Paco Pomet. En El Parque, 2010. Óleo - lienzo, 120 x 120 cm
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The Merkelization of Europe

No so long ago, France was the political driver and Germany the economic motor of the European Union. "Now," remarked former European Commission president Romani Prodi in February, it is Merkel "that decides and Sarkozy that holds a press conference to explain her decisions." This searing image could be embellished with the 24 EU members cowering in the press room -- and Britain now watching through the window.

Now that Britain has sidelined itself from the historic "fiscal compact" concluded in Brussels on Dec. 9, which provides the EU with new powers to enforce stricter discipline in national budgets, the community appears even more fiercely segregated within its own ranks. Pathetically, the Brits walked not because of the starkly deficient democratic procedure or the fact these governance changes wouldn't adequately address the euro quagmire, but rather to protect London's financial services industry from regulations that were part of the deal.

This isn't the way European Union was supposed to work, not at all, and Germany's one-woman show -- ostensibly in Europe's name -- could well doom the continent's beautiful project. Merkel may look like the big winner today, seemingly with Europe at Germany's feet, but this turn of events could well prove to no country's detriment more than than Germany's.

"The prospect is of a joyless union of penalties, punishments, disciplines and seething resentments, with the centrist elites who run the EU increasingly under siege from anti-EU populists on the right and left everywhere in Europe," wrote the Guardian's Ian Traynor.

Merkel's short-sighted, audaciously Germany-first reaction to staunch the eurocrisis is the Germanization of European monetary and fiscal policy, foremost the codification of its obsession with tight money, fiscal purity, and budgetary orthodoxy. In spite of all evidence to the contrary, she insists that what's good for Germany is good for everybody else, too. It's clearly not. And with the world's leaders begging her to do "whatever it takes" to stave off global calamity, she's doing it with Sarkozy at her side and over the heads of the now completely irrelevant European "voters" ("subjects" is the more fitting word). This is a catastrophic mistake, which, politically, vastly expands the EU's centralized authority while robbing it of even the fig leaf of democratic legitimacy it had sported. Moreover, the economics of Berlin's Germanocentric prescriptions for the eurozone compound the very problems that landed Europe's weaker economies in the mess they're in right now.

by Paul Hockenos, Foreign Policy |  Read more:
JEAN-PAUL PELISSIER/AFP/Getty Images

On Iowa

On January 3, Iowans will trudge through snow, sleet, sludge, ice, gale-force blizzards -- whatever it takes -- to join their neighbors that evening in 1,784 living rooms, community halls, recreation centers, and public-school gymnasiums in a kind of bygone-era town-hall meeting at which they'll eat and debate, and then vote for presidential candidates along party lines. Chat 'n' Chews, they are called.

These Iowa Caucuses create a seismic shift in the presidential nominating contests. Obama catapulted to the top of the Democrats' dance card when he captured 38 percent of Iowa voters in 2008, and then swept to victory at the Democratic Convention eight months later. Without such a strong initial showing in Iowa, Obama might not have been able to steamroll through subsequent state primaries to win the presidency.

Since Obama is the presumed Democratic candidate in 2012, this year it's the Republican candidates who have trained their attentions on the state these brisk, late-autumn days. They're falling over each other in front of grain elevators and cornfields, over biscuits and gravy in breakfast cafes, and at potluck dinners (casseroles are the thing to bring), glad-handing and backslapping as many Iowa voters they can. Great photo ops, you know. Hoisting a baby in the air is good politics. So's gulping down a brat (short for bratwurst).

Considering the state's enormous political significance, I thought this would be a good time to explain to the geographically challenged a little about Iowa, including where Iowa is, and perhaps more importantly, in both a real and metaphysical way, what Iowa is.

For almost 20 years I've lived in Iowa, where as a professor at the University of Iowa I've taught thousands of university students. I've written a couple of books on rural Iowa, traveling to all 99 counties, and have spent much of my time when not teaching, visiting with and interviewing Iowans from across the state. I haven't taken up hunting or fishing, the main hobbies of rural Iowans, but I'm a fan of University of Iowa Hawkeye football, so I'm a good third of the way to becoming an adopted Iowan. I even have a dog, born and bred in Iowa (more on that later).

by Stephen G. Bloom, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Image credit: Jason Reed / Reuters

The Missing Piece

In the next few months, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern may detect one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe: the elusive Higgs boson. The collider, one of the most ambitious machines ever built—which sends two beams of subatomic particles around an underground circuit 27km in circumference, to crash into each other at close to the speed of light—may already have given them the crucial data.

