Policyholders in Limbo After Rare Failure of Insurer

Something unusual happened last month: A good-size American insurer, Penn Treaty of Allentown, Pa., was ordered to liquidate and wind down its affairs. Its demise will orphan tens of thousands of policyholders — people who bought its long-term-care insurance to shield their families from crushing nursing home costs.

Big insurance companies rarely fail in the United States. Most of the time, an ailing insurer will quietly find a buyer, and vanish under its rescuer’s wing. Policyholders may not know what happened, or care, as long as their claims are paid.

The dearth of visible insurance failures makes it seem the industry’s squadrons of actuaries and regulators will always get things right, measuring complex risks accurately and charging premiums that will cover all future claims.

But the failure of Penn Treaty shows that was not really true. It’s quite possible for a regulated insurer to miscalculate its book of business, operate for years without correcting the mistake, and ultimately take policyholders into the very realm of loss and uncertainty that insurance is specifically designed to avoid.

Now, some fear Penn Treaty’s failure is a signal of more trouble to come in the long-term-care sector. (...)

Michelle Leonard, a Penn Treaty policyholder in Venus, Fla., said she was shocked to learn of the liquidation.

“It’s time for me to go to a facility to live out my days,” she said, explaining that she had already selected a group home, submitted an application and been accepted (but had not yet sold her house). “They may not take me now. I may not have enough assets to go in.”

Each state has a so-called guarantee fund to rescue policyholders in insurance failures. The funds pay people’s claims, up to a predetermined limit that varies by state. The limit is $300,000 in Florida.

“But how long does that take?” Ms. Leonard wondered. She said that she had not yet heard from the guarantee fund, but added that she had received mailings instructing her to keep on paying her monthly premium in full, even if it rises, or else her coverage would be canceled.

“Oh, hey! We’re going down the toilet but keep paying your premium,” she said, mocking the letters. “It’s very upsetting.”

Other Penn Treaty customers agreed. “That’s why we have C.P.A.s and actuaries and insurance professionals — to run the business properly,” said Charley Sproule, a policyholder in Harrisburg, Pa. “In my opinion, the actuaries and executives and the board should be held legally liable for this, but they won’t. They’ll get off scot-free.”

In Pennsylvania, the guarantee limit is also $300,000. Mr. Spoule said the cash value of his policy was close to double that — $573,000. So is the cash value of a separate policy held by his wife, Mary Lou.

Mr. Sproule said that his mother lived to be 100 and spent her final years in a nursing home. The care was expensive enough to wipe out all of her assets in just three years, including the value of her house. After that, she had to turn to Medicaid, the government health program for the poor.

“That’s why we bought insurance, so that all of our assets wouldn’t be gobbled up by nursing-home costs,” Mr. Sproule said.

In liquidation, the policies will be canceled, and the guarantee fund will take care of $300,000 worth of claims. “We end up suffering about a 48 percent loss,” Mr. Sproule said. It took the couple 18 years to build up their policies’ value to $573,000 apiece. Mr. Sproule said he was sure it was too late to go out and buy coverage to replace what they had lost.Photo

“We’re probably uninsurable,” he said. “You buy long-term-care insurance when you’re young and healthy, because that’s how you pay the lower premium.”

They were also encouraged by a federally financed program in which states urged their residents to buy long-term-care insurance. The goal was to keep Medicaid from being overwhelmed by tens of millions of aging baby boomers.

The Sproules, Ms. Leonard and all the rest of Penn Treaty’s policyholders have spent the last nine years in a strange legal limbo. State insurance regulators in Pennsylvania first petitioned the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania to order liquidation in 2009, which is standard procedure.

But then the standard playbook went out the window. Droves of insurance agents challenged the petition in court. That’s because as long as Penn Treaty stayed out of liquidation, they would keep receiving their sales commissions, which they said they were constitutionally entitled to.

Health insurers fought the liquidation, too. State guarantee funds, it turns out, are not funded at all. When an insurance company goes under, all the surviving companies in that line of business are required to chip into the guarantor, with assessments based on their market share.

Long-term-care insurance is classified as health insurance, so health insurers would get the assessment — even the ones that steered clear of long-term-care insurance and never sold a single policy. They were aghast at having to pay for other people’s mistakes.

by Mary Williams Walsh, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Zack Wittman

[ed. What a mess.]

Masters Press Room, Augusta National Golf Course
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[ed. Pray for good weather. See also: Pro Golfers Find Winning Rounds From Numbers Crunching.]

