|   We just published a story by freelancers Robert Fortner and Alex Park about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's role in the international response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. We've been working on it for months, and we asked Alex about it.How did this piece come about?When the Ebola epidemic was unfolding three years ago, I was writing about it from Mother Jones' DC bureau. The picture that I and just about everyone was seeing was that the organization charged with managing global health was hampered from the inside, and I wrote something saying as much and left the WHO story at that. But after we ran the story, I got a Tweet from Robert, who at the time, I didn't know at all, asking for some of my source material. Robert had a blog where he wrote about science and technology and global health, and I read some of it, and we started talking. We began to wonder if there might be a deeper story, about what role the Foundation -- which, until then, had said very little about Ebola -- had in the response. Given how powerful the Foundation is and -- let's face it -- how much money it has, it was natural to think they were at least speaking with the WHO and CDC during this time. So we filed several Freedom of Information Act requests for emails between the Foundation and the CDC, and once those came in about a year later, we knew we had a story. What was the most surprising thing you discovered while reporting this?
Personally, I was astonished by how much of WHO's resources were invested in eradicating polio prior to the Ebola epidemic. That such a large slice of WHO staff in Africa -- 38 percent in 2013-- were covered by polio funds is an indication of where its priorities really lie. WHO says these staff also help with routine immunizations, so they're not only working on polio eradication. But one way of looking at this is that WHO depends on voluntary donations, earmarked for polio eradication, to support its basic mission.What was the hardest thing about the reporting, writing, or editing process?There wasn't one moment when WHO suddenly became dysfunctional and the Gates Foundation became the agenda setter in global health. It happened one step at a time over years and years. Keeping track of the details of this slow change, which often looked insignificant, without losing sight of the bigger picture of this shift happening in the foreground was definitely hard. Did you learn anything that could help other writers or reporters?Just to deal with the deluge of material, we kept a timeline with names, quotes, links where we could make a note of pretty much every event, however small, that was relevant in the scope of our story. At first it was just a place to dump material, but for this story, where there are so many events over years, and the timing of a decision can say as much as the decision itself, the timeline became an essential resource. When we started working on a first draft, the timeline was 13 pages and almost 4,000 words long. While we were writing the story, we could always come back to it to make sense of certain details, and see what else was happening at that time. Anything else you want readers to know?Robert and I have both written about the Gates Foundation before, and we've been criticized for writing about an organization that does a lot of good in unflattering ways. We recognize the Gates Foundation does good work. But it's an enormously powerful institution, and like all powerful institutions, it deserves scrutiny. Love,
Nick (who used to work with Alex) and Sam The three can't-miss must reads this week Duterte, who took office in June 2016 after promising to kill tens of thousands of drug users and other criminals, has overseen a campaign of extrajudicial murder that has taken the lives of thousands of Filipinos, almost none of whom had actually been convicted of capital crimes.
In person, Thompson is soft-spoken, polite and reluctant to talk about himself. When we met at a restaurant near 30 Rock one afternoon in January, he wouldn’t even eat his chicken wings until the official interview had ended for fear of seeming rude. During our conversation, he admitted that he quietly struggled with himself during those early years at SNL.He couldn’t find his voice, and the situation led to panic and uncertainty. He had difficulty watching himself on screen. In a moment of frustration, Thompson said, he asked his manager, “Why you even got me on this fucking show?”
What bullets do to bodies The first thing Dr. Amy Goldberg told me is that this article would be pointless. She said this on a phone call last summer, well before the election, before a tangible sensation that facts were futile became a broader American phenomenon. I was interested in Goldberg because she has spent 30 years as a trauma surgeon, almost all of that at the same hospital, Temple University Hospital in North Philadelphia, which treats more gunshot victims than any other in the state and is located in what was, according to one analysis, the deadliest of the 10 largest cities in the country until last year, with a homicide rate of 17.8 murders per 100,000 residents in 2015.
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