Numlock Sunday: Kelsey Piper on Saving the World

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Kelsey Piper who a few weeks ago wrote “Warning people off tainted drinking water may have killed children.” Here's what I wrote about it:

Aid groups have to balance all sorts of development goals and trade-offs, and a new study illustrates how not taking all of the factors into consideration can make things way worse. In the 1970s, agencies helped poor people in Bangladesh build 86 million tube wells. In 1999, arsenic contamination of those tubes was discovered, prompting a subsequent campaign to get people to stop using the wells. That became a case study in screwing up, but there’s more. The research now suggests that in areas where people were pushed away from the wells, child mortality jumped a gut-wrenching 45 percent and adult mortality rose as…