New York’s July 15–28 Health Issue includes two special packages: The first is a deeply reported series of features on American health in a year with seismic medical breakthroughs, and the second centers political reporting, commentary, and analysis on the existential crisis Democrats are facing as the nation questions President Biden’s fitness for office.
For the issue, Olivia Nuzzi writes a startling feature on the conspiracy of silence to protect Joe Biden, Rebecca Traister interviews Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer on her sudden proximity to presidential politics, and Jonathan Chait writes on how Democrats will lose more than an election if they stick with Biden. In addition, Mark Jacobson reflects on aging as questions about President Biden’s health remains a matter of concern.
Half of all women in the United States have dense breast tissue, and Dyan Neary’s damning feature explains not only how mammograms fail to detect cancer in these patients, but why far more effective MRIs are rarely covered by insurance. Features editor Christopher Cox dives into the ways historic advances in immunotherapy research have led to promising cancer treatments, particularly one for glioblastoma, the most common type of malignant brain tumor. Cox spotlights researchers at Mass General in Boston whose immunotherapy clinical trial is showing remarkable success. Amelia Schonbek interviews ten people who discovered through 23andMe that they inherited the APOE4 gene variant from both their parents, significantly heightening their risk for Alzheimer’s. Also in the issue, Kristen Mascia talked to four people who appealed their denied insurance claims and won, and Joe Kloc explores how the rich die.
“We had already been thinking about how to address the fact that this health issue would drop in the middle of the presidential campaign, when the presidential debate put the health and age of the candidates in the center of the national conversation,” said New York’s executive editor, Genevieve Smith. The cover, part of the magazine’s tradition of special-issue political cartoons, depicts President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump on weighing scales during a medical exam. The photo-illustration by Martin Schoeller is based on source photographs of Trump by Seth Wenig and Biden by Mandel Ngan.