Your Name

Early in “Your Name,” the anime blockbuster that’s conquered Japan, China, and the rest of Asia, a high-school girl named Mitsuha performs a ritual dance at her family’s Shinto shrine. Dressed in the red and white costume of a miko shrine maiden, she and a partner pose and twirl, punctuating the leisurely rhythms of drums with precisely timed, jangly handbells. Mitsuha’s rural village is perched on the edge of a gleaming lake, surrounded by verdant forests and soaring mountains. It looks like a modern-day Eden. To Mitsuha, though, it’s an inescapable cage of tradition. After the rite is over, she rushes down the shrine’s ancient staircase to the empty street below and cries out, in frustration, “Make me a handsome Tokyo boy in my next life!” As fate would have it, her wish is granted. Soon afterward, Mitsuha begins switching bodies with Taki, a teen-age boy at a Tokyo high school.

Such a film seems like an unlikely candidate for “Titanic”-level success. But since “Your Name” premièred, last August, young adults in Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and China have flocked to watch and rewatch it. It has become a national and regional phenomenon. Even its director, Makoto Shinkai, seems to have been taken aback: “It’s not healthy,” he said, during a December interview in Paris. “I don’t think any more people should see it.” The film has now grossed more than three hundred and twenty-six million dollars worldwide, making it the most successful anime film of all time—surpassing even Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away,” from 2001.

The success of “Your Name” is due, in part, to its remarkable beauty. It contains some of the most vivid imagery ever seen in an animated film. Although it was produced entirely on computers, like nearly all modern anime, Shinkai and his team seem to have synthesized the best parts of both worlds: the characters emote with a warmth reminiscent of traditional hand-drawn animation. The backdrops are digitally rendered in detail so exquisite that they resemble high-definition video. Tokyo’s streets surge with life, down to the anti-slip striations on the pavement; the countryside erupts with a lushness worthy of “Planet Earth.” Even mundane images—the tangle of recharging cables atop a high-school student’s desk; old cans cluttering a countryside bus stop; a wood-and-paper shoji screen sliding in its well-worn track—glow with a rich, romantic intensity. (...)

But “Your Name” has not been Disneyfied. It remains defiantly strange. The film’s oddest moment comes early on, when Mitsuha, as part of her Shinto ritual, chews and spits rice into a jar to make a primitive form of sake, fermented using human saliva. Later, Taki drinks the sake. Shinkai has said that he intended the scene to represent an idea common in teen anime, the “indirect kiss,” in which one drinks from the same container as one’s crush. But the image of a teen-age girl dribbling milky liquid from her lips has raised eyebrows. Pressed during a December TV appearance, he admitted that “saliva is a fetish element for a lot of teen-age boys.”

Midway through, moreover, “Your Name” takes a surprising turn. Its frivolity is interrupted by a great Something that cleaves the protagonists’ lives into “before” and “after,” in a way that anyone who has lived through a 9/11 or a Fukushima will understand. Eventually, the movie becomes a metaphysical love story steeped in Shinto cosmology—“Interstellar,” if that film had been written by Haruki Murakami, perhaps, instead of Christopher Nolan.

The easy gender fluidity of Mitsuha and Taki has led some Western commentators to describe the film as a “queer” movie, but gender bending is a classic trope in anime; the real subject of “Your Name” is the contrast between the country and the city. In this respect, it reflects an unprecedented change in Japanese society. Over the past few decades, more than ninety per cent of the Japanese population has migrated to dense urban areas, leading to depopulation and a so-called “hollowing out” of youth and industry in the countryside. Take, for example, Hida, the town in Gifu prefecture that inspired the one in which Mitsuha lives. A recent Nikkei newspaper study calculates that, by 2040, the town will lose more than sixty per cent of its female population between the ages of twenty and thirty-nine. In this demographic erosion, Hida is hardly alone. A handful of rural municipalities, desperate to expand their tax bases, have even experimented with giving land away to lure city-dwellers back.

By contrast, in the Japan of “Your Name,” the city and the country exist in symmetry, not competition. Mitsuha is a country girl and Taki a city boy, but they are equally educated and comfortable. Tokyo’s skyline beckons like a twenty-first-century Emerald City, but the countryside, too, brims with vitality, both natural and human—its forests unspoiled, its schools filled with students, its festivals thronged with visitors. The movie is an elegiac meditation on a Japan that no longer exists—if it ever truly did. From “Madame Butterfly” to “Lost in Translation,” portrayals of Japan that have been exoticized and idealized by Western eyes abound. But “Your Name” is Japan as the Japanese wish it was.

by Matt Alt, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Your-Name

Hungary. Budapest. September 5, 2015. A Syrian father, centre, sleeps with his son and other family members on the floor of a bus driving from Budapest to Vienna.
   ~ Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

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Mars Maiers
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Demand Booming on College Campuses for Creative Writing

Some credit the rise of social media. Others attribute it to a flourishing culture of self-expression. Whatever the reason, colleges across the United States are seeing a boom in demand for courses on creative writing.

Colleges are adding writing programs to accommodate interest in what has become the rarest of fields in the humanities - a sector that is growing, rather than losing students to science and technology.

