Friday, May 29, 2015
Young Women Say No to Thongs
A young generation of women is discovering a new brand of sexy in the most unlikely of places: their grandmothers’ underwear drawers.
“When I walk into a lingerie store, I’m always like, ‘O.K., which drawer in here is for the grannies?’ ” Daphne Javitch, 35, said of her predilection for ample-bottomed undies. That preference led Ms. Javitch, back in 2010, to found Ten Undies, a line with a cult following that sells cotton full-bottom bikinis, boy shorts and high-waist briefs not unlike the kind immortalized in “Bridget Jones’s Diary.” (“Hello, mommy.”) Ten’s wares are comfortable and practical, to be sure, but that’s hardly the only draw.
“Within millennial and Generation Y consumer groups, it’s considered cool to be wearing full-bottom underwear,” said Bernadette Kissane, an apparel analyst at the market intelligence firm Euromonitor. “Thongs have had their moment.”
Data provided by the research company NPD Group back her up. Sales of thongs decreased 7 percent over the last year, while sales of fuller styles — briefs, boy shorts and high-waist briefs — have grown a collective 17 percent.
Erica Russo, the fashion director for accessories, cosmetics and intimate apparel at Bloomingdale’s, said that indeed there has been a “shift in the business.” She noted that the trend is in line with the higher-waist and roomier pants styles that have dominated fashion this season. Perhaps motivated by the same kind of contrarianism that helped elevate Birkenstocks and fanny packs, young women are embracing “granny panties” — and not just for laundry day. (...)
Besides sales, the “feminist underwear” has inspired countless Instagram “belfies” (that’s a selfie for the behind) from Me and You customers eager to show off their feminist convictions as well as their pert posteriors.
Besides sales, the “feminist underwear” has inspired countless Instagram “belfies” (that’s a selfie for the behind) from Me and You customers eager to show off their feminist convictions as well as their pert posteriors.
by Haley Phelan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via:
Jean Suquet- Cadastre Photomontage Large Glass (Marcel Duchamp) and Photography Given by the author, 1960s
via:
Thursday, May 28, 2015
What To Do If You See A Bear
[ed. Actually, brown and grizzly bears are one and the same, except brown bears are found in coastal habitats and grizzlies further inland. So, don't try to psych-out either of them. Also (to be pedantic) black bears are black, but also cinnamon-colored, and even blue (glacier bears). So yeah, other than that, all of this seems like good advice.]
If You See a Black Bear
Black bears are black. They have black fur, which looks black, when you see it. If you encounter a black bear, do not make eye contact. If you make eye contact, black bears will take this as an act of aggression. They will put two and two together and go nuts on you and ruin your life. But also don’t look away. Just look to the side, or act as if you spotted something over the black bear’s shoulder. Like, “Oh, that leaf? That’s good stuff.” Then stick your arms out to make yourself look bigger and back away slowly. But not too slowly. If you back away too slowly, black bears will think you are simply delicious. The last thing you want is for a black bear to think that. If you happen to have a neon traffic cone, go ahead and put it between you and the bear. Not because black bears understand traffic signals, but because it’s a well known fact that they hate neon shit. (...)
If You See a Brown Bear
Brown bears are brown, with fur that can be qualified as “standard brown.” Brown bears tend to be peaceful and to keep to themselves, going along with their daily business, until someone comes up to them and starts playing the devil’s advocate. The last thing you want to do around a brown bear is jauntily take a contrarian stance in order to challenge its preconceived notions. If you do this, the bear will feel as if he is being razzed within an inch of his life, and might decide to take you, and everyone you’re with, “to town” in the sense of killing you. Also, there is a common misconception that brown bears appreciate the art of a good psych-out. We cannot stress enough how untrue this is. Do not attempt to psych-out a brown bear by showing him a photo of what looks like a computer chip but turns out to be an aerial view of a city. This will cause him to turn into his most conflicted self.
If You See a Grizzly Bear
If you see a grizzly bear, the most important thing to remember is to not ride its nuts about anything. Like whether it’s foraged enough today. Or stuck its head out and growled in a terrifying manner. Or had a salmon jump into its mouth from a stream in a picturesque way. If it senses you’re riding its nuts about any of this stuff, it might just get up in arms and have a snack-attack with your body. We can’t stress this enough: if you see a Grizzly Bear, just give it the sense that it’s doing a great job, that it’s generally done “enough,” and that every decision it’s ever made has been the right one.
by Emma Rathbone, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: UIG via Getty
Off Diamond Head
Hawaii, 1966: Nobody bothered me. Nobody vibed me. It was the opposite of my life at school.
[ed. Pretty much my life growing up in Honolulu in the 60s. Intermediate school was brutal back then, with an undercurrent of violence that could erupt seemingly at any moment. I'm Hapa (half) haole, and remember quite clearly Kill a Haole Day. But it wasn't just school, it was anywhere that kids congregated - on waves, or playgrounds, beaches or parking lots. Everyone had their tribe (which adhered closely to race or community), and it took an acute sense of local awareness to avoid getting crosswise with any particular individual or group. It still does to some extent.]
The budget for moving our family to Honolulu was tight, judging from the tiny cottage we rented and the rusted-out Ford Fairlane we bought to get around. My brother Kevin and I took turns sleeping on the couch. I was thirteen; he was nine. But the cottage was near the beach—just up a driveway lined with other cottages, on a street called Kulamanu—and the weather, which was warm even in January, when we arrived, felt like wanton luxury.
I ran to the beach for a first, frantic survey of the local waters. The setup was confusing. Waves broke here and there along the outer edge of a mossy, exposed reef. All that coral worried me. It was infamously sharp. Then I spotted, well off to the west, and rather far out at sea, a familiar minuet of stick figures, rising and falling, backlit by the afternoon sun. Surfers! I ran back up the lane. Everyone at the house was busy unpacking and fighting over beds. I threw on a pair of trunks, grabbed my surfboard, and left without a word. (...)
I was beside myself with excitement just to be in Hawaii. All surfers, all readers of surf magazines—and I had memorized nearly every line, every photo caption, in every surf magazine I owned—spent the bulk of their fantasy lives, like it or not, in Hawaii. Now I was there, walking on actual Hawaiian sand (coarse, strange-smelling), tasting Hawaiian seawater (warm, strange-smelling), and paddling toward Hawaiian waves (small, dark-faced, windblown).
