Kevin Sack, Sheri Fink, Pam Belluck and Adam Nossiter; Photographs by Daniel Berehulak, How Ebola Roared Back. The New York Times, 29 December 2014. “For a fleeting moment last spring [2014], the epidemic sweeping West Africa might have been stopped. But the opportunity to control the virus, which has now caused more than 7,800 deaths, was lost.”
December 17, 2012
Operation Delirium: a secret Cold War chemical weapons testing program conducted by the US Army during the 1950s and ’60s
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.
May 6, 2012
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.