The Swiss government asks Cern, the joint European research institution, to shut down the circuit in winter, to spare it the demand on the electricity grid; these cold months are used for analysing the torrent of data from the summer’s experiments. If scientists find the Higgs boson, then it will be one of the greatest advances ever in physics. The world’s attention—including that of the Nobel committee, will turn to, among others, Peter Higgs, 82, emeritus professor at the school of physics and astronomy at the University of Edinburgh.

But if they don’t find the particle, the consequences could be even more interesting—as Peter Higgs explains in this interview for Prospect. The particle that he has argued must exist “plays such a role” in the modern theory of the structure of the physical world “that if you tried to modify the theory to take it out, the whole thing becomes nonsense.”

Higgs takes the bus south through Edinburgh to the James Clerk Maxwell building of the science faculty, where a large portrait of him (above) looks out over the main staircase. When I accompany him to a talk given there by a Cern scientist, at one point, the lecturer jokes to the audience that he is attempting to make the discussion accessible to all, “even to you, Peter,” he says, gesturing towards Higgs. There is a communal intake of breath; students crane to look as they realise who is sitting in the front row. After, they crowd round asking to have their photos taken with Higgs, who obliges.

Higgs’s insights are central to the work at Cern. The experiments aim to answer some of the most profound questions, such as where the mass of fundamental particles comes from. For physicists, mass is an expression of a body’s resistance to changes in its velocity (its speed and direction.) In everyday life, we are most aware of an object’s mass through its weight, a concept intuitively linked to our grasp of the physical world. But the individual bits that make up an atom, if weighed separately, would equal less than the mass of the complete atom. So where does that extra mass come from?

by James Elwes, Prospect |  Read more:
Painting: Ken Currie

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

The Movie

Anthony Bourdain

Still Life with Lemon, by Lucian Freud, 1946
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Sillouettes in Bombay. Danish Siddiqui
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Is Modern Capitalism Sustainable?

[ed. Five reasons why it might not be.]

I am often asked if the recent global financial crisis marks the beginning of the end of modern capitalism. It is a curious question, because it seems to presume that there is a viable replacement waiting in the wings. The truth of the matter is that, for now at least, the only serious alternatives to today's dominant Anglo-American paradigm are other forms of capitalism.

Continental European capitalism, which combines generous health and social benefits with reasonable working hours, long vacation periods, early retirement and relatively equal income distributions, would seem to have everything to recommend it - except sustainability. China's Darwinian capitalism, with its fierce competition among export firms, a weak social safety net, and widespread government intervention, is widely touted as the inevitable heir to Western capitalism, if only because of China's huge size and consistent outsize growth rate. Yet China's economic system is continually evolving.

Indeed, it is far from clear how far China's political, economic and financial structures will continue to transform themselves, and whether China will eventually morph into capitalism's new exemplar. In any case, China is still encumbered by the usual social, economic and financial vulnerabilities of a rapidly growing lower-income country.

Perhaps the real point is that, in the broad sweep of history, all current forms of capitalism are ultimately transitional. Modern-day capitalism has had an extraordinary run since the start of the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago, lifting billions of ordinary people out of abject poverty. Marxism and heavy-handed socialism have disastrous records by comparison. But, as industrialisation and technological progress spread to Asia (and now to Africa), someday the struggle for subsistence will no longer be a primary imperative, and contemporary capitalism's numerous flaws may loom larger.

by Kenneth Rogoff, Al Jazeera via Project Syndicate |  Read more:
Photo: Gallo/Getty

The Hot Spotters

The critical flaw in our health-care system that people like Gunn and Brenner are finding is that it was never designed for the kind of patients who incur the highest costs. Medicine’s primary mechanism of service is the doctor visit and the E.R. visit. (Americans make more than a billion such visits each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control.) For a thirty-year-old with a fever, a twenty-minute visit to the doctor’s office may be just the thing. For a pedestrian hit by a minivan, there’s nowhere better than an emergency room. But these institutions are vastly inadequate for people with complex problems: the forty-year-old with drug and alcohol addiction; the eighty-four-year-old with advanced Alzheimer’s disease and a pneumonia; the sixty-year-old with heart failure, obesity, gout, a bad memory for his eleven medications, and half a dozen specialists recommending different tests and procedures. It’s like arriving at a major construction project with nothing but a screwdriver and a crane.  (...)

