This week in the magazine, the novelist Rivka Galchen goes back to Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, where she did her medical residency, and writes about a doctor she had a rotation with, Dr. Joseph Lieber. In this week’s New Yorker Out Loud podcast, she and Jerome Groopman, who writes about medical issues for the magazine, talk about the training of doctors and about medical writing: http://nyr.kr/10d7TyT

Cartoon by Peter C. Vey. For more: http://nyr.kr/Zp1f7S

Is there a downside to clean hands? In this week’s issue, David Owen writes about the rise of Purell, and looks at the hand-cleaning transformations to come in both our everyday lives and in the medical world (subscription required): http://nyr.kr/YhTvGh

In this week’s issue, John Colapinto writes about Dr. Zeitels, who’s performed vocal chord surgery on Adele, Roger Daltrey, and other notable singers. Here, Colapinto considers the claim by many that Adele has “seemed a little restrained” in her recent performances at the Oscars and the Grammys, and writes, 

I wonder whether Daltrey and others who have detected tentativeness are not projecting their own anxieties onto Adele, knowing that those extraordinary vocal cords were once laid open by the surgeon’s scalpel, and knowing that Adele knows it… That we see, or think we see, restraint or fear makes me understand why singers keep vocal problems a secret. 

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/Y16RVj 

Michael Specter reflects on the influence of C. Everett Koop, former surgeon general who died yesterday: http://nyr.kr/13elk8o

And here, a look at what the magazine had to say about Dr. Koop on the occasion of his retirement, in August, 1989: http://nyr.kr/XVlnRe

(Source: newyorker.com)

In this week’s issue, Michael Specter profiles Dr. Mehmet Oz, and looks at some of the controversial ideas that he entertains on his show: “Much of the advice Oz offers is sensible, and is rooted solidly in scientific literature,” Specter writes. “That is why the rest of what he does is so hard to understand…

“…Oz has been criticized by scientists for relying on flimsy or incomplete data, distorting the results, and wielding his vast influence in ways that threaten the health of anyone who watches his show.”

Click-through to read “The Operator”: http://nyr.kr/W5c2Y0

Photograph by Ethan Levitas.

(Source: newyorker.com)

Cartoon editor Bob Mankoff reflects on aging and hypochondria in his newsletter this week:

I had some minor surgery a few weeks ago. Thanks, I’m fine. Completely routine—for the doctor…

For more cartoons, and more of Mankoff’s musings: http://nyr.kr/Vko41d

Bacteria make us sick. Do they also keep us alive? Michael Specter explores the human microbiome: http://nyr.kr/QWdsRR

For many years, when the term “rare gene mutation” appeared in a sentence along with “Alzheimer’s disease,” the news was reliably grim.  Today, for the first time, researchers have positive genetic news to report: there is a mutation, also rare, that appears to prevent people from getting Alzheimer’s.

Michael Specter puts this important find into perspective: http://nyr.kr/MjisdY

Follow the link for the story behind this week’s cover, “In Good Health” from artist Bob Staake, and for a slideshow of New Yorker covers that capture other Obama milestones: http://nyr.kr/N3Vdaq