Waking Up to Major Colonoscopy Bills

[ed. I think the take-away here is that medical billing is simply a starting point for negotiations between insurance companies, medical facilities and medical practitioners. The final payment will likely be significantly different than the original bill. Of course, along the way the patient gets caught in the middle - subject to exorbitant initial co-pays, bill collectors and other unpleasant surprises - and is the funding source of both first and last resort. What a system.]

Patients who undergo colonoscopy usually receive anesthesia of some sort in order to “sleep” through the procedure. But as one Long Island couple discovered recently, it can be a very expensive nap.

Both husband and wife selected gastroenterologists who participated in their insurance plan to perform their cancer screenings. But in both cases, the gastroenterologists chose full anesthesia with Propofol, a powerful drug that must be administered by an anesthesiologist, instead of moderate, or “conscious,” sedation that often gastroenterologists can administer themselves.

And in both cases, the gastroenterologists were assisted in the procedure by anesthesiologists who were not covered by the couple’s insurance. They billed the couple’s insurance at rates far higher than any plan would reimburse — two to four times as high, experts say.

Now the couple, Lawrence LaRose and Susan LaMontagne, of Sag Harbor, N.Y., are fending off lawyers and a debt collection agency, and facing thousands of dollars in unresolved charges. All this for a cancer screening test that public health officials say every American should have by age 50, and repeat every 10 years, to save lives — and money.

“Doctors adopt practices that cost more, insurers pay less, and patients get stuck with a tab that in many cases is inflated and arbitrary,” said Ms. LaMontagne, whose communications firm, Public Interest Media Group, is focused on health care. “I work on health care access issues every day, so if I’m having a hard time sorting this out, what does that say for other consumers?”

by Roni Caryn Rabin, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Scott Menchin

Steven Yazzi. Coyote Series.
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Crazy for Crispy

At any run-of-the-mill Japanese restaurant in North America, the menu features such traditional items as tempura, tonkatsu, and kara-age chicken. This crispy trio has long had an important place in Japanese cuisine. But it is surprising to find out that all three are cultural borrowings, some dating back to time periods when Japan went to great lengths to isolate itself from foreign influences. The batter-frying tempura technique (used typically for vegetables and shrimp) was borrowed from Spanish and Portuguese missionaries and traders in the 15th and 16th centuries. Tonkatsu is a breaded pork cutlet, a version of the schnitzel from Germany and Central Europe, which was added to Japanese cuisine probably no later than the early part of the 20th century. Kara-age originally meant "Chinese frying" and refers to deep-frying foods that have been coated with corn starch.

In The Babbo Cookbook, the celebrity chef and restaurateur Mario Batali wrote, "The single word 'crispy' sells more food than a barrage of adjectives. ... There is something innately appealing about crispy food." If crispy food really is innately appealing, that might help explain why Japanese cuisine was so receptive to these particular "outside" foods. In turn, it is quite possible that crispy dishes such as tempura and tonkatsu were gateway foods for the worldwide acceptance of squishier Japanese delicacies, such as sushi. Tortilla chips, potato chips, French fries, fried chicken, and other crispy items may serve as the advance guard in the internationalization of eating throughout the developed (and developing) world. Crispy conquers cultural boundaries.

The hypothesis that crispy foods are innately appealing is a fascinating one. As an anthropologist interested in the evolution of cognition and the human diet, I think that maybe our attraction to crispy foods could give us insights into how people have evolved to think the food that they eat.

Eating has been as critical to human survival as sociality, language, and sex and gender roles have, but it has not received much interest from evolutionary psychologists and other scientists interested in behavioral evolution. What we eat is, of course, shaped by culture, which influences the range of foods that are deemed edible and inedible in any given environment. But eating and food choices have also been shaped by millions of years of evolution, giving us a preference for certain tastes and textures, as well as a desire to eat more than we should when some foods are readily available.

by John S. Allen, The Chronicle Review |  Read more:
Photo: iStock

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The Things That Carried Him

The seven soldiers stood in a stiff line and fired three volleys each. This is a part of the ritual they practice again and again. The seven weapons should sound like one. When the shots are scattered — "popcorn," the soldiers call it — they've failed, and they will be mad at themselves for a long time after. On this day, with news cameras and hundreds of sets of sad eyes trained on them, they were perfect. After the final volley, Huber bent down and picked up his three polished shells from the grass.