The Special Care Center reinvented the idea of a primary-care clinic in almost every way. The union’s and the hospital’s health funds agreed to switch from paying the doctors for every individual office visit and treatment to paying a flat monthly fee for each patient. That cut the huge expense that most clinics incur from billing paperwork. The patients were given unlimited access to the clinic without charges—no co-payments, no insurance bills. This, Fernandopulle explained, would force doctors on staff to focus on service, in order to retain their patients and the fees they would bring.

The payment scheme also allowed him to design the clinic around the things that sick, expensive patients most need and value, rather than the ones that pay the best. He adopted an open-access scheduling system to guarantee same-day appointments for the acutely ill. He customized an electronic information system that tracks whether patients are meeting their goals. And he staffed the clinic with people who would help them do it. One nurse practitioner, for instance, was responsible for trying to get every smoker to quit.

I got a glimpse of how unusual the clinic is when I sat in on the staff meeting it holds each morning to review the medical issues of the patients on the appointment books. There was, for starters, the very existence of the meeting. I had never seen this kind of daily huddle at a doctor’s office, with clinicians popping open their laptops and pulling up their patient lists together. Then there was the particular mixture of people who squeezed around the conference table. As in many primary-care offices, the staff had two physicians and two nurse practitioners. But a full-time social worker and the front-desk receptionist joined in for the patient review, too. And, outnumbering them all, there were eight full-time “health coaches.”

Fernandopulle created the position. Each health coach works with patients—in person, by phone, by e-mail—to help them manage their health. Fernandopulle got the idea from the promotoras, community health workers, whom he had seen on a medical mission in the Dominican Republic. The coaches work with the doctors but see their patients far more frequently than the doctors do, at least once every two weeks. Their most important attribute, Fernandopulle explained, is a knack for connecting with sick people, and understanding their difficulties. Most of the coaches come from their patients’ communities and speak their languages. Many have experience with chronic illness in their own families. (One was himself a patient in the clinic.) Few had clinical experience. I asked each of the coaches what he or she had done before working in the Special Care Center. One worked the register at a Dunkin’ Donuts. Another was a Sears retail manager. A third was an administrative assistant at a casino.

“We recruit for attitude and train for skill,” Fernandopulle said. “We don’t recruit from health care. This kind of care requires a very different mind-set from usual care. For example, what is the answer for a patient who walks up to the front desk with a question? The answer is ‘Yes.’ ‘Can I see a doctor?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Can I get help making my ultrasound appointment?’ ‘Yes.’ Health care trains people to say no to patients.” He told me that he’d had to replace half of the clinic’s initial hires—including a doctor—because they didn’t grasp the focus on patient service.

by Atul Gawande, New Yorker |  Read more:
Photograph by Phillip Toledano

Matthias Moravek
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No Copyright Intended

On October 26, a YouTube user named crimewriter95 posted a full-length version of Pulp Fiction, rearranged in chronological order.

A couple things struck me about this video.

First, I'm surprised that a full-length, 2.5-hour very slight remix of a popular film can survive on YouTube for over six weeks without getting removed. Now that it's on Kottke and Buzzfeed, I'm guessing it won't be around for much longer.

But I was just as amused by the video description:

"The legendary movie itself placed into chronological order. If you'd like me to put the full movie itself up, let me know and I'll be glad to oblige. Please no copyright infringement. I only put this up as a project."

These "no copyright infringement intended" messages are everywhere on YouTube, and about as effective as a drug dealer asking if you're a cop. It's like a little voodoo charm that people post on their videos to ward off evil spirits.

How pervasive is it? There are about 489,000 YouTube videos that say "no copyright intended" or some variation, and about 664,000 videos have a "copyright disclaimer" citing the fair use provision in Section 107 of the Copyright Act.

Judging by his username, I'm guessing crimewriter95 is 16 years old. I wouldn't be surprised if most of those million videos were uploaded by people under 21.

