We are still considered controversial here  

Sorry for the lack of posts around here lately. We ended up leaving town suddenly and I wasn't in a position to post anything. It's too bad, too, because it was an incredible week in politics... more on that later, I guess).

Something I've been meaning to link to is this extended New Yorker profile on Grant Achatz, the chef behind Alinea, and his struggle with tongue cancer. It's a much more revealing piece than any I've seen before, full of insight into how the menu at Alinea comes together but also the kinds of choices cancer can put in front of you.

One thing really annoyed me about the article though:

The main risk factors for cancer of the "oral tongue," as the forward two-thirds of the organ are called, are alcohol and tobacco. Achatz never smoked or drank heavily, but his life style wasn’t exactly healthy. At Trio, he ate poorly, drank ten Diet Cokes a day, and worked long hours, sometimes as many as ninety a week. (When a local magazine featured Achatz and asked him to name "one thing that's overrated," his response was "Sleep.")

What possible reason could there be for implying that Achatz's unhealthy lifestyle led to this cancer? Is the author just trying to fit this workaholic picture in somewhere in the piece? It's really irresponsible, for one thing, to take a scientific finding and expand it casually like this. But it also seems to come out of a larger view of disease that looks for ways to blame the patient.