Leatherbee wet his lips before he raised his trumpet. That was the first indication that he was a genuine bugler. There is such a shortage of buglers now — ushered in by a confluence of death, including waves of World War II and Korea veterans, the first ranks of aging Vietnam veterans, and the nearly four thousand men and women killed in Iraq — that the military has been forced to employ bands of make-believe musicians for the graveside playing of taps. They are usually ordinary soldiers who carry an electronic bugle; with the press of a button, a rendition of taps is broadcast out across fields and through trees. Taps is played without valve work, so only the small red light that shines out of the bell gives them away.

Now Leatherbee, using his lungs and his lips to control the pitch, played the first of twenty-four notes: G, G, C, G, C, E... Taps is not fast or technically difficult, and even if it were, most true Army buglers, like Leatherbee, are trained at the university level, possessing what the military calls a "civilian-acquired skill." They have each spent an additional six months in Norfolk, Virginia, for advanced work in calls. But there are still subtle differences that survive the efforts at regimentation — in embouchure, volume, and vibrato, and in how they taper the notes — and there is always the risk of a cracked note, whether due to cold or heat or the tightness that every bugler feels in his chest.

"You always run into the question," Leatherbee said later, "do I close my eyes, so that emotion won't be involved, or do I leave them open, so that more emotion will be in the sound? In my opinion, you can't close your eyes. There's a person in a casket in front of you. You want to give them as much as you can."

After Leatherbee lowered the trumpet from his lips, the six men who carried the casket to the burial vault returned to fold the flag. For some soldiers, that can be the hardest part. "Because you're right there," said one of the riflemen, Sergeant Chris Bastille. "You're maybe two feet from the family. And the younger the soldier is, the younger the family is."

"He had a few kids," Huber said.

First, the soldiers folded the flag twice lengthwise, with a slight offset at the top to ensure that the red and white would disappear within the blue. "Their hands were shaking," Dawson would remember later. "I could see that they were feeling it."

Then they made the first of thirteen triangular folds. Before the second fold, Huber took the three gleaming shells out of his pocket and pushed them inside the flag. No one would ever see them again — a flag well folded takes effort to pull apart — but he took pride in having polished them.

by Chris Jones, Esquire (May, 2008) |  Read more:

The Beach Boys’ Crazy Summer

Brian Wilson, the lumbering savant who wrote, produced and sang an outlandish number of immortal pop songs back in the 1960s with his band, the Beach Boys, is swiveling in a chair, belly out, arms dangling, next to his faux-grand piano at the cavernous Burbank, Calif. studio where he and the rest of the group’s surviving members are rehearsing for their much-ballyhooed 50th Anniversary reunion tour, which is set to start in three days. At 24, Wilson shelved what would have been his most avant-garde album, Smile, and retreated for decades into a dusky haze of drug abuse and mental illness; now, 45 years later, he has reemerged, stable but still somewhat screwy, to give the whole sun-and-surf thing a final go.

Before that can happen, though, the reconstituted Beach Boys must learn how to sing “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” the first new A-side that Wilson has written for the band since 1980. They are not entirely happy about this. Earlier, I heard keyboardist Bruce Johnston, who replaced Wilson on the road in 1965, talking to the group’s tour manager about an upcoming satellite-radio gig. “Just so you know,” the manager said, “Sirius wants you to perform ‘That’s Why God Made the Radio’ tomorrow night.”

“Oh really?” Johnston responded. “And how are we going to do that when we don’t know it?”

And so the band has gathered, once again, around Wilson’s piano. I’d like to imagine that this is how it was when they first accustomed their vocal cords to, say, “California Girls.” Except it’s not, exactly: back then, in 1965, Wilson was the maestro, conducting each singer as his falsetto floated skyward and his fingers pecked out the accompaniment. Now he stares at a teleprompter and sings when he’s told to sing, ceding his bench to one member of the 10-man backing band that will buffer the Beach Boys in concert and looking on while another orchestrates the harmonies and handles the loftier notes. At first, the blend is rough: Wilson strains to hit the high point of the hook; frontman Mike Love and guitarist Al Jardine miss their cues. But after eight or nine passes the stray voices begin to mesh. They begin to sound like the Beach Boys. Close your eyes, shutting out Wilson’s swoosh of silver hair and Love’s four golden rings, and 1965 isn’t such a stretch.

Or it isn't until someone's iPhone rings. Jardine's. He turns away from the piano and presses the device to his ear. "I'm going to have to call you back, because--wait, what?" He hangs up, shaking his head. "Dick Clark just passed away," he says. The room begins to murmur; the makeup lady covers her mouth with her hand.