Nothing was what I’d expected. In the mags, Hawaiian waves were always big and, in the color shots, ranged from a deep, mid-ocean blue to a pale, impossible turquoise. The wind was always offshore (blowing from land to sea, ideal for surfing), and the breaks themselves were the Olympian playgrounds of the gods: Sunset Beach, the Banzai Pipeline, Makaha, Ala Moana, Waimea Bay.
All that seemed worlds away from the sea in front of our new house. Even Waikiki, known for its beginner breaks and tourist crowds, was over on the far side of Diamond Head—the glamorous western side—along with every other part of Honolulu anybody had heard of. We were on the mountain’s southeast side, down in a little saddle of sloping, shady beachfront west of Black Point. The beach was just a patch of damp sand, narrow and empty.
I paddled west along a shallow lagoon, staying close to the shore, for half a mile. The beach houses ended, and the steep, brushy base of Diamond Head itself took their place across the sand. Then the reef on my left fell away, revealing a wide channel—deeper water, where no waves broke—and, beyond the channel, ten or twelve surfers riding a scatter of dark, chest-high peaks in a moderate onshore wind. I paddled slowly toward the lineup—the wave-catching zone—taking a roundabout route, studying every ride.
The surfers were good. They had smooth, ungimmicky styles. Nobody fell off. And nobody, blessedly, seemed to notice me. I circled around, then edged into an unpopulated stretch of the lineup. There were plenty of waves. The takeoffs were crumbling but easy. Letting muscle memory take over, I caught and rode a couple of small, mushy rights. The waves were different—but not too different—from the ones I’d known in California. They were shifty but not intimidating. I could see coral on the bottom but nothing too shallow.
There was a lot of talk and laughter among the other surfers. Eavesdropping, I couldn’t understand a word. They were probably speaking pidgin. I had read about pidgin in James Michener’s “Hawaii,” but I hadn’t actually heard any yet. Or maybe it was some foreign language. I was the only haole (white person—another word from Michener) in the water. At one point, an older guy paddling past me gestured seaward and said, “Outside.” It was the only word spoken to me that day. And he was right: an outside set was approaching, the biggest of the afternoon, and I was grateful to have been warned. (...)
I had never thought of myself as a sheltered child. Still, Kaimuki Intermediate School was a shock. I was in the eighth grade, and most of my new schoolmates were “drug addicts, glue sniffers, and hoods”—or so I wrote to a friend back in Los Angeles. That wasn’t true. What was true was that haoles were a tiny and unpopular minority at Kaimuki. The “natives,” as I called them, seemed to dislike us particularly. This was unnerving, because many of the Hawaiians were, for junior-high kids, quite large, and the word was that they liked to fight. Asians were the school’s most sizable ethnic group, though in those first weeks I didn’t know enough to distinguish among Japanese and Chinese and Korean kids, let alone the stereotypes through which each group viewed the others. Nor did I note the existence of other important tribes, such as the Filipinos, the Samoans, or the Portuguese (not considered haole), nor all the kids of mixed ethnic background. I probably even thought the big guy in wood shop who immediately took a sadistic interest in me was Hawaiian.
He wore shiny black shoes with long, sharp toes, tight pants, and bright flowered shirts. His kinky hair was cut in a pompadour, and he looked as if he had been shaving since birth. He rarely spoke, and then only in a pidgin that was unintelligible to me. He was some kind of junior mobster, clearly years behind his original class, just biding his time until he could drop out. His name was Freitas—I never heard a first name—but he didn’t seem to be related to the Freitas clan, a vast family with several rambunctious boys at Kaimuki Intermediate. The stiletto-toed Freitas studied me frankly for a few days, making me increasingly nervous, and then began to conduct little assaults on my self-possession, softly bumping my elbow, for example, while I concentrated over a saw cut on my half-built shoeshine box.
I was too scared to say anything, and he never said a word to me. That seemed to be part of the fun. Then he settled on a crude but ingenious amusement for passing those periods when we had to sit in chairs in the classroom section of the shop. He would sit behind me and, whenever the teacher had his back turned, hit me on the head with a two-by-four. Bonk . . . bonk . . . bonk, a nice steady rhythm, always with enough of a pause between blows to allow me brief hope that there might not be another. I couldn’t understand why the teacher didn’t hear all these unauthorized, resonating clonks. They were loud enough to attract the attention of our classmates, who seemed to find Freitas’s little ritual fascinating. Inside my head the blows were, of course, bone-rattling explosions. Freitas used a fairly long board—five or six feet—and he never hit too hard, which permitted him to pound away without leaving marks, and to do it from a certain rarefied, even meditative distance, which added, I imagine, to the fascination of the performance.
I wonder if, had some other kid been targeted, I would have been as passive as my classmates were. Probably. The teacher was off in his own world, worried only about his table saws. I did nothing in my own defense. While I eventually understood that Freitas wasn’t Hawaiian, I must have figured that I just had to take the abuse. I was, after all, skinny and haole and had no friends. (...)
My parents had sent me to Kaimuki Intermediate, I later decided, under a misconception. This was 1966, before the Proposition 13 tax revolt, and the California public-school system, particularly in the middle-class suburbs where we had lived, was among the nation’s best. The families we knew never considered private schools for their kids. Hawaii’s public schools were another matter—impoverished, mired in colonial, plantation, and mission traditions, miles below the American average academically.
Ignorant of all this, my parents sent two of my younger siblings (I have three) to the nearest elementary school, which happened to be in a middle-class area, and me to the nearest junior high, up in working-class Kaimuki, on the inland side of Diamond Head crater, where they assumed I was getting on with the business of the eighth grade but where I was occupied almost entirely by the rigors of bullies, loneliness, fights, and finding my way, after a lifetime of unconscious privileged whiteness in the segregated suburbs of California, in a racialized world. Even my classes felt racially constructed. For academic subjects, at least, students were assigned, on the basis of test scores, to a group that moved together from teacher to teacher. I was put in a high-end group, where nearly all my classmates were Japanese girls. The classes, which were prim and undemanding, bored me in a way that school never had before. To my classmates, I seemed not to exist socially. And so I passed the class hours slouched in back rows, keeping an eye on the trees outside for signs of wind direction and strength, drawing page after page of surfboards and waves.
