The Ebola Wars” (P

For Immediate Release: October 20, 2014 Press Contacts: Natalie Raabe, (212) 286-6591 Molly Erman, (212) 286-7936 Ariel Levin, (212) 286-5996 How Genomics Research Can Help Contain the Outbreak In the October 27, 2014, issue of The New Yorker, in “The Ebola Wars” (p. 42), Richard Preston, author of the best-selling book “The Hot Zone”—inspired by a 1992 article he wrote for this magazine—reports from the front lines of American Ebola research, and looks at sci- entists’ efforts to map the genome of the virus. Preston also reports on the quest to save American Ebola survivors Nancy Writebol and Kent Brantly—the first human recipients of the experimental drug ZMapp—and details the tragic loss of Dr. Sheik Humarr Khan, of the Kenema Government Hospital, in Sierra Leone, a specialist in viral hemorrhagic diseases, who died without receiving an experimental treatment. The current Ebola crisis marks “the most dangerous outbreak of an emerging infectious disease since the appearance of H.I.V., in the early nineteen-eighties,” Preston writes. According to Preston, the virus seems to have gone beyond the threshold of outbreak and ignited an epidemic. “Right now, the virus’s [genetic] code is changing,” Preston writes. “As Ebola enters a deepening relation- ship with the human species, the question of how it is mutating has significance for every person on earth.” This summer, a team at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, led by Pardis Sabeti, an associate professor of biology at Harvard Uni- versity, sequenced the RNA code of the Ebola strains that lived in the blood of seventy-eight people in and around Kenema during three weeks in May and June, just as the virus was first starting to form chains of infection in Sierra Leone. Their findings—which provided around two hundred thousand individual snapshots of the virus—showed that Ebola can be analyzed in real time. “This virus is not a sin- gle entity,” Sabeti tells Preston. “Now we have an entry into what the virus is doing, and now we can recognize what we are battling with at every point in time.” Speaking of Dr. Khan’s death, Sabeti tells Preston, “I can’t even begin to describe the feeling of loss for the world.” The world’s supply of ZMapp—a cocktail of three antibodies grown in tobacco plants—is temporarily exhausted. More of the drug is growing, and, if there are no glitches in the process, twenty to eighty more treatment courses are expected in the next two months. “The drug re- mains untested, and nobody can say whether it will ever become a weapon in the Ebola wars,” Preston writes. In addition to ZMapp and other drug candidates, there are currently vaccines in development. “It seems possible that some time next year a vaccine may be available for use on people who have already been exposed to Ebola, though it will still not be cleared for general use,” Preston writes. “If a vaccine shows effectiveness against Ebola, and if it can be transported in the tropical climate without breaking down, then vaccinations against Ebola could someday begin.” The President Considers His Judicial Legacy In “The Obama Brief ” (p. 24), Jeffrey Toobin, through an in-depth interview with President Barack Obama, explores his judicial legacy vis-à-vis his influence on the federal courts. “To the extent that there is an Obama legal legacy, it largely centers on gay rights and voting rights, sub- jects that the President addresses more with caution than with passion,” Toobin writes. Toobin asked Obama to name the best Supreme Court decision of his tenure. “In some ways, the decision that was just handed down to not do anything about what states are doing on same-sex marriage may end up being as consequential—from my perspective, a positive sense—as anything that’s been done,” Obama says. “Because I think it really signals that although the Court was not quite ready—it didn’t have sufficient votes to follow Loving v. Virginia and go ahead and indicate an equal-protection right across the board—it was a consequential and powerful signal of the changes that have taken place in society and that the law is having to catch up.” (In the Loving decision, from 1967, the Court held that states could no longer ban racial intermar- riage.) Obama, speaking to Toobin about his judicial appointees, says, “The bulk of my nomi- nees, twenty years ago or even ten years ago, would have been considered very much centrists, well within the mainstream of American jurisprudence, not particularly fire-breathing or ideo- logically driven. So the fact that now Democratic appointees and Republican appointees tend to vote differently on issues really has more to do with the shift in