Silent Spring

The Nature of Nuclear Risk

Ghost In the Machine

 

more here:

In this series I showcase a number of portraits of musicians made out of recycled cassette tape with original cassette. Also included are portraits made from old film and reels. The idea comes from a phrase (ironically) coined by philosopher Gilbert Ryle, a description of how your spirit lives in your body. I imagine we are all, like cassettes, thoughts wrapped up in awkward packaging.   Erika Iris Simmons

Concierge Medicine

Every year, thousands of people make a deal with their doctor: I'll pay you a fixed annual fee, whether or not I need your services, and in return you'll see me the day I call, remember who I am and what ails me, and give me your undivided attention.

But this arrangement potentially poses a big threat to Medicare and to the new world of medical care envisioned under President Barack Obama's health overhaul.

The spread of "concierge medicine," where doctors limit their practice to patients who pay a fee of about $1,500 a year, could drive a wedge among the insured. Eventually, people unable to afford the retainer might find themselves stuck on a lower tier, facing less time with doctors and longer waits.

Medicare recipients, who account for a big share of patients in doctors' offices, are the most vulnerable. The program's financial troubles are causing doctors to reassess their participation. But the impact could be broader because primary care doctors are in short supply and the health law will bring in more than 30 million newly insured patients.

If concierge medicine goes beyond just a thriving niche, it could lead to a kind of insurance caste system.

"What we are looking at is the prospect of a more explicitly tiered system where people with money have a different kind of insurance relationship than most of the middle class, and where Medicare is no longer as universal as we would like it to be," said John Rother, policy director for AARP.    read more:

Tilt-Shift

more here:

Serena Malyon, an illustrator in her third year at the Alberta College of Art & Design, has taken the classics works of Vincent Van Gogh and added a contemporary twist. Using Photoshop, Serena has added the ’tilt-shift’ effect to Van Gogh’s paintings, providing a fresh perspective on these masterpieces.

Tilt-Shift photography is a technique often used to create that miniature scene feel. You know that feeling [of superiority] when you’re…playing with micro-machines, or holding those tiny bottles of liquor, or reading Gulliver’s Travels? Well tilt-shift photography can achieve that look with life-size locations and/or objects through the use of special lenses and camera movements; or you can fake it using Adobe Photoshop.

How The Golden Years Disappeared

At 50, I made a startling realization: I was burning out, but nowhere near retirement -- and I wasn't alone

Remarkably, the first recipient of Social Security, a bookkeeper named Ida May Fuller, started to collect her checks in 1940. She proceeded to live another thirty-five years, long enough to witness the ascent and disbanding of the Beatles and the landing of the man on the moon. (For her total $24.75 contribution, she received $22,888.92 in benefits, perhaps qualifying her as the nation's first de facto lottery winner, as well as its inaugural Social Security recipient.) Indeed, the time between the end of work and the end of life was already starting to raise uncomfortable questions in the decades following the establishment of Social Security and mass retirement -- most fundamentally, what do you do with yourself during this period? Medical experts were advising a quiet existence, rocking peacefully in Whistler's Mother-like fashion.

It took ingenuity to redesign lives to keep up with changes in longevity and society in mid-twentieth-century America, but we rose to the occasion. We plugged the purpose gap with something called the "golden years," a stunning innovation that almost overnight turned an arid economic institution, retirement, from an anteroom to the great beyond into a core component of the American dream. We did such a good job of making virtue out of seeming necessity that soon retirement at sixty-five wasn't enough. Even as lives were already lengthening, we wanted retirement earlier and earlier. We couldn't wait to stop working and start playing in a period that was fashioned by financial marketers and housing entrepreneurs as a kind of second childhood. Golf became the new symbol of late-life success. A new deal was struck around shorter working lives that turned the push out of the labor market into a powerful pull. The golden years shored up the postmidlife purpose gap for fifty years and then some, filling the unstable space with something aspirational and attainable. This was a dream for average Americans, not just the elite. But as lives lengthened and careers shortened, this fix grew shakier and shakier, especially as the vast wave of boomers began approaching.  read more:

Saturday Night Mix

 

The Girls In Their Summer Dresses

When the weather turned Thursday and, 2 1/2 months early, summer seemed to settle on Los Angeles, I began to think of Irwin Shaw. Not because Shaw wrote much about Southern California -- although he did do some work here -- but because one of his early stories, "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses" felt momentarily apropos.

