New Yorker magazine alert thread

i mean life is messy and articles should acknowledge/capture that but i see no problem with old-fashioned muckraking "this is what happened, it's awful, this is who needs to be held to account" articles are worth a lot too IMO.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, June 10, 2013 5:46 PM (26 seconds ago) Bookmark

imo this article is part of a larger piece and needs to be understood in the context of, well, everything that's happened since 2001.

the article seemed to pretty squarely place most of the blame the VA hospital that the shooter went to and the VA medical system in general though? they kept repeating the theme about how he tried to get help, said he was going to hurt people, and the hospital just kept releasing him

i took that as a metonymous indictment of "the whole damn system" that put him where he was

would any hospital have done significantly different, VA or no?

yeah apparently he was too sane to be admitted to the hospital but too unbalanced to go into one particular other program?

GTFO is the hospital industry motto

just to be clear i'm not criticizing the article at all

i was responding to jon lewis in saying that while this article did a great job of kind of letting it all hang out, not all articles need to end on a note of irresolution

i do think that it's not hard to draw some real conclusions from the article, but in this case i think it was admirable that it didn't try to tie it all together too neatly

n/a IIRC the hospital does fuck up several times but not always and (this was left out of the article) they may have been bound by rules not allowing them to keep someone against their will unless yaddayaddayadda

i feel like this is an issue in terms of how we deal with the mentally ill in general

as in, when it is ok to hospitalize someone against their will, how do we determine if they pose a threat to themselves or others, etc

otm

well yeah

i kept thinking that the sniper guy with his hatred of our elected government + racism + PTSD + delusions of heroism + pathological lying would have himself been a candidate to do something really awful under other circumstances

maybe that is committing calumny toward the dead i dunno

hate to go there but you can't compare/contrast the two dudes w/o factoring in privilege

explain--i can't remember which of the two came from a poorer background...

if that's what you meant...

well the sniper guy was on tv shows and having dudes say "here take my ranch" and the marine kid was mowing lawns and proposing to his gf without a wedding ring

the narrative even subtly points out how one got his DUI dismissed and the other didn't

yeah that's right

the whole last part, about his (sister?) still going around promoting gun-therapy, seemed to not need any additional gloss.

Haven't read the article, but according to a followup blog post, his wife is warning about Obama gonna take our guns: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/06/chris-kyles-wife-speaks-for-his-book-and-for-guns.html

oy

Yeah, knowing that makes me not want to get to the article itself.

I feel like resisting the urge to editorialise or draw more specific attention to some of the fringier elements of the story must have been easier in light of the facts of the story; the blunt, flat, straightforward ending of his life casts shadows over any gun policy or conspiracist discussion throughout, nothing really needed tying up or underlining

totally, even just the one line where he throws out a statistic on Texas execution rates and just moves on

ya that was brutal

this piece reminded me a little of last year's article on a jailed hitman in I think Detroit, describing killing people as they made their way from the car to the front door. just in case anyone skipped it & is somehow hungry for more of the cold hard look they got from this.

Yeah both had those heartbreaking details that were just mentioned briefly w/o comment. The hitman article had one about a cop who put out a hit on his wife because he wanted to be with someone else but didn't think his wife could handle being alone o_O

yeah hitman article was good

really enjoyed the issue from a couple of weeks ago, esp the stop and frisk article (that judge is a hero) and joan acocella's review of those dante translations (i liked a couple of the other features as well but i forget what they were because i left the magazine on the plane [along with my copy of tender is the night u___u] and i'm a bit drunk atm)

k3v you have mentioned taking a plane twice lately, how was your trip

thanks for asking! good, i am still here in thailand and will be for the next 2 months. haven't gotten malaria yet

oh wow! & that's good, it's a long enough trip that it's okay to be spending your time doing regular stuff rather than feeling obliged to ~unwind~

please post on one of the breakfast threads if you eat any good Thai breakfast food, my friend lived there for awhile & hearing about bulgur wheat breakfasts used to enthrall me

when was the hitman article, anyone got a link or date

october 15 2012

Jhumpa Lahiri story was great - I'm glad she has another book coming

chock a block with stuff, this new issue: Gang of Eight, Japanese suicide rates (disappointing as sociological report on said suicides, terrific on monk habits).

Yeah, new issue is promising. Superman book piece read like it was edited in half though.

Read the sniper story, and I almost hate to admit this, but I LOLed at this part:

I got him there and he was talking all kinds of goddam bullshit. I mean, this off-the-wall shit—how he’s Dracula, how he’s a werewolf, and all this shit.”

Weirdly credulous or at least steadfastly neutral article on the controversies around Lyme disease by Michael Specter.

I wonder if the framing was influenced by the comments on a throwaway piece he did during the election on Mitt Romney promoting more funding for chronic Lyme disease: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/10/mitt-romney-versus-lyme-disease-and-science.html

The new article accepts the equation of illness (how people feel sick) and disease (damage to the body) wholeheartedly. Mentions "antibodies" and "metabolic abnormalities" as evidence of chronic Lyme, without specifics as to how those findings are caused by Borrelia burgdorferi, or how they supposedly explain the long list of symptoms. Mentions treatments for Lyme that are unlikely to help the supposed underlying pathology, but do help, but holds back from drawing the explicit conclusion that this argues against, not for, the theory of chronic Lyme.

