Running to Beijing

By Peter Hessler

Issue: Aug. 11 & 18, 2008

     You read an article in the New Yorker about long-distance runner Ryan Hall. Hall won the Olympic Trials marathon last year and ran last week in Beijing. At 25 years old, Hall is tall, blond, handsome and, according to his coach, looks like a white Kenyan.  

     You were surprised to learn that although the top African marathoners "tend to come from high-altitude parts of the continent... scientific studies have shown that there's no significant difference in the VO2 max rates of elite Kenyan and European runners. Instead, the Africans' advantage seems to come from running efficiency, body mass-index and leg shape." In other words, the effectiveness of high-altitude training is still questionable. 

     When talking about this article, beware that not everyone will think it odd that Hall credits God with turning him onto running. 

     Also, be sure to mention that after American marathoner Frank Shorter won gold at the 1972 Munich games,  another American didn't earn a medal until 2004 and even then it was silver. 

     Needless to say, pretty boy Hall (who is also a Stanford grad) respects that silver medalist's accomplishments, but questions his fashion sense.

     "Meb [Keflezighi] cut his shirt in Athens," Hall tells his entourage one day. "He cut it off at his stomach, because otherwise the sweat will pool there...If I'm running with the midriff it will be the supreme sacrifice...I just hate the look."

Superbugs

By Jerome Groopman

Issue: Aug 11-18

The moral of this story is: don't get sick and don't end up in the hospital.

According to Dr. Christian Giske of Stockholm, we are returning to a "preantibiotic era." The widespread use of antibiotics (for people and in our food products) has caused some strains of bacteria to develop resistance to all of our viable medicines. 

New strains of potent bacteria have been appearing all over, especially in hospitals where cross-contamination is an issue. These bacteria don't show up on a certain type of test and so are called "gram-negative." The article goes through the ways that the bacteria's DNA could become resistant and talks about how widespread antibiotics are (they even appear in people in an isolated cannibalistic tribe in the Solomon Islands).

Basically, we have been using too many of our good, last-line-of-defense antibiotics and doctors (or someone) should have been better at reserving them for really serious situations. There won't be any easy breakthoughs for new kinds of antibiotics, but the answer might come from other biological medicines (like a counter-bacteria). 

For now, though, don't get sick with one of these superbugs because no one can help you yet.

You probably thought scariest part of the article was either that there was an outbreak at the respected NY Tisch hospital. Or that the bacteria can do this cool thing called "quorum sensing" where they wait to release their "virulence genes" (crap that makes you sick) so that they don't trigger your natural defenses until there are enough of them around that it is too late for you.

Read the full article at NewYorker.com

The Strawberry Girls

By Anne Hull

Issue: Aug 11-18

Author Anne Hull goes back to her hometown of Plant City, FL where this year's Strawberry Queen and her court are competing.

The article details the way of life in the small town and portrays it as an unchanged slice of life from the 1950s South. No one really leaves town, the price of strawberries determines a lot about the health of the town, and big hair is the best. The girls are nice, naive, and religious.

Though the town hasn't changed much, the competition has. A new coordinator is trying to class it up and has made entry more difficult, the costumes less tacky, and is eliminating the swimsuit competition (for moral reasons). Also, they now have more racially diverse applicants (sort of).

Your favorite part of the article was when you learned that the Strawberry court had black jeans with strawberry patches on the back pockets, or when the coordinator told the toll booth attendant that she had nice hair.

Slide show from NewYorker.com

Hello, World!

How many times have you been at a party, in a bar, or waiting for your meeting to start when people talk on and on about a New Yorker article you haven't even heard of, let alone read?

How many times have you gotten your New Yorker in the mail, flipped to an article that looked interesting, only to put it down once you realize it is more than 12 pages?

Well, we've done the dirty work of reading all the articles (ok, so we skip the reviews sometimes, no one is perfect) and are here to offer some quick summaries and highlights.

Use them to sound smart or to decide which articles are worth that hour of real reading time.