The connection, I'll admit, is a bit tenuous, because "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses" is not about summer -- taking place, as it does, in November -- although it does involve weather that is unseasonably warm. Rather, it is about Michael Loomis, a husband with a wandering eye who looks over every woman on Manhattan's lower Fifth Avenue as he and his wife Frances take a Sunday morning stroll.

Originally published in the New Yorker on Feb. 4, 1939, the story has had a long life, probably because it is so taut and well-constructed: barely 3,000 words, mostly dialogue, taking place within the span of an hour or so. Its genius lies in its indirection, the way Shaw manages to withhold, until almost the very end, just exactly what's at stake.    read more:

Story here:

Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%

Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.

It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

Some people look at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. So what if this person gains and that person loses? What matters, they argue, is not how the pie is divided but the size of the pie. That argument is fundamentally wrong. An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after year—an economy like America’s—is not likely to do well over the long haul. There are several reasons for this.

First, growing inequality is the flip side of something else: shrinking opportunity. Whenever we diminish equality of opportunity, it means that we are not using some of our most valuable assets—our people—in the most productive way possible. Second, many of the distortions that lead to inequality—such as those associated with monopoly power and preferential tax treatment for special interests—undermine the efficiency of the economy. This new inequality goes on to create new distortions, undermining efficiency even further. To give just one example, far too many of our most talented young people, seeing the astronomical rewards, have gone into finance rather than into fields that would lead to a more productive and healthy economy.  read more:

3-D Wall Murals

via:

Wax Like a Brazilian

A girl's first bikini wax is much like her first kiss, in that (a) she always wants to tell the story of how it went down, and (b) no one else cares. But I'm going to tell you my bikini wax story anyway. It should be noted, as long as we're going to get intimate, that I am not really a terribly hairy lady to begin with. So the fact that I waited until I was 23 to even notice the existence of bikini waxes as a concept -- let alone get one -- speaks less to any prudishness on my part than it does to a simple lack of necessity. Plus I hadn't really dated anyone who did that gross thing where they say, "It would be cool if you wanted to go bare, you know; it could be fun for both of us." (Yay for dating guys who, on balance, managed to keep their considerable dickishness from spilling over into the pubic-grooming department!) But when I broke up with someone after several years together, one of my friends was like, "You should get a bikini wax. But make sure it's a Brazilian because otherwise why even bother." So I said, "Okay!" (because I was in one of those post-break-up phases where you say "okay!" to literally everything that is presented to you, no matter what), and I did.

At that point, the only person I knew who had ever talked to me about her Brazilian bikini wax was a friend from college who I ran into one day on the street when she was immediately post-wax. She described the experience as "not that bad," mostly because, and I'm paraphrasing here, "I had a glass of white wine first, and I hardly felt a thing." (This is a sentence that turns out to be astonishingly applicable to many things in life.) As a result of that, somehow I'd gotten it into my head that the pre-wax glass of white wine was a necessity, like you legally could not get a wax without it, which was going to be kind of a problem given that I had made a 3pm waxing appointment at a nail salon a few blocks from my office. The good news was that the walk from where I worked to the nail salon involved passing a liquor store, so when I ducked out for what my boss probably thought was an awkwardly late lunch, I went inside and bought a white wine juice box, which is a product I had not previously known existed. but in that moment felt like an actual gift from the hand of God.   read more:

photo credit:

