What Young Gay Men Don’t Know About AIDS

November 29, 2013Posted by Michael Specter I used to keep a picture on my desk, taken on Castro Street, in 1983, at the moment when it seemed as if gay life in San Francisco was ending forever. There were two men in the photograph: the first, tall and gaunt, was leaning over the other, who was in a wheelchair, tucking a blanket around...

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The Outlaws Who Love To Sue

By SERGE F. KOVALESKIPublished: November 28, 2013 PHOENIX â€" Fritz Clapp, a 67-year-old lawyer with a bright red mohawk, practices intellectual property law. Years ago, his clients were “small-time businesses that nobody had ever heard of.” Then he found something bigger. Today, Mr. Clapp, an eloquent and irreverent man known to wear a purple fez during negotiations with other lawyers, represents the interests...

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23andMe Revealed A Condition It Took My Doctors Six Years To Diagnose

The FDA claims it halted the sale of 23andMe‘s flagship Personal Genome Service (PGS) kit due to concerns over its validity and the possibility that clients may suffer from mental anguish when faced with the possibility that their genetic code puts them at risk of serious diseases. In other words, the FDA is worried about patients flooding doctors’ offices holding their genetics reports demanding to be tested...

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Inside The Mind Of A Turkey

Modern Farmer recently came across a fascinating book called The Psychology of Birds. Written by shrink-turned-birdwatcher Harold Burtt, the book applies the powers of psychoanalysis to our inscrutable feathered friends, e.g., "There's no point in asking a bluejay why he is screaming." But, in a major scholastic oversight, Burtt forgot the turkey. We’d like to pick up where the book left off. After all, Americans wolf...

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The Problem Of Infinity

In the course of exploring their universe, mathematicians have occasionally stumbled across holes: statements that can be neither proved nor refuted with the nine axioms, collectively called “ZFC,” that serve as the fundamental laws of mathematics. Most mathematicians simply ignore the holes, which lie in abstract realms with few...

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I Come Not To Praise QWERTY, But To Bury It

I bought a Droid 4 twenty-one months ago. As a devout user of physical QWERTY keyboards, I'm pretty sure I'm screwed. My two-year contract expires in just three more months, but I don't know if my phone will make it. I touch-type all my interviews into my Droid, but it’s simply not reliable anymore. There isn't a day that goes by without some app experiencing crippling...

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The McRib: Enjoy Your Symptom

Wikimedia CommonsEach year, the McRib makes a brief visit to Earth. Its arrival elicits reactions ranging from horror to awe. And for good reason: this would-be rib sandwich is really a restructured pork patty pressed into the rough shape of a slab of ribs, its slathering of barbecue sauce...

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There's A Whole New Way Of Killing Cancer

On May 7 of this year, I received a Facebook message from a woman named Stephanie Lee: Hey Mark, I found that I have colon cancer today. I go for surgery Thursday morning. Please keep me in your prayers. At the time, Stephanie was thirty-six and lived on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, in the town of Ocean Springs. I had met her eight years...

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Why Did 9,000 Porny Spambots Descend On A San Diego High Schooler?

A voyage into the strange underworld of spambots, shady marketing, and non-human intelligence. Bots can be scary. This is not Olivia. (Shutterstock/mast3r)It was around 5pm last Thursday when Olivia, a San Diego high school student, noticed that something interesting was...

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