Over the next few minutes, I watch as each Beach Boy absorbs the news. Love makes light of it, pretending to strangle Jardine behind his back. “You’re next, Al,” he purrs. Johnston, a former A&R man at Columbia, pitches Clark’s death as an angle for my story. “It’s kind of ironic to have our television hero in music pass away while we’re doing this next big move,” he explains

And then there’s Wilson—always the conduit, the live wire, the pulsing limbic system of the Beach Boys. As his biographer David Leaf once put it, “Brian Wilson's special magic in the early and mid-1960s was that he was at one with his audience ... Brian had a teenage heart, until it was broken.” At first, Wilson says nothing. Then I overhear him talking to Jardine.

“We're 70 fucking years old,” he says. “You'll be 70 in September. I'll be 70 in June. I'm worried about being 70.”

“It’s still a few months off,” Jardine says.

“That's true,” Wilson mutters. He pauses for a few seconds, looking away from his bandmate. “I want to know how did we get here?” he finally says. “How did we ever fucking get here? That's what I want to know.”

by Andrew Romano, The Daily Beast |  Read more:
Photo: courtesy of Capitol Records Archive

[ed. A special day. Congratulations Hil and Phil!]

Henri Rousseau- Le Chat Tigre. Oil on canvas, undated.
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Jonathan Franzen: the path to Freedom

[ed. Fascinating glimpse into the life of an acclaimed writer, and the process of writing a great novel.]

I'm going to begin by addressing four unpleasant questions that novelists often get asked. These questions are apparently the price we have to pay for the pleasure of appearing in public. They're maddening not just because we hear them so often but also because, with one exception, they're difficult to answer and, therefore, very much worth asking.

The first of these perennial questions is: Who are your influences?

Sometimes the person asking this question merely wants some book recommendations, but all too often the question seems to be intended seriously. And part of what annoys me about it is that it's always asked in the present tense: who are my influences? The fact is, at this point in my life, I'm mostly influenced by my own past writing. If I were still labouring in the shadow of, say, EM Forster, I would certainly be at pains to pretend that I wasn't. According to Harold Bloom, whose clever theory of literary influence helped him make a career of distinguishing "weak" writers from "strong" writers, I wouldn't even be conscious of the degree to which I was still labouring in EM Forster's shadow. Only Harold Bloom would be fully conscious of that.

Direct influence makes sense only with very young writers, who, in the course of figuring out how to write, first try copying the styles and attitudes and methods of their favourite authors. I personally was very influenced, at the age of 21, by CS Lewis, Isaac Asimov, Louise Fitzhugh, Herbert Marcuse, PG Wodehouse, Karl Kraus, my then-fianceé, and The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. For a while, in my early 20s, I put a lot of effort into copying the sentence rhythms and comic dialogue of Don DeLillo; I was also very taken with the strenuously vivid and all-knowing prose of Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon. But to me these various "influences" seem not much more meaningful than the fact that, when I was 15, my favourite music group was the Moody Blues. A writer has to begin somewhere, but where exactly he or she begins is almost random.

It would be somewhat more meaningful to say that I was influenced by Franz Kafka. By this I mean that it was Kafka's novel The Trial, as taught by the best literature professor I ever had, that opened my eyes to the greatness of what literature can do, and made me want to try to create some myself. Kafka's brilliantly ambiguous rendering of Josef K, who is at once a sympathetic and unjustly persecuted Everyman and a self-pitying and guilt-denying criminal, was my portal to the possibilities of fiction as a vehicle of self-investigation: as a method of engagement with the difficulties and paradoxes of my own life. Kafka teaches us how to love ourselves even as we're being merciless toward ourselves; how to remain humane in the face of the most awful truths about ourselves. The stories that recognise people as they really are – the books whose characters are at once sympathetic subjects and dubious objects – are the ones capable of reaching across cultures and generations. This is why we still read Kafka.

The bigger problem with the question about influences, however, is that it seems to presuppose that young writers are lumps of soft clay on which certain great writers, dead or living, have indelibly left their mark. And what maddens the writer trying to answer the question honestly is that almost everything a writer has ever read leaves some kind of mark. To list every writer I've learned something from would take me hours, and it still wouldn't account for why some books matter to me so much more than other books: why, even now, when I'm working, I often think about The Brothers Karamazov and The Man Who Loved Children and never about Ulysses or To the Lighthouse. How did it happen that I did not learn anything from Joyce or Woolf, even though they're both obviously "strong" writers?