The number of schools offering bachelor's degrees in creative writing has risen from three in 1975 to 733 today, according to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, an industry group based at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

So what will these students do after graduating?

"Most of them are aware that this probably is not going to be their career. At least, I hope they're aware," said David Galef, director of the creative writing program at Montclair State University in New Jersey. "They're interested in doing something they feel is creative."

While some will become professional writers, others will find work in fields such as public relations, advertising or something completely unrelated. Instructors say some students see their focus on writing as a way to understand themselves, make use of a liberal education and enrich their lives.

One Montclair State undergraduate, Gil Moreno, 46, enrolled years after completing another bachelor's degree, in business management, and dreams of becoming a writer. Even if he can't do it professionally, he'll keep it up on the side.

"I'm looking to get away from the business world," he said. "I'm kind of looking to live in my own separate world."

The number of creative writing bachelor's programs has grown steadily, but spiked from 161 in 2008 to 592 in 2013, according to the AWP . English departments elsewhere have offered new concentrations or minors in writing, and still more major programs are planned, including one beginning next fall at the University of Chicago.

In some English departments, the boom has created tension between creative writing and those who emphasize instruction of literature.

At Yale University's English department, which is reviewing admissions procedures for the writing concentration amid a surge in applications, professors say their writing program is unusual in requiring that all courses include reading in contemporary work of the chosen genre.

"All over the country students are more interested in writing about themselves than they are in reading other people," said English professor Leslie Brisman, who has taught at Yale since 1969. "We are in favor of creativity. We are not in favor of ignorance."

The number of course offerings in creative writing has roughly doubled over the last five years at Yale, where the creative writing director, Richard Deming, suspects the interest can be credited, at least partly, to social media.

"This act of expressing one's voice in a public way - some people feel that they want to add craft, they want to hone those skills and take it to a place of more intensity," he said. "It just builds from there."

by Michael Melia, AP |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Biggest Threat Facing Middle-Age Men Isn’t Smoking or Obesity. It’s Loneliness.

Let's start with the moment I realized I was already a loser, which was just after I was more or less told that I was destined to become one.

I’d been summoned to an editor’s office at the Globe Magazine with the old “We have a story we think you’d be perfect for.” This is how editors talk when they’re about to con you into doing something you don’t want to do.

Here was the pitch: We want you to write about how middle-aged men have no friends.

Excuse me? I have plenty of friends. Are you calling me a loser? You are.

The editor told me there was all sorts of evidence out there about how men, as they age, let their close friendships lapse, and that that fact can cause all sorts of problems and have a terrible impact on their health.

I told the editor I’d think about it. This is how reporters talk when they’re trying to get out of something they don’t want to do. As I walked back to my desk in the newsroom — a distance of maybe 100 yards — I quickly took stock of my life to try to prove to myself that I was not, in fact, perfect for this story.

First of all, there was my buddy Mark. We went to high school together, and I still talk to him all the time, and we hang out all the . . . Wait, how often do we actually hang out? Maybe four or five times a year?

And then there was my other best friend from high school, Rory, and . . . I genuinely could not remember the last time I’d seen him. Had it already been a year? Entirely possible.

There were all those other good friends who feel as if they’re still in my lives because we keep tabs on one another via social media, but as I ran down the list of those I’d consider real, true, lifelong friends, I realized that it had been years since I’d seen many of them, even decades for a few.

By the time I got back to my desk, I realized that I was indeed perfect for this story, not because I was unusual in any way, but because my story is very, very typical. And as I looked into what that means, I realized that in the long term, I was heading down a path that was very, very dangerous.

Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general of the United States, has said many times in recent years that the most prevalent health issue in the country is not cancer or heart disease or obesity. It is isolation.

I turned 40 in May. I have a wife and two young boys. I moved to the suburbs a few years ago, where I own a fairly ugly home with white vinyl siding and two aging station wagons with crushed Goldfish crackers serving as floor mats. When I step on a Lego in the middle of the night on my way to the bathroom, I try to tell myself that it’s cute that I’ve turned into a sitcom dad.

During the week, much of my waking life revolves around work. Or getting ready for work. Or driving to work. Or driving home from work. Or texting my wife to tell her I’m going to be late getting home from work.

Much of everything else revolves around my kids. I spend a lot of time asking them where their shoes are, and they spend a lot of time asking me when they can have some “dada time.” It is the world’s cutest phrase, and it makes me feel guilty every time I hear it, because they are asking it in moments when they know I cannot give it to them — when I am distracted by an e-mail on my phone or I’m dealing with the constant, boring logistics of running a home.