My orientation program at school included a series of fistfights, some of them formally scheduled. There was a cemetery next to the school grounds, with a well-hidden patch of grass down in one corner where kids went to settle their differences. I found myself facing off there with a number of boys named Freitas—none of them, again, apparently related to my hairy tormentor from wood shop. My first opponent was so small and young that I doubted that he even attended our school. The Freitas clan’s method for training its members in battle, it seemed, was to find some fool without allies or the brains to avoid a challenge, then send their youngest fighter with any chance at all into the ring. If he lost, the next biggest Freitas would be sent in. This went on until the non-kinsman was defeated. It was all quite dispassionate, the bouts arranged and refereed by older Freitases, and more or less fairly conducted.
My first match was sparsely attended—really of no interest to anyone—but I was still scared sick, having no seconds in my corner and no idea what the rules were. My opponent turned out to be shockingly strong for his size, and ferocious, but his arms were too short to land punches, and I eventually subdued him without much damage to either of us. His cousin, who stepped up immediately, was more my size, and our sparring was more consequential. I held my own, but we both had shiners before a senior Freitas stepped in, declaring a draw. There would be a rematch, he said, and, if I won that, somebody named Tino would come and kick my ass, no questions asked. Team Freitas departed. I remember watching them jog, laughing and loose, a happy family militia, up the long slope of the graveyard. They were evidently late for another appointment. My face hurt, my knuckles hurt, but I was giddy with relief. Then I noticed a couple of haole guys my age standing in the bushes at the edge of the clearing, looking squirrelly. I half recognized them from school, but they left without saying a word.
I won the rematch, I think. Then Tino kicked my ass, no questions asked.
[ed. Pretty much my life growing up in Honolulu in the 60s. Intermediate school was brutal back then, with an undercurrent of violence that could erupt seemingly at any moment. I'm Hapa (half) haole, and remember quite clearly Kill a Haole Day. But it wasn't just school, it was anywhere that kids congregated - on waves, or playgrounds, beaches or parking lots. Everyone had their tribe (which adhered closely to race or community), and it took an acute sense of local awareness to avoid getting crosswise with any particular individual or group. It still does to some extent.]
I ran to the beach for a first, frantic survey of the local waters. The setup was confusing. Waves broke here and there along the outer edge of a mossy, exposed reef. All that coral worried me. It was infamously sharp. Then I spotted, well off to the west, and rather far out at sea, a familiar minuet of stick figures, rising and falling, backlit by the afternoon sun. Surfers! I ran back up the lane. Everyone at the house was busy unpacking and fighting over beds. I threw on a pair of trunks, grabbed my surfboard, and left without a word. (...)I was beside myself with excitement just to be in Hawaii. All surfers, all readers of surf magazines—and I had memorized nearly every line, every photo caption, in every surf magazine I owned—spent the bulk of their fantasy lives, like it or not, in Hawaii. Now I was there, walking on actual Hawaiian sand (coarse, strange-smelling), tasting Hawaiian seawater (warm, strange-smelling), and paddling toward Hawaiian waves (small, dark-faced, windblown).
Nothing was what I’d expected. In the mags, Hawaiian waves were always big and, in the color shots, ranged from a deep, mid-ocean blue to a pale, impossible turquoise. The wind was always offshore (blowing from land to sea, ideal for surfing), and the breaks themselves were the Olympian playgrounds of the gods: Sunset Beach, the Banzai Pipeline, Makaha, Ala Moana, Waimea Bay.
All that seemed worlds away from the sea in front of our new house. Even Waikiki, known for its beginner breaks and tourist crowds, was over on the far side of Diamond Head—the glamorous western side—along with every other part of Honolulu anybody had heard of. We were on the mountain’s southeast side, down in a little saddle of sloping, shady beachfront west of Black Point. The beach was just a patch of damp sand, narrow and empty.
I paddled west along a shallow lagoon, staying close to the shore, for half a mile. The beach houses ended, and the steep, brushy base of Diamond Head itself took their place across the sand. Then the reef on my left fell away, revealing a wide channel—deeper water, where no waves broke—and, beyond the channel, ten or twelve surfers riding a scatter of dark, chest-high peaks in a moderate onshore wind. I paddled slowly toward the lineup—the wave-catching zone—taking a roundabout route, studying every ride.
The surfers were good. They had smooth, ungimmicky styles. Nobody fell off. And nobody, blessedly, seemed to notice me. I circled around, then edged into an unpopulated stretch of the lineup. There were plenty of waves. The takeoffs were crumbling but easy. Letting muscle memory take over, I caught and rode a couple of small, mushy rights. The waves were different—but not too different—from the ones I’d known in California. They were shifty but not intimidating. I could see coral on the bottom but nothing too shallow.
There was a lot of talk and laughter among the other surfers. Eavesdropping, I couldn’t understand a word. They were probably speaking pidgin. I had read about pidgin in James Michener’s “Hawaii,” but I hadn’t actually heard any yet. Or maybe it was some foreign language. I was the only haole (white person—another word from Michener) in the water. At one point, an older guy paddling past me gestured seaward and said, “Outside.” It was the only word spoken to me that day. And he was right: an outside set was approaching, the biggest of the afternoon, and I was grateful to have been warned. (...)
I had never thought of myself as a sheltered child. Still, Kaimuki Intermediate School was a shock. I was in the eighth grade, and most of my new schoolmates were “drug addicts, glue sniffers, and hoods”—or so I wrote to a friend back in Los Angeles. That wasn’t true. What was true was that haoles were a tiny and unpopular minority at Kaimuki. The “natives,” as I called them, seemed to dislike us particularly. This was unnerving, because many of the Hawaiians were, for junior-high kids, quite large, and the word was that they liked to fight. Asians were the school’s most sizable ethnic group, though in those first weeks I didn’t know enough to distinguish among Japanese and Chinese and Korean kids, let alone the stereotypes through which each group viewed the others. Nor did I note the existence of other important tribes, such as the Filipinos, the Samoans, or the Portuguese (not considered haole), nor all the kids of mixed ethnic background. I probably even thought the big guy in wood shop who immediately took a sadistic interest in me was Hawaiian.
He wore shiny black shoes with long, sharp toes, tight pants, and bright flowered shirts. His kinky hair was cut in a pompadour, and he looked as if he had been shaving since birth. He rarely spoke, and then only in a pidgin that was unintelligible to me. He was some kind of junior mobster, clearly years behind his original class, just biding his time until he could drop out. His name was Freitas—I never heard a first name—but he didn’t seem to be related to the Freitas clan, a vast family with several rambunctious boys at Kaimuki Intermediate. The stiletto-toed Freitas studied me frankly for a few days, making me increasingly nervous, and then began to conduct little assaults on my self-possession, softly bumping my elbow, for example, while I concentrated over a saw cut on my half-built shoeshine box.
