Apparently, I'm not allowed to make public entries about the thing I really want to be talking about today (is blogging journalism? is a livejournal a blog? my head hurts.), so I'll take on the New Yorker instead.

One of the things that's struck me about all of the verbiage devoted to the Terri Schiavo case is that there's been very little mention of how she was reduced to a permanent vegetative state in the first place. Amidst the discussions from both left and right about whether a brain cavity filled with spinal fluid actually qualified as "life," why is "look, bulimia can kill you!" not being shouted from every rooftop? As one of the few publications that actually mentions the disease in conjunction with Schiavo, the esteemed New Yorker might have an answer for us. Hendrik Hertzberg writes, in the column "The Talk of the Town" for the April 4th issue (emphasis mine):

Terri Schiavo was born on December 3, 1963, near Philadelphia, the first of three children of Robert and Mary Schindler. As a teenager, she was obese--at eighteen, she weighed two hundred and fifty pounds--but with diligence she lost a hundred pounds, and by the time she married Michael Schiavo, in 1984, she was an attractive and vivacious young woman. By the end of the decade, she had moved with her husband to Florida, was undergoing fertility treatments, and had slimmed down further, to a hundred and ten pounds. On February 25, 1990, Terri suffered cardiac arrest, leading to severe brain damage. The cause was a drastically reduced level of potassium in her bloodstream, a condition frequently associated with bulimia.

Do I really even have to subject this to an analysis? Perhaps I do. All right, then. The above paragraph implies not only that a young woman who weighs two hundred and fifty pounds can be neither "attractive" nor "vivacious," but also the inverse, i.e., that losing a hundred of that two hundred and fifty pounds will automatically make you both of these things, even if you lose that weight through bulimia. Even worse, it reduces bulimia--a disease in which people starve themselves by self-induced vomiting or abuse of laxatives--to "diligence," and praises a dead woman for having the disease that killed her. A disease which it goes on to mention in the *very same paragraph*. Never mind that many healthy young women exist who are attractive, vivacious, *and* fat. Never mind that a young woman with bulimia, a disease which, among other things, causes feelings of ill health, is most likely anything but "vivacious." Never mind that one of the U.S.'s foremost magazines turned an opportunity to educate people about bulimia into a subtle propagation of the demonstrably false ideology that arguably killed the very person they were writing about.

Never mind that the truth about what science has learned about fitness and fatness--that there is no provable relationship between so-called obesity and poor health--is out there for anyone who wants to read about it:

• Big Fat Lies: The Truth About Your Weight and Your Health, by obesity researcher and exercise physiologist Dr. Glenn Gaesser
  
• Just the Weigh You Are: How to Be Fit and Healthy, Whatever Your Size, by journalist Linda Konner and physician Dr. Steven Jonas
  
• The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health, by attorney Paul Campos

It galls me that a staff writer and senior editor of the New Yorker can write prose this biased, and that none of the people who presumably edited his work even noticed. But what's even more sobering is the number of young women who are taking this in--just as they do all of the other subtle but persistent false messages about weight and health--and not noticing, either.

[Edited to add: Apparently, this review of Kirstie Alley's show "Fat Actress" is scheduled to appear in *next* week's New Yorker. I am beginning to sense a trend.]