We can usually squeeze in an hour of “dada time” before bed — mostly wrestling or reading books — and so the real “dada time” happens on weekends. That’s my promise. “I have to go to work, but this weekend,” I tell them, “we can have ‘dada time.’ ”

I love “dada time.” And I’m pretty good about squeezing in an hour of “me time” each day for exercise, which usually means getting up before dawn to go to the gym or for a run. But when everything adds up, there is no real “friend time” left. Yes, I have friends at work and at the gym, but those are accidents of proximity. I rarely see those people anywhere outside those environments, because when everything adds up, I have left almost no time for friends. I have structured myself into being a loser.

“You should use this story suggestion as a call to do something about it.”

That’s Dr. Richard S. Schwartz, a Cambridge psychiatrist, and I had reached out to him because he and his wife, Dr. Jacqueline Olds, literally wrote the book on this topic, The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century.

He agreed that my story was very typical. When people with children become overscheduled, they don’t shortchange their children, they shortchange their friendships. “And the public health dangers of that are incredibly clear,” he says.

Beginning in the 1980s, Schwartz says, study after study started showing that those who were more socially isolated were much more likely to die during a given period than their socially connected neighbors, even after you corrected for age, gender, and lifestyle choices like exercising and eating right. Loneliness has been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke and the progression of Alzheimer’s. One study found that it can be as much of a long-term risk factor as smoking.

The research doesn’t get any rosier from there. In 2015, a huge study out of Brigham Young University, using data from 3.5 million people collected over 35 years, found that those who fall into the categories of loneliness, isolation, or even simply living on their own see their risk of premature death rise 26 to 32 percent.

Now consider that in the United States, nearly a third of people older than 65 live alone; by age 85, that has jumped to about half. Add all of this up, and you can see why the surgeon general is declaring loneliness to be a public health epidemic.

“Since my wife and I have written about loneliness and social isolation, we see a fair number of people for whom this is a big problem,” Schwartz continues. But there’s a catch. “Often they don’t come saying they’re lonely. Most people have the experience you had in your editor’s office: Admitting you’re lonely feels very much like admitting you’re a loser. Psychiatry has worked hard to de-stigmatize things like depression, and to a large part it has been successful. People are comfortable saying they’re depressed. But they’re not comfortable saying they’re lonely, because you’re the kid sitting alone in the cafeteria.”

I’m not that kid. I’m gregarious. I have family around me all the time, or I’m around “friends” at work or elsewhere. I comment on their Facebook posts. They comment on mine. My wife and I also have other couples we like and see often. It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that’s good enough — and for many men it is, at least until their spouse gets the friends in the divorce.

I’m hesitant to say I’m lonely, though I’m clearly a textbook case of the silent majority of middle-aged men who won’t admit they’re starved for friendship, even if all signs point to the contrary. Now that I’ve been forced to recognize it, the question is what to do about it. Like really do about it. Because the tricks I’ve been using clearly do not work. I’ve been on “guy dates” with people I like — maybe I met them through my kids or on an assignment or whatever — but all too often those are one and done. It’s not that we don’t hit it off. We’ll go have that beer, and we’ll spend that beer talking about how we’re overscheduled and never get to hang with our friends, vaguely making plans to do something again, though we both know it’s probably not going to happen — certainly not the grand “Let’s hike the Appalachian Trail” ideas that start getting thrown out after the third beer. It’s a polite way of kicking the ball down the road, but never into the goal. I like you. You like me. Is that enough? Does that make us friends?

In February at a conference in Boston, a researcher from Britain’s University of Oxford presented study results that most guys understand intuitively: Men need an activity together to make and keep a bond. Women can maintain friendships over the phone. My wife is capable of having long phone talks with her sister in Virginia or her friend Casey (whom she sees in person almost every day), and I kind of look at it with amazement. I hate the phone. My guy friends seem to share my feelings, because our phone conversations seem to naturally last about five minutes before someone says, “All right, I’ll catch up with you later.” Dudes aren’t going to maintain a bromance that way, or even over a once-in-a-blue-moon beer. We need to go through something together. That’s why, studies have shown, men tend to make their deepest friends through periods of intense engagement, like school or military service or sports. That’s how many of us are comfortable.

When I was talking to Richard Schwartz, the psychiatrist told me something that had me staring off into the distance and nodding my head. Researchers have noticed a trend in photographs taken of people interacting. When female friends are talking to each other, they do it face to face. But guys stand side by side, looking out at the world together.

But in the middle years of life, those side-by-side opportunities to get together are exactly the sort of things that fall off. When you have a gap in your schedule, you feel bad running off with the fellas and leaving your partner alone to look for the shoes. And the guys I’d like to spend time with are all locked in the exact same bind as me. Planning anything takes great initiative, and if you have to take initiative every time you see someone, it’s easy to just let it disappear.

by Billy Baker, Boston Globe |  Read more:

Image: Mario Zucca

On the Yamanaka-goe Road
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Pepsi's New Ad Is a Total Success

[ed. See also: How Pepsi's ad backfired for Kendall Jenner.]

