In a post I wrote last week, I critiqued a cancer story in Esquire that I thought was sometimes misleading, sometimes wrong, and not very well written.
Today, the authors of the piece, Mark Warren (left, photo) and Tom Junod (right), responded. "Our story, which is entitled 'Patient Zero,' does not meet [Raeburn's] ideal of what science journalism should be; as such, he is free to criticize it," they wrote.
So far, so good. Then this: "What he is not free to do, however, is to turn his disapproval of our storytelling into an attempt to discredit us and our effort to obtain advanced medical care for a woman we care about deeply."
I scrambled back to my post to see where I'd discredited their effort to help a woman get care. I couldn't find it. I clicked back to Warren and Junod to read more:
Raeburn has a beat cop’s idea of what journalism can be — if he doesn’t understand something, he’s swinging the night-stick. What is it that Raeburn doesn’t understand? Well, two things. The first is writing, of which he’s clearly suspicious. The second, though, is humanity, which is what makes his entry into that most self-congratulatory journalistic genre — the online “takedown” — grotesque.
On the first point, I'm as suspicious of writing as I am of paychecks, and I've used one to get the other for quite some time. I can't argue with the second point; grotesquerie is in the eye of the beholder. And I would like to add a third thing I don't understand: Where are they getting this stuff?
While I was chewing on that, they mercifully shifted gears to attack something I had written, as opposed to things I hadn't. I wrote that the story's narrative crackled and its characters were richly drawn. Their response: "We'll take it, we'd normally say; but in Raeburn’s world, what seems like the language of praise is actually the language of dismissal. Our efforts to create a vivid portrayal of Stephanie Lee’s life and Eric Schadt’s science not only render us less than serious in Raeburn’s eyes; they render us suspect."
I'd like to claim credit for this subtle but devastating use of praise to indicate dismissal, but it was so subtle that I confess I was completely unaware of it. I foolishly thought I had used the language of praise to praise.
I also referred to an incident 12 years ago in which Junod wrote a profile of R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, in which he admitted making up half of it. The story doesn't say which half. Junod says it was originally published with an online annotation of the made-up stuff, but a republication of the story in January, 2013 contains no such annotation.
Junod now reassures us that "there are no contested facts" in the cancer story. That's a relief. What's sad is that he felt he needed to say so.
Warren is no help on that score either. Two years ago, he wrote a post about the recall of a book on President Obama's birth. No such recall occurred. Warren later added an editor's note in which he wrote, "for those who didn't figure it out yet, and the many on Twitter for whom it took a while: We committed satire this morning…" Translation: Warren made it up. The book is for sale on Amazon.
After I'd spent a few hours thinking about Junod's and Warren's rebuttal and tinkering with this post, I finally realized where the disagreement was. I read Junod's and Warren's story as a cancer story constructed around a patient undergoing treatment–a staple of magazine writing. Junod and Warren wrote what they thought was a story about helping a Mississippi woman get care for her terminal cancer.
They took my critique of the story as an attack on their efforts to help Stephanie Lee. I don't think anyone else would read my post that way, but Junod and Warren have a unique relationship to the story. It makes sense they might see things differently from all the rest of us.
The problem with their story is that it creates false hope. The likelihood that Lee will be helped by the treatment is very, very small. It is always small for experimental treatments, and especially so for the very first patient to receive the new treatment–which Lee is in this case. That's why they dubbed her "Patient Zero."
How do I know that Lee has unrealistic expectations? Junod and Warren told me. When she had surgery to remove cancer tumors, they write, "she didn’t ask about pain or recovery or risk. 'Please freeze my tissue so they can analyze it in New York' was the only thing she said." She thinks the treatment in New York is all that matters. She thinks it will save her life. The odds are overwhelming that it will not.
I missed two things in my first post. Because there was no date on the story, I guessed that it was in Esquire's December issue. A short video introduction by Warren confirms that it is. And in the video, Esquire calls this piece "the most extraordinary story we've ever published."
Among the people who have written for Esquire are Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Raymond Carver, Nora Ephron, Tom Wolfe, Michael Herr, and Gore Vidal.
"The most extraordinary story we've ever published"?
So they say.
-Paul Raeburn
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