A long trip on an American highway Lin the summer of 2024 leaves the impression that two kinds of billboards now have near-monopoly rule over our roads. On one side, the billboards, gravely black-and-white and soberly reassuring, advertise cancer centers. ("We treat every type of cancer, including the most important one: yours"; "Beat 3 Brain Tumors. At 57, I gave birth, again.") On the other side, brightly colored and deliberately clownish billboards advertise malpractice and personal-injury lawyers, with phone numbers emblazoned in giant type and the lawyers wearing superhero costumes or intimidating glares, staring down at the highway as they promise to do to juries.
A new Tocqueville considering the landscape would be certain that all Americans do is get sick and sue each other. We ask doctors to cure us of incurable illnesses, and we ask lawyers to take on the doctors who haven't. We are frightened and we are angry; we look to expert intervention for the fears, and to comic but effective-seeming figures for retaliation against the experts who disappoint us.
Much of this is distinctly Americanthe idea that cancer-treatment centers would be in competitive relationships with one another, and so need to advertise, would be as unimaginable in any other industrialized country as the idea that the best way to adjudicate responsibility for a car accident is through aggressive lawsuits. Both reflect national beliefs: in competition, however unreal, and in the assignment of blame, however misplaced. We want to think that, if we haven't fully enjoyed our birthright of plenty and prosperity, a nameable villain is at fault.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October 21, 2024-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October 21, 2024-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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MING HAN ONG
Thadeus had never offered to take Johnny Mac out for a meal before. This is new, Johnny Mac says, grinning. For twenty-five years, Johnny Mac worked as a tenant-rights lawyer. He is a fount of varied and surprising knowledge.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON'S CHOSEN PEOPLE
What a long-unpublished novel reveals about her magnificent obsession.
FEAR AND LOATHING
Are all our arguments really over who's harmed?
ODD JOBS
\"Severance,\" on Apple TV+.
ON A MISSION FROM GOD
Inside the movement to redirect billions of taxpayer dollars to private religious schools.
MAKE HIM LAUGH
How Lorne Michaels's sensibility governs \"Saturday Night Live.\"
TABULA RASA
“Bleb” is worth eight points in Scrabble. Thought you might like to know. I have known the word since Wednesday, June 11, 1958, when I learned it from a company physician at Time Incorporated, in Rockefeller Center. He said I should have been hospitalized four days ago, but there was nothing much to do about it now, go back to work.
WELCOME TO OUR FIRST/FINAL BOOK CLUB!
Thank you, everyone, for coming to our first/final book-club meeting. Apologies for how long it's taken us to settle on a date, but in between work, kids, and the pretense of joining adult recreational sports leagues, it seems that we all have incredibly busy schedules.
THE POISON MACHINE
The talk-show host Yinon Magal's hard-line tactics.
MEAN TIME
“Hard Truths.”
