NPR’s Ailsa Chang talks with Charles Tatelbaum, director at Tripp Scott law firm, about what the Purdue Pharma settlement would mean for the company, the plaintiffs and the Sackler family.
USWNT soccer star Carli Lloyd was invited to play in an NFL pre-season game after nailing a 55-yard field goal during a Philadelphia Eagles practice.
Ibibio Sound Machine performing in the Pool Recording Studio in London
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Kimberly Junod/WXPN
British-born singer Eno Williams grew up in Nigeria, where her family passed on storytelling traditions in the Ibibio language. Eno’s grandmother used to tease her, saying, “You always sing in English, when are you going to sing in Ibibio?” When Eno eventually came around to the idea, she noticed that the rhythms and melodies inherent in the language made it a perfect fit for songwriting. Now, in Ibibio Sound Machine, Eno fuses the language of her roots with the musical roots of her bandmates, who hail from Ghana, Trinidad, Australia and Brazil.
Ibibio Sound Machine’s music — and its very existence — is a unique testament to the global city where the members came together; London. We meet the band at the Pool Recording Studio in London to hear live performances of songs from its latest album, Doko Mien.
Donal Lunny playing an Irish bouzouki on January 23, 2008.
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When the Celtic rhythms go quiet on your radio, you can always stream great songs and tunes on ThistleRadio’s 24-hour music channel. Span the decades with classic tracks that are the bedrock of the playlist, together with some of the newer artist who are helping redefine the sound of today’s music from Celtic roots. Artists include Dougie MacLean, Donal Lunny and Loreena McKennitt.
Man Kaur of India celebrates after competing in the 100-meter sprint in the 100+ age category at the World Masters Games in Auckland, New Zealand, in April 2017.
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Michael Bradley/AFP/Getty Images
Man Kaur started running in 2009, when she was in her 90s — it was her son’s idea — and began racking up medals. We first wrote about her when she was 101. Is she still a track and field star?
At 103, Man Kaur is not only going strong, she’s getting others to follow in her footsteps.
India’s oldest female athlete is spending her summer coaching 30 young athletes.
Kaur and her 81-year-old son and trainer, Gurdev Singh, were invited for two weeks to several universities in Baru Sahib in the mountains of India, but their methods made such an improvement in the students’ performance, they were asked to stay through September.
Goats are curious animals and “Goats and Soda” is a curious blog. Over the next week, we’ll be looking back at some of our favorite stories to see “whatever happened to …”
Kaur famously follows a strict diet regimen designed by Singh including homemade soy milk and kefir, wheatgrass juice, nuts, lentils and chapatis made from sprouted wheat. That’s the kind of nutritional advice they’re sharing with the students.
This invitation came on the heels of Kaur’s participation in the World Masters Athletics Championships in Poland earlier this year, where she won gold in all four events she competed in: shot put, javelin, 60-meter dash and 200-meter run.
Though she was the only competitor in her age category for all four events, for the 60-meter dash, she had company from other categories: two sprightly 85-year-olds and three 90-year-olds. Though they weren’t competing for the prize in her age bracket, they ran alongside her (and eventually ahead of her).
At last year’s World Masters event, the diminutive great-grandmother, who is just under 5 feet tall, clinched the gold in the javelin throw as well as the 200-meter race.
In 2017, while participating in World Masters Games held at Auckland, she finished the 100-meter run in 74 seconds. “But in Poland she improved her speed and finished the 60-meter dash in 36 seconds and felt great. She thanked the Almighty who gave her enough courage to do this,” says Singh, who acts as an interpreter for his mother, who mostly speaks Punjabi.
Ten years after she first started running, Kaur still loves it, according to her son. She isn’t thinking of retiring and Singh says she still thinks she can improve her performance.
“She enjoys the company of her admirers,” her son adds. “Every time she participates, she feels proud that people around the world feel inspired.”
The year has not been all fun and games, though. Kaur was in the hospital with gallstones this August and her osteoporosis has been causing her back pain, says her son. Still, she loves winning and is happiest on the track, where she says she forgets all her ailments.
Next stop: Malaysia, where both mother and son will compete in their age brackets at the Asian Masters Athletics Championships in December.
Editor’s note: Now you may be thinking … is Man Kaur really 103? She doesn’t have proof of her age but her oldest child does. When her firstborn’s birth certificate was issued 83 years ago, Kaur was 20, so you do the math.
Chhavi Sachdev is a journalist based in Mumbai. Contact her @chhavi.
The Blooper Burger is a monstrous sandwich sold at Atlanta Braves games, and it has developed a cult following. The four cheeseburger patties are just the start of this $26 ballpark standout.
