So don’t mind if I fall apart There’s more room in a broken heart. -- Carly Simon, “Coming Around Again” When Will Armstrong emerges from heart surgery in just a few days, he will have weeks of hospitalization ahead. He will also have expensive new hardware in...
The young woman sitting across from me on the bus is in her mid-20s. She turns to her companion and her voice grows serious. “I know someone who died,” she says in the hushed tone reserved for tales of mortality. Her friend looks up from his phone. “He was a good...
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Daniel Cardone’s essential but relentlessly grim documentary about longtime AIDS survivors, Desert Migration, is fascinated with the bodies of the gay men it profiles. The film begins with lingering shots of each of the subjects as they begin their day. It follows...
When Sadiq Ali heard about a clinical trial for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) happening in the United Kingdom in 2013, the athletic 26-year old hesitated. He worried about what starting PrEP might say to people about his sexual behavior. The stigma he associated...
Stigma is insidiously quiet. It is conjured in the mind, born of discomfort and fear, and then it is projected at “the other” among us. It judges them and isolates them. And it happens without a sound. Stigma lets us take comfort in seeing things in others about...
Dr. Oz has a very strange verbal compulsion. He can't stop making lame metaphors. When taking an early morning jog with Charlie Sheen, in the first of their two-part interview for The Dr. Oz Show, the doctor sees metaphors everywhere. "You have to look down so you...
When he conducted the funerals, Tom Bonderenko tells me, he always wore his priestly garments and white stole. Even when no one showed up for the graveside service. “It was important to show dignity and respect,” Tom says. He taps the coffee cup in his lap nervously....
(I can't resist posting this each Holiday Season. The video below is my very favorite, of the more than 70 I have produced over the years. Enjoy!) My mother's home here in Shreveport, Louisiana, was fraught with excitement last week. Christmas decorations littered the...
This is a clever social media campaign: Healthline, an online health community, has asked people who have been living with HIV to create videos for those who have recently tested positive, known as "You've Got This." Think of it as "It Gets Better" for those with HIV....
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