Before it’s an ad for shampoo or cat food or cola, every advertisement is first an ad for capitalism.

Without a privately-controlled industry jockeying to compete with one another for consumer dollars, there’s no need for advertising. People would wash their hair with Shampoo, and feed their cats with Cat Food, and quench their thirst with Cola. Without competition, there would be no need to advertise in the first place. Especially when it comes to commodities. There are some differences between colas—the taste and the ingredients, for example. But the main difference is on the can rather than in it. The branding, and the sensibilities that branding conveys.

Yesterday, Pepsi released an ad that takes a strong, if bizarre, brand position on contemporary politics. In the spot, dubbed “Jump In,” Kendall Jenner abandons a photo shoot to join a passing march. To do so, she sheds a blonde wig and slips in among a diverse throng of variously-toned participants in a seemingly-innocuous protest. Eventually, Jenner meets an equally innocuous policeman keeping order. She hands him a cold Pepsi, and the crowd of protesters rejoices. “Live for Now,” the spot concludes, topped by the Pepsi brand mark.

The ad has been almost universally panned online. A tone-deaf take on “protest as brunch.” An absurdist parody of the long, unfinished project of civil-rights activism in America. A trivialization of today’s street unrest.

All these criticisms are dead-on. But they don’t matter, because the ad is an undeniable success. Yes, true, it coopts the politics of protest, particularly as they surround race relations in America today. But that’s not the ad’s goal, so the public’s objection is ultimately irrelevant to Pepsi’s mission. The ad’s point is to put the consumer in a more important role than the citizen anyway. And to position Pepsi as a facilitator in the utopian dream of pure, color-blind consumerism that might someday replace politics entirely. (...)

Critics aren’t wrong to see the protest as a milquetoast mockery of the real agitation for social justice in the streets in America. In particular, the ad neuters one of the most memorable images of protest in recent memory, that of a woman facing-off with riot police in a mid-2016 Baton Rouge demonstration.

But the ad’s interpretive possibilities don’t end with this explanation. It’s equally possible to understand the Pepsi protest as a march for the power of Pepsi branding instead of social justice. It may seem preposterous or even revolting to advance this interpretation, but that doesn’t make it any less viable. After all, the ad ends with a clear admission of the march’s purpose: to deliver ice-cold Pepsi cola to the (prominently unmilitarized) police who quirkily mistook an innocent, branded march for a political protest.

At a time when so much is worthy of protest, it might seem insane to imagine a big company like Pepsi greenlighting such a tone-deaf take. But it’s equally likely that Pepsi is banking on this exact social anxiety as an invitation for branded levity. Today’s political climate is distressing for many people in America. For some of them, the answer to such distress is protest and agitation. But for others, salve comes in dreaming of a near future in which all that anxiety melts away, like a cool soda quenching a big thirst. (...)

The genius of this decision is that it satisfies everyone. The Kardashian fanatics got their Kendall Jenner fix. The agitators get to feel that they have successfully redressed a big brand company; a minor victory in a time of so many defeats. The earnest, probably-white folk who enjoyed Pepsi’s alternative to constant politicization got their saccharine status-quo—and now they also get a branded excuse to issue a counter-offensive against the progressives who insisted on bringing politics into innocuous soft drinks (surely it’s coming). The media get their scoops, and their thinkpieces (like this one). And these outcomes, incompatible though they are, all return attention to Pepsi—which is all it really wanted in the first place.

by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: PepsiCo

Trump's Terrible Moment of Truth in Syria

Last November, a few days before the U.S. Presidential election, I was among a group of American reporters and researchers who visited Damascus, Syria, to interview President Bashar al-Assad and his foreign minister, Walid Muallem. At a meeting with the group, Muallem was asked which candidate he favored, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.

“I hope they will not elect anybody,” he said.

Muallem laughed at his own joke. He wasn’t serious. Both Muallem and his boss very much wanted Trump to win, hoping that, if he did, some of the pressure on their regime, which has been ostracized around the globe for committing war crimes, would ease up. Assad and Muallem had every reason to think that Trump would give them a more sympathetic hearing than they’d receive from a Clinton Administration. During the campaign, while Clinton was promising to get tough on Assad, Trump had praised him, if for no other reason than that he was battling the Islamic State. Trump had also made numerous positive references to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s leader and Assad’s most important international ally. There was talk, after Trump’s election, of a possible rapprochement with Syria, perhaps facilitated by Putin. And, indeed, the Washington Post reported on Monday that, earlier this year, the Blackwater founder Erik Prince met secretly in the Seychelles with a confidant of Putin to discuss, among other things, a possible deal on Syria.

“I don’t like Assad at all,’’ Trump said in a Presidential debate in October. “But Assad is killing isis. Russia is killing isis and Iran is killing isis.”

