The San Francisco Examiner
“Believe me, there were some lively debates behind closed doors. Would a trip abroad with our two young sons, Avery and Oliver, create fond memories or nightmarish ones? My husband and I had traveled far and often before we had children. We’d watched exhausted couples hauling toddlers through Paris and wondered if we’d ever have the nerve. Last summer, with our kids 9 and nearly 6, we decided to take our chances.”
Read MoreNew York Magazine
“From the mid-1800s into the first couple of decades of this century, quiet Murray Hill, now nestled at the foot of midtown, drew the big money of Manhattan. It was home to people who had many fortunes in banking and trade. A Murray Hill address had cachet; even if you didn’t have a pedigree, it made clear that you had arrived.”
Read MoreOutside
“You board the Governor Muskie ferry in Rockland, Maine, which has to be one of the ugliest towns in New England. There’s a hustle and a confusion as pickups and battered vans line up: Can the milk truck get on? Are there groceries in that wagon? A man in a hunter’s orange vest, directing traffic, thrusts a flat hand at you to pull you up short and motions forward a flatbed truck loaded with lumber. Then he waves his arm, and you roll your bicycle onto the crowded deck, sucking in your gut to squeeze past a fender. Just then, there’s an ear-piercing whistle. The ferry is under way.”
Read MoreSan Francisco Chronicle
“For five years, since the first time they saw “Cool Runnings,” my sons, 12 and 15, had been angling for a trip to Jamaica. I’d been to the island several times, and we’d have gone in a minute if it wasn’t so far from California, requiring at least one plane change and a long layover. Then, Air Jamaica announced nonstop service from Los Angeles to Montego Bay, four days a week. On its heels, Delta followed. For West Coast dwellers, the Caribbean was finally within reasonable reach.”
Read MoreNew York Woman
“I had a presumption: intelligent people do not fall for this stuff. Only desperate slobs of small means and low birth invest any faith in psychic power. Only stalwart relics of the Age of Aquarius—the people who still serve big bowls of tofu to guests—are into the tarot. And only people who are pathetically fatalistic pay rapt attention to the transits of the planets. I was, to put it mildly, very skeptical of the whole shooting match.”
Read MoreMademoiselle
“Being in love meant making a weekend pilgrimage. Sometimes he flew down to see me. More often—especially in the warm months—I left the steaming streets of New York City and headed for the cool brick sidewalks of Portland, Maine. After a year of flying back and forth, and a few thousand dollars spent between us on phone calls and plane fare, he decided to do what he’d been fantasizing about for ten years—and what I’d been hoping he’d do—take on the big city. From the start of our relationship, we’d always talked about living in the same city. We assumed that such proximity would solve all our problems, that everything that disturbed us about our relationship could be attributed to distance. That there were problems no related to our three-hour commute didn’t cross our minds.”
Read MoreMademoiselle
“In the old days, like last year, I would have known exactly what to do. I would have called him in a week to tell him what a pleasant time I’d had, and without hesitation, I would have asked him to join me at a movie or a play or a party or some other event. I would have expected him to be tickled. Now I’m not so sure.”
Read MoreChild
“‘My love for Zoe and Robin has a physical, tangible quality that grounds me. Their existence makes me feel connected to my mate, to the rest of the world, to the past and the future; it has nothing to do with who they are or what they do. This feeling hit me like a ton of bricks the minute I saw Zoe and has never gone away. It’s with me all the time, like some secret good news.’ These sentiments came to me last night by fax, a midnight gift from a Philadelphia friend. I had another opener ready, but I pressed the delete button on my computer and sent it reeling into oblivion. Unconditional love ought to be this simple, this instinctual, I think—a present bestowed at birth, with no dangerous pieces to swallow. Quite the opposite is often true.”
Read MoreLos Angeles Times Magazine
“Joan has never been a hesitant shopper. Everything she chooses is the biggest, and with good reason: She and her husband, Tino, have 13 children, nine of whom live at home. Out of mammoth cardboard cartons, she plucks heavy packages as if they were weightless. Although she is only 5 foot 1, she seems to have the strength of 10, the kind of muscle that comes not from Nautilus equipment, but from lifting toddlers and infants, often simultaneously, for years.”
Read MoreThe New York Times Magazine
“Why, as I edge toward the end of my 40’s, has so much of what I know become impossible to access on demand? Where are the thoughts that spring forth in the shower but evanesce before they can be recorded, the mental lists that shed items on the way to the supermarket? The names of books and movies, actors and authors, le mot juste, the memory of social plans agreed upon in some calendarless situation — what have become of these?”
