Search Results for: cancer

The Case Against Lance Armstrong

The Case Against Lance Armstrong

Opium Wars

Longreads Pick

A key step to securing peace will be to wean Afghan farmers off growing poppies. “This is a bad way to make money. It trains you for no other occupation. When a father feeds a boy with money from poppies, he will grow poppies too. He’ll have no other skill. We have no carpenters, no engineers, no mechanics. We have nothing.” With a sad smile, the farmer says, “It is a kind of cancer on our country.”

Published: Jan 18, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,760 words)

AIDS and Media Coverage, the Early Years: A Longreads List

Logan Sachon is a writer and editor based in Portland.

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Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals 

1981. New York Times. Lawrence K. Altman. 

903 words / 3.5 minutes 

No mention of AIDS, no utter of HIV, but this is where mainstream media’s coverage of AIDS starts, with the New York Times first mention of a new disease in 1981. 

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AIDS in the heartland

1987. St Paul Pioneer Press. Jacqui Banaszynski. 

21,000 words (est) / 84 minutes (note: not Instapaper-friendly)

This Pulitzer-winning three-part series follows Dick Hanson — farmer, political activist, and gay man — from diagnosis to death. The writer describes the piece as such: “I wanted to be able not just to write about a disease, but THIS disease and all that went with it … the prejudice, the fear, the distance, the judging, the legal, financial and moral consequences, the lifestyle and the love …” Many people cite this article as the first time they were really drawn in to the AIDS crisis. 

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Fighting AIDS all the way

1989. New York Times Magazine. Larry Josephs. 

3,695 words / 15 minutes

The harrowing plunge 

1990. New York Times Magazine. Larry Josephs. 

5,905 words / 24 minutes 

Larry Josephs, 34, writer about AIDS, dies of the disease 

1991. New York Times. Alessandra Stanley 

360 words / 1.5 minutes 

In these two essays, Josephs writes first about his diagnoses and treatment and then about what happens when he gets very sick. Heart-wrenching personal voice coupled with details and research from someone who desperately wanted and needed to know everything about the disease. Honest, brave first-person journalism. 

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Out of control: AIDS and the corruption of medical science 

2006. Harper’s. Celia Farber. 

12,163 words / 48 minutes 

From 1987 to 1995, Farber wrote a column in SPIN about AIDS called “Words from the front.” (Those articles can be found here.) She was one of the first and only journalists to cover scientists who questioned the link between AIDS and HIV and questioned the use of AZT to fight it. These scientists — including National Academy of Sciences member and Berkeley researcher Dr. Peter Duesberg — were labeled “AIDS denialists” by the scientific community, and Farber’s coverage of them put her in that pot, too. This article was published in 2006, but Farber had been writing about its topic for nearly 20 years. The piece provoked heated responses, including letters from the scientists who are credited with discovering  HIV. This response from the Columbia Journalism Review is in line with the criticism of the piece, the author, and its thesis. 

Grandpa Joe & Secretariat: A Christmas Story

Grandpa Joe & Secretariat: A Christmas Story

Grandpa Joe and Secretariat: A Christmas Story

Longreads Pick

In mid-October, he’d seen his beloved Charlie Rose interview Diane Lane and John Malkovich. Ever since that interview, he’d been carrying with him the notion that he would see this movie at his earliest opportunity. Never mind his preceding fondness for the racehorse and its moment in history–there was also *Diane Lane* to consider. (It turns out–and I never really knew this before–my grandfather has a major thing for Diane Lane.) And then there he was, stuck with cancer, stuck dying, stuck in movie limbo.

Published: Dec 23, 2010
Length: 8 minutes (2,168 words)

The Face of Pain

Longreads Pick

From 2003: In her dazzling “Autobiography of a Face,” Lucy Grealy detailed her quest to reclaim her jaw, disfigured by cancer. Suddenly, she was the toast of literary New York, beloved for her quick wit and wild streak, saluted for her grit. But her endless surgeries left her so weak, impoverished, and dependent on drugs that even her dearest friends couldn’t save her.

Published: Jul 1, 2003
Length: 28 minutes (7,237 words)

The Courage of Jill Costello

The Courage of Jill Costello

The Courage of Jill Costello

Longreads Pick

After a promising junior season as a coxswain at Cal, she learned she was in the late stages of cancer. The next year was her best. “When she asked her doctors about rejoining the team, they looked at her as if she were crazy. Crew? She’d need all her strength just to make it through each day. Jill didn’t care. She told her mom she saw cancer as ‘just another thing on my plate.’ Besides, she’d had three goals for the better part of her adult life: to graduate from Cal, to cox the first boat and to win nationals. She saw no reason to change them.”

Published: Nov 29, 2010
Length: 27 minutes (6,879 words)

What Good Is Wall Street?

Longreads Pick

Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless. “I asked him how he and his co-workers felt about making loads of money when much of the country was struggling. ‘A lot of people don’t care about it or think about it,’ he replied. ‘They say, it’s a market, it’s still open, and I’ll sell my labor for as much as I can until nobody wants to buy it.’ But you, I asked, what do you think? ‘I tend to think we do create value,’ he said. ‘It’s not a productive value in a very visible sense, like finding a cure for cancer. We’re middlemen. We bring together two sides of a deal. That’s not a very elevated thing, but I can’t think of any elevated economy that doesn’t need middlemen.'”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 22, 2010
Length: 31 minutes (7,987 words)

New Drugs Stir Debate on Rules of Clinical Trials

Longreads Pick

When two cousins each learned that a lethal skin cancer called melanoma was spreading rapidly through his body, the young men found themselves with the shared chance of benefiting from a recent medical breakthrough.

Author: Amy Harmon
Published: Sep 18, 2010
Length: 16 minutes (4,173 words)