Book Discussion With Mariah Blake

Join us on Saturday, May 3 at 11:00 am for a special event featuring investigative journalist and author Mariah Blake in conversation with local reporter Deena Winter!

Mariah is the author of They Poisoned the World , an in-depth look at PFAS—their history, the coverups surrounding them, and their deadly legacy.

The book won’t go on sale until May 6, so this is an exclusive chance to hear from the author and get a singed copy before the official release. You might recognize a local connection in the book as well!

Mariah Blake is an investigative journalist whose writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The New Republic, and other publications. She was a Murrey Marder Nieman Fellow in Watchdog Journalism at Harvard University.

Deena Winter has been a journalist for over 30 years, working in North Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska and now, Minnesota, where she worked for the Minnesota Reformer and wrote extensively about PFAS contamination in the communities east of the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. She currently covers city government for the Minnesota Star-Tribune.

RSVP today – tickets are free, but they are limited.

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They Poisoned the World

By Mariah Blake

A landmark investigation of the chemical industry's decades-long campaign to hide the dangers of forever chemicals, told through the story of a small town on the frontlines of an epic public health crisis

In 2014, after losing several friends and relatives to cancer, an unassuming insurance underwriter in Hoosick Falls, New York, began to suspect that the local water supply was polluted. When he tested his tap water, he discovered dangerous levels of forever chemicals. This set off a chain of events that led to 100 million Americans learning their drinking water was tainted. Although the discovery came as a shock to most, the U.S. government and the manufacturers of these toxic chemicals—used in everything from lipstick and cookware to children’s clothing—had known about their hazards for decades.

In They Poisoned the World, investigative journalist Mariah Blake tells the astonishing story of this cover-up, tracing its roots back to the Manhattan Project and through the postwar years, as industry scientists discovered that these chemicals refused to break down and were saturating the blood of virtually every human being. By the 1980s, manufacturers were secretly testing their workers and finding links to birth defects, cancer, and other serious diseases. At every step, the industry’s deceptions were aided by our government’s appallingly lax regulatory system—a system that has made us all guinea pigs in a vast, uncontrolled chemistry experiment.

Drawing on years of on-the-ground reporting and tens of thousands of documents, Blake interweaves the secret history of forever chemicals with the moving story of how a lone village took on the chemical giants—and won. From the beloved local doctor to the young mother who took her fight all the way to the nation’s capital, citizen activists in Hoosick Falls and beyond have ignited the most powerful grassroots environmental movement since Silent Spring.

Humane and revelatory, this book will provoke outrage—and hopefully inspire the change we need to protect the health of every American for generations to come.