About John Hoberman

In December 2004 a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs refused to recommend Procter & Gamble’s Intrinsa testosterone patch for female sexual dysfunction (FSD) in surgically menopausal women whose ovaries had been removed. The FDA panel found that administering testosterone to these patients would produce an average of one [...]

As the U.S. Congress prepares to renew its assault on anabolic steroid use among professional athletes at a hearing scheduled for May 18, longtime observers of doping control initiatives will recognize the selective indignation that continues to sensationalize the use of these drugs by athletes. The fact that certain groups of steroid consumers have been [...]

Last week’s US congressional hearings on steroids in baseball should be seen as the dying gasp of a failed exercise in social engineering. The idea that America’s national pastime can help to remedy our social ills acquired its credibility back in the 1940s and 1950s, when Major League Baseball (MLB) finally allowed black athletes to [...]

In 1957 the celebrated Parisian man-of-letters Roland Barthes published a short and clever essay called “The Tour de France as Epic.” Barthes saw the Tour as a profoundly symbolic (and therefore enormously appealing) ordeal which, for the duration of the race, creates a caste of heroes and villains that for sheer theatrical effect are second [...]