In The Vagina Bible, gynecologist Jen Gunter dispels myths about the female body.
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Hey, women: Dr. Jen Gunter wants you to understand your own vagina.
The California gynecologist is on a quest to help women get the facts about their own bodies. It isn’t always easy. In an era of political attacks on women’s reproductive choices and at a time when Internet wellness gurus are hawking dubious pelvic treatments, getting women evidence-based information about their health can be a challenge, she says.
But Gunter isn’t backing down.
“I’m really just trying to give women information so they can make informed choices,” Gunter tells NPR. “Misinformation is the opposite of feminism. Making an empowered decision requires accurate information.”
Gunter started her blog, Wielding the Lasso of Truth, almost 10 years ago, writing on topics that range from abortion politics to the risks to women who eat the placenta after childbirth (yes, really). She rose to Internet fame as she took on the very public task of debunking several treatments touted by Gwyneth Paltrow and her wellness empire, Goop — including $66 jade eggs designed to be inserted into the vagina and a treatment known as “vaginal steaming.” Gunter now writes a column about women’s health for the New York Times.
She spoke about her new book, The Vagina Bible, with NPR contributor and family physician Mara Gordon. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Gunter started a blog almost 10 years ago writing about women’s health topics. She now has a column on women’s health for The New York Times.
Jason LeCras
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Jason LeCras
The Vagina Bible is coming out at a moment where women’s reproductive health in the U.S. is a huge political issue. Yet this book is more clinical than political. What made you want to take this approach?
I found myself debunking the same myth over and over again: “No, you shouldn’t put yogurt in your vagina. No, you shouldn’t put garlic in your vagina.” I got really fixated on this idea that I wanted women to have a textbook so they could divorce themselves from the cacophony that’s online. … When I went through medical school, Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine was the internal medicine Bible. Williams Obstetrics was my obstetrics Bible. That’s how I referred to my resources that I went to over and over again.
You talk about how women are conditioned to think their vaginas are abnormal, saying, “There’s a lot of money in vaginal shame.” You argue that it’s related to marketing of procedures like vaginal rejuvenation, or expensive objects women are told to put in their vaginas, or cleansing gels and wipes they’re encouraged to use. What’s going on?
I have noticed a huge increase in what I can only describe as women being “vaginally hyperaware.” I did a fellowship in infectious diseases in 1995, and since then, I have specialized in vaginitis — irritation of the vagina. The number of patients, the percentage that I see, who have nothing physiologically wrong with them has increased dramatically.
What do they tend to be experiencing?
I would say odor, volume of discharge. … Then there’s also this group of patients who are convinced they have yeast infections. They definitely have something causing their symptoms that’s not yeast — usually chronic vulvar irritation. So what happens when someone comes in and the doctor can’t find anything wrong is that many doctors will just give antibiotics or give antifungals.
Do your patients ever feel like you’re dismissing or not believing their symptoms?
For so many years, women have had their symptoms dismissed. They’ve been told that their normal bodies are wrong. And so there are all these complex messages. I really try to pin down and ask them, “OK, so what’s your bother factor? And then let’s work it out from there.”
An interesting theme in the book is something I see in my own primary care practice: the “well, it can’t hurt” phenomenon. For example, a doctor might tell a woman to only wear white cotton underwear if she’s having recurrent yeast infections, because “Well, it can’t hurt, right?” Doctors suggest a lot of treatments that don’t have any evidence behind them. What’s going on?
I think that it’s really hard for doctors to say, “I don’t know.” That’s something that I learned being a parent of children who had unfixable medical conditions. [My] son has cerebral palsy, and [my] other son has a heart condition that can’t be fixed. … The most valuable thing, actually, a physician ever told me when I was struggling with my kids was, “You know, if we had better therapies to offer you, we’d be offering them to you.” And that was a really profound moment.
How do you approach this as a clinician, when you can’t offer your patients a quick-fix treatment with rigorous research behind it?
I actually have a lot of therapies for a lot of conditions that people think are impossible to treat. But I do get a lot of patients saying, “Is this the best you have?” And I say, “Yes. Yes, it is the best I have.” And I explain why.
Most people can understand the science behind what we’re offering. … The biggest issue is that we don’t have the time to explain it. If you’re only given seven minutes to explain to someone the complexities of chronic yeast infections — because actually, immunologically, it’s a little bit complex — the only way you can do it is in a horrible, patriarchal “Well, just do this” manner.
Let’s talk about your other specialty — women’s pelvic pain. Why is this so hard to treat?
Pain is so complex. When you explain it to patients, you have to be so careful, because it can sound like you are saying their pain is in their head, when that’s not what you mean. It’s in their nervous system. It’s physiologically very hard to explain.
