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I want to blog the New Yorker: Not
I just read two fascinating articles in the New Yorker. The first, in the August 5, 2002 issues, is by Malcom Gladwell. It is a look at the work of a researcher, Paul Ekman, who studies how people read other people's faces. It is a great old style New Yorker article -- take an obscure subject and research it and write about it in enough detail to show people how fascinating it really is. Gladwell explains how Ekman has come up with a system, The Facial Action Coding System, that can be used to teach people how to read facial expressions. He profiles a couple of policemen who score in the 99th percentile for ability to read people's faces, and tells how that skill has effected their lives. Aside from an abrupt and unsatisfactory ending, a great article (and I can easily see a book coming out of it). However, you can't find the article on the web. If you want to read it, you'll have to go buy the New Yorker or wait until Gladwell puts it up on his personal site, www.gladwell.com For now, the best you can do online is go Paul Ekman's personal site and download one of his academic papers.
The second article was from the July 29, 2002 issue. It was an article by Jerome Groopman on the current medical fad for prescribing testosterone, and it revealed how much of the fad has to do with marketing and subsidized research and promotion by Unimed, a division of Belgian conglomerate Solvay, makers of AndroGel. It also exposed how unreliable current tests for testosterone levels are, and how little research has been done on the effect of testosterone replacement therapy on prostate cancer, and how possible it is that in the long term testosterone replacement therapy will lead to an epidemic of prostate cancer. A very interesting article that should be part of the current debate over hormone replacement therapy. Is it up on the New Yorker's web site? No, nor could I find it anywhere online. Presumably, it will eventually find its way onto Groopman's personal/book site, www.jeromegroopman.com, but right now I couldn't find it online anywhere.
While I understand the New Yorker's reluctance to provide content for free, and it has yet to be shown that there is a viable business model for making profits from putting content online for general readers, I think that the New Yorker and its authors are missing a real chance to start and be part of a conversation. So much of the conversation about ideas today starts online and continues online. If I can't blog it, if I can't link to it, how likely am I to talk about it online? I don't want to read a 10-15 page article online, but if you aren't online, if people can't link to your content, your ideas don't get passed around, discussed and debated, and spread. And that's a shame.
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