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January 1997 Archives

January 20, 1997

Smoke Alarm: Death of Home Rule

I am reading an open letter slipped under my door by our neighborhood commissioner, a woman named Beth Kravetz. In the letter she reports on the local fire station at Tenley Circle on Wisconsin Avenue. The station is home to a pumper and a hook-and-ladder truck that cover a good stretch of predominantly white, mostly affluent Northwest Washington, D.C.

She writes that "true to the spirit of self-reliance," a group is forming in the virtual suburb surrounding American University to collect donations for the firehouse: among the items needed are three shower heads, eleven pillows, forty gym lockers, three space heaters, a dishwasher, three wall clocks, five air conditioners and four refrigerators.
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January 12, 1997

Breakthrough

IMPURE SCIENCE
AIDS, Activism, and
the Politics of Knowledge.
By Steven Epstein.
466 pp. Berkeley:
University of California Press. $29.95.

At the battleship-sized headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration, Oct. 11, 1988, is still remembered as the day Act Up scaled the walls. More than 1,000 demonstrators, many in Washington to view a display of the AIDS quilt, marched on the building in suburban Rockville, Md., to protest the policies of what Act Up and other radical AIDS groups then called the "Federal Death Administration." The AIDS activists were angered by the slow pace of drug approval; among patient-advocacy groups they were not alone in this view, but they were louder than the others.
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