I was too scared to say anything, and he never said a word to me. That seemed to be part of the fun. Then he settled on a crude but ingenious amusement for passing those periods when we had to sit in chairs in the classroom section of the shop. He would sit behind me and, whenever the teacher had his back turned, hit me on the head with a two-by-four. Bonk . . . bonk . . . bonk, a nice steady rhythm, always with enough of a pause between blows to allow me brief hope that there might not be another. I couldn’t understand why the teacher didn’t hear all these unauthorized, resonating clonks. They were loud enough to attract the attention of our classmates, who seemed to find Freitas’s little ritual fascinating. Inside my head the blows were, of course, bone-rattling explosions. Freitas used a fairly long board—five or six feet—and he never hit too hard, which permitted him to pound away without leaving marks, and to do it from a certain rarefied, even meditative distance, which added, I imagine, to the fascination of the performance.
I wonder if, had some other kid been targeted, I would have been as passive as my classmates were. Probably. The teacher was off in his own world, worried only about his table saws. I did nothing in my own defense. While I eventually understood that Freitas wasn’t Hawaiian, I must have figured that I just had to take the abuse. I was, after all, skinny and haole and had no friends. (...)
My parents had sent me to Kaimuki Intermediate, I later decided, under a misconception. This was 1966, before the Proposition 13 tax revolt, and the California public-school system, particularly in the middle-class suburbs where we had lived, was among the nation’s best. The families we knew never considered private schools for their kids. Hawaii’s public schools were another matter—impoverished, mired in colonial, plantation, and mission traditions, miles below the American average academically.
Ignorant of all this, my parents sent two of my younger siblings (I have three) to the nearest elementary school, which happened to be in a middle-class area, and me to the nearest junior high, up in working-class Kaimuki, on the inland side of Diamond Head crater, where they assumed I was getting on with the business of the eighth grade but where I was occupied almost entirely by the rigors of bullies, loneliness, fights, and finding my way, after a lifetime of unconscious privileged whiteness in the segregated suburbs of California, in a racialized world. Even my classes felt racially constructed. For academic subjects, at least, students were assigned, on the basis of test scores, to a group that moved together from teacher to teacher. I was put in a high-end group, where nearly all my classmates were Japanese girls. The classes, which were prim and undemanding, bored me in a way that school never had before. To my classmates, I seemed not to exist socially. And so I passed the class hours slouched in back rows, keeping an eye on the trees outside for signs of wind direction and strength, drawing page after page of surfboards and waves.
My orientation program at school included a series of fistfights, some of them formally scheduled. There was a cemetery next to the school grounds, with a well-hidden patch of grass down in one corner where kids went to settle their differences. I found myself facing off there with a number of boys named Freitas—none of them, again, apparently related to my hairy tormentor from wood shop. My first opponent was so small and young that I doubted that he even attended our school. The Freitas clan’s method for training its members in battle, it seemed, was to find some fool without allies or the brains to avoid a challenge, then send their youngest fighter with any chance at all into the ring. If he lost, the next biggest Freitas would be sent in. This went on until the non-kinsman was defeated. It was all quite dispassionate, the bouts arranged and refereed by older Freitases, and more or less fairly conducted.
My first match was sparsely attended—really of no interest to anyone—but I was still scared sick, having no seconds in my corner and no idea what the rules were. My opponent turned out to be shockingly strong for his size, and ferocious, but his arms were too short to land punches, and I eventually subdued him without much damage to either of us. His cousin, who stepped up immediately, was more my size, and our sparring was more consequential. I held my own, but we both had shiners before a senior Freitas stepped in, declaring a draw. There would be a rematch, he said, and, if I won that, somebody named Tino would come and kick my ass, no questions asked. Team Freitas departed. I remember watching them jog, laughing and loose, a happy family militia, up the long slope of the graveyard. They were evidently late for another appointment. My face hurt, my knuckles hurt, but I was giddy with relief. Then I noticed a couple of haole guys my age standing in the bushes at the edge of the clearing, looking squirrelly. I half recognized them from school, but they left without saying a word.
I won the rematch, I think. Then Tino kicked my ass, no questions asked.
by William Finnegan, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: William Finnegan
The Agony of Medical Bills
It shouldn’t take a Harvard expert in health policy to understand a doctor’s bill. But sometimes, it does. In August of last year, Liz was a medical student whose doctor found a lump on her tonsils. Her primary-care physician referred her to an in-network ear-nose-and-throat specialist.
Liz, who asked to go by her first name, expected the usual $20 copay. Instead, she was charged $219.90—wrongly, in her view—for separate physician and facility fees. Under the terms of her plan, Liz says, she should not have been responsible for those charges. After a polite letter to her (“Thank you for your recent grievance...”), Anthem Blue Cross upheld the charges.
A few months later, Liz convinced Anthem to wipe much of the bill. But here’s the thing: By that time, she was studying health policy as a master’s student at Harvard. “It took me hours of going over the insurance policy and hours of arguing with the insurance company over that insurance pamphlet,” she said. (Later, Liz realized she had been doubly insured that month—her Harvard insurance had already kicked in—and she got the other plan to take care of the remainder of the balance.)
“I’m in a privileged position, but the tides were very much against me,” she said. “Other people aren’t as privileged and don’t have as much time.”
Liz is, like the roughly half of Americans who have decent insurance through their jobs (or grad schools, in her case), comparatively fortunate. But her experience reveals the persistent frustration, for people with all types of insurance, of trying to avoid surprise medical bills. Even generous insurance plans don’t always shield patients from puzzling bills. A simple trip to an in-network facility—with a referral!—can combine all the mental anguish of tax season with all the physical anguish of, well, physical anguish. (...)
A major reason for medical sticker-shock is that many facilities bill patients separately for each service they provide. “Imagine going out to eat and receiving separate bills from the restaurant, host, waiter, cook, and busboy, some of whom were willing to negotiate discounts or accept coupons, while others were not,” wrote Stacey Pogue, from the Texas think-tank Center for Public Policy Priorities, in a September report on surprise medical billing. (...)
Even when a hospital is in-network for a given plan, one or more of the doctors whom a patient sees while there may not participate with that plan. Occasionally, this discrepancy results in balance billing, a situation in which a provider charges the patient for the portion of the bill the insurer didn’t pay. These bills can amount to thousands of dollars, especially for long or complicated hospital stays. (...)
