Steve Salerno | Missouri Review | Winter 2004| 24 minutes (6,016 words) Steve Salerno’s essays and memoirs have appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, Esquire and many other publications. His 2005 book, SHAM, was a groundbreaking deconstruction of the self-help movement, and he is working on a similar book about medicine. He teaches globalization and […]
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Longreads Best of 2013: Here Are All 49 of Our No. 1 Story Picks From This Year
Every single story that was chosen as No. 1 this year.
A group of young doctors from the Clinical Excellence Research Center at the Stanford School of Medicine are looking for new models to make health care better and more affordable: Patel was second up in the presentation, a little nervous and barely tall enough to be seen behind the podium. She stated the problem in […]
A Sin City Savior’s Quest To Cure The Common Hangover
An enterprising anesthesiologist is offering hungover people in Las Vegas an intravenous treatment: “Burke set up an IV bag in his office and inserted a catheter into his foot. ‘That’s really the only place that’s easy to start an IV on yourself,’ he says. ‘I let probably 300 or 400 cc’s of fluid in.’ The […]
Drone Home
On the future of drones in America: “But the drone industry is ramping up for a big landgrab the moment the regulatory environment starts to relax. At last year’s Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) trade show in Las Vegas, more than 500 companies pitched drones for filming crowds and tornados and surveying agricultural […]
Do We Really Want to Live Without the Post Office?
The U.S. Postal Service is losing $25 million per day—but its leadership is not giving up: “The investment in the shipping and trucking and sorting infrastructure has already been made, so they’re exploring whether there are ways to get more value from it. Postal carriers already deliver one million packages of drugs and contact lenses […]
Pardis Sabeti, the Rollerblading Rock Star Scientist of Harvard
On trailblazing geneticist Pardis Sabeti, who balances being in a rock band with her work in computational genomics: “There’d be plenty of people eager to talk to Sabeti before long. That October, she was the lead author on a paper published in Nature that laid out her discovery’s ‘profound implications for the study of human […]
Against the Odds
A group of young doctors from the Clinical Excellence Research Center at the Stanford School of Medicine are looking for new models to make health care better and more affordable: “Patel was second up in the presentation, a little nervous and barely tall enough to be seen behind the podium. She stated the problem in […]
The Island Where People Forget to Die
Researchers are studying the residents of the island of Ikaria to figure out why so many of them live well into their 90s and beyond: “Following the report by Pes and Poulain, Dr. Christina Chrysohoou, a cardiologist at the University of Athens School of Medicine, teamed up with half a dozen scientists to organize the […]
The Great New England Vampire Panic
How 19th Century American farmers became convinced that dead relatives could rise from their graves and feed on them as vampires: “The skeleton had been beheaded; skull and thighbones rested atop the ribs and vertebrae. ‘It looked like a skull-and-crossbones motif, a Jolly Roger. I’d never seen anything like it,’ Bellantoni recalls. “Subsequent analysis showed […]
