shared air

must read long-form feature on the progression of the cholera outbreak in haiti, the UN’s inadequate response and the expert predictions that didn’t go far enough 

Dr. Farmer said he kept thinking about the many water stations at the New York City Marathon: “That’s for a sport, for heaven’s sake. You’re telling me the giant humanitarian aid machine can’t do that in an epidemic?”

from nytimes “Global Failures on a Haitian Epidemic” by Deborah Sontag

from NYTimes: “Michelle Obama and the Evolution of a First Lady”

from nytimes:

Rihanna’s version of this sound dates to the club music of the early 1990s, an era in which she would have shone…

Like Jay-Z and Kanye West’s recent “Watch the Throne,”this album has major parts recorded in hotel rooms, a testament to the globalization and rootlessness of pop, to the outlandish prices of conventional studio time, to the desire to create in an environment of luxury, a liminal space with no repercussions.

this album is 100% percent crystal waters. ok maybe 70% but still a fun, fun album.

“When I moved here it was like a hotel. It was beautiful. Now it’s down to nothing,” Ms. Davis said, recalling the days when her son and D.J. Kool Herc, who was born Clive Campbell, were doing “their rapping thing” in the building’s community room. “But where should we go? We stay here and fight. I’m going to stay here till the bricks come loose.”

alice speri for nytimes “For Birthplace of Hip-Hop, New Life”

from NYTimes:

Mr. Weiner, 47, who was the representative for New York State’s Ninth Congressional District for 12 years, declined to be interviewed for this article — waving away a reporter at the hockey rink with the words, “I don’t have time for this tonight,” adding, “Find me in, like, March.” But friends and former colleagues say the energetic and social Mr. Weiner is unlikely to remain cooped up as he seeks to rebuild his life.

qaddafi’s never never land as seen through the lens of nytimes magazine.

from NYTimes:

Mr. Obama read from Psalm 46: “God is our refuge and strength,” which an aide said he chose because it spoke of perseverance. Mr. Bush, the wartime leader, read a letter from Abraham Lincoln to a widow who was believed to have lost sons in the Civil War.

Unlike Mr. Obama, Mr. Bush drew a cheer from those who remembered him shouting through a bullhorn atop the smoldering rubble. For Mr. Obama, Sept. 11 is perhaps a less wrenching experience, though it underpins what has become one of the great paradoxes of his presidency.

He is a Democratic leader who opposed the Iraq war and is pulling troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan but has, at the same time, notched up a record as a lethal, relentless hunter of terrorists.

He is a president who banned torture in the interrogationof suspected terrorists and pledged — unsuccessfully, so far — to close the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, but carried out more drone strikes in Pakistan in his first year in office than Mr. Bush did in his eight years.

interesting NYTimes’ profile on Rep. Tim Scott (R-SC).

From NYTimes: Sudanese Struggle to Survive Endless Bombings Aimed to Quell Rebels