The common understanding of influence, whether Harold Bloomian or more conventional, is far too linear and one-directional. When I write, I don't feel like a craftsman influenced by earlier craftsmen who were themselves influenced by earlier craftsmen. I feel like a member of a single, large virtual community in which I have dynamic relationships with other members of the community, most of whom are no longer living. By means of what I write and how I write, I fight for my friends and I fight against my enemies. I want more readers to appreciate the glory of the 19th-century Russians; I'm indifferent to whether readers love James Joyce; and my work represents an active campaign against the values I dislike: sentimentality, weak narrative, overly lyrical prose, solipsism, self-indulgence, misogyny and other parochialisms, sterile game-playing, overt didacticism, moral simplicity, unnecessary difficulty, informational fetishes, and so on. Indeed, much of what might be called actual "influence" is negative: I don't want to be like this writer or that writer. (...)

The second perennial question is: What time of day do you work, and what do you write on?

by Jonathan Franzen, The Guardian | Read more:

U n’ Me by Scott Westmoreland
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The Self Illusion: An Interview With Bruce Hood

[ed. Jonah Lehrer inteviews Bruce Hood, author of The Self Illusion, on the nature of self and what it means when we use that term.]

LEHRER: The title of The Self Illusion is literal. You argue that the self – this entity at the center of our personal universe – is actually just a story, a “constructed narrative.” Could you explain what you mean?

HOOD: The best stories make sense. They follow a logical path where one thing leads to another and provide the most relevant details and signposts along the way so that you get a sense of continuity and cohesion. This is what writers refer to as the narrative arc – a beginning, middle and an end. If a sequence of events does not follow a narrative, then it is incoherent and fragmented so does not have meaning. Our brains think in stories. The same is true for the self and I use a distinction that William James drew between the self as “I” and “me.” Our consciousness of the self in the here and now is the “I” and most of the time, we experience this as being an integrated and coherent individual – a bit like the character in the story. The self which we tell others about, is autobiographical or the “me” which again is a coherent account of who we think we are based on past experiences, current events and aspirations for the future. (...)

LEHRER: If the self is an illusion, then why does it exist? Why do we bother telling a story about ourselves?

HOOD: For the same reason that our brains create a highly abstracted version of the world around us. It is bad enough that our brain is metabolically hogging most of our energy requirements, but it does this to reduce the workload to act. That’s the original reason why the brain evolved in the first place – to plan and control movements and keep track of the environment. It’s why living creatures that do not act or navigate around their environments do not have brains. So the brain generates maps and models on which to base current and future behaviors. Now the value of a map or a model is the extent to which it provides the most relevant useful information without overburdening you with too much detail.

The same can be said for the self. Whether it is the “I” of consciousness or the “me” of personal identity, both are summaries of the complex information that feeds into our consciousness. The self is an efficient way of having experience and interacting with the world. For example, imagine you ask me whether I would prefer vanilla or chocolate ice cream? I know I would like chocolate ice cream. Don’t ask me why, I just know. When I answer with chocolate, I have the seemingly obvious experience that my self made the decision. However, when you think about it, my decision covers a vast multitude of hidden processes, past experiences and cultural influences that would take too long to consider individually. Each one of them fed into that decision.

LEHRER: Let’s say the self is just a narrative. Who, then, is the narrator? Which part of me is writing the story that becomes me?

HOOD: This is the most interesting question and also the most difficult to answer because we are entering into the realms of consciousness. For example, only this morning as I was waking up, I was aware that I was gathering my thoughts together and I suddenly became fixated by this phrase, “gathering my thoughts.” I felt I could focus on my thoughts, turn them over in my mind and consider how I was able to do this. Who was doing the gathering and who was focusing? This was a compelling experience of the conscious self.

