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For subscribers to the print edition, this article spans 40 pages and space in the issue is dedicated to little else. I haven’t worked through the entire thing

For subscribers to the print edition, this article spans 40 pages and space in the issue is dedicated to little else. I haven’t worked through the entire thing yet to decide if this is due to the gravity of the reporting or is typical of an end-of-year slowdown at the publisher.

zeofig 6y ago
40 pages! That's intriguingly long. There's also a nice audio version.
- rgovostes 6y ago
  Yes, if you have 3.5 hours to spare!
  - joegahona 6y ago
    Yeah, that Audm player sucks. No controls to make it play at 1.5x or anything.
    - JZL003 6y ago
      Because I do this trick a lot of places, almost all these players use the default <video> tag of the browser for the actual decoding/playback. So you can use that tag's control's manually even if they don't give a button So for this, something like: $("video").playbackRate = 2 or whatever. It's nice even for players with controls (like YT) if you want more than 2x speed Also you can just look at the video tag's internal URL and just download and play however, offline :)
      - _nalply 6y ago
        I tried that out on Firefox and the maximum speed is about 12x. At about 5x you lose sound.
        JZL003 6y ago
        Hah! Nice, I've never experimented that far. I seem to remember even audacity had trouble with >4x speed (but don't remember if I just couldn't keep up at all, or if it was just choppy quality)
        _nalply 6y ago
        You need to resample sound. If you play sound faster everything will sound higher like Mickey Mouse. At 2 or 4 times the speed I think is a simple step, just omit every two or three of four samples. Anyway, this gives different distortions. I am Deaf so I don't hear the distortions but I understand sound in a mathematical way. At a sampling rate of 44.1k the highest representable sound is about 22kHz. At 4 times the speed this is only the fourth of it, about 5500 Hz. If higher sounds aren't filtered they will wrap around and re-appear as low frequency sounds. I imagine that this sounds very weird. And for n not being a power of two or at 8 times or more, you need to resample sound. Transform the samples into the frequency domain and back into the time domain but sped up. This is quite a mathematically heavy operation and probably there are other limits I don't know of.
andirk 6y ago
Give us the 5 paragraph essay summary! Although 2021 will also be the plague year.
- Exmoor 6y ago
  I know you're mostly joking, but here were some of the takeaways I took from the article: * China lied about the virus. They banned investigators from outside the country and tried to cover everything up. Experts knew they'd lied previously about SARS, but rather than assuming the worst they more or less assumed it probably wouldn't be a big deal. * The FDA completely dropped the ball on testing kits and it took an incredibly long time to resolve the issue. Its unclear that people in power even realized this. Back in January and February when we were hearing about a case here, a case there there was almost certainly rampant community transmission and death occurring. * CDC leaders were very slow to consider that the virus might transmit through the air. This led to the early advice being misguided (6ft of distancing and washing your hands protects you) and just flat out wrong (wearing a mask does nothing). * Inside the executive branch, people who gave bad news were forced out and people who gave good news got promoted. Predictably this made things much, much worse.
  - gen220 6y ago
    I read the article, and agree with this summary fwiw. I would also emphasize that, in terms of personal culpability, Secretary Alex Azar of the Department of Health and Human Services comes out looking very poor. (Mnuchin was also the speaker of some, in retrospect, appalling secondhand quotes). The article points out that Azar is the director of both the FDA and the CDC, and should have played a more active role in orchestrating their handshakes in February. Misunderstanding and miscommunication between the FDA and CDC were responsible for the absurd delay in widely-available testing, which otherwise should have been available in med-February. Not only was he aware of problems early on, he didn't properly communicate them up (to Trump, which contributed to Trump's belief that the whole thing would blow over), or manage them down. This is my reading, as a disclaimer, not an explicit statement from the article. I recommend people read it for themselves.
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
Somebody on Titter mentioned that the initial submission was 7X,000 words, and they cut it down to half that to fit within a single issue.
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  I hope this original is published as a book. (This is actually fairly common for journalism in the New Yorker.)
teeray 6y ago
While I get that some folks like The New Yorker’s long-form content, I would greatly appreciate a Cliff Notes version of many of their articles.
pdar4123 6y ago
Read it, listen to it, share it, discuss it. This is one of the most important pieces of journalism in American history.
sdenton4 6y ago
My understanding is that they have very rarely done this; John Hersey's pulitzer prize winning article on Hiroshima was one of the few other examples of dedicating the entire magazine to a single article. So, "gravity" all the way. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_(book) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_(book)
- overlordalex 6y ago
  For anyone who is interested, the article is available to read online https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima Here is the most recent time it was posted (5 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24101712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24101712
  - dan-robertson 6y ago
    There’s also another article from 1985 by Hersey on the same people and the long-term aftermath 30 years on
  - harrydehal 6y ago
    Thank you for sharing -- last summer in August 2020, PBS Newshour also covered a new book about Hersey and 75 years from the Hiroshima bomb: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-intrepid-journalist-who-exposed-hiroshimas-horror https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-intrepid-journalist-wh... And here's the book, "Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World" https://www.amazon.com/Fallout-Hiroshima-Cover-up-Reporter-Revealed/dp/1982128518 https://www.amazon.com/Fallout-Hiroshima-Cover-up-Reporter-R...
deleted 6y ago
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zeofig 6y ago