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

[ed.  After reading several articles this morning about the debris from the Japan tsunami eventually washing up on West Coast beaches, I realized I didn't know much about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  Apparently it's so large and diffuse that there's an Eastern and Western component, and smaller subtropical convergence zones as well.  Millions of tons of garbage slowly circling in gyres, pushed about by large ocean currents]

by Thomas M. Kostigen, Discover Magazine

How trash makes its way to the garbage patch is pretty straightforward. When a plastic cup gets blown off the beach in, say, San Francisco, it gets caught in the California Current, which makes its way down the coast toward Central America. Somewhere off the coast of Mexico it most likely meets the North Equatorial Current, which flows toward Asia. Off the coast of Japan, the Kuroshio Current might swoop it up and yank it eastward again, until the North Pacific Current takes over and carries it past Hawaii to the garbage patch. These are the currents that make up the North Pacific Gyre. Moore says it takes a year for material to reach the Eastern Garbage Patch from Asia and several years for it to get there from the United States. Now multiply that one cup by billions of plastic items over years and years—actually about 60 years, starting after World War II, when we really began to make plastic products en masse.

Marcus Eriksen, Algalita’s director of research and education, has studied that connection between the increasing amount of plastic found in the ocean and the increasing amount of plastic produced: In 1999 there was 0.002 gram of plastic per square meter of ocean in the Eastern Garbage Patch, and as of 2005 there was 0.004 gram per square meter in the same place. In that same period plastic production in North America alone experienced double-digit growth, topping 113 billion pounds in 2006, according to the plastics division of the American Chemistry Council in Arlington, Virginia.

Beyond plastic degradation and its toxic ramifications, other refuse issues ensue. Twenty-mile castaway fishnets snare sea turtles, dolphins, and other animals, endangering their populations; birds mistake trash for food, eat it, and die; jellyfish get sick; gnarly junk washes back to shore—some of it hazardous waste. The Eastern Garbage Patch isn’t just a problem for those living in the middle of the ocean; it’s a problem for those of us who are landbound as well. 

Read more:

Then there's this.  Making lemonade from lemons, or in this case, islands from plastic.

also
NOAA's Marine Debris Fact Sheet
and this previous post on the effects of ocean-borne plastic

Nice Mussels

How to cook delicious mussels

OK, this is the fun part. Mussels have a flavor that's unmistakably oceanic -- salty, briny, minerally. They're not as saline or meaty as clams, not as clear and ringing as oysters, but they're a little earthier, a little down-and-dirtier. And they pair beautifully with anything you can think of that would do well with that salty, earthy bass note.

Earlier, I knocked on the combination of mussels with garlic and shallots, white wine, herbs and butter, but there's a lot to be learned in the basics. You have garlic and shallots (and usually butter or olive oil) as the aromatic base; an acidic liquid to help the steaming and to lighten the flavor; a bunch of fresh herbs towards the end of cooking to add a nice top note, and a finishing stir-in of butter to enrich the broth.

Using this framework, you can start improvising your way to limitless combinations. Basically, if you can imagine a bunch of flavors tasting good together, they will probably be good with mussels. Like a version with leeks or onions (aromatics), bacon (just because) and dark beer (liquid), and finished with a stir-in of crushed or ground nuts for more richness. (And maybe a final splash of malt vinegar or something if it wants a little brightness.)

Steamed mussels
This isn't a recipe so much as a basic method for steaming mussels; please do improvise with different flavor combinations, liquids, finishers, etc. Serve with big hunks of bread, crisp toasts, French fries, rice, pasta or whatever floats your boat. Allow about 1 pound of mussels per person for a main course, or half that for an appetizer.

