The New Yorker, August 2, 2010

As usual, here is my post about this week's New Yorker. Enjoy!



Articles
Talk of the Town
Comment: Open Secrets, by Hendrik Hertzberg (p. 17)
The Musical Life: Two Beats, by Alec Wilkinson (p. 19)
I thought that this was one of the best Talk of the Town articles I have ever read. I loved how it was just a simple "word snapshot" about music. Nice!
The two page ad on pp. 22-23 I thought was interesting - though I could have done without another ridiculous Lady Gaga outfit. Pointless. The New Yorker is a text-driven periodical - and that should have been respected.

Letter from Moscow: Stuck; The Meaning of the City's Traffic Nightmare, by Keith Gessen (p. 24)
Shouts & Murmurs: Postmadern Men, by Teddy Wayne (p. 29)
I liked this, as Jen and I enjoy Mad Men on AMC.
Annals of Medicine: Letting Go; What Should Medicine Do When It Can't Save Your Life?, by Atul Gawande (p. 36)
Frankly, this hit very close to home. In the past year and a half, Jen and I have been through two close family situations which required difficult questions about end-of-life treatment and quality of life questions. I found myself thinking about another book I read in the past couple of years, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust. I think every century or so, societies must re-define what it is to die, and what cultural norms are associated with that process. Dr. Gawande looks at this from a health-care perspective, as expected. I thought this was an especially pertinent quote, from p. 39:

People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure it measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system's expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what's most important to them at the end of their lives.

Ok, let's move on from gloom and doom to the cartoons.

Cartoons
Pp. 33, 56, 62