I would argue that while I had the very strong impression that I was gathering my thoughts together, you do have to question how did the thought to start this investigation begin? Certainly, most of us never bother to think about this, so I must have had an unconscious agenda that this would be an interesting exercise. Maybe it was your question that I read a few days ago or maybe this is a problem that has been ticking over in my brain for some time. It seemed like a story that I was playing out in my head to try and answer a question about how I was thinking. But unless you believe in a ghost in the machine, it is impossible to interrogate your own mind independently. In other words, the narrator and the audience are one and the same.

by Jonah Lehrer, Wired |  Read more:

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ALGORHYTHMS : JURNE & MWM. by MWM Graphics
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The Imperial Mind

Americans of all types — Democrats and Republicans, even some Good Progressives — are just livid that a Pakistani tribal court (reportedly in consultation with Pakistani officials) has imposed a 33-year prison sentence on Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani physician who secretly worked with the CIA to find Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil. Their fury tracks the standard American media narrative: by punishing Dr. Afridi for the “crime” of helping the U.S. find bin Laden, Pakistan has revealed that it sympathizes with Al Qaeda and is hostile to the U.S. (NPR headline: “33 Years In Prison For Pakistani Doctor Who Aided Hunt For Bin Laden”; NYT headline: “Prison Term for Helping C.I.A. Find Bin Laden”). Except that’s a woefully incomplete narrative: incomplete to the point of being quite misleading.

What Dr. Afridi actually did was concoct a pretextual vaccination program, whereby Pakistani children would be injected with a single Hepatitis B vaccine, with the hope of gaining access to the Abbottabad house where the CIA believed bin Laden was located. The plan was that, under the ruse of vaccinating the children in that province, he would obtain DNA samples that could confirm the presence in the suspected house of the bin Laden family. But the vaccine program he was administering was fake: as Wired‘s public health reporter Maryn McKenna detailed, “since only one of three doses was delivered, the vaccination was effectively useless.” An on-the-ground Guardian investigation documented that ”while the vaccine doses themselves were genuine, the medical professionals involved were not following procedures. In an area called Nawa Sher, they did not return a month after the first dose to provide the required second batch. Instead, according to local officials and residents, the team moved on.”

That means that numerous Pakistani children who thought they were being vaccinated against Hepatitis B were in fact left exposed to the virus. Worse, international health workers have long faced serious problems in many parts of the world — including remote Muslim areas — in convincing people that the vaccines they want to give to their children are genuine rather than Western plots to harm them. These suspicions have prevented the eradication of polio and the containment of other preventable diseases in many areas, including in parts of Pakistan. This faux CIA vaccination program will, for obvious and entirely foreseeable reasons, significantly exacerbate that problem.

As McKenna wrote this week, this fake CIA vaccination program was “a cynical attempt to hijack the credibility that public health workers have built up over decades with local populations” and thus “endangered the status of the fraught polio-eradication campaign, which over the past decade has been challenged in majority-Muslim areas in Africa and South Asia over beliefs that polio vaccination is actually a covert campaign to harm Muslim children.” She further notes that while this suspicion “seems fantastic” to oh-so-sophisticated Western ears — what kind of primitive people would harbor suspicions about Western vaccine programs? – there are actually “perfectly good reasons to distrust vaccination campaigns” from the West (in 1996, for instance, 11 children died in Nigeria when Pfizer, ostensibly to combat a meningitis outbreak, conducted drug trials — experiments — on Nigerian children that did not comport with binding safety standards in the U.S.).

When this fake CIA vaccination program was revealed last year, Doctors Without Borders harshly denounced the CIA and Dr. Afridi for their “grave manipulation of the medical act” that will cause “vulnerable communities – anywhere – needing access to essential health services [to] understandably question the true motivation of medical workers and humanitarian aid.” The group’s President pointed out the obvious: “The potential consequence is that even basic healthcare, including vaccination, does not reach those who need it most.” That is now clearly happening, as the CIA program “is casting its shadow over campaigns to vaccinate Pakistanis against polio.” Gulrez Khan, a Peshawar-based anti-polio worker, recently said that tribesman in the area now consider public health workers to be CIA agents and are more reluctant than ever to accept vaccines and other treatments for their children.

For the moment, leave to the side the question of whether knowingly administering ineffective vaccines to Pakistani children is a justified ruse to find bin Laden (just by the way, it didn’t work, as none of the health workers actually were able to access the bin Laden house, though CIA officials claim the program did help obtain other useful information). In light of all the righteous American outrage over this prison sentence, let’s consider what the U.S. Government would do if the situation were reversed: namely, if an American citizen secretly cooperated with a foreign intelligence service to conduct clandestine operations on U.S. soil, all without the knowledge or consent of the U.S. Government, and let’s further consider what would happen if the American citizen’s role in those operations involved administering a fake vaccine program to unwitting American children. Might any serious punishment ensue? Does anyone view that as anything more than an obvious rhetorical question?

by Glenn Greenwald, Salon |  Read more:

Golf's Hardest Shot? Opinions Vary

What’s the hardest shot in golf?

