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Into India
At 8 in the morning , the sidewalks of Mumbai’s Nariman Point neighborhood are thick with pedestrians, getting in a morning run or stroll with a view of the Arabian Sea before starting their workday. About a mile away, in the Machhimar Nagar (fishing …
Issue: March-April 2012
Al Franken: You Can Call Me Senator
Paul Wellstone didn’t mind taking unpopular positions. In 1990, his first year as junior U.S. senator from Minnesota, he voted against the Gulf War. President George H.W. Bush’s reaction: “Who is that chickenshit?” An equal-opportunity offender, Wellstone …
Issue: March-April 2012
World’s Best Blogger?
It was noon in Washington, D.C., when the shooting began in Tucson. Across the country, reporters and media executives rushed to cover the story of the gunman, the Congresswoman he shot at close range, and the 14 other victims. But the news couldn’t reach …
Issue: May-June 2011
The Social Epidemic
Zasembo Mkhize, age eight, has come to the doctor dressed in a hot-pink-and-white outfit, immaculately coordinated down to her shoes and socks. She is HIV-positive and comes each month for a checkup at the pediatric HIV clinic of Don McKenzie Hospital, in …
Issue: September-October 2010
The Unlikely Writer
One Wednesday last April, Atul Gawande was in his office at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, trying to make some progress on a New Yorker article about disparities in healthcare spending. He kept getting paged when other physicians thought their patients …
Issue: September-October 2009
April Fool Every Day
At Shaker Heights High School, outside Cleveland, Andy Borowitz '80 was the top student in his class, thanks to “extreme grade grubbing,” he says. He also became editor of The Shakerite , the school paper, whose annual April Fools' issue was filled with …
Issue: May-June 2009
Vistas of Perfection
In September 1928, James Agee moved in to his freshman dorm at Harvard--room B-41 in George Smith Hall, a building that is now part of Kirkland House. Decades later, after Agee had become a kind of legend--for his tormented life and early death, no less …
Issue: May-June 2009
Out and About
As winter is nudged out by the first warm days of spring and the refreshing sight of a few green shoots, we all welcome the chance to explore our environs anew. Herewith our array of places to visit through0ut the region. Far from complete, the grouping …
Issue: March-April 2008
Cambridge 02138
Summing Up Summers The article on, and interview with, Lawrence Summers ( Summers in Summary , September-October, page 56) should be required reading for members of the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers. The Summers-faculty debacle was a failure …
Issue: November-December 2006
Cambridge 02138
Prescription Psychiatry Ashley Pettus touches on some real conundrums for mental-health treatment (“ Psychiatry by Prescription ,” July-August, page 38). The nationwide shortage of trained cognitive-behavioral therapists means that patients with mild to …
Issue: September-October 2006
Twigs Bent Left or Right
How did Franklin Delano Roosevelt ’04, born in 1882 to a privileged, aristocratic life in New York’s Hudson River Valley, become a liberal reformer? Historians have proposed several possibilities. It may have been the example of his father, who stood …
Issue: January-February 2006
Intelligent Evolution
Pellegrino University professor emeritus Edward O. Wilson, a scholarly giant of biodiversity and sociobiology, remains at heart a teacher. His latest lesson concerns the continuing consequences of Charles Darwin’s “timeless and consistently inspirational” …
Issue: November-December 2005
The New Ancient Trend in Medicine
In the 1950s American Cancer Society had a Committee on Quackery. Later that turned into a committee on "unproven methods of cancer management," superseded by one on "questionable methods." The names indicate a gradual acceptance of the unconventional; …
Issue: March-April 2002
Cambridge 02138
A Too-Political Madison? In his review of a book about James Madison ( “America’s Little Giant,” January-February, page 56), Lincoln Caplan makes the statement that the Electoral College is “obsolete.” I suggest that it is not. The United “States” is just …
Issue: March-April 2018
Color and Incarceration
In 2005, during her first year of graduate school, Elizabeth Hinton traveled from New York to California to visit her cousin in prison. In some ways, she understood what to expect: for most of her childhood, she’d known family members who cycled in and …
Issue: September-October 2019