get the word out. For that reason I wrote about county employees at Child Protective Services managing more cases than they could adequately investigate; I asked national physicians and experts why cancer is over diagnosed and over treated in the United States. I asked why the successful medical treatments that exist for opioid users are considered taboo in the treatment and recovery community and how chronic hunger affects childhood behavior and stunts development.
My strongest skill as a writer is taking complicated topics (scientific, economic, financial, technological) and translating them to the general public without dumbing down the particulars. Whatever assignment I get, no matter how seemingly dry, I work to make it relatable and compassionate, and of course, interesting.
I’ve interviewed more than 2,000 sources: professors, CEOs, victims of violent crimes, advocates, scientists, unhoused men and women, software designers, surgeons, substance users, economic analysts, psychologists, architects, engineers, artists, government officials, clergy, and others whose perspectives have enriched and humbled me.
Below are some pearls of wisdom I've collected along the way.
—Mary Stone
Total bilingual fluency strengthens cognitive function," explains Dr. Benjamin Zinszer, Ph.D. from the Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Rochester Center for Brain Imaging Office at University of Rochester.
"However, we can observe these changes in brain activity beginning after just a few months of language classes," Zinszer says. The effects of language proficiency also become less important as a person's level of education increases. Learning new skills and managing difficult cognitive tasks might be the key to unlocking these long-term cognitive benefits in aging, whether through language learning or other types of educational pursuits.
Over time, the repetition of selecting and suppressing eventually changes the architecture of the brain. "Learning a new language seems to result in changes to gray matter—neurons—and new or stronger connections between neurons," Zinszer says. (Gray matter includes areas of the brain involved in muscle control, seeing, hearing, memory, emotions, speech, decision making, and self-control.)
"I think the most interesting aspect of bilingualism is just how profound the differences can be between languages and how bilinguals still manage these differences to successfully communicate in two or more languages," Zinszer says.
Having gender stereotypes hinders people from looking at their partner as an individual. They may also discourage people from pursuing certain kinds of goals. When psychological and intellectual tendencies are seen as defining characteristics, they are more likely to be assumed to be innate and immutable. Why bother to try to change?” asks Bobbi Carothers, senior data analyst for the Center for Public Health System Science at Washington University in St. Louis.
People are inclined to categorize each other, and gender often is the first label we attach, she says.
Yet research shows that psychologically, women and men are not predictably or identifiably different. In terms of character, men and women are very similar, says Harry Reis, professor of psychology at University of Rochester.
Keep in mind, we in the United States have been taught since we were on our mother’s knee that cancer was bad and that the way to deal with it is to find it early and cut it out,” says Otis Webb Brawley M.D., chief medical and scientific officer and executive vice president of the American Cancer Society.
“Now we’re changing the rules. Some cancers are good, and they can be watched. Some cancers don’t need aggressive treatment. Some cancers we can watch and if they seem to be growing, then we can increase the aggressiveness of our treatment.”
It’s very weird to be a human being,” says Adam Frank, an astrophysicist professor at University of Rochester. “You’re born, and you have this self to protect from all of the other selves out there.”
Humans, for many reasons, are resistant to uncertainty, Frank says, and scientists are no different. We use a false sense of certainty as a shield to protect ourselves, he says.
“One of the great problems for human beings, I think, one of the major steps we need to make in terms of cultural evolution is becoming comfortable with uncertainty, as Pema Chödrön would say,” he says. (Chödrön is an American Tibetan Buddhist and author.)
“To me, the idea of objectivity is very important, but we should always understand that the idea of the objective world is a very useful fiction. Nobody has ever experienced the objective world,” Frank says. “We’re all stuck looking out from our own perspectives. It’s important to understand where we begin.”
The psyche will hang on to stuff when you think you’re not. People don’t really know the emotional baggage, if you will, that they’re carrying,” says Joseph Carlino, a psychotherapist and clinical social worker in Rochester.
Many times the emotional baggage is some variety of anger or sadness from a situation in which the person felt disrespected. It’s usually about a relationship and a distorted perception, Carlino says. The medical problems usually begin when the emotions associated with those perceptions or judgments go unexpressed.
“Once I see someone expressing something they’ve been holding on to, it’s like an onion, there’s always more, but once they begin to let some of that go and begin to have some internal peace about it, their whole body begins to change, their whole body begins to heal,” Carlino says. “We really can heal ourselves if someone can facilitate that healing.”
Pert, who explained how emotional memory is stored in the body’s peptide and receptor network, wrote that unexpressed emotions get lodged in the body; one way to prevent that is to express feelings as they bubble up.
To the extent that we live in a world that is ‘me-oriented,’ it becomes more challenging to be humble,” Rodney Bassett, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Roberts Wesleyan College explains. “Humility involves the ability to be less self-absorbed and preoccupied. Many of us go through life as if a spotlight is upon us, and we are the center of it all. That is toxic to humility.”
In many ways, it is in people’s best interest to be humble, Bassett says.
“Psychologists have found that humble people have a pro-social personality disposition. Essentially, this means that people like and respond well to humble people. Also, it has been found that greater humility predicts deeper religiousness/spirituality,” Bassett says. Humility, he adds, predicts greater levels of subjective well-being and lower levels of materialism. Humble people are more likely to have a strong social network; they are more likely to forgive and feel forgiven; some research shows that humble people have better health in later life, perhaps because they generally tend to be more active and energetic, Bassett says.
At that point in my studies, I was procrastinating a lot. I wasn’t making a lot of great progress,” remembers Jonathan Binstock’s of his last year at Michigan. He was writing his Ph.D. dissertation when his mother suddenly passed away. Her death sent Binstock (director of the Memorial Art Gallery) reeling into the worst time of his life—but also the most motivating.
“I had various part-time jobs at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. I was supposed to be researching and writing my dissertation. I was dragging, and then she died, and then I went from dragging to spiraling downward."
It was 1997. Binstock’s parents had been at a Broadway show together. At intermission, Binstock’s mother fell on the stairs and hit her head. “She was very healthy; she was a dancer, so it’s kind of ironic that she had lost her footing,” Binstock says.
“There’s this solar system. You’re the Earth or something. Your mom is the sun; your dad is the moon; your brothers and sisters are the planets. Then suddenly this major component—the sun—drops out, or the moon drops out. The point is the whole system has to recalibrate. Gravity changes; orientation changes. It takes time for equilibrium to be found again,” he says.