the Republican Party and in the nature of Republican-appointed jurists. Democrats haven’t moved from where they were.” Toobin asked Obama if he entertained thoughts of serving as a judge later in his career, as Wil- liam Howard Taft did. “When I got out of law school, I chose not to clerk,” Obama says. “Partly MARK ULRIKSEN because I was an older student, but partly because I don’t think I have the temperament to sit in a chamber and write opinions.” But, according to Toobin, he sounded tempted by the idea. “I love the law, intellectually,” Obama says. “I love nutting out these problems, wres- tling with these arguments. I love teaching. I miss the classroom and engaging with students. But I think being a Justice is a little bit too monastic for me. Particularly after having spent six years and what will be eight years in this bubble, I think I need to get outside a little bit more.”’ Note: a transcript of Jeffrey Toobin’s interview with President Obama is available on newyorker.com. Billy Joel Lives on Long Island, Still Rules the Garden In “Thirty-Three Hit Wonder” (p. 54), Nick Paumgarten profiles the tunesmith and performer Billy Joel, who—despite the fact that he hasn’t released a new pop album since 1993, and despite a limited number of performances—was one of the highest-grossing pop acts of the summer, just behind One Direction, Jay Z and Beyoncé, and Justin Timberlake. In 2010, Joel told his band he was taking a break. “Turning sixty, the end of his marriage to Katie Lee, the hip pain: it was a combo platter of shit,” Steve Cohen, Joel’s longtime lighting man, tells Paumgarten. “It got really dark.” Cohen continues: “At the beginning of that break, I told everyone, ‘I think this is it.’ ” But it wasn’t. Joel returned to the stage for a Hurricane Sandy relief concert in 2012. “Watching on TV,” Paumgarten writes, “I realized that I hadn’t really thought much about Joel in years, yet here he was on a bill with the Stones, the Who, Bruce Springsteen, and Paul McCart- ney, and, on this occasion, anyway, and with respect, he was better than all of them.” Since the beginning of this year, Joel has been play- ing Madison Square Garden once a month. Joel tells Paumgarten that he intends to continue the so-called residency—which he com- mutes to by helicopter from his Long Island home—for as long as both ticket demand and his level of performance remain strong. According to Paumgarten, who spent time with Joel at home, there have been two Billy Joels: “the angry young man-cum-irrepressible tunesmith from the hitmaking days and the moody middle-aged millionaire Everyman” of the later years. “I’m not crazy about going into a recording studio and doing that kind of life again,” Joel says, adding, “I look back at the guy who was the recording artist, this Billy Joel guy, and I think, Who the fuck was that guy? He was very ambitious, very driven, and I don’t feel like that anymore.” Over the years, Joel said, Elton John would ask, “ ‘Why don’t you make more albums?’ And I’d say, ‘Why don’t you make less?’ ” He went on, “Some people think it’s because I’m lazy or I’m just being contrary. But, no, I think it’s just—I’ve had my say.” On his living-room piano, Joel played Paumgarten a selection of in- strumental pieces that he has been working on privately for years but that he has yet to record or even write down. Can a Pro-Life Platform Win Elections? In “The Intensity Gap” (p. 34), Kelefa Sanneh explores the influence of the Susan B. Anthony List, a small pro-life political organization that has emerged as a leading combatant in the abortion wars, and its president, Marjorie Dannenfelser. The S.B.A. List is “named for the pioneering feminist, and modelled on EMILY’s List, the powerful pro-choice organization, but it has little in common with most feminist groups; its sole aim is to abolish abortion,” Sanneh writes. “The S.B.A. List supports politicians who are pro-life . and, ideally, fe- male—the better to deflect the old but effective charge that the battle against abortion is necessarily a battle against the half of the popu- lation that might potentially undergo one,” Sanneh writes. The committee chooses a few important campaigns to support in each election season; this year, it plans to spend ten million dollars, an all-time high. Republicans’ skittishness around the topic of abortion has increased in recent years, as Democrats have accused the party of waging a “war on women.” Dannenfelser thinks that the Republican tactic on abortion should be to speak better, not less, and her ongoing message is to convince candidates that pro-life messages resonate with the electorate.

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