40 pages! That's intriguingly long. There's also a nice audio version.

rgovostes 6y ago
Yes, if you have 3.5 hours to spare!
- joegahona 6y ago
  Yeah, that Audm player sucks. No controls to make it play at 1.5x or anything.
  - JZL003 6y ago
    Because I do this trick a lot of places, almost all these players use the default <video> tag of the browser for the actual decoding/playback. So you can use that tag's control's manually even if they don't give a button So for this, something like: $("video").playbackRate = 2 or whatever. It's nice even for players with controls (like YT) if you want more than 2x speed Also you can just look at the video tag's internal URL and just download and play however, offline :)
    - _nalply 6y ago
      I tried that out on Firefox and the maximum speed is about 12x. At about 5x you lose sound.
      - JZL003 6y ago
        Hah! Nice, I've never experimented that far. I seem to remember even audacity had trouble with >4x speed (but don't remember if I just couldn't keep up at all, or if it was just choppy quality)
        _nalply 6y ago
        You need to resample sound. If you play sound faster everything will sound higher like Mickey Mouse. At 2 or 4 times the speed I think is a simple step, just omit every two or three of four samples. Anyway, this gives different distortions. I am Deaf so I don't hear the distortions but I understand sound in a mathematical way. At a sampling rate of 44.1k the highest representable sound is about 22kHz. At 4 times the speed this is only the fourth of it, about 5500 Hz. If higher sounds aren't filtered they will wrap around and re-appear as low frequency sounds. I imagine that this sounds very weird. And for n not being a power of two or at 8 times or more, you need to resample sound. Transform the samples into the frequency domain and back into the time domain but sped up. This is quite a mathematically heavy operation and probably there are other limits I don't know of.

andirk 6y ago

Give us the 5 paragraph essay summary! Although 2021 will also be the plague year.

Exmoor 6y ago
I know you're mostly joking, but here were some of the takeaways I took from the article: * China lied about the virus. They banned investigators from outside the country and tried to cover everything up. Experts knew they'd lied previously about SARS, but rather than assuming the worst they more or less assumed it probably wouldn't be a big deal. * The FDA completely dropped the ball on testing kits and it took an incredibly long time to resolve the issue. Its unclear that people in power even realized this. Back in January and February when we were hearing about a case here, a case there there was almost certainly rampant community transmission and death occurring. * CDC leaders were very slow to consider that the virus might transmit through the air. This led to the early advice being misguided (6ft of distancing and washing your hands protects you) and just flat out wrong (wearing a mask does nothing). * Inside the executive branch, people who gave bad news were forced out and people who gave good news got promoted. Predictably this made things much, much worse.
- gen220 6y ago
  I read the article, and agree with this summary fwiw. I would also emphasize that, in terms of personal culpability, Secretary Alex Azar of the Department of Health and Human Services comes out looking very poor. (Mnuchin was also the speaker of some, in retrospect, appalling secondhand quotes). The article points out that Azar is the director of both the FDA and the CDC, and should have played a more active role in orchestrating their handshakes in February. Misunderstanding and miscommunication between the FDA and CDC were responsible for the absurd delay in widely-available testing, which otherwise should have been available in med-February. Not only was he aware of problems early on, he didn't properly communicate them up (to Trump, which contributed to Trump's belief that the whole thing would blow over), or manage them down. This is my reading, as a disclaimer, not an explicit statement from the article. I recommend people read it for themselves.

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago

Somebody on Titter mentioned that the initial submission was 7X,000 words, and they cut it down to half that to fit within a single issue.

howlgarnish 6y ago
I hope this original is published as a book. (This is actually fairly common for journalism in the New Yorker.)

teeray 6y ago

While I get that some folks like The New Yorker’s long-form content, I would greatly appreciate a Cliff Notes version of many of their articles.

pdar4123 6y ago

Read it, listen to it, share it, discuss it. This is one of the most important pieces of journalism in American history.

sdenton4 6y ago

My understanding is that they have very rarely done this; John Hersey's pulitzer prize winning article on Hiroshima was one of the few other examples of dedicating the entire magazine to a single article. So, "gravity" all the way. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_(book) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_(book)

overlordalex 6y ago
For anyone who is interested, the article is available to read online https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima Here is the most recent time it was posted (5 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24101712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24101712
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  There’s also another article from 1985 by Hersey on the same people and the long-term aftermath 30 years on
- harrydehal 6y ago
  Thank you for sharing -- last summer in August 2020, PBS Newshour also covered a new book about Hersey and 75 years from the Hiroshima bomb: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-intrepid-journalist-who-exposed-hiroshimas-horror https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-intrepid-journalist-wh... And here's the book, "Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World" https://www.amazon.com/Fallout-Hiroshima-Cover-up-Reporter-Revealed/dp/1982128518 https://www.amazon.com/Fallout-Hiroshima-Cover-up-Reporter-R...

deleted 6y ago

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