He's hardly alone. On YouTube's support forums, there's rampant confusion over what copyright is. People genuinely confused that their videos were blocked even with a disclosure, confused that audio was removed even though there was no "intentional copyright infringement." Some ask for the best wording of a disclaimer, not knowing that virtually all video is blocked without human intervention using ContentID.

YouTube's tried to combat these misconceptions with its Copyright School, but it seems futile. For most people, sharing and remixing with attribution and no commercial intent is instinctually a-okay.

Under current copyright law, nearly every cover song on YouTube is technically illegal. Every fan-made music video, every mashup album, every supercut, every fanfic story? Quite probably illegal, though largely untested in court.

No amount of lawsuits or legal threats will change the fact that this behavior is considered normal — I'd wager the vast majority of people under 25 see nothing wrong with non-commercial sharing and remixing, or think it's legal already.

Here's a thought experiment: Everyone over age 12 when YouTube launched in 2005 is now able to vote.

What happens when — and this is inevitable — a generation completely comfortable with remix culture becomes a majority of the electorate, instead of the fringe youth? What happens when they start getting elected to office? (Maybe "I downloaded but didn't share" will be the new "I smoked, but didn't inhale.")

Remix culture is the new Prohibition, with massive media companies as the lone voices calling for temperance. You can criminalize commonplace activities from law-abiding people, but eventually, something has to give.

 

by Andy Baio, Waxy

Howard Tate (1939 - 2011)

NPR Interview, 2003

Friday Book Club - A Soldier of the Great War

Alessandro Giuliani, the Italian hero of Mark Helprin's A Soldier of the Great War, spends much of the novel cliff-hanging — clinging to Alpine precipices and leaping chasms — and so does Helprin, literarily speaking. Literally speaking, Helprin has done his own share of Alpine mountaineering, as well as other daring things like serving in the Israeli air force and declaring himself a Republican. His previous novel, 1983's Winter's Tale, was an extravagant, reckless hash of urban reality and fantasy. No one can accuse him of playing it safe. If you're wondering what the exact opposite of the typical, carefully calculated products of academic writing programs might be like, you can't do much better than this massive, soaring novel of ideas and ordeals, which is magnificent even in its flaws. It's an Alp among contemporary fictional foothills and molehills.

The story is framed by a long walk. In the summer of 1964, Alessandro, a retired 74-year-old professor of aesthetics, is on his way from Rome to a village 70 kilometers away on the last tram-bus of the day. At the edge of the city he sees a young man running to catch up with the tram as if his life depended on it. The truculent driver refuses to stop, and Alessandro demands to be let off. As their tram disappears, he sternly proposes to the baffled young man, an illiterate 17-year-old factory worker named Nicolò, that they walk to their destination — all night, without stopping. He makes the walk first of all a metaphor for passion and persistence, a rebuke to Nicolò's complacent innocence. Then, as Nicolò is stirred into curiosity, the walk becomes the story of the war 50 years earlier that so intensified life and death, passion and chance that it separated Alessandro forever from everything comfortable and predictable.

Before the war Alessandro had been a brilliant student, developing aesthetic theories, writing for the papers, disturbing the sleepiness of Rome with headlong horseback rides, climbing in the Alps with a Jewish friend he had saved from anti-Semitic thugs, experiencing thwarted love with a beautiful neighbor and unthwarted lust with an Irishwoman in a train compartment, living a civilized and secure life with his parents and sister. His experience of the war is so thorough as to render it a symbol of loss — of innocence, pride, belief, love. He witnesses the relentless, pointless slaughter of the trenches; he hunts deserters who have joined forces with the Mafia in Sicily and becomes a deserter himself; he returns to the Alps he once climbed for sport to shoot Austrians. As a prisoner of war, he is handed from savage Bulgarians to a whimsical pacifist field marshal; as the war ends, he has a final ordeal of escape over the glacial, sovereign, timeless Alps, and in the Italy he returns to, everyone he loves is dead or vanished, and fascists and communists prepare for further mayhem.

