‘We Gained Hope.’ The Story of Lilly Grossman’s Genome

A couple has trouble finding a treatment for their 13-year-old daughter’s undiagnosed illness. Sequencing her genome provided a promising path to an answer:

“The family has a mantra: It’s a marathon not a sprint. They were battle-hardened from a long road of possible fixes and disappointments. ‘We thought: This is great but it’s probably just going to be another data point that we add to the binder,’ says Steve. ‘Lilly’s already had a lot of bad news in her life,’ says Gay. ‘Her biggest fear was that we wouldn’t find anything. Not knowing would be the worst thing.'”

Author: Ed Yong
Published: Mar 11, 2013
Length: 12 minutes (3,222 words)

Return to River Town

A writer returns to Fuling, China more than a decade after he lived there as a Peace Corps volunteer. He witnesses major changes:

“The writer’s vanity likes to imagine permanence, but Fuling reminds me that words are quicksilver. Their meaning changes with every age, every perspective—it’s like the White Crane Ridge, whose inscriptions have a different significance now that they appear in an underwater museum. Today anybody who reads River Town knows that China has become economically powerful and that the Three Gorges Dam is completed, and this changes the story. And I’ll never know what the Fuling residents of 1998 would have thought of the book, because those people have also been transformed. There’s a new confidence to urban Chinese; the outside world seems much less remote and threatening. And life has moved so fast that even the 1990s feels as nostalgic as a black-and-white photo. Recently Emily sent me an email: ‘With a distance of time, everything in the book turns out to be charming, even the dirty, tired flowers.'”

Published: Feb 15, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,286 words)

The Bite That Heals

Venom can be deadly, but it can also heal:

“The molecular gifts of toxic animals offer hope in the fight against a host of debilitating diseases. Heart patients owe gratitude to the Eastern green mamba, a deadly African tree snake whose venom impairs its victim’s nerves and blood circulation. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic fused a key peptide from the venom with a peptide from cells in the lining of human blood vessels to make cenderitide, the subject of clinical trials. It is intended not only to lower blood pressure and reduce fibrosis (the growth of excess connective tissue) in a failing heart but also to shield the kidneys from an overload of salt and water. ‘That’s the beauty of this drug,’ says Mayo cardiovascular researcher John Burnett. ‘It’s designed to cover both things.’ The closely related black mamba, a snake whose open mouth resembles a coffin and whose venom can quickly put you in one, holds a toxin with huge potential to be a powerful new painkiller.”

Published: Jan 28, 2013
Length: 15 minutes (3,962 words)

Into the Unknown

In December 1912, 30-year-old Douglas Mawson lost most of his supplies while exploring uncharted territory in Antarctica. The story of his survival:

“For three hours, Mawson and Mertz called into the depths, hoping against hope for an answering cry. They had far too little rope to lower themselves into the crevasse to search for their companion. At last they accepted the inevitable. Ninnis was dead. Gone with him were the team’s most valuable gear, including their three-man tent, the six best huskies, all the food for the dogs, and nearly all the men’s food.”

Published: Jan 1, 2013
Length: 9 minutes (2,431 words)

Cuba’s New Now

A reporter spends a winter in Cuba and takes a look at life in a post-Fidel era, which is changing gradually for some, but not fast enough for others who are still looking to escape to the U.S.:

“‘Viva Cuba Libre,’ Eduardo muttered, mimicking a revolutionary exhortation we’d seen emblazoned high on an outdoor wall. Long live free Cuba. ‘Free from both of them,’ he said. ‘That’s when there might be real change.’

“If there is in fact a Cuba under serious transformation—and you can find Cubans all over the country engaging now in their own versions of this same debate—Eduardo is a crucial component of it, although not for the reasons you might think. “Dissident” is the right label for a subset of politically vocal Cubans, notably the bloggers whose critical online missives have gained big followings outside the country, but Eduardo is no sort of dissident. He’s not fleeing persecution by the state. He’s just young, energetic, and frustrated, a description that applies to a great many of his countrymen. Ever since he was a teenager in high school, Eduardo told me, it had been evident to him that adulthood in revolutionary Cuba offered exactly nothing by way of personal advancement and material comfort to anybody except the peces gordos. The big fish. (Well, literally translated, the fat fish—the tap-on-the-shoulder parties.) Nothing works here, Eduardo would cry, pounding the steering wheel of whatever car he’d hustled on loan for the day: The economic model is broken, state employees survive on their tiny salaries only by stealing from the jobsite, the national news outlets are an embarrassment of self-censored boosterism, the government makes people crazy by circulating two national currencies at once.