Ingredients

• Aromatics, sliced or chopped, to taste (garlic, onion, shallots, ginger, lemongrass, chilies, bacon, salami, you name it. Just make sure it's tasty stuff.)
• ½ cup wine, beer, juice or whatever liquid you'd like (use more for a brothier dish, but the mussels themselves will release a lot of juice)
• 2 pounds mussels, cleaned (see above)
• Herbs, chopped (parsley, thyme, rosemary or others) or other delicate flavor additions, to taste (orange zest? A little more raw shallot?)
• Butter, cream, olive oil, ground nuts or other finishing touch to enrich the broth, to taste
• Lemon, vinegar or some other kind of tart flavoring, to taste, if your liquid isn't very bright
• Salt and pepper, to taste (mussels do tend to be salty, so this might not be necessary)

Directions

1. Grab a pan big enough to fit all the mussels comfortably, preferably with a lid. Get it hot over medium heat. Add a touch of butter or oil, and sweat or sauté your aromatics. When they're throwing off delicious smells, add the liquid and turn the heat up to high.
2. When the liquid is boiling, add the mussels all at once, cover the pan, and give it a couple of good, hard shakes. Peek under the lid after about two minutes to see how they're doing. Once they're open, they're cooked. Give the pan another shake, and another after two minutes or so, until all the shells are open. (If there are stubborn stragglers, way behind the rest, just ditch them. They might be dead, and you don't want to overcook the rest of the mussels waiting for the dead to make contact.)
3. Now have a taste of the broth. Season it with salt and pepper if need be, but here's a tip -- when you season, tip the pan and season directly into the broth, and stir it in to dissolve. (Just tossing salt into the pan might get a bunch of it tucked into the mussels' shells, and you won't be able to really tell how seasoned the broth is.)
4. Add your herbs, butter and/or other finishers. Stir or toss to combine everything and emulsify the butter to a creamy sauce, and serve right away.

via:

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

[ed. note.  man...I don't know how many quarters I dropped on this game in the 70's.  It will always have a special place in my heart]

In an exclusive excerpt from Harold Goldberg’s upcoming book, All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture*, the author tells the story of Atari’s genesis—and how a charismatic dreamer led a gang of merry nerdsters down a path that would ultimately revolutionize the way we play

DEPOSIT QUARTER
BALL WILL SERVE AUTOMATICALLY
AVOID MISSING BALL FOR HIGH SCORE
—Instructions seen on the first Pong arcade game, September 1972

Nolan Bushnell was a dreamer who dreamed big dreams. In his dreams, he imagined the finest things that money could buy: expensive cars and massive homes and the prettiest girls. Yet his greatest dream surrounded a game so simple, so utterly straightforward, so easy to learn that even a stinking drunk in a bar could learn to play it.

The testing ground for Pong, the very first arcade game, was a newly opened bar in the Silicon Valley. Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, wasn’t the kind of place where fights would break out every night. But the hole, named for the surly British comic-strip slacker, was shadowy and dark. Cigarette smoke swirled so thick that it rivaled the fog that rolled in over the Santa Cruz Mountains. You might bring your girlfriend to Andy Capp’s, but not on a first date.

The story goes this way. After designer Allan Alcorn made Pong’s circuitry and Ted Dabney crafted its case, a lowly sawed-off plastic milk jug was placed inside beneath the coin slot, to collect quarters. Pong was put in a truck and delivered to an anteroom in Capp’s that also included a pinball machine. Then the drunks played. Not only did they play, they lined up to play. Their egos wouldn’t take being beaten by a machine. They fed so many quarters into the slot that the machine jammed up. Then the bar’s usually genial manager, Bill Gattis, phoned Bushnell in a booming voice that carried the length of the bar.

It’s a wonderful creation story for Atari, but it might not be exactly true. Loni Reeder, Bushnell’s longtime assistant, claims the tale was a well-crafted myth. “The Atari guys (and I don’t remember if Nolan personally went over there along with the guys or not) went to Andy Capp’s and stuffed the coin box to the point that the machine wouldn’t work—then just sat back and waited for the bar to call to say the game wasn’t working.” Reeder says the fabrication was completely in keeping with Bushnell’s “carny” personality.

read more: 

* All Your Base Are Belong to Us

Oh My Sweet Carolina

The Pale King

Two months after the writer David Foster Wallace killed himself, his agent, accompanied by his widow, went into his garage office to look through his papers. It was Thanksgiving weekend, 2008, and the weather was cold and gray in Claremont, Calif. On Wallace's desk they found a neat stack of around 200 pages containing several chapters of a novel called The Pale King.

