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Letter from Russia – Planet Kirsan

April 24th, 2006 | Posted in The New Yorker, Articles | No Comments
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Download the PDF Inside a chess master's fiefdom.
by Michael Specter

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov is not your typical post-Soviet millionaire Buddhist autocrat. He is the ruler of Kalmykia, one of the least well known of Russia's twenty-one republics. He also happens to be president of the Fédération Internationale des Échecs, or FIDE, the governing body of world chess. Ilyumzhinov functions a bit like the Wizard of Oz. Instead of a balloon, though, he uses a private jet. In Kalmykia, a barren stretch of land wedged between Stavropol and Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea, you can't miss the man: his picture dominates the airport arrivals hall, and billboards all along the rutted road that leads to Elista, the capital, show him on horseback or next to various people he regards as peers—Vladimir Putin, the Dalai Lama, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II. Read more »

A Reporter at Large – Political Science

March 13th, 2006 | Posted in The New Yorker, Articles | No Comments
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Download the PDFThe Bush Administration's war on the laboratory.
by Michael Specter

On December 1st, Merck & Company applied to the Food and Drug Administration for a license to sell a vaccine that it has developed to protect women against the human papillomavirus. HPV is the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United States; more than half of all Americans become infected at some point in their lives. The virus is also the primary cause of cervical cancer, which kills nearly five thousand American women every year and hundreds of thousands more in the developing world. Read more »

What Money Can Buy

October 24th, 2005 | Posted in The New Yorker, Articles | No Comments
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Download the PDF Millions of Africans die needlessly of disease each year. Can Bill Gates change that?
by Michael Specter

Each May, representatives from the hundred and ninety-two member nations of the World Health Organization travel to Geneva to set policies for the coming year. The assembly lasts a week, and the delegates often find themselves devoting as much of that time to politics as they do to matters of life or death. Read more »

The Kingdom

September 26th, 2005 | Posted in The New Yorker, Articles | No Comments
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Download the PDF In the court of Valentino.
by Michael Specter

June has never been an easy month for Valentino, the seventy-three-year-old Roman designer. But this spring was more frantic than usual. He introduced a new fragrance—V—and celebrated in New York at the end of May with a party that began at Bergdorf Goodman, continued at the Four Seasons, and ended, close to dawn, at Bungalow 8. Read more »

Higher Risk

May 23rd, 2005 | Posted in The New Yorker, Articles | No Comments
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Download the PDF Is there any way to prevent a deadly avian-flu pandemic?
by Michael Specter

Early last September, an eleven-year-old girl from Kamphaeng Phet, a remote village in Thailand, developed a high fever, a severe cough, and a sore throat. She lived with her aunt and uncle in a one-room wooden house—not much more than a hut on stilts. The family had fifteen chickens, which wandered freely beneath the plank floor, where the young girl often played and slept. Then, at the end of August, the chickens died. Read more »

A Reporter at Large – Nature’s Bioterrorist

February 28th, 2005 | Posted in The New Yorker, Articles | No Comments
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Download the PDF Is there any way to prevent a deadly avian-flu pandemic?
by Michael Specter

Early last September, an eleven-year-old girl from Kamphaeng Phet, a remote village in Thailand, developed a high fever, a severe cough, and a sore throat. She lived with her aunt and uncle in a one-room wooden house—not much more than a hut on stilts. The family had fifteen chickens, which wandered freely beneath the plank floor, where the young girl often played and slept. Then, at the end of August, the chickens died. Read more »

Personal Responsibility Dept: Nowhere

November 22nd, 2004 | Posted in The New Yorker, Articles | No Comments
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Download the PDF Larry Kramer delivered a long and fiery speech at Cooper Union last Sunday night. That, of course, was nothing new. Kramer, the playwright who founded the activist group ACTUP and was the signature voice of the age of AIDS, is famous for his fury: once, he and thousands of his supporters invaded St. Patrick's Cathedral during Mass; another time, they wrapped Jesse Helms's house in a giant yellow condom. Over the years, they hounded pharmaceutical companies and the government into developing and providing drugs and treatments. Read more »

The Devastation

October 11th, 2004 | Posted in The New Yorker, Articles | No Comments
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Download the PDF Since 1965, life expectancy for Russian men has decreased by nearly six years. And now there is AIDS.
by Michael Specter

The first days of spring are electrifying in St. Petersburg. The winters are hard and dark and long, and when the light finally returns each year thousands of people pour onto Nevsky Prospekt and into the squares in front of the Winter Palace and St. Isaac's Cathedral. Read more »

Fashion Cafeteria

September 27th, 2004 | Posted in The New Yorker, Articles | No Comments
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Download the PDF Where everyone goes in Paris after the shows are over.
by Michael Specter

One evening not long ago, I wandered down the Rue de Richelieu on my way to a Chinese restaurant called Dave, which is recommended regularly by people in the fashion business. Like many popular restaurants in Paris, reservations are hard to get at Dave. So I wasn't surprised to find a Complet sign hanging over the lacquered red door. Inside, though, the place was practically empty—there was just one couple, sitting at a table near the window. A rumpled, unshaven Chinese man of indeterminate age emerged from the kitchen. Read more »

Profiles: The Designer

March 15th, 2004 | Posted in The New Yorker, Articles | No Comments
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Download the PDF Miuccia Prada has a doctorate in political science. She calls herself a feminist. "I make clothes. It's silly. But it's my job." Read more »