How Many Monicas?
“Anonymity here is airtight: As the [Central Park Medical Associates] office manager says, ‘We must have 50 patients named Bill Clinton.’”
--“Best HIV Test,” New York Magazine’s “Best of” Issue, May 4

It’s All Greek to Us
“[Cypriot Greek Orthodox Archbishop] Chrysostomos claimed that allowing a priest with AIDS to distribute communion would be the same as ‘infefcting someone with a contaminated needle.’”
--“Cypriot Archbishop Will Defrock Priest with AIDS,” Gay and Lesbian Times, May 4

Bare Jordan
“He may banter about condoms— he’ll never endorse them, he has said, because ‘they’re too small!’— but he seldom edges past PG-13.”
--Henry Louis Gates on Michael Jordan in The New Yorker, June 1

Too Many Pina Kolatas
“Deconstruct her stories and a familiar pattern begins to emerge. Upon re-interviewing the people she cites, it becomes evident that she appears to have decided before making her first call what her story will say…. Scientists who disagree with her are ignored, dismissed…. If Kolata’s reporting faults were only a reflection of her own journalistic short-comings, that would be bad enough. But to the extent that they reflect the attitudes of the Times, they suggest a policy that is anti-environment, pro-corporate and fundamentalist about scientific inquiry. On the subject of this story, her only spoken comment…was ‘my reporting speaks for itself.’”
--Mark Dowie on New York Times AIDS reporter Gina Kolata, “What’s Going Wrong with The New York Times’s Science Reporting?” The Nation, July 6