His agent, Bonnie Nadell, knew he'd been working on it. A lot of people did: a significant fraction of the American reading public had been waiting for a new novel from Wallace ever since 1996, when his monumental Infinite Jest reshaped the skyline of American literature. But she hadn't read it, and she had no idea how much of it he'd managed to finish. She did know it had an unlikely subject: the lives of a group of IRS employees in Peoria, Ill. 

Nadell called Michael Pietsch, publisher of Little, Brown & Co. and Wallace's longtime editor. He flew out in January and started reading. As it turned out, there was a lot more than just that neat stack. "They brought me literally bins and drawers and wire baskets," Pietsch says. "Just heaps of pages. There was no order to them." He went back to New York City with a duffel bag full of them.

Pietsch spent two years assembling and editing the contents of that duffel bag. The results will be published, appropriately enough, on April 15. If The Pale King isn't a finished work, it is, at the very least, a remarkable document, by no means a stunt or an attempt to cash in on Wallace's posthumous fame. Despite its shattered state and its unpromising subject matter, or possibly because of them, The Pale King represents Wallace's finest work as a novelist.

full review:

via:
also
NY Times posthumous appreciation article:

Broiled, Sautéed, Roasted, Poached

The chart on the following page provides ideas for cooking 1½ pounds of white fillet, whether whole or cut into individual portions. None of these recipes take more than half an hour from start to finish; thicker pieces of fish will cook in 15 minutes or less, thinner pieces in under 10. You can tell that any fillet is done when it’s opaque and a thin-bladed knife meets little resistance when you use it to poke the thickest part of the fish.
Cooking white fish is easy. The hard part — besides figuring out what’s sustainable — is choosing the recipe.

1. BROILED

With Tomatoes and Capers 
Set rack 4 inches from heat source. Spread a broiler-safe pan with olive oil. Add fish. Mix 1 pound sliced tomatoes with oil and 2 tablespoons each capers and chopped red onion. Spread over and around fish; broil. Garnish: Chopped parsley and lemon wedges.
Tacos
Skip tomatoes and capers. Rub fish with vegetable oil and a mild chili powder; broil. Meanwhile combine 2 chopped cucumbers, 1/2 cup chopped cilantro, 1 minced hot chili and 2 tablespoons lime juice. Flake fish and serve in warm corn tortillas with cucumber salsa.
Caramelized Fish
Skip tomatoes and capers. Heat a little vegetable oil in pan; dredge fish in a mixture of brown sugar and (lots of) coarse black pepper. Broil carefully; fish will brown quickly. Drizzle with fish sauce. Garnish: Mint (lots), minced chili (optional).

2. SAUTÉED

Cornmeal-Crisped
Cut fish into 4 pieces and soak in 1½ cups buttermilk. Combine 1 cup cornmeal with 1 tablespoon chili powder. Put a large skillet over medium heat; add 1 tablespoon each olive oil and butter. Pull half the fish from buttermilk; drain, then dredge in cornmeal; cook until golden, turning once. Wipe skillet clean, then repeat. Garnish: Lemon and parsley or cilantro.
Classic Sautéed
Skip buttermilk, cornmeal and chili powder. Beat 2 eggs with ¼ cup chopped parsley. Dredge the fish lightly in all-purpose flour, then in egg mixture; cook in butter and oil in two batches. Garnish: Chopped parsley, lemon wedges.
Prosciutto-Wrapped
Skip buttermilk, cornmeal and chili powder. Lay 2 slices of prosciutto, slightly overlapping, on work surface; top with basil leaves. Wrap each piece of fish in prosciutto/basil, then repeat. Cook in oil only in two batches. Garnish: More basil.

