Longreads Pick
Until cancer attacked his vocal cords, the author didn’t fully appreciate what was meant by “a writer’s voice,” or the essential link between speech and prose. As a man who loved to talk, he turns to the masters of such conversation, both in history and in his own circle.
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Published: May 10, 2011
Length: 7 minutes (1,979 words)
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Longreads Pick
The predicted dire emergency [with H1N1] did not occur. In the 2009–2010 “influenza season” about 18,000 people died from the disease worldwide, fewer than in previous years, and the vast majority of victims had serious underlying conditions such as cancer, lung disease, AIDS, or severe obesity, which can impair breathing.7 Since one influenza strain usually dominates all others during a typical flu season, H1N1 may actually have saved lives by displacing more aggressive viruses. The WHO maintains that its decisions were based on the best available evidence, but last year European governments, stuck with hundreds of millions of euros’ worth of unused medicines and vaccines, began asking questions.
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Published: Apr 22, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,588 words)
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Longreads Pick
In animals, or at least in laboratory rats and mice, it’s clear that if the fructose hits the liver in sufficient quantity and with sufficient speed, the liver will convert much of it to fat. This apparently induces a condition known as insulin resistance, which is now considered the fundamental problem in obesity, and the underlying defect in heart disease and in the type of diabetes, type 2, that is common to obese and overweight individuals. It might also be the underlying defect in many cancers. If what happens in laboratory rodents also happens in humans, and if we are eating enough sugar to make it happen, then we are in trouble.
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Published: Apr 13, 2011
Length: 25 minutes (6,474 words)
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Longreads Pick
Georgeanne Mumm’s surgeon emerged from the operating room with welcome news for her worried family. He had removed her cancerous kidney, he said, and her outlook looked good. The surgeon failed to mention, however, that he also had accidentally removed part of her pancreas, having mistaken it for a tumor. Nor did he mention that he had in-advertently cut the blood flow to her spleen, damaging it irrevocably. Only an emergency operation by another doctor the next day kept Georgeanne from dying right then and there.
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Published: Mar 10, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,977 words)
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Longreads Pick
Daniel Kish was born with an aggressive form of cancer called retinoblastoma, which attacks the retinas. To save his life, both of his eyes were removed by the time he was 13 months old. Since his infancy — Kish is now 44 — he has been adapting to his blindness in such remarkable ways that some people have wondered if he’s playing a grand practical joke. But Kish, I can confirm, is completely blind. He knew my car was poorly parked because he produced a brief, sharp click with his tongue. The sound waves he created traveled at a speed of more than 1,000 feet per second, bounced off every object around him, and returned to his ears at the same rate, though vastly decreased in volume.
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Published: Mar 2, 2011
Length: 23 minutes (5,761 words)
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Clayton Christensen: The Survivor
Clayton
I got Type 1 diabetes at 30. It hit me in 1982 when I was a White House Fellow in Washington. I had viral pneumonia. I lost 35 pounds in six weeks. And I couldn’t see anything. Everything was blurry. I was always thirsty.
Matthew
One time we visited my mom’s sister in Charlottesville. My mom is the oldest of 12 children, 9 boys. My dad drank a full 2 liters of Seven Up at dinner. My mom thought that was rude. She was upset. He was always thirsty.
Clayton
I called a friend who was a doctor in Boston, and he immediately diagnosed it: “Oh, you have diabetes.” I called my wife and said, “Oh, Christine, I am so relieved I have diabetes. I thought I was going to die of cancer.”
Diabetes is a great example whereby giving the patient the tools you can manage yourself very well. It’s been 28 years. If you have too much insulin your blood sugar drops and your brain shuts down. I’ve only lost consciousness four times in all of those years. The reason is that I test my blood sugar seven times a day. If it’s too low I have a Snickers bar. If it’s high I take a shot. And sometimes I am so desperate for a Snickers bar I give myself insulin so I can have one. I figure if I live a normal life I will take about 90,000 shots.
As told to David Whelan, Forbes
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Longreads Pick
The Harvard Business School professor’s work took on new urgency the past few years as he suffered a heart attack followed by cancer followed by a stroke. For Christensen it was not a reason to get too upset. It was another opportunity, in a lifetime full of them, to gain insight into how to make the world work better. Because of his July stroke it took a long time for Christensen to be ready to sit down with Forbes. He was in intensive speech therapy, eight hours a day at the beginning. But he graciously agreed to tell his inspiring story in January, the same month he went back to teaching. Here it is in his words, along with those of his family, friends and close colleagues.
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Published: Feb 25, 2011
Length: 30 minutes (7,727 words)
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Longreads Pick
By day, Joseph Harris studied potential treatments for gastrointestinal cancer — work that invariably required the use of animal models. By night, he crusaded against such animal research, sabotaging companies with links to it. Within a month, Harris would be caught vandalizing another company. Ultimately, he would become the first person in the United Kingdom to be convicted under a law intended to crack down on activist extremism.
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Published: Feb 23, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,460 words)
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Longreads Pick
Profile of Noel Biderman, founder of cheaters website Ashley Madison. “When I asked Biderman’s wife, Amanda, what it’s like being joined in holy matrimony with an anti-marriage entrepreneur, she let out a long sigh. ‘Really, the business itself doesn’t match who he is as a person—it’s not our lifestyle or value system or any of that,’ she said. ‘I mean, yeah, I’d love it if he were working on a cure for cancer. But it’s a business, and that’s how we look at it.'”
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Published: Feb 11, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,702 words)
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