By the end of the article even he even accepts the chronic Lyme community's favorite metaphor for their struggle to establish a new disease in the absence of convincing pathology:

The atmosphere resembles that of the early days of aids activism, when many of the individuals most at risk lost confidence in their doctors and sought their own medical answers.

This from the guy who wrote the "for God's sake, get a flu shot" article last winter. Don't remember him valorizing vaccine skeptics as standing against an uncaring medical establishment. Sigh.

lyme disease is a weird thing. at some point in high school i started becoming debilitated, had trouble walking, had extreme pain in my extremities, and for months the doctors couldn't find anything wrong. someone finally tested me for lyme disease (despite finding no ticks) and i tested positive. treatment completely alleviated my symptoms. idk that this relates to the chronic lyme 'community,' but it seemed to me at the time that the doctors were pretty confused by the entire ordeal and i wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot more related to lyme that the medical 'community' hasn't uncovered yet. have we done a thread about this yet?

i'm sure there's some talk previously. chronic lyme is a tough subject to discuss with patients, particularly in the northeast where it's more endemic, but so much of the treatment some patients receive is contrary to the evidence available. many patients get extended courses of antibiotics and feel better eventually, but it's not clear that there's any biological basis for it or that these people wouldn't have improved without abx. furthermore a lot of the "tests" done by "lyme-literate" institutions, again particularly in the northeast, aren't really validated

haven't read this article in a year or so but this is where the most recent evidence is: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra072023

also haven't read the NYer piece but i gather it deals with "chronic lyme"?

oh man just perused a couple of the advocacy blogs mentioned in the piece.

http://jmgarnet76.blogspot.com/2012/08/re-introducing-myself-to-all-of-you.html

poor woman was getting naltrexone for her lyme disease

specter is usually OK. i remember his pieces on GM food, GM mosquitos, and dr oz within the last year all being good

Next week's cover:

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/s403x403/1011892_10151736731965329_639397415_n.jpg

aw

<3

Chronic lyme is a personal subject for me, because it has effectively ruled my sister's life for the past 10 years. I haven't read the article yet, but I've read lots of other things about it, and she's been through the gamut of tests and treatments, skepticism and sometimes outright dismissal, and finds the entire idea of a "controversy" as to the existence of the thing that has made her life agony for months at a time infuriating. As do I. It is obviously true that the mechanisms and interplays that cause chronic lyme are still mysterious. It is also true that not all therapies work for everyone -- but there are therapies that work to one degree or another for a whole lot of people. But believe me, it is a very real thing.

I mean, chronic lyme is the reason why she and her husband never had another child (fortunately, they'd had one before she got sick). It's the reason she has for months or years at a time had to give up playing the fiddle, which she loves. It's the reason that merely going to a part-time job can be exhausting and debilitating for her. This isn't a person who was ever sick much in her life before, she was an energetic, healthy, happy, busy mom and teacher until BAM.

There shouldn't be any dismissal of the fact that she's sick. Whatever the cause of her suffering, the fact that she is suffering shouldn't be minimized.

The controversy is whether chronic infection with the Lyme spirochete is the cause of symptoms like that, and whether chronic antibiotic treatment is helpful and necessary.

We don't (and won't ever) fully understand the complexity of the body, especially since each person is in some ways different than everyone else. There will always be room for doubt and more questions to research.

What I look for as a neurologist is evidence of damage to the nervous system. Symptoms are an indication of potential damage but are not sufficient proof: many severe and persisting symptoms can arise from an otherwise normal nervous system. The patients I've seen with a diagnosis of chronic Lyme (not as common in Canada as in the US) have had normal examinations and tests (MRI, CSF, nerve conduction studies). In the absence of some indicator of how Lyme is damaging the nervous system (infection -> damage -> symptoms), there's no particular reason to believe it is the cause of the symptoms, at least from a neurological point of view.

This is a separate debate from the non-controversial evidence of acute/subacute Lyme infection causing neurological problems. There's a long list of neurological conditions that Lyme can cause, but they can be proven by the usual methods (damaged nerve function on electrical tests, inflammatory changes in spinal fluid, lesions on MRI, etc). Treatment of the infection is definitely helpful in those cases, which usually improve considerably but can leave residual neurological damage behind (scars in the brain or spinal card, etc).

It's good that there are treatments that your sister and others with similar symptoms have found helpful. I offer symptomatic treatment to patients whenever I can. Antibiotic treatment is not intended to be symptomatic but curative of the supposed underlying cause. When I'm not convinced that an infection is in fact the cause of the symptoms, I can't in good conscience recommend it.

I would argue that this is in fact a really unfortunate portrayal of common attitudes. First, it's actually not conducive to gay rights or gay dignity to act as though every close male relationship is necessarily a sexual or romantic relationship. But worse, this is subtly a perfect distillation of how your average liberal views gay people, as Muppets: sexless, harmless, inoffensive, childish, silly, and ultimately mere fodder for the condescending entertainment of straight people.

Personally, I don't think that a group that has for decades labored against a brutally oppressive regime that humiliated them, assaulted them, and systematically denied them equal rights should be analogized to imaginary characters that have been built out of felt for the edutainment of children, nor that American liberalism's obsession with meaningless symbolism and empty uplift is a long-term strategy for success.

where is that from. i wrote "<3" as a response to that image earlier today but i actually think i agree with that quote.

fre-fre-freddie

I don't disagree with the quote, but the cover is really a play on the already widespread half-joking speculation that ernie and bert are a gay couple, speculation that is often fueled by the show's writing