In Dallas recently, I met a man whose personal account exemplifies how balance billing typically works. (He requested anonymity because of a legal case he says he is building, so I’ll call him Steve.) Three years ago, Steve had a stroke, and the paramedics who rushed to the house suggested they take him to Medical City Dallas Hospital, a top hospital for strokes in the area. At the hospital, he was given a clot-busting drug and spent the weekend in intensive care. He recovered and went home.“Our system is so convoluted that most providers don’t even know how patients are billed.”
Steve had an Aetna PPO plan, but he says that in the weeks to come, he received bills totaling several thousand dollars above what his insurance covered because of various diagnostics and providers that were billed out-of-network. Six months later, Steve had another stroke. He said the same thing happened with a different hospital, Methodist Richardson Medical Center, which was in-network for Aetna.
In separate statements, both hospitals said that while they encourage their doctors to accept the same insurance plans as the overall facility, the doctors do bill separately for their care. It’s conceivable, in other words, that these other providers did not accept Steve’s plan.
Steve told me he couldn’t find his bills, so I could not independently verify his account.
Which brings the total opacity of American health care full circle: Hospitals don’t tell patients how much they charge. Patients don’t know how much their insurers will pay until they get their bills. And the information in the bills isn’t publicly available, so there’s no way to know exactly how, why, or to whom frequently surprise billing is happening.
Liz, who asked to go by her first name, expected the usual $20 copay. Instead, she was charged $219.90—wrongly, in her view—for separate physician and facility fees. Under the terms of her plan, Liz says, she should not have been responsible for those charges. After a polite letter to her (“Thank you for your recent grievance...”), Anthem Blue Cross upheld the charges.A few months later, Liz convinced Anthem to wipe much of the bill. But here’s the thing: By that time, she was studying health policy as a master’s student at Harvard. “It took me hours of going over the insurance policy and hours of arguing with the insurance company over that insurance pamphlet,” she said. (Later, Liz realized she had been doubly insured that month—her Harvard insurance had already kicked in—and she got the other plan to take care of the remainder of the balance.)
“I’m in a privileged position, but the tides were very much against me,” she said. “Other people aren’t as privileged and don’t have as much time.”
Liz is, like the roughly half of Americans who have decent insurance through their jobs (or grad schools, in her case), comparatively fortunate. But her experience reveals the persistent frustration, for people with all types of insurance, of trying to avoid surprise medical bills. Even generous insurance plans don’t always shield patients from puzzling bills. A simple trip to an in-network facility—with a referral!—can combine all the mental anguish of tax season with all the physical anguish of, well, physical anguish. (...)
A major reason for medical sticker-shock is that many facilities bill patients separately for each service they provide. “Imagine going out to eat and receiving separate bills from the restaurant, host, waiter, cook, and busboy, some of whom were willing to negotiate discounts or accept coupons, while others were not,” wrote Stacey Pogue, from the Texas think-tank Center for Public Policy Priorities, in a September report on surprise medical billing. (...)
Even when a hospital is in-network for a given plan, one or more of the doctors whom a patient sees while there may not participate with that plan. Occasionally, this discrepancy results in balance billing, a situation in which a provider charges the patient for the portion of the bill the insurer didn’t pay. These bills can amount to thousands of dollars, especially for long or complicated hospital stays. (...)
In Dallas recently, I met a man whose personal account exemplifies how balance billing typically works. (He requested anonymity because of a legal case he says he is building, so I’ll call him Steve.) Three years ago, Steve had a stroke, and the paramedics who rushed to the house suggested they take him to Medical City Dallas Hospital, a top hospital for strokes in the area. At the hospital, he was given a clot-busting drug and spent the weekend in intensive care. He recovered and went home.“Our system is so convoluted that most providers don’t even know how patients are billed.”
Steve had an Aetna PPO plan, but he says that in the weeks to come, he received bills totaling several thousand dollars above what his insurance covered because of various diagnostics and providers that were billed out-of-network. Six months later, Steve had another stroke. He said the same thing happened with a different hospital, Methodist Richardson Medical Center, which was in-network for Aetna.
In separate statements, both hospitals said that while they encourage their doctors to accept the same insurance plans as the overall facility, the doctors do bill separately for their care. It’s conceivable, in other words, that these other providers did not accept Steve’s plan.
Steve told me he couldn’t find his bills, so I could not independently verify his account.
Which brings the total opacity of American health care full circle: Hospitals don’t tell patients how much they charge. Patients don’t know how much their insurers will pay until they get their bills. And the information in the bills isn’t publicly available, so there’s no way to know exactly how, why, or to whom frequently surprise billing is happening.
by Olga Khazan, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Lauren Giordano
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
Scientists Map 5,000 New Ocean Viruses
In March 2011, the Tara, a 36-meter schooner, sailed from Chile to Easter Island — a three-week leg of a five-year global scientific expedition. All but one of the seven scientists aboard the ship spent much of their time on the sun-drenched deck hauling up wondrous creatures such as luminous blue jellyfish and insects known as sea-skaters, which spend their entire lives skimming the surface of the ocean far from land.
At the stern of the Tara, a shipping container was bolted to the deck, with a door and a tiny window cut through the metal walls. One of the scientists, Melissa Duhaime, spent most of the voyage inside the dark, tiny cell, where she fought off an endless bout of seasickness.
“People would come in to see what I was doing and leave pretty quickly,” Duhaime said.
Inside her cell, Duhaime sat next to a hose as wide as an outstretched hand. A pump drew water through the hose from several meters below the boat and then pushed it through a series of filters. Each filter was finer than the last, blocking smaller and smaller life forms. The setup stopped animals first, then zooplankton and algae. The last filter in the hose, with pores just 220 nanometers wide, was fine enough to block bacteria. Scrubbed of all these living things, the water finally flowed into three 30-liter vats.
To the untrained eye, these vats might seem to be full of sterile water. But they were seething with ocean life — or life-like things, at the very least. The three vats held up to 1 trillion viruses.
The ocean contains many mysteries, but none so great as its viruses. Scientists estimate that there are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 virus particles in all the world’s seas. They outnumber all cellular life forms by roughly a factor of 10. Scientists have been dimly aware of the staggering scale of the ocean’s virosphere since the late 1980s, but many of the simplest questions about it remained open for years. Scientists couldn’t even say how many species of viruses there were in the oceans. It’s as if zoologists were dimly aware that many places on Earth were home to things called mammals, but their knowledge was based only on a few squirrels in a cage.
