Photo Credit: Tobin  Is it possible for an epidemic to be invisible? Since 1991 the annual number of newly documented cases of thyroid cancer in the United States has skyrocketed from 12,400 to 62,450. It’s now the seventh most common type of cancer. Relatively little attention is paid to the butterfly-shaped thyroid gland that wraps around […]

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This past June, pulp novelist Brad Meltzer revealed that, while he was touring Secret Service headquarters for research on a White House thriller, agents shared with him what Meltzer called a “secret.” President Ronald Reagan packed heat. “It’s true,” they said. “A .38. Reagan used to hide it in his briefcase and take it on Air Force […]

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Photo Credit: Toby Marks I was covering a committee hearing in the Texas House 25 years ago when a legislator asked a witness an interesting question: “Are there any unintended consequences we’re not anticipating?” At the time, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, swept into office by evangelicals and Tea Partiers in 2014, was the host […]

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Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore Ben Carson was on the ropes at the last Republican debate. But it didn’t matter. By that time, his improbable run for the presidency was all but over. In fact, the campaign was already on life support the last week in December, when campaign manager Barry Bennett was sent packing, along […]

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  Photo Credit: Brian Stansberry Wade, as a symbolic force and active agent, straddles both the disciplining of women’s bodies through law and medicine and the brutalization of a criminalized underclass, largely delineated along racial lines, through the prison industrial complex. Wade’s surname, depersonalized, is now a metonym for patriarchy, but the association ought to extend […]

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