The trouble, of course, was that while Assad may indeed have been killing isis, he was also killing Syrian civilians—and so prolifically that most Western governments, including the United States, long ago severed diplomatic relations with Assad’s government and called on Assad to step down. Most notoriously, in 2013, the Assad regime was accused by Western governments of using poison gas in the Damascus suburb of East Ghouta, an attack that killed at least fourteen hundred people and wounded more than three thousand, most of them civilians. And though President Barack Obama had previously publicly drawn a “red line” over the use of chemical weapons in Syria, and threatened to respond militarily if it were crossed, he decided, at the last moment, to refrain from any military action, securing instead a promise from Assad to turn over the country’s chemical weapons. It was one of the most significant moments of Obama’s Presidency, and one that Trump and other Republicans ridiculed.

Now comes the moment of truth for President Trump. Sources inside Syria are reporting that a sarin-gas attack in Idlib Province killed dozens of civilians and injured hundreds more on Tuesday. In a statement, Trump blamed Assad’s regime, called the attack “reprehensible,” and said that it “cannot be ignored by the civilized world.” He also described the attack as a “consequence of the past Administration’s weakness and irresolution.”

What happens now? Trump’s comment put forward no clear policy or planned response. During a press briefing on Tuesday, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, strongly suggested that the Administration is preparing a military response in order to punish the Syrian government and deter it from carrying out any more chemical-weapons attacks.

The Obama Administration took plenty of actions against the Assad government, including sending arms to rebel groups. But Obama’s other aim, in addition to destroying isis, was to avoid a collapse of the Syrian state—the kind that might happen if the United States were to directly attack the Assad regime. Obama feared that the ensuing vacuum in Damascus would be filled by the likes of isis and the Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra. When Obama looked at Damascus in 2013, he saw Baghdad in 2003.

by Dexter Filkins, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Getty
[ed. Well, he's already blamed Obama, so that's out of the way. Next item on the day's agenda: this.]

Tiger Woods and the Amazing 1997 Masters

It’s Masters week, the annual ritual of thrilling golf, whispered commentary, blooming magnolias, white-suited caddies, and “patrons” in Bermuda shorts. (For the sensitive souls who run Augusta National Golf Club, which has hosted the tournament since 1934, the “fans” is too redolent of beer-swilling frat boys.)

Twenty years ago this month, a young man named Tiger Woods blitzed his way around Augusta, taking down the other players, the racial prejudice that has long attended golf, and the very expectations of what was possible in the sport. The shock of his performance wasn’t merely in seeing a twenty-one-year-old phenom defeat the rest of the field by twelve shots, beating the previous record of nine shots that Jack Nicklaus had set in 1965. It was the preternaturally calm demeanor that Woods displayed, and the manner in which he dismantled a course that had long been regarded as one of the world’s most difficult.

Colin Montgomerie, who was then one of the leading golfers in the world, was paired with Woods on Saturday, the third day of the four-day tournament. Woods shot seven under par—“the easiest sixty-five I’ve ever seen,’’ Montgomerie called it recently. “From the second hole onwards, I thought, ‘Hang on a minute. This is something extraordinary,’ ” he said. “This is a game that I had not seen before, and none of us had.” On Sunday, Woods shot three under par, and on the back nine his round turned into a victory procession. “From the 13th to the 18th, the people supported him like crazy,” his playing partner Costantino Rocca recalled. “I don’t know if anyone remembered I was on the golf course. It was good for him, not for me.’’

For those who would like to see Woods’s victory again, or who were too young to see it the first time around, the Masters is streaming the original CBS Sports broadcast of Sunday’s final round on its Web site. To watch the three-hour tape is to be reminded of how green Augusta National is, how white the crowds were (and are to this day), and how young, talented, and self-assured Woods was.

On the video, you can see Woods standing on the tee at the famous par-five thirteenth hole. At that point, he had a ten-shot lead over his closest competitor that weekend, Tom Watson. Standing tall, a steel-shafted three wood in hands, Woods lashed the ball straight down the middle of the fairway and bent over to pick up his tee. “You couldn’t walk that out there any better than that,” the late Ken Venturi commented.

Before going after his ball, Woods flashed his caddie, Mike (Fluff) Cowan, a quick, close-mouthed smile—a smile of youth and limitless confidence. Although he was barely old enough to drink legally, Woods had already won three professional tournaments, and going into Augusta he believed he could triumph there. In fact, he expected to win. “There are a few tournaments throughout my career where I felt, ‘Just don’t screw it up,’ ” he told USA Today a couple of weeks ago. “That was one of them.”