Duhaime and her colleagues joined the Tara Oceans Expedition to change that, by collecting ocean viruses on a scale never attempted before. As they report in the May 22 issue of Science, they gathered enough samples to confidently estimate the total number of distinct populations of viruses in the sunlit upper reaches of the ocean. Out of the 5,476 populations they identified, only 39 were previously known to science.
The researchers have gone on to study where these species live and how they affect the ocean’s ecosystems. For years, scientists have suspected that viruses alter the very chemistry of the world’s oceans and may even influence the planet’s climate. Now, the data from the Tara are going to give researchers a much better handle on the full power of the ocean’s viruses.
by Carl Zimmer, Quanta | Read more:
Image: Jennifer Brum, Tucson Marine Phage Lab
At the stern of the Tara, a shipping container was bolted to the deck, with a door and a tiny window cut through the metal walls. One of the scientists, Melissa Duhaime, spent most of the voyage inside the dark, tiny cell, where she fought off an endless bout of seasickness.“People would come in to see what I was doing and leave pretty quickly,” Duhaime said.
Inside her cell, Duhaime sat next to a hose as wide as an outstretched hand. A pump drew water through the hose from several meters below the boat and then pushed it through a series of filters. Each filter was finer than the last, blocking smaller and smaller life forms. The setup stopped animals first, then zooplankton and algae. The last filter in the hose, with pores just 220 nanometers wide, was fine enough to block bacteria. Scrubbed of all these living things, the water finally flowed into three 30-liter vats.
To the untrained eye, these vats might seem to be full of sterile water. But they were seething with ocean life — or life-like things, at the very least. The three vats held up to 1 trillion viruses.
The ocean contains many mysteries, but none so great as its viruses. Scientists estimate that there are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 virus particles in all the world’s seas. They outnumber all cellular life forms by roughly a factor of 10. Scientists have been dimly aware of the staggering scale of the ocean’s virosphere since the late 1980s, but many of the simplest questions about it remained open for years. Scientists couldn’t even say how many species of viruses there were in the oceans. It’s as if zoologists were dimly aware that many places on Earth were home to things called mammals, but their knowledge was based only on a few squirrels in a cage.
Duhaime and her colleagues joined the Tara Oceans Expedition to change that, by collecting ocean viruses on a scale never attempted before. As they report in the May 22 issue of Science, they gathered enough samples to confidently estimate the total number of distinct populations of viruses in the sunlit upper reaches of the ocean. Out of the 5,476 populations they identified, only 39 were previously known to science.
The researchers have gone on to study where these species live and how they affect the ocean’s ecosystems. For years, scientists have suspected that viruses alter the very chemistry of the world’s oceans and may even influence the planet’s climate. Now, the data from the Tara are going to give researchers a much better handle on the full power of the ocean’s viruses.
by Carl Zimmer, Quanta | Read more:
Image: Jennifer Brum, Tucson Marine Phage Lab
Bred To Death
[ed. See also: Endangered Dog Breeds and The Market Forces Behind Them.]
Bred for looks, not health, many purebred dogs are drawn from a genetic wading pool that might have been designed by a cabal of Ralph Lauren, Dr. Frankenstein, Walt Disney and David Koch.
Even socially aware consumers who sneer at $5,000 designer purses, and animal defenders who deplore the cruelties of commercial livestock production, buy into trendy canines. Purebreds are commodities like any other luxury good, and breeding them is big business. Registered golden retrievers go for up to $3,000, English bulldogs for $9,000, and a Cavalier King Charles spaniel can cost $14,000, almost as much as a Honda Fit.
But neither price, pedigree nor being loved like a member of the family can shield a dog from the pain, breathing difficulties, cancer, panoply of debilitating genetic disorders, mental illness, crippling physiognomy and shortened life span that disproportionately plague purebreds.
The main U.S. arbiter of canine purity is the American Kennel Club. The first goal of its mission is “upholding the integrity of its Registry.” Pedigree, the AKC asserts, “creates a level of breed predictability” of “temperament and physical characteristics.” But the AKC is also a lead profiteer in an industry that Michael Brandow, author of A Matter of Breeding, decried as “a kind of long-term, institutionalized cruelty that makes vivisection look humane.”
“The demand for ever-more-perfect purebred dogs has concentrated bad recessive genes and turned many pets into medical nightmares,” Consumer Reports warned. Inbreeding for clonelike consistency ensures that genes for disease and deformity piggyback on those for a lush coat, appealing nose, witty wrinkles, quirky gait or endearingly protuberant eyes.
And often the deformity itself—like the crippling slope of German shepherds’ hindquarters—is the desired, indeed required, trait. In bulldogs, a “liver colored nose” is a deal breaker by AKC show standards, and a brachycephalic face that impairs breathing is essential. Both traits, however, can hasten death— one from breeders’ culling of irregular specimens, the other from disease.
Unlike some of its European counterparts, the AKC opposes mandatory genetic screening that weeds out heritable diseases. It rejects accepting healthier conformations or expanding the gene pool by outbreeding with non-registered dogs. Producers who want high-value animals eligible for competition must accede to insanely capricious, detailed and dangerous AKC standards set by its breed clubs.
Breeders are abetted by consumers, who—seeking fashion, predictability or the doppelganger of a beloved lost pet—disassociate breed flaws from their own cherished pet. Then, when faced with high vet bills for dogs that are disabled, ill or willfully deformed, they often offload the dogs within a year to shelters, where purebreds constitute 25 percent of canines.
The AKC keeps its registration fees. And they add up: The club’s 990 tax form for 2013 reported $60 million in total revenue, with more than half—$32 million—from registrations. Judging and pedigree dog shows (the AKC claims 3.2 million entries from 190 approved breeds), like Westminster, generated $12.6 million. The AKC allocated 1 percent of its revenue to its Canine Health Foundation. CEO Dennis Sprung’s 2013 compensation topped $567,000, while the club’s nine other top officers garnered $20.3 million.
While the club gets rich, the AKC abets or essentially mandates the genetic impoverishment of dogs through inbreeding, overbreeding and bizarre standards of beauty.
Bred for looks, not health, many purebred dogs are drawn from a genetic wading pool that might have been designed by a cabal of Ralph Lauren, Dr. Frankenstein, Walt Disney and David Koch.