Read MoreNew York Magazine
“From their front window on Saturday mornings, the couple saw a stream of well-dressed people, the men in yarmulkes, on the sidewalks of West End Avenue. One day, the Goldsteins followed them to Lincoln Square Synagogue; they were astonished to find it was an Orthodox shul. When they’d think of Orthodoxy, they’d think of the diamond district, of 47th Street Photo. Where were the long black coats and black hats? The crowd that gathered in front of the synagogue on Saturday morning was affluent and attractive. These people seemed to having a wonderful time. The Goldsteins signed up for a course called Basic Judaism.”
Read MoreO, The Oprah Magazine
“With antidepressants now being used to treat not only depression but an ever- expanding variety of conditions (shyness, eating disorders, premature ejaculation, sexual addictions, smoking, premenstrual syndrome), they’ve almost gained the status of all-purpose wonder drugs. As Andrew Solomon, the author of The Noon- day Demon, a brutally honest and much-heralded tome on depression, noted in a recent article, there are “people with an inflated idea of how happy we should be, who want to medicate away their personalities.” My question is: At what cost?”
Read MoreThe New York Times Magazine
“Life imitates television. The comparison shoppers of “The Price is Right” meet the impulse shoppers of “Sale of the Century.” A woman wearing a self-satisfied grin loads her cart with six reproduction Louis XIV dining-room chairs with needlepoint seats. “I’ve been looking for these for years,” she gloats, “and here they are, for $125 each.” Another woman says, with a sigh, “I stand in the aisles anticipating turns in my life. I think, ‘I might someday need a snowblower.’”
Read MoreMore Magazine
“Several days later, as I walked through the front door of her freshly renovated suburban office, she greeted me as warmly as if I were entering her home. Dressed in casual cords and a nice sweater, she looked like a college girl, even though she’s 44. Within moments, we were chatting like longtime girlfriends, swapping stories of kids and career paths. Here’s what I noticed right away: There was no professional firewall between us, no ‘You are the patient and I am the doctor, and you will stand in awe of my white coat.’”
Read MoreMore Magazine
“For years, compounding pharmacies were few and far between. But during the early 2000s, the backlash against [hormone therapy] presented an opportunity for compounding pharmacies to greatly expand their business by offering bio-identicals. The bioidentical drugs fit nicely into the zeitgeist, which was characterized by the public’s distrust of big pharmaceutical companies, an urge to go organic and the conviction that natural is better. No wonder women have often been willing to pay more for compounded hormones (about $58 for a month’s supply and rarely reimbursed by insurance) than commercial ones ($80 or more but usually covered by insurance carriers and so ultimately cheaper).”
(Note: In 2013, The Endocrine Society presented me with its award for Excellence in Science and Medical Journalism for my work on “The Hormone Hoax,” a project funded in large part by The Fund for Investigative Journalism.
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Center For Health Journalism
“At More, we wanted to better understand what such compounding pharmacies were offering, since without FDA regulation of their business practices, that remained unclear. We knew that the FDA had dismissed “bioidentical” as a meaningless marketing term. Mexican yams provide the molecules for all bioidentical hormone products, whether they are made commercially or formulated in a pharmacy’s back room. From a pharmacological standpoint – at least at the molecular level – there was no difference. But our main focus of the article was: Would the capsule contents reflect what the doctor had prescribed? We developed a study design to see what was inside the pills and a plan for a story that we hoped would help a lot of women and alter public policy.”
Read MoreNewYorker.com
“Zogenix proposed that Zohydro ER be approved to manage “moderate-to-severe chronic pain in cases in which a continuous, around-the-clock opioid is needed,” for twelve hours a day and months at a time—in other words, to deal with persistent and long-term pain, such as back pain, that shorter-acting opioids don’t cover as well. But given the concerns about abuse of painkillers and evidence of the complications that can result over the course of long-term treatments, how did Zohydro make it through the approval process?”
Read MoreNewYorker.com
“In Colonial times, if someone wanted a house built, he didn’t call on an architect; he hired, instead, a master builder, a carpenter, and a stonemason. The result was usually a rectangular box, as unadorned as a Puritan’s smock. The evolution of the American home, from those days to contemporary times, is the focus of a fascinating exhibition called “Selling the Dwelling: The Books that Built America’s Houses, 1775-2000,” on display and open to the public in New York’s Grolier Club, a private establishment for book collectors and scholars.”
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