newyorker.com
“If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble,” its author, Larry Kramer, began. “If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage and action, gay men have no future on this earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get. . . . Unless we fight for our lives we shall die.” The piece became perhaps the most widely reprinted article ever published in a gay newspaper. “I am sick of closeted gay doctors who won’t come out to help us fight. . . .…
almost 22 years ago
newyorker.com
Mr. Puff Daddy, the thirty-two-year-old rap impresario, restaurateur, clothing entrepreneur, bon vivant, actor, and Page Six regular—who is also known as P. Diddy, and whose mother calls him Sean John Combs—was expected in Paris within hours. He needed to be on the 8 A.M. flight: it was the first day of fashion week, and Donatella Versace had invited him to sit in the front row at her couture show. Versace’s shows always attract enormous publicity, usually more for the celebrities in the audienc…
over 21 years ago
newyorker.com
By then, Einstein was having an affair with his cousin Elsa Löwenthal, who soon became his second wife (and who, it is often said, remained his second wife by permitting him to “meet” with Betty Neumann, the niece of a friend, twice a week for nearly a decade). The divorce from Mileva was bitter, but it generated one of the more unusual legal agreements in the history of science: Einstein assumed that he would eventually win the Nobel Prize, so he instructed his lawyers to make the money part of…
over 21 years ago
newyorker.com
None of that prevented four members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals from infiltrating the audience. As the Brazilian model Gisele Bündchen made her way down the catwalk, dressed in a beaded bra and black panties, the women leaped onto the stage, unfurling signs that said “Gisele: Fur Scum.” The women from PETA, as the animal-rights organization is always called, were gone in less than thirty seconds—dragged off the runway, then arrested, arraigned, and deposited in the Tombs. Gise…
about 21 years ago
newyorker.com
Avian influenza is nothing new in Thailand, or anywhere else where poultry are raised. Veterinarians often refer to it as the fowl plague, because in one form or another the disease has killed millions of chickens, turkeys, and other birds over the years. In 1983, the virus raced so rapidly through the Pennsylvania poultry population that health officials there were forced to slaughter nearly every chicken in the state. Until recently, however, humans rarely became infected with this type of vir…
about 19 years ago
newyorker.com
Politkovskaya was supposed to spend the day at the hospital, but her twenty-six-year-old daughter, who was pregnant, had just moved into Politkovskaya’s apartment, on Lesnaya Street, while her own place was being prepared for the baby. “Anna had so much on her mind,’’ Elena Kudimova told me when we met in London, before Christmas. “And she was trying to finish her article.’’ Politkovskaya was a special correspondent for the small liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and, like most of her work, the p…
over 17 years ago
newyorker.com
The reaction was immediate and almost completely hostile. “This was a flagrant violation of the Arpanet,’’ one recipient wrote. Another noted that “advertising of particular products” should be strongly discouraged on the network. The system administrator promised to respond at once, and Thuerk was harshly reprimanded. Nevertheless, his company sold more than twenty of the computer systems, for a million dollars apiece. Thuerk saw no harm in his actions; he and others viewed the network as an em…
almost 17 years ago
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Viruses reproduce rapidly and often with violent results, yet they are so rudimentary that many scientists don’t even consider them to be alive. A virus is nothing more than a few strands of genetic material wrapped in a package of protein—a parasite, unable to function on its own. In order to survive, it must find a cell to infect. Only then can any virus make use of its single talent, which is to take control of a host’s cellular machinery and use it to churn out thousands of copies of itself.…
over 16 years ago
newyorker.com
Tesco sells nearly a quarter of the groceries bought in the United Kingdom, it possesses a growing share of the markets in Asia and Europe, and late last year the chain opened its first stores in America. Few corporations could have a more visible—or forceful—impact on the lives of their customers. In his speech, Leahy, who is fifty-two, laid out a series of measures that he hoped would ignite “a revolution in green consumption.” He announced that Tesco would cut its energy use in half by 2010,…
about 16 years ago
newyorker.com