In spite of the Italian front, the rain, and a wounded soldier falling in love with a nurse, this book has little in common with A Farewell to Arms; it's not about lyrical disillusionment but the lyrical transcendence of disillusionment. It has more in common with Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma, including a witty rendering of cynical diplomats; a vivid evocation of the chaos of war and the persistence of passion; a love for Italy and Italians. But it most resembles Dostoyevski, at his best and worst. Wedged between the narrow escapes and convenient coincidences of the melodramatic plot are enough philosophical reflections and dialogues to occupy a whole platoon of Middle European metaphysicians; even an elderly railway porter seizes the opportunity and comes up with a theory of time. The philosophy, in bare summary, may not sound original: Language and reason can never grasp what is most sacred in experience; history is compounded of illusion and futility; art is about beauty and beauty about intimations of God; truth lies in stillness, not action; the innocence of children has an angelic power; the presence, or memory, of those we love is what ultimately matters. But this vague mix of existentialism, neo-Platonism, and quietism is made eloquent by the sober beauty of Helprin's prose and the hard-won experience it conveys. And if the plot has its Dostoyevskian defects — a grotesque, mad, dwarflike clerk becomes a little too portentously the symbol of the arbitrary character of war — it has its intense, memorable triumphs in the passages on war, nature, and love. And not least important, the book reminds us that one freedom the 20th century has taken from us is the freedom to ignore politics

by L.S. Klepp, EW

Conflicted

With its cast of international superstars, 135-minute running time, nine interconnecting subplots, and ostentatious tagline “The Ultimate Romantic Comedy,” Richard Curtis’ Love Actually seems to have made its way into the pantheon of Christmas classics by sheer force alone. It’s a glossy, big-budget film with borderline-detestable examinations of love and romance containing perhaps three genuine moments that seem to be of our own universe, but Love Actually is one terrible Christmas movie that has strong-armed its way into the hearts of millions (including my own) despite being absolutely terrible. And this is why.

by Bobby Finger, The Hairpin |  Read more:

Now That Books Mean Nothing

[ed. For Anna, in admiration.]

About a month ago, I had surgery. I am not sick, but the surgery was to reduce my risk of becoming sick in the future: a double mastectomy, a significant procedure for an otherwise healthy 31-year-old woman.

I’d been struggling with whether to do it for nearly two years, ever since I learned I carry the BRCA1 genetic mutation that predisposes me to early-onset reproductive cancers. My sister and I both inherited it from our mother. Typing the percentages of cancer risk for those with the mutation makes me cringe, as much for us women as for the simple, intractable nature of the human genome: The risk of breast cancer is as high as 90 percent, and 50 percent for ovarian. Breast cancer typically appears first. Thus, if you have not already developed cancer and been forced into decisions, as my sister has, doctors often recommend the prophylactic removal of one’s breasts and, eventually, ovaries, where the cancer is far more difficult to detect but whose removal is far more physically and existentially complicated.

I’ve always considered myself physically sturdy, the product of determined Irish, Swedish, and German farming stock. I’ve never sprained an ankle. The only bone I’ve ever broken is the forefinger of my left hand; it eventually healed, crooked but perfectly functional. I am not allergic to anything. Lately, though, I’ve thought about how much sturdier genes are than bodies: Bodies break and fall apart but the genes that comprise them remain steadfast, titanium double helixes. Bodies, it could even be said, break most often under the implacable weight of their genes, and will continue to do so forever, or at least until we truly master how to manipulate the genes, an eventuality that of course inspires ambivalence.

I know I am fortunate to have had the privilege and opportunity to make this decision that could help save my life. I am lucky that, when the pathology reports returned from the lab, the news was that my doctors had gotten to me before the cancer had. That said, this shit—testing positive for the gene, facing the decisions it forces, this surgery, recuperation, and whatever comes next—has been difficult. I choose those words—“difficult” and “shit”—carefully: Difficult is all this is. All the time, worse things happen, things that can’t, eventually and with effort, be scraped off the sole of the boot.

Meanwhile, the months have been dwindling during which I can claim (translation: buy) comprehensive health insurance through my graduate program. I am technically still a student, yet actually just unemployed, so the possibility of getting cancer while uninsured has grown increasingly real and distinct. This is why I went ahead and did it now, while I can bask in the dual luxuries of coverage and time. That said, I’m not bouncing back the way I’d planned on or hoped for when I hoisted myself onto and under the lights of the operating table and stared up at the anesthesiologist’s surgical cap covered in smiley faces. Nearly four weeks out, and I still can’t shave my armpits properly. Pulling a shirt over my head requires a mental pep talk and I can barely lift a gallon of milk from the fridge.