Dealing with pain is very humbling as a physician. We’re really talking about improvement, not fixing. And that’s really very hard for people to accept. We have all of this cool medicine, all these advances, and we can’t fix pain. It’s frustrating.
Doctors don’t have a great track record of taking women’s pain seriously.
We know anxiety and depression amplify pain. It’s well-known. I work with a pain psychologist, and I’ll talk about mind-body medicine. When I say that, a patient often hears that I’m dismissing their pain. What I’m doing is actually taking it very seriously. … People come in and they want scalpels, right? They want a grand thing because when you have pain, it’s huge, it’s all-consuming. And you come in and you hear, “Wait, what? Physical therapy? And managing my anxiety? How can you fix my huge problem with these seemingly little things?” So when you have a huge problem, you think that you need a huge solution, like surgery, like an MRI, because those are big.
We doctors have had a strictly biomedical model for disease for a long time. It’s a pretty recent development that we consider sex, relationships, stress and even sexism within our purview. Do you feel like your patients are eager for you to address those things?
I think that women appreciate knowing the forces that led us here. … I want people to understand that the patriarchy has been everywhere. Medicine is part of everything. So of course medicine has patriarchy. … I personally don’t think that medicine is worse than anything else, but I do think that because medicine cares for people, we have the biggest duty to respond to it fast.
I think that a lot of women are really hungry for a woman physician to stand up and say, “Wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait. I know about women’s bodies. That’s not going to fly, because I know the physiology.”
What is the most absurd vaginal product that you’ve come across in your research?
Ozone getting blown into your vagina. It’s highly toxic for your lungs. … I can’t imagine what it does to your vagina.
Mara Gordon is a family physician in Camden, N.J., and a contributor to NPR. You can follow her on Twitter: @MaraGordonMD.
NPR’s David Greene talks to Courtney Nguyen, a tennis reporter and co-host of the No Challenges Remaining podcast, about the start of the U.S. Open tennis tournament.
Around 150 elite ultrarunners from across the world are in Milwaukee this week to clock as many laps during a six-day period as possible, with runners expected to reach upwards of 600 miles.
A statue of Althea Gibson sits in front of Arthur Ashe Stadium at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center during the first round of the US Open tennis tournament in New York.
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In a long overdue tribute to the first African American to break international tennis’ color barrier, a new statue of Althea Gibson was unveiled at the opening day of the U.S. Open.
The statue is comprised of five granite blocks and created by American sculptor Eric Goulder. It sits outside Arthur Ashe Stadium at the Billy Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens, New York.
In 1947, Gibson broke into the elite ranks of the tennis world winning the first 10 consecutive American Tennis Association women’s titles. (The ATA was the tennis equivalent of baseball’s Negro Leagues.) At the age of 23, Gibson became the first African American player to compete in the U.S. Nationals, the precursor to the U.S. Open, in 1950.
Between 1956 to 1958, Gibson made her mark. She won 11 majors, and was the first black player to win the French Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals. When she retired in 1958, she was the top-ranked woman in tennis having won more than 50 singles and doubles championships.
Perhaps because she was a star during a period when tennis champs made no real money and because she was a woman, more than a few people believe Gibson did not get all of the respect she earned as a trailblazer.
“Recognizing for me as an African American woman and recognizing what Althea stood for and understanding that she truly broke the color barrier for tennis – a lot of people think it’s Arthur [Ashe], but it was Althea 11 years before him,” said Katrina Adams, former president and CEO of the U.S. Tennis Association.
Adams, along with Billy Jean King, helped lead the campaign for the Gibson statue.
“I said, ‘She’s our Jackie Robinson of tennis and she needs to be appreciated for it, and she’s not,’ ” King told the Undefeated in 2018. “I wanted something there that was permanent. I didn’t want just a one-day highlight.”
“It’s about bloody time,” said Angela Buxton of Britain, who won the 1956 French and Wimbledon doubles championships with Gibson, referring to the statue as quoted by the Associated Press.
Buxton, who is Jewish, shared more than doubles titles with Gibson. She knew first hand what Gibson endured as a black competitor in a sport dominated then by white players.
“Althea, with her two ticker-tape parades, still wasn’t allowed into a hotel where the whites sleep or a water fountain to drink where whites drink, but she helped to break that down,” Buxton said.
After leaving the tennis world, Gibson had a brief career as a golfer, becoming the first African American woman to join the Ladies Professional Golf Association.
Etched on one of the granite blocks of the Gibson statue is a quote from her: “I hope that I have accomplished just one thing: that I have been a credit to tennis and my country.”
Gibson died in 2003 at the age of 76.