Knowledgeable golfers have been trained to respond, almost by reflex: the long bunker shot. It requires a long carry from sand, from 25 to 100 yards, and that scares most recreational golfers.

But is that truly the hardest shot in golf? Is it harder than hitting your first tee shot of the day with a waiting crowd of other golfers watching? Is it harder than the same first tee shot to open a member-guest tournament — and you’re the guest? Is it harder than the first tee shot of the day if the first tee is positioned directly in front of the clubhouse deck, where dozens of people usually gather?

And if you hit that first tee shot of the day out of bounds and have to re-tee with everyone watching, does that next shot become the hardest shot in golf?

Or, is the hardest shot in golf the dreaded “playing through” shot? You know the one I mean. Your group has been coming up on a slower group for several holes, then, as you approach the tee of a nasty par 3 over water, they decide to wave you through. They stand to the side of the green, their hands on their hips, and wait for you to hit.

Now that’s a tough situation. Even if they’re not annoyed at the interruption, you worry that they are. You must hit, and do so quickly. But you sense, perhaps irrationally, that the golfers in front are judging you, standing there thinking, “Well, you’ve been pushing us for an hour, let’s see how good you are.”

And this always seems to happen on a treacherous hole, usually the highest-handicap hole on the scorecard.

So is that the hardest shot in golf?

I have a few other candidates to propose:

by Bill Pennington, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Andy Lyons/Getty Images

This Is How We Ride

This summer the city’s Department of Transportation inaugurates a new bike-share program. People who live and work in New York will be able to travel quickly and cheaply between many neighborhoods. This is major. It will make New Yorkers rethink their city and rewrite the mental maps we use to decide what is convenient, what is possible. Parks, restaurants and friends who once seemed beyond plausible commuting distance on public transportation will seem a lot closer. The possibilities aren’t limitless, but the change will be pretty impressive.

I’ve used a bike to get around New York for decades. There’s an exhilaration you get from self-propelled transportation — skateboarding, in-line skating and walking as well as biking; New York has good public transportation, but you just don’t get the kind of rush I’m talking about on a bus or subway train. I got hooked on biking because it’s a pleasure, not because biking lowers my carbon footprint, improves my health or brings me into contact with different parts of the city and new adventures. But it does all these things, too — and sometimes makes us a little self-satisfied for it; still, the reward is emotional gratification, which trumps reason, as it often does.

More than 200 cities around the world have bike-share programs. We’re not the first, but ours will be one of the largest systems. The program will start with 420 stations spread through the lower half of Manhattan, Long Island City and much of western Brooklyn; eventually more than 10,000 bikes will be available. It will cost just under $10 for a day’s rental. The charge includes unlimited rides during a 24-hour period, as long as each ride is under 30 minutes. So, for example, I could ride from Chelsea to the Lower East Side, from there to food shopping, later to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and after that, home. This system is not geared for leisurely rides up to the George Washington Bridge or to Coney Island. This is for getting around.

I’ve used bike-sharing programs in London, Ottawa, Washington, Toronto, Barcelona, Milan and Paris. In London, where they introduced a public bike program two years ago, I could enjoy a night out without having to worry about catching the last tube home or finding a no longer readily available black cab. In Paris, the Vélib program has more than 20,000 bikes and extends all the way to the city’s borders. Significantly, the banlieues, the low-income housing projects that surround that city, aren’t included, so the system reinforces a kind of economic discrimination, but maybe more coverage is coming.  (...)

New York’s system will be a lot like the one in London, which I used last summer. Before setting off, I downloaded a map and app that showed me where to find the bike station closest to my hotel, near Soho Square and to my destinations, an art gallery in Mayfair and later a restaurant in Notting Hill. I made one payment — a pound (about $1.50 — cheap!) — and I was good all day; there are no additional charges as long as each bike trip is under 30 minutes. (It’s easy to keep bike trips within that time limit because there are loads of stations where you can drop the bike off, and you can get a new bike after having a coffee.)

So, I don’t have to worry about leaving my bike somewhere if it rains or if I decide to cab home? Nope. I don’t have to worry about parking my bike outside for hours? Nope. I don’t have to think about whether my friend has a bike if we’re going somewhere together? Nope. Everyone has a bike now.

by David Byrne, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Josh Cochran

Talking Heads

Bettye LaVette

[ed. I'm curious what Ringo Starr thinks of Ms. LaVette's cover of his song. I did a quick Google search but didn't turn up anything.]

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