“Those monkeys are viral warehouses,” Wolfe said to me, as the couple drove toward the market, dragging their bloody merchandise behind them. Mangabeys carry many viruses that infect humans, including one that may cause a rare form of T-cell leukemia and another, simian foamy virus, the ultimate impact of which is not yet known. Wolfe is a forty-year-old biologist from Stanford University; a swarthy man with a studiously dishevelled look, he comes off as a cross between a pirate and a graduate s…
over 13 years ago
newyorker.com
Ahh—the old phony-vaccination ruse. How does the C.I.A. come up with this stuff? On Monday we learned, from a report in the Guardian, that our vaunted intelligence community decided to use a staged vaccination drive as a cover in its attempt to pin down the location of Osama bin Laden. (The idea seems to have been to get D.N.A. samples from the children in the Abbottabad compound while injecting them, to compare to that of bin Laden’s relatives.) Has anyone who works at the C.I.A. ever heard the…
almost 13 years ago
newyorker.com
Miranda’s “job,” like that of the now-banished squeegee men of New York, falls into the poorly defined space between labor and harassment. Nobody is required to pay Miranda, but he rarely earns less than fifty euros a day—a passable sum in one of Europe’s poorest countries. There is no fighting for turf, nor have the police ever tried to shoo him away. “I serve a purpose,” Miranda told me, waving a metallic-blue Volkswagen Passat into an open slot. “But I know I am lucky. I could have died long…
over 12 years ago
newyorker.com
Not long after Kaptchuk arrived in Boston, he treated an Armenian woman for chronic bronchitis. A few weeks later, she showed up in his office with her husband, who had a Persian rug slung over his shoulder. He nodded to Kaptchuk and said, “This is for you.” Kaptchuk accepted the rug, which he still owns, but had no idea what he had done to earn it. “Oh, doctor, you have been so wonderful,” the woman told him. “You cured me. I was about to have an operation on my ovaries and the pain went away t…
over 12 years ago
newyorker.com
This strain, however, was unusual, and it took an international team of virologists three months to identify it as H5N1—“bird flu,” as it has come to be called. Avian influenza had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of chickens, but there had never been a report of an infected person, even among poultry workers.
By the end of the year, eighteen people in Hong Kong had become sick, and six had died. That’s a remarkably high mortality rate: if seasonal flu were as virulent, it…
about 12 years ago
newyorker.com
He asked the woman if she could last thirty more seconds. It wasn’t easy, but she did. As the woman gasped for breath, he continued, “I’ve got to say that I am disappointed in how deconditioned you are.” With her blood pressure showing no signs of easing, the physicians stopped the test. The woman stepped off the treadmill, sat on the edge of an examination table, and began to cry. “What got you so emotional?” the producer asked, then pointed at Oz: “Tell him!” The rest of the medical team inche…
over 11 years ago
newyorker.com
No aspect of the bitter and enduring debate about Lyme disease—which I addressed in the magazine a few weeks ago—has been more contentious than the …
over 10 years ago
newyorker.com
Sigmund Schiller’s disregard for Holocaust Remembrance Day is perhaps understandable; he spent the first two years of the Second World War in the Horodenka ghetto (at the time in Poland, but now in Ukraine) and the next two hiding in bunkers scattered across the forests of Galicia. In 1942, at the age of fifteen, he was captured by the Germans and sent to a labor camp near Tluste, where he managed to survive the war. Trauma victims frequently attempt to cordon off their most painful memories. Bu…
almost 10 years ago
newyorker.com
For the past two years, Luanda—not Tokyo, Moscow, or Hong Kong—has been named, by the global consulting firm Mercer, as the world’s most expensive city for expatriates. Luanda’s lure, and its treasure, is oil. José Eduardo dos Santos, who has presided over Angola for more than thirty-five years, long ago realized that foreign oil companies were the key to power, and he has worked diligently to accommodate them. In the past decade, tens of thousands of American and European employees of internati…
almost 9 years ago
newyorker.com
ANNALS OF MEDICINE about AIDS in India... Writer describes the social campaign of pharmaceuticals businessman Yusuf K. Hamied to bring AIDS drugs to the …
almost 7 years ago
newyorker.com
When public-health programs are successful, they are invisible, and what is invisible is almost always taken for granted. Nobody cheers when they remain untouched by a disease that they hardly knew existed. That makes it easy for shortsighted politicians to deny long-term realities. And that is what they almost always do.
Members of Congress hardly made a peep in 2018, when the Trump Administration disbanded the White House’s National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and B…
about 4 years ago
newyorker.com
The defiant group of AIDS activists was itself riven by discord. What can the movement’s legacy, of both ferocity and fragility, teach us?
almost 3 years ago