3. ROASTED

With Herbs
Heat oven to 475. Put 4 tablespoons butter in an ovenproof pan and place in oven to melt. Add 4 tablespoons chopped herbs (a combo is best — parsley, dill, basil, tarragon, thyme, etc.), then add fish. Roast, turning once. Garnish: The pan juices.
With Potatoes
Skip butter and herbs. Heat oven to 425. Toss 2 pounds sliced new potatoes with ¼ cup olive oil. Roast, turning occasionally, until brown. Add 1 tablespoon chopped sage and 1 teaspoon (or more) minced garlic. Top with fish and 2 tablespoons oil. Roast until fish is done. Garnish: Pan juices.
With Leeks and Bacon
Skip butter and herbs. Toss 4 sliced leeks and 2 ounces chopped bacon (optional) with ¼ cup olive oil. Roast for 10 minutes, then add 1 tablespoon thyme leaves and ½ cup white wine. Roast 20 minutes, then top with fish and 2 tablespoons oil and roast until fish is done. Garnish: More thyme.

4. POACHED

With Ginger and Soy
Put a large, deep skillet over medium heat; add 2 tablespoons vegetable oil and 1 tablespoon minced ginger; cook until sizzling. Add fish, ½ cup soy sauce, 1½ cups water, ½ cup chopped scallions, ½ cup chopped cilantro and a teaspoon rice vinegar. Boil, cover and turn off heat. Fish will be done in about 10 minutes. Garnish: Chopped scallions.
Curried With Zucchini
Sauté 1 chopped onion and 2 chunked zucchini in oil for 5 minutes, then add 1 tablespoon ginger and 1 tablespoon curry powder (or to taste). Cook for a minute, then add fish. Substitute 1 cup coconut milk for soy sauce and use 1 cup water. Skip scallions and vinegar. Garnish: Cilantro.
In Tomato-Fennel Broth
Skip ginger; use olive oil. When oil is hot, add 1 chopped onion and 2 chopped fennel bulbs; cook 5 minutes. Add the fish, a pinch of saffron and 1 tablespoon fennel seeds. Substitute 1 cup diced tomatoes (canned are fine) for soy sauce; use 1 cup water. Skip scallions, cilantro and rice vinegar. Garnish: Chopped fennel fronds.

via:

Home

Mistakes Were Made

A bitterly divided Supreme Court on Tuesday tossed out a jury verdict won by a New Orleans man who spent 14 years on death row and came within weeks of execution because prosecutors had hidden a blood test and other evidence that would have proven his innocence.

The 5-4 decision delivered by Justice Clarence Thomas shielded the New Orleans district attorney's office from being held liable for the mistakes of its prosecutors. The evidence of their misconduct did not prove "deliberate indifference" on the part of then-Dist. Atty. Harry Connick Sr., Thomas said.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg emphasized her disapproval by reading her dissent in the courtroom, saying the court was shielding a city and its prosecutors from "flagrant" misconduct that nearly cost an innocent man his life.

"John Thompson spent 14 years isolated on death row before the truth came to light," she said. He was innocent of the crimes that sent him to prison and prosecutors had "dishonored" their obligation to present the true facts to the jury, she said.

In 1999, when all his appeals had failed on his conviction for the murder of a hotel executive, Thompson was scheduled to be put to death. But a private investigator hired by his lawyer found a blood test in the police lab that showed the man wanted for a related carjacking had type B blood, while Thompson's was type O.

In rejecting the judgment, Justice Thomas described the case as a "single incident" in which mistakes were made. He said Thompson did not prove a pattern of similar violations that would justify holding the city's government liable for the wrongdoing. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined to form the majority.

However, Thompson's lawyers showed that at least four prosecutors knew about the hidden blood test. They also showed evidence of other, similar cases in New Orleans in which key evidence was concealed from defense lawyers.

via:

Marching Into History

[ed.  I'd never seen this photo before.  It appears to have been taken moments before another picture; one that would become one of the most searing and enduring images of the Vietnam War ever captured on film]

Iconic photo here:

photo credit:

Not So Foreign Policy

via: