Raffi Khatchadourian, Operation Delirium. The New Yorker, 17 December 2012. “Military doctors who helped conduct the [psychochemical] experiments [during the 1950s and ’60s] have long since moved on, or passed away, and the soldiers who served as their test subjects—in all, nearly five thousand of them—are scattered throughout the country, if they are still alive. Within the Army, and in the world of medical research, the secret clinical trials are a faint memory. But for some of the surviving test subjects, and for the doctors who tested them, what happened at Edgewood remains deeply unresolved. Were the human experiments there a Dachau-like horror, or were they sound and necessary science?” Companion piece to Operation Delirium: High Anxiety: LSD in the Cold War by Raffi Khatchadourian, The New Yorker, 16 December 2012. “For decades, the U.S. Army conducted secret clinical experiments with psychochemicals at Edgewood Arsenal. In the nineteen-sixties, Army Intelligence expanded the arsenal’s work on LSD, testing the drug as an enhanced-interrogation [torture] technique in Europe and Asia. This companion piece to “Operation Delirium”…documents the people who were involved and what they did.” Primary Sources : Operation Delirium, The New Yorker, 26 December 2012.
Operation Delirium: a secret Cold War chemical weapons testing program conducted by the US Army during the 1950s and ’60s
The Voter-Fraud Myth: The man [Hans von Spakovsky] who has stoked fear about imposters at the polls
Jane Mayer, The Voter-Fraud Myth. The New Yorker, 29 October 2012. From Jane Mayer’s Notes on Voter Fraud, The New Yorker, 1 November 2012: “[W]hat [Hans von Spakovsky] and other such fearmongers are stubbornly wrong about, and won’t acknowledge no matter how much evidence piles up, is that there is virtually no modern record of individual voters trying to steal elections by impersonating others at the polls. It is this phantom threat that has fuelled the push for voter-I.D. laws over the past few years…. [A] nationwide study of legal records undertaken by the reporting consortium News21 found a grand total of only seven convictions for this type of voter fraud since 2000.”
Prep-School Predators: The Horace Mann School’s Secret History of Sexual Abuse
Amos Kamil, Prep-School Predators: The Horace Mann School’s Secret History of Sexual Abuse. The New York Times Magazine, 6 June 2012. Behind the Cover Story: Amos Kamil on Sexual Abuse at Horace Mann: ” Penn State [2011] was the watershed moment for me personally. I reached out to a friend of mine who had talked about being abused at Horace Mann just to ask him how he was doing. And he said he wasn’t doing very well because of it. And he also said, “I wish someone would write about what went on at Horace Mann.” I found myself on the train the next day from New York to D.C., and I had my laptop, so I just wrote what I thought I knew the whole way down. And I looked up at the end of the trip and had written 30 pages.”
Playing With Fire: Chemical companies, Big Tobacco and the toxic products in your home
Patricia Callahan and Sam Roe, Playing With Fire: Chemical companies, Big Tobacco and the toxic products in your home. Chicago Tribune, 6 May 2012. Six-part series published between 6 May and 30 December 2012. This series won the Nieman Foundation’s 2012 Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Newspapers and was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. “The average American baby is born with 10 fingers, 10 toes and the highest recorded levels of flame retardants among infants in the world. The toxic chemicals are present in nearly every home, packed into couches, chairs and many other products. Two powerful industries — Big Tobacco and chemical manufacturers — waged deceptive campaigns that led to the proliferation of these chemicals, which don’t even work as promised.”
Winner of the 2013 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.
The Burger That Shattered Her Life: Trail of E. Coli Shows Flaws in Ground Beef Inspection System
Michael Moss, The Burger That Shattered Her Life. The New York Times, 3 October 2009. “Stephanie Smith, a children’s dance instructor, thought she had a stomach virus. The aches and cramping were tolerable that first day, and she finished her classes. Then her diarrhea turned bloody. Her kidneys shut down. Seizures knocked her unconscious. The convulsions grew so relentless that doctors had to put her in a coma for nine weeks. When she emerged, she could no longer walk. The affliction had ravaged her nervous system and left her paralyzed. Ms. Smith, 22, was found to have a severe form of food-borne illness caused by E. coli, which Minnesota officials traced to the hamburger that her mother had grilled for their Sunday dinner in early fall 2007.
Michael Moss and members of The New York Times Staff won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for nine articles published between 5 March 2009 and 9 February 2010 “for relentless reporting on contaminated hamburger and other food safety issues that, in print and online, spotlighted defects in federal regulation and led to improved practices.”
The Deadly Choices at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina
Sheri Fink, The Deadly Choices at Memorial. This article was a collaboration between The New York Times Magazine, 25 August 2009 and ProPublica, 27 August 2009. [This is] “the story of what happened at a New Orleans hospital cut off by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina…. The experiences of doctors and nurses during Katrina, [Fink] recognized, were emerging at the center of a quiet national debate certain to resonate in the decades ahead: What legal and ethical standards must doctors meet in a disaster such as a pandemic flu or terrorist attack? Who should be saved first? Who decides? To understand the pressures doctors and nurses faced, readers needed to know exactly what it felt like to be trapped in a sweltering hospital in a city that had descended into chaos.” Sheri Fink was one of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize Winners for Investigative Reporting.
The Great American Bubble Machine: Goldman Sachs
Matt Taibbi, The Great American Bubble Machine. Rolling Stone, From the Archives Issue 1082, 9 July 2009. (Dated 5 April 2010 online.) “From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression–and they’re about to do it again…. The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.”
For their own good: a St. Petersburg Times special report on child abuse at the Florida School for Boys
Ben Montgomery and Waveney Ann Moore, For their own good: a St. Petersburg Times special report on child abuse at the Florida School for Boys, Part 1. Tampa Bay Times, 17 April 2009. “The men remember the same things: blood on the walls, bits of lip or tongue on the pillow, the smell of urine and whiskey, the way the bed springs sang with each blow. The way they cried out for Jesus or mama. The grinding of the old fan that muffled their cries. The one-armed man who swung the strap. They remember walking into the dark little building on the campus of the Florida School for Boys, in bare feet and white pajamas, afraid they’d never walk out…. This story is based on more than 100 hours of interviews with 27 men who were sent to the Florida School for Boys in the 1950s and ’60s, and with current and former officials with the state, the school and the Department of Juvenile Justice. The interviews were supplemented with newspaper clippings, congressional and court testimony, archival photographs and other documents. Over five months, the reporters traveled to Marianna four times. Since launching its investigation, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has sealed access to the school, now called the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys.” Part 2: Ben Montgomery and Waveney Ann Moore, “For Their Own Good. Florida juvenile justice: 100 years of hell at the Dozier School for Boys.” Tampa Bay Times, 9 October 2009.
The Experiment: The military trains people to withstand interrogation. Are those methods being misused at Guantánamo?
Jane Mayer, The Experiment: The military trains people to withstand interrogation. Are those methods being misused at Guantánamo? The New Yorker, 11 July 2005. “From the beginning…the Guantánamo Bay prison camp was conceived by the Bush Administration as a place that could operate outside the system of national and international laws that normally govern the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody. Soon after September 11th, the Administration argued that the Guantánamo site, which America had been leasing from the Cuban government since 1903, was not bound by the Geneva Conventions. Moreover, the Administration claimed that terrorist suspects detained at the site were not ordinary criminals or prisoners of war; rather, they would be classified under a new rubric, “unlawful combatants.” This new class of suspects would be tried not in U.S. courts but in military tribunals, the Administration announced. ”