With the advantage of a young, limber body and a free-flowing swing that generated tremendous club-head speed, Woods drove the ball thirty or forty yards farther than most other players. He was also a great iron player and a fabulous putter. When the three elements of his game came together, as they did that week at Augusta, he was unbeatable. On the fifteenth hole, after driving his tee shot three hundred and one yards, he arrowed a mid-iron over the creek in front of the green. The shot landed about twenty feet behind the hole, setting up a two-putt birdie that extended his lead to eleven shots. “How good does it get?” Venturi asked. “You don’t want to play him on holes like this, he’ll own you. And he’s owning everybody today.”

During the twelve and a half years that followed his Masters coming-out party, Woods won another sixty-six tournaments on the P.G.A. Tour, including thirteen more major championships. The members at Augusta, seeing what he had done to their beloved course, lengthened it considerably, laid down new rough, and planted trees in areas where previously there had been none. This effort to “Tiger-proof” Augusta didn’t prevent Woods from winning the Masters three more times. But, as other venues copied Augusta’s example, Woods’s 1997 victory changed the very game, creating the conditions for the rise of a generation of “bombers” who also hit the ball a mile—players like Dustin Johnson, Rory McIlroy, and Jason Day.

by John Cassidy, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Gary Hershorn/Reuters/Alamy
[ed. Watching the video again, it's startling how much people age in 20 years.]

How Seattle Is Dismantling a NIMBY Power Structure

For decades, activist homeowners have held virtual veto power over nearly every decision on Seattle’s growth and development.

In large and small ways, these homeowners, who tend to be white, more affluent and older than the average resident, have shaped neighborhoods in their reflection — building a city that is consistently rated as one of the nation’s most livable, as well as one of its most expensive.

Now — in the face of an unprecedented housing crisis and a dramatic spike in homelessness — that may be starting to change.

Last July, Mayor Ed Murray and the director of the city’s Department of Neighborhoods, Kathy Nyland, announced that Seattle was cutting formal ties with, and funding for, the 13 volunteer Neighborhood District Councils that had been the city’s chief sounding boards on neighborhood planning since the 1990s. Through this bureaucratic sleight of hand, Murray and Nyland signaled their intent to seek more input and feedback from lower-income folks, people of color and renters — who now make up 54 percent of the city — and away from the white baby boomers who have long dominated discussions about Seattle’s future. The message: We appreciate your input, but we’re going to get a second opinion.

A few months later, the Department of Neighborhoods doubled down on its commitment to community engagement, putting out a call for volunteers to serve on a new 16-member Community Involvement Commission, which will be charged with helping city departments develop “authentic and thorough” ways to reach “all” city residents, including underrepresented communities such as low-income people, homeless residents and renters. Finally, DON will also oversee and staff a second new commission, the Seattle Renters’ Commission, which will advise all city departments on policies that affect renters and monitor the enforcement and effectiveness of the city’s renter protection laws.

The shakeup has rattled traditional neighborhood groups, which have grown accustomed to outsized influence at City Hall, and invigorated some groups that have long felt ignored and marginalized by the city.

The shift toward a more inclusive neighborhoods department, and neighborhood planning process, is more than just symbolic; it’s political. The homeowner-dominated neighborhood councils have typically argued against land use changes that would allow more density (in the form of townhouses and apartment buildings) in and near Seattle’s traditional single-family neighborhoods, which make up nearly two-thirds of the city. Including more renters and low-income people in the mix could dilute, or even upend, those groups’ agendas.

“Our city has changed dramatically since our district councils system was created three decades ago, and we have seen them over time become less and less representative not only of their neighborhoods but of Seattle itself,” Murray said last year.

His statement echoed a point Nyland made in a memo to the City Council back in May: “We have heard from residents active in the system that ‘District Councils work for us.’ … However, they don’t work for everyone.” (...)

Nyland’s reform can be traced back to a 2009 audit of the district councils that found an obsolete system that did not reflect the city’s true demographics. “The system is dominated by the presence of longtime members whose point of view is overly dominant at both the district council and city neighborhood council levels and potentially not representative of their communities,” the city audit found. “The district councils in general are not sufficiently representative of the communities they nominally represent,” it concluded.

The disconnect was even deeper in 2016, when a report by the neighborhoods department found that while the population of Seattle was becoming younger, more diverse and more evenly split between homeowners and renters, “residents attending district council meetings tend to be 40 years of age or older, Caucasian and homeowners.”

“If you’ve ever gone to some of these community meetings, they’re just deadly dull, and the same 25 people have been there for 100 years,” City Council Member Sally Bagshaw says.

At a meeting of the Ballard District Council in northwest Seattle immediately after the announcement, district council members seemed shell-shocked by the city’s decision to cut them off. Sitting around a horseshoe of tables at the area’s branch library in northwest Seattle, they took turns grousing about the change. One member argued that the mostly white, mostly middle-aged council should be considered diverse, because “this group represents homeowners, environmental groups, businesses and other organizations.” “We have people here from every state,” he added. Another suggested that the city had made the move in haste, without a plan to replace the councils. “If you’re going to get rid of the current plan, you need to have a new plan in place before you get rid of the old one,” he said.