As a result, all I’ve craved are suburban comforts. Chief among these: my dog, a television with decent cable, a car and a place to park it, and gas enough to get me with a short drive to someplace pretty in the country where my dog and I can both take a walk off-leash. These are some of the reasons why I am writing this not from Brooklyn, which has been home for the past four and a half years, but from my parents’ house in Virginia. Here, I migrate between my old bedroom, lined from floor to ceiling with books, and my parents’ library downstairs.

by Nell Boeschenstein, TMN |  Read more:
Illustration: Emil Robinson, Pink Book, 2011. Courtesy the artist and Waterhouse & Dodd.

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Heidi Palmer
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Christine Lafuente
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Alice's Wonderland

[ed. I just read this morning that six members of the Walmart family are financially worth as much as the bottom 30 percent of all Americans. For a detailed account of Walmart's beginnings and a better understanding of its policies and impacts read John Lanchester's excellent article: The Price of Pickles.]

On the morning of December 1, 2004, Sotheby’s offered at auction one of the last great private troves of American art. Daniel Fraad, who died in 1987, made his fortune supplying fuel to airlines; in the late forties, he and his wife, Rita, began amassing American paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including works by Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and Edward Hopper. When the Fraads started buying, their taste was not especially fashionable—French art was more in vogue—but by the time of Rita Fraad’s death, in May, 2004, American art was highly sought after, and the seventy-eight works on the block at Sotheby’s were estimated to be worth between thirty million and forty-five million dollars.

The sale got under way at a quarter past ten, and the first lot, a portrait by the naturalist painter Gari Melchers, sold to a telephone bidder for more than nine hundred thousand dollars, seven times what was expected. The sixth lot, “The Little White House,” a 1919 landscape by Willard Metcalf, sold for just over a million dollars—nearly three times its estimate, and also to a buyer on the phone. As a reporter for Maine Antique Digest noted, “People began to wonder: with almost every collector one could think of present in the room, who the heck could be on the phone?”

One of the phone bidders that day was a collector whose activities had thus far gone largely unnoticed by the art world: Alice Walton, the daughter of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, who died in 1992. The youngest of Walton’s four children, Alice, who was born in 1949 and grew up in Bentonville, Arkansas, was a member of the richest family in America. The Waltons were worth some ninety billion dollars at the time—as much as the fortunes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined. Alice had started buying art in the seventies, mostly watercolors by American artists, but by the late nineties she had become a more serious collector; she hung the works on the walls of her ranch outside of Fort Worth, where she raised, bred, and rode cutting horses, which are trained to work with cattle. In fact, as the auction got under way in New York, Walton was at the Will Rogers Coliseum, in Fort Worth, preparing to compete in the first qualifying round of the National Cutting Horse Association Futurity.

So it was from the saddle of a three-year-old gelding named IC Lad that Walton successfully bid for several lots from the Fraad collection: “Spring,” a gorgeous watercolor of a rural scene, by Winslow Homer; “A French Music Hall,” by Everett Shinn, the Ashcan School artist; and “The Studio,” by George Bellows, which depicts the artist at work with his children playing at his feet. Collectively, these works cost Walton more than twelve million dollars. She competed with IC Lad before lunchtime—they were in the third round, fourth horse—then returned to making bids during the afternoon session at Sotheby’s. From the collection of Pierre Bergé, the co-founder of Yves Saint Laurent, she bought several notable works, including “The Indian and the Lily”—an exquisite rendering of a muscular Native American, by George de Forest Brush—and “October Interior,” a sunny, celadon-hued painting of a domestic scene, by Fairfield Porter.

By the end of the day, Walton had spent more than twenty million dollars on art. She had also prevailed at the Will Rogers Coliseum, placing sixty-second out of three hundred and seventy-four entrants, which allowed her to advance to the next round. Indeed, she made it all the way to the finals, which took place on December 10th. Walton came in nineteenth out of twenty riders—not a spectacular result but one that came with a prize of nearly thirteen thousand dollars.

by Rebbeca Mead, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photograph by Sylvia Plachy