“‘I love my country,’ Eduardo kept saying. ‘But there is no future for me here.'”

Published: Oct 25, 2012
Length: 27 minutes (6,772 words)

In the Shadow of Wounded Knee

A look at the Oglala Lakota people of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and how they’ve preserved their identity and customs after more than a 100 years of a tenuous relationship with the U.S.:

“Buried deep within the pages of the 2010 Defense appropriations bill, signed by President Barack Obama in December 2009, is an official apology ‘to all Native Peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States.’ The resolution commends those states ‘that have begun reconciliation efforts with recognized Indian tribes,’ but there is no mention of reparations, nor of honoring long-broken treaties.

“White Plume lit one of his rolled-up cigarettes and squinted at me through a ribbon of smoke. ‘Do you know what saved me from becoming a cold-blooded murderer? My language saved me. There is no way for me to be hateful in my language. It’s such a beautiful, gentle language. It’s so peaceful.’ Then White Plume started to speak in Lakota, and there was no denying the words came softly.”

Published: Aug 1, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,082 words)

Vanishing Voices

There are roughly 7,000 languages in the world, but 78 percent of the world’s population only speaks the 85 largest languages. Thousands of languages are on the edge of disappearing.

“After dinner Nimasow disappeared for a moment and came back with a soiled white cotton cloth, which he unfolded by the flickering light of the cooking fire. Inside was a small collection of ritual items: a tiger’s jaw, a python’s jaw, the sharp-toothed mandible of a river fish, a quartz crystal, and other objects of a shaman’s sachet. This sachet had belonged to Nimasow’s father until his death in 1991.

“‘My father was a priest,’ Nimasow said, ‘and his father was a priest.’ And now? I asked. Was he next in line? Nimasow stared at the talismans and shook his head. He had the kit, but he didn’t know the chants; his father had died before passing them on. Without the words, there was no way to bring the artifacts’ power to life.”

Author: Russ Rymer
Published: Jun 18, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,666 words)

The Teenage Brain

These studies help explain why teens behave with such vexing inconsistency: beguiling at breakfast, disgusting at dinner; masterful on Monday, sleepwalking on Saturday. Along with lacking experience generally, they’re still learning to use their brain’s new networks. Stress, fatigue, or challenges can cause a misfire. Abigail Baird, a Vassar psychologist who studies teens, calls this neural gawkiness—an equivalent to the physical awkwardness teens sometimes display while mastering their growing bodies. The slow and uneven developmental arc revealed by these imaging studies offers an alluringly pithy explanation for why teens may do stupid things like drive at 113 miles an hour, aggrieve their ancientry, and get people (or get gotten) with child: They act that way because their brains aren’t done! You can see it right there in the scans!

Published: Sep 16, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,055 words)

Brazil’s Girl Power

That new Brazilian fertility rate is below the level at which a population replaces itself. It is lower than the two-children-per-woman fertility rate in the United States. In the largest nation in Latin America—a 191-million-person country where the Roman Catholic Church dominates, abortion is illegal (except in rare cases), and no official government policy has ever promoted birth control—family size has dropped so sharply and so insistently over the past five decades that the fertility rate graph looks like a playground slide. And it’s not simply wealthy and professional women who have stopped bearing multiple children in Brazil. There’s a common perception that the countryside and favelas, as Brazilians call urban slums, are still crowded with women having one baby after another—but it isn’t true.

Published: Aug 18, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,269 words)

Too Young to Wed: The Secret World of Child Brides

Because the wedding was illegal and a secret, except to the invited guests, and because marriage rites in Rajasthan are often conducted late at night, it was well into the afternoon before the three girl brides in this dry farm settlement in the north of India began to prepare themselves for their sacred vows.

Published: May 17, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,411 words)