newyorker.com
“I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress.
“We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.
The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around f…
over 13 years ago
newyorker.com
One season when Miller was making his annual rounds of the spring-training sites, he decided to put his argument to the players as plainly as he could. He was visiting the San Francisco Giants, in Phoenix, Arizona. “The right fielder for the Giants was Bobby Bonds, a nice man,” Miller says. “I knew what Bonds’s salary was. And, considering that he was a really prime ballplayer—that he had hit more home runs as a lead-off man than anyone had ever hit in the major leagues, that he was a speedy bas…
over 13 years ago
newyorker.com
Last summer, the editors of Car and Driver conducted a comparison test of three sports cars, the Lotus Evora, the Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport, and the Porsche Cayman S. The cars were taken on an extended run through mountain passes in Southern California, and from there to a race track north of Los Angeles, for precise measurements of performance and handling. The results of the road tests were then tabulated according to a twenty-one-variable, two-hundred-and-thirty-five-point rating system,…
about 13 years ago
newyorker.com
Xerox PARC was the innovation arm of the Xerox Corporation. It was, and remains, on Coyote Hill Road, in Palo Alto, nestled in the foothills on the edge of town, in a long, low concrete building, with enormous terraces looking out over the jewels of Silicon Valley. To the northwest was Stanford University’s Hoover Tower. To the north was Hewlett-Packard’s sprawling campus. All around were scores of the other chip designers, software firms, venture capitalists, and hardware-makers. A visitor to P…
almost 13 years ago
newyorker.com
How much proof do we need about the harmfulness of something before we act?
about 11 years ago
newyorker.com
Mäntyranta carries a rare genetic mutation. His DNA has an anomaly that causes his bone marrow to overproduce red blood cells. That accounts for the color of his skin, and also for his extraordinary career as a competitive cross-country skier. In cross-country skiing, athletes propel themselves over distances of ten and twenty miles—a physical challenge that places intense demands on the ability of their red blood cells to deliver oxygen to their muscles. Mäntyranta, by virtue of his unique phys…
over 10 years ago
newyorker.com
Gioia looked for patterns. “You have to be able to identify something that’s breaking,” he said not long ago. “Otherwise, I’ve got an imaginary event. I try not to engage in magical thinking. I’ve also got to have a pattern of failures. Idiosyncrasies won’t do. Question is, do you have enough here indicating that these failures are not just one-off events?” He was looking for what he called “traceable cause.”
From the case reports that came in, Gioia built files, hundreds of them. He posted upda…
almost 9 years ago
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It’s propping up the governments in Colombia and Peru
You ask any DEA man,
He’ll say, “There’s nothin’ we can do . . .” For weeks, he thought of little else. He talked about the song obsessively with his friends. Finally, he had a moment of clarity. As he recalls in his memoir, “The Dark Art: My Undercover Life in Narco-Terrorism” (Penguin/Gotham), written with Douglas Century, “I said to myself, Fuck it. I’m gonna become that DEA man. Let ’em try to tell me there’s nothing we can do.”
Follis j…
almost 9 years ago
newyorker.com
Kirk is a sociologist at the University of Oxford. He trained at the University of Chicago under Robert Sampson, and, for Sampson and the small army of his former graduate students who now populate sociology departments around the world, neighborhoods are the great obsession: What effect does where you live have on how you turn out? It’s a difficult question to answer because the characteristics of place and the characteristics of the people who happen to live in that place are hard to untangle.…
over 8 years ago
newyorker.com
Half a century ago, the N.C.I. was a very different place. It was dingy and underfunded—a fraction of its current size—and home to a raw and unruly medical staff. The orthodoxy of the time was that cancer was a death sentence: the tumor could be treated with surgery or radiation, in order to buy some time, and the patient’s inevitable decline could be eased through medicine, and that was it. At the N.C.I., however, an insurgent group led by Frei and Freireich believed that if cancer drugs were u…
over 8 years ago
newyorker.com
For example, smoking pot is widely supposed to diminish the nausea associated with chemotherapy. But, the panel pointed out, “there are no good-quality randomized trials investigating this option.” We have evidence for marijuana as a treatment for pain, but “very little is known about the efficacy, dose, routes of administration, or side effects of commonly used and commercially available cannabis products in the United States.” The caveats continue. Is it good for epilepsy? “Insufficient eviden…
about 5 years ago