A defiant Wakefield after a General Medical Council ruling branded him dishonest in 2010. Photo / Getty Images
A defiant Wakefield after a General Medical Council ruling branded him dishonest in 2010. Photo / Getty Images
Welcome to the weekend.
Aucklanders will be celebrating their first weekend at level 2.5 after emerging from lockdown on Monday.
No matter where you are in the country though, make time to grab a cuppa and check out some of the best content from our premium international syndicators this week.
Anti-vax fraud: Exposing the doctor who fooled the world
Seldom has any new book been more timely than The Doctor Who Fooled the World. As its author says: "To understand where we are now with Covid, you need to know the past — to see how that anti-vaccine movement developed. If we don't learn from the past, and understand who the anti-vaxxers are and where they've come from, then we're not well placed to evaluate their messages. This is how we got here: through this man and what he did."
"This man" is Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced British doctor who fabricated evidence, published in The Lancet in 1998, to make a link between the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine and autism in young children, triggering a worldwide panic about the safety of vaccination.
Wakfield falsified medical records and doctored parents' accounts of symptoms to conceal the fact that some had displayed symptoms of autism long before receiving the MMR jab. Photo / 123RF
Breonna Taylor's life was changing. Then police came to her door
This was the year of big plans for 26-year-old Breonna Taylor. Her home was brimming with the Post-it notes and envelopes on which she wrote her goals. She had just bought a new car. Next on the list: buying her own home. And trying to have a baby with boyfriend Kenneth Walker.
Instead she was shot and killed by police in a bungled drug raid.
Interviews, documents and jailhouse recordings help explain how Taylor's ex-boyfriend's run-ins with the law entangled her even as she tried to move on.
A photograph in New York of Breonna Taylor, who was shot and killed by police officers in Louisville, Kentucky. Photo / Todd Heisler, The New York Times
Lie back, take it easy: Why we were born lazy
Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman is one of the world's leading experts on the human body, and kick-started the cult of ultra long-distance running. Which makes it all the more surprising that he now says that we were born to be lazy.
Sit back and put your feet up because it turns out, we're born to be lazy. Photo / Getty Images
Big oil is in trouble. Its plan: Flood Africa with plastic
Confronting a climate crisis that threatens the fossil fuel industry, oil companies are racing to make more plastic. But they face two problems: Many markets are already awash with plastic, and few countries are willing to be dumping grounds for the world's plastic waste.
The industry thinks it has found a solution to both problems in Africa.
A dump in Nakuru, Kenya. A trade group is pushing United States trade negotiators to demand a reversal of the country's strict limits on plastics. Photo / Khadija M. Farah, The New York Times
A vow of silence, a cabin in the woods, a terrible wildfire
Even for Last Chance, a rugged community in the forests above the Pacific Ocean where residents mill their own lumber and grow their own food, Tad Jones was particularly ascetic. He shunned electricity and plumbing. He once spent a year living in the hollow base of a redwood tree. For decades he took a vow of silence, scrawling in notebooks or on a tiny chalkboard when he had something to say.
If anyone could outsmart a wildfire, friends thought it would be Jones. But the fire outmanoeuvred him.
Tad Jones' charred minivan near where his body was found at the bottom of a ravine in Last Chance, California in August 2020. Photo / Thomas Fuller, The New York Times
The many sides to Dan Brown
Ever since his breakout with The Da Vinci Code, novelist Dan Brown has been renowned for his twisty, adrenaline-fuelled yet cerebral plots involving cryptography, symbology, smart and sexy lady sidekicks, secret and violent religious cults, and unhinged zealots bent on mass murder and destruction.
His new book, on the other hand, features a mouse conductor who recruits a menagerie of animals to perform in an orchestra. It will be released alongside a classical music album for children, called Wild Symphony, that was composed by Brown.
The author Dan Brown, at home in Rye Beach, New Hampshire. Photo / Cody O'Loughlin, The New York Times
Film crew spent 3 years in remote Balkan hamlet. Will they ever leave?
Director Ljubomir Stefanov and his colleagues have grappled with an ethical conundrum since finishing filming Honeyland. It's one that's long troubled documentary filmmakers. As observers, should they ever help their subjects? And as humans, how could they ever not?
Nominated for two Oscars, Honeyland charted the tensions between a hermitic beekeeper and her disorderly neighbours. Now the filmmakers are struggling to disentangle themselves from their subjects.
Hatidze Muratova, a beekeeper and the star of Honeyland, at her home in the remote mountain village of Bekirlija in North Macedonia. Photo / Laura Boushnak, The New York Times
Future of work: How managers are harnessing employees' hidden skills
Coronavirus has rippled across the world, taking hundreds of thousands of lives and changing many millions more.
One striking side-effect is that across many organisations, urgent necessity has become the mother of management invention.
The pandemic has ignited new initiatives, refreshed old ones, and compelled managers to reassess an approach still often based on being close to their staff.
As workers flee offices around the world, management has also had to become more flexible. Photo / Getty Images
'I am stuck until that border opens': Marooned in paradise
A home that long seemed like paradise is lately beginning to feel more like Alcatraz.
A 12-square-kilometre drop of land clinging to the southern end of British Columbia, Point Roberts is detached from the rest of Washington state. To reach the rest of the United States from Point Roberts requires two international border crossings with a 38km drive in between.
The isolation is both a blessing and a curse during a pandemic. Despite having no coronavirus cases to date, Point Roberts may be the last place in the United States to return to normal because the Canadian government has extended its international border closure.
To reach the rest of the United States from Point Roberts, Washington, requires two international border crossings with a 38km drive in between. Photo / Ruth Fremson, The New York Times
'A Hail Mary': Psychedelic therapy draws veterans to jungle retreats
There was a ghostlike quality to Rudy Gonsior, an American former Special Forces sniper, on the morning he arrived at a jungle retreat to see if a vomit-inducing psychedelic brew could undo the damage years of combat had done to his mind.
He was one of seven veterans who had come to western Costa Rica to try ayahuasca, a substance people in the Amazon rainforest have imbibed for centuries.
In 2007, Rudy Gonsior joined the Army Special Forces as a sniper. The fast tempo of missions left him feeling that he had joined a "cult of death," he said. Photo / Adam Ferguson, The New York Times
Jane Fonda, intergalactic eco-warrior in a red coat
At 82, Jane Fonda still has the same intensity that made her a two-time Oscar winner, an anti-war activist and an intergalactic sexpot. And a repeater.
The leg warmers. Barbarella. The Vietnam War. Tom Hayden and Ted Turner. And she's not done yet.