Even socially aware consumers who sneer at $5,000 designer purses, and animal defenders who deplore the cruelties of commercial livestock production, buy into trendy canines. Purebreds are commodities like any other luxury good, and breeding them is big business. Registered golden retrievers go for up to $3,000, English bulldogs for $9,000, and a Cavalier King Charles spaniel can cost $14,000, almost as much as a Honda Fit.But neither price, pedigree nor being loved like a member of the family can shield a dog from the pain, breathing difficulties, cancer, panoply of debilitating genetic disorders, mental illness, crippling physiognomy and shortened life span that disproportionately plague purebreds.
The main U.S. arbiter of canine purity is the American Kennel Club. The first goal of its mission is “upholding the integrity of its Registry.” Pedigree, the AKC asserts, “creates a level of breed predictability” of “temperament and physical characteristics.” But the AKC is also a lead profiteer in an industry that Michael Brandow, author of A Matter of Breeding, decried as “a kind of long-term, institutionalized cruelty that makes vivisection look humane.”
“The demand for ever-more-perfect purebred dogs has concentrated bad recessive genes and turned many pets into medical nightmares,” Consumer Reports warned. Inbreeding for clonelike consistency ensures that genes for disease and deformity piggyback on those for a lush coat, appealing nose, witty wrinkles, quirky gait or endearingly protuberant eyes.
And often the deformity itself—like the crippling slope of German shepherds’ hindquarters—is the desired, indeed required, trait. In bulldogs, a “liver colored nose” is a deal breaker by AKC show standards, and a brachycephalic face that impairs breathing is essential. Both traits, however, can hasten death— one from breeders’ culling of irregular specimens, the other from disease.
Unlike some of its European counterparts, the AKC opposes mandatory genetic screening that weeds out heritable diseases. It rejects accepting healthier conformations or expanding the gene pool by outbreeding with non-registered dogs. Producers who want high-value animals eligible for competition must accede to insanely capricious, detailed and dangerous AKC standards set by its breed clubs.
Breeders are abetted by consumers, who—seeking fashion, predictability or the doppelganger of a beloved lost pet—disassociate breed flaws from their own cherished pet. Then, when faced with high vet bills for dogs that are disabled, ill or willfully deformed, they often offload the dogs within a year to shelters, where purebreds constitute 25 percent of canines.
The AKC keeps its registration fees. And they add up: The club’s 990 tax form for 2013 reported $60 million in total revenue, with more than half—$32 million—from registrations. Judging and pedigree dog shows (the AKC claims 3.2 million entries from 190 approved breeds), like Westminster, generated $12.6 million. The AKC allocated 1 percent of its revenue to its Canine Health Foundation. CEO Dennis Sprung’s 2013 compensation topped $567,000, while the club’s nine other top officers garnered $20.3 million.
While the club gets rich, the AKC abets or essentially mandates the genetic impoverishment of dogs through inbreeding, overbreeding and bizarre standards of beauty.
by Terry J. Allen, In These Times | Read more:
Image: Gareth Cattermole / Getty Images
The Enigma of “Blind Tom” Wiggins
[ed. The first African American musician to play in the White House, and probably an autistic savant, Blind Tom has been almost "completely written out of history". See also: Young, Gifted, and Black.]
"I am astounded. I cannot account for it, no one can. No one understands it," a St Louis man uttered after watching Blind Tom perform in concert in 1866. His mystification was by no means isolated. Few other performers on the nineteenth century stage aroused as much curiosity as "Blind Tom" Wiggins. Born a slave in Georgia in 1848, by the time he died Hoboken in 1908, he was an international celebrity and his name was a byword for inexplicable genius.
From an early age, it was clear that Blind Tom possessed extraordinary musical gifts. He could imitate, either vocally or musically, any sound he heard. This, coupled with an encyclopedic memory and all-encompassing passion for music, meant that by the age of sixteen, he hovered somewhere between a respected concert pianist and glorified sideshow freak. For the following forty years, he toured the length and breadth of North America, soaking up the sounds of the Civil War and Gilded Age, then baffling audiences with his astonishing gifts.
During the tumultuous election campaign of 1860, for instance, he was taken to a political rally in support of Democratic presidential candidate Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois. Tom heard his speech and years after he would deliver this oration, capturing not only the senator's distinctive boom and mannerisms, but the crowd's heckles and cheers. Somehow he could recall the sensory snapshot of that moment with sparkling precision.
One of his music teachers described how Tom, now a man in his thirties, learned Beethoven's 3rd Concerto to perfection in the space of an afternoon. He then stunned her by capping off the lesson by turning his back to the piano and playing the bass with his right hand and the treble with his left hand. Somehow Tom could separate the treble from the bass as if they were detached, self-contained streams that were independent of one another. (...)
Yet today this remarkable pianist is virtually forgotten. His story comes as a surprise to many who consider themselves well versed in African American history. "How is it I've never heard of him before?" is a question often put to me.
The answer, I suspect, is that for all his genius, Blind Tom falls short on what an African American hero should be. After emancipation, he remained loyal to his master, electing to remain with him. Even at the height of his career, black newspaper editors kept him at arm's length, thinking him a buffoon who perpetuated negative stereotypes about the black race. Most damning of all, his most famous composition, The Battle of Manassas, tells the story of the great Confederate victory at Bull Run in April 1861. With a track record like this, little wonder some condemned Blind Tom to the ranks of Uncle Tom.
But was Blind Tom really a Confederate stooge or, like the St Louis man, was there something about him that American society did not understand? Drawing from the wealth of scientific research over the last fifty years, it is highly likely that "Blind Tom" Wiggins was a savant, most likely an autistic one. His brain was wired in a profoundly different way than most people.
by Deirdre O'Connell, BlackPast.org | Read more:
Image: Deirdre O'Connell
"I am astounded. I cannot account for it, no one can. No one understands it," a St Louis man uttered after watching Blind Tom perform in concert in 1866. His mystification was by no means isolated. Few other performers on the nineteenth century stage aroused as much curiosity as "Blind Tom" Wiggins. Born a slave in Georgia in 1848, by the time he died Hoboken in 1908, he was an international celebrity and his name was a byword for inexplicable genius.From an early age, it was clear that Blind Tom possessed extraordinary musical gifts. He could imitate, either vocally or musically, any sound he heard. This, coupled with an encyclopedic memory and all-encompassing passion for music, meant that by the age of sixteen, he hovered somewhere between a respected concert pianist and glorified sideshow freak. For the following forty years, he toured the length and breadth of North America, soaking up the sounds of the Civil War and Gilded Age, then baffling audiences with his astonishing gifts.
During the tumultuous election campaign of 1860, for instance, he was taken to a political rally in support of Democratic presidential candidate Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois. Tom heard his speech and years after he would deliver this oration, capturing not only the senator's distinctive boom and mannerisms, but the crowd's heckles and cheers. Somehow he could recall the sensory snapshot of that moment with sparkling precision.
One of his music teachers described how Tom, now a man in his thirties, learned Beethoven's 3rd Concerto to perfection in the space of an afternoon. He then stunned her by capping off the lesson by turning his back to the piano and playing the bass with his right hand and the treble with his left hand. Somehow Tom could separate the treble from the bass as if they were detached, self-contained streams that were independent of one another. (...)
Yet today this remarkable pianist is virtually forgotten. His story comes as a surprise to many who consider themselves well versed in African American history. "How is it I've never heard of him before?" is a question often put to me.
The answer, I suspect, is that for all his genius, Blind Tom falls short on what an African American hero should be. After emancipation, he remained loyal to his master, electing to remain with him. Even at the height of his career, black newspaper editors kept him at arm's length, thinking him a buffoon who perpetuated negative stereotypes about the black race. Most damning of all, his most famous composition, The Battle of Manassas, tells the story of the great Confederate victory at Bull Run in April 1861. With a track record like this, little wonder some condemned Blind Tom to the ranks of Uncle Tom.
But was Blind Tom really a Confederate stooge or, like the St Louis man, was there something about him that American society did not understand? Drawing from the wealth of scientific research over the last fifty years, it is highly likely that "Blind Tom" Wiggins was a savant, most likely an autistic one. His brain was wired in a profoundly different way than most people.
by Deirdre O'Connell, BlackPast.org | Read more:
Image: Deirdre O'Connell
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Legacy Maker
That winter’s day, as she headed to the White House, Gina McCarthy undoubtedly steeled herself for a confrontation. It was 2014, and McCarthy, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, was about to make her case for blocking the controversial Pebble gold mine planned for Alaska’s Bristol Bay watershed, home to one of the world’s most prolific salmon fisheries. But she knew that the lawyers, economists and political advisors assembled in the Roosevelt Room would make Swiss cheese out of her plan. The decision would inflame the Republican Congress, they’d say, hamper economic growth and likely provoke a lawsuit from industry. Then they’d send her on her way without an answer.
But McCarthy also knew there would be a new player in the room. Longtime Democratic operative John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, had just returned to the White House as counselor to Barack Obama. And Podesta had a reputation for bold conservation policy.
Shortly before the meeting, in fact, Podesta pulled aside Mike Boots, the acting head of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality. He said: “Maybe it’s time for me to show people it’s going to be different,” Boots recalled.
And 10 minutes into the conversation, Podesta broke in. He said that he and the president endorsed McCarthy’s plan, and then laid out exactly how the announcement would roll out. McCarthy left the room, dumbfounded and elated. “Was that the Roosevelt Room that I was just in?” she asked, according to a White House staffer, who asked to remain anonymous. “I’ve only ever been handed my ass in that room.”
The Pebble Mine decision was just the start of a yearlong presidential sprint to advance conservation and climate change goals. Podesta has been there every step of the way. Think of him as the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz, telling Obama’s Dorothy that she always had the power to do what she wanted; she simply had to tap her heels together three times.
As the 66-year-old Podesta embarks on yet another adventure — this time as Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager for the 2016 election — he can list some remarkable achievements: He directly had a hand in six of 16 national monuments Obama has created or expanded so far by executive order, including New Mexico’s Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks, Colorado’s Browns Canyon, Southern California’s San Gabriel Mountains, and the country’s largest marine reserve, the Pacific Remote Islands National Monument; and steered a landmark climate deal with China to control greenhouse gas, as well as the first proposal to regulate climate emissions from U.S. coal-fired power plants.
Add in his record under Bill Clinton — the sweeping 2001 “Roadless Rule” protecting 58 million acres administered by the U.S. Forest Service, and the 19 national monuments and conservation areas, many in the West, that Clinton declared in his second term in office — and Podesta can claim a green legacy that even Teddy Roosevelt would be proud of.
“Nobody in the 21st century in U.S. government has had the influence that he has had on public lands and climate change,” says Douglas Brinkley, a Rice University professor of history.
Podesta rarely gets public credit, but those who do — from the presidents he has served to Cabinet members and agency heads — are quick to acknowledge his contributions.
by Elizabeth Shogren, High Country News | Read more:
But McCarthy also knew there would be a new player in the room. Longtime Democratic operative John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, had just returned to the White House as counselor to Barack Obama. And Podesta had a reputation for bold conservation policy.Shortly before the meeting, in fact, Podesta pulled aside Mike Boots, the acting head of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality. He said: “Maybe it’s time for me to show people it’s going to be different,” Boots recalled.
And 10 minutes into the conversation, Podesta broke in. He said that he and the president endorsed McCarthy’s plan, and then laid out exactly how the announcement would roll out. McCarthy left the room, dumbfounded and elated. “Was that the Roosevelt Room that I was just in?” she asked, according to a White House staffer, who asked to remain anonymous. “I’ve only ever been handed my ass in that room.”
The Pebble Mine decision was just the start of a yearlong presidential sprint to advance conservation and climate change goals. Podesta has been there every step of the way. Think of him as the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz, telling Obama’s Dorothy that she always had the power to do what she wanted; she simply had to tap her heels together three times.
As the 66-year-old Podesta embarks on yet another adventure — this time as Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager for the 2016 election — he can list some remarkable achievements: He directly had a hand in six of 16 national monuments Obama has created or expanded so far by executive order, including New Mexico’s Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks, Colorado’s Browns Canyon, Southern California’s San Gabriel Mountains, and the country’s largest marine reserve, the Pacific Remote Islands National Monument; and steered a landmark climate deal with China to control greenhouse gas, as well as the first proposal to regulate climate emissions from U.S. coal-fired power plants.
Add in his record under Bill Clinton — the sweeping 2001 “Roadless Rule” protecting 58 million acres administered by the U.S. Forest Service, and the 19 national monuments and conservation areas, many in the West, that Clinton declared in his second term in office — and Podesta can claim a green legacy that even Teddy Roosevelt would be proud of.
“Nobody in the 21st century in U.S. government has had the influence that he has had on public lands and climate change,” says Douglas Brinkley, a Rice University professor of history.
Podesta rarely gets public credit, but those who do — from the presidents he has served to Cabinet members and agency heads — are quick to acknowledge his contributions.
by Elizabeth Shogren, High Country News | Read more:
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