At another recent meeting of the group formerly known as the Magnolia/Queen Anne District Council, which represents a wealthy enclave just south of Ballard, one member asked plaintively, “Why do we have to encourage certain groups to come? Why can’t it just be an open forum?”

In a sense, traditional neighborhood groups are right to feel threatened. Nyland’s announcement, coupled with her department’s new emphasis on outreach to communities that have rarely had a say in city decisions, represents a fundamental shift in the very definition of the “neighborhoods” department. By emphasizing outreach to underserved groups such as renters, immigrants and refugees, Nyland is shaking up traditional notions of community engagement and redefining community as something based not on geographic proximity, but on personal and cultural affinity.

by Erica C. Barnett, Next City | Read more:
Image:Alex Garland

Costco Members Get Deeper Discounts on $100 Google Play Codes

If you are a member of the Costco wholesale warehouse retailer, you already know you can get deep discounts on lots of bulk items. That also includes purchasing Google Play e-codes. At the moment, Costco is running a promotion where its members can get a $100 Google Play code for an even bigger discount.

Normally, the discount for a $100 Google Play code from Costco would be down to $92.99, or a price cut of $7.01. However, from now until April 16, there will be an additional $10 discount taken for the Google Play e-codes, bringing the price down to just $82.99. The code is delivered via email and is limited to five codes per customer. You can use it to purchase items on the Google Play Store, including apps, movies, TV shows, books, and music. You can also use it to purchase subscriptions to some of Google’s services, including YouTube Red and adding more storage to Google Drive.

by John Callaham, Android Authority |  Read more:

Image: Costco

Why You Feel the Urge to Jump

Have you ever stood in a high place and felt the urge to jump? Judith Dancoff did one beautiful, clear day on Deception Pass Bridge, a narrow two-lane causeway that ribbons between two islands north of Seattle. If she followed her compulsion to leap, death at the bottom of the steep ocean gorge 180 feet below would be almost certain.

A novelist known for literary flights of fancy, she did not feel suicidal—and never had. Though normally fearful of heights, she strangely was not afraid then, though Deception Pass Bridge is ranked among the scariest in the world. Its slender concrete span cantilevers over jagged cliff-tops and reportedly wobbles in high winds, with only a minimalist 1935 railing separating you from distant roiling waters.

None of that registered with Dancoff, who was also unaware of the bridge’s history of attracting jumping. Instead, she saw herself as if in a dream, climbing onto the pedestrian railing then diving off. She was so unnerved that she sat down cross-legged on the pavement to stop herself. “It was terrifying because of the possibility of doing it,” she later recalled. “I felt a bit foolish. I thought, ‘where did that come from?’ ”

The seemingly irrational, but common urge to leap—half of respondents felt it in one survey—can be so disturbing that ruminators from Jean-Paul Sartre (in Being and Nothingness) to anonymous contributors in lengthy Reddit sub-threads have agonized about it. While the French philosopher saw a moment of Existentialist truth about the human freedom to choose to live or die, ramp_tram called it “F***king stupid” when he had to plaster himself to the far wall of a 14th-floor hotel atrium away from the balcony railing because “I was deathly afraid of somehow jumping off by accident.”

The French explain it as L’Appel du Vide, or call of the void. Are they just French, or can the void really beckon you to kill yourself? New science on balance, fear, and cognition shows that the voice of the abyss is both real and powerful. Heights, it turns out, are not exactly what they seem.

by Jessica Seigel, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Amit Chattopadhyay / Wikipedia

[ed. I live a few miles from this bridge and you could not pay me enough to walk over it... the vertigo and urge to jump are just too great (even driving on it gives me the creeps).]

Saving the World

[ed. It's hard to find much to laugh about in politics these days, but this was awesome:
 http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/president-trumps-son-law-jared-kushner-travels-iraq-46557547]

I'll try to post a video when it's available.

[ed. See also: Jared Kushner, Man of Steel]

Gonzaga's Brand of Winning Leads University's Broader Growth

In the summer of 1998, Gonzaga University was a small private college in Eastern Washington that barely made a blip on the public consciousness, even within its own region.

To shake things up, administrators decided to change the school's visual identity. The school colors went from light blue and white to a deep navy. The odd-looking mascot — a bulldog in a sailor's cap — needed an update, too, so it became the snarling canine with the spiked collar of today.

A new brand was born.

"We made a conscious decision to change who we were," Gonzaga athletic director Mike Roth said. "We decided we wanted people to see us differently, too, and to do that we had to change the way things looked. We sat down that summer and decided, we need a new logo. We made it and thought, 'That's pretty cool.'"

The logo got a huge boost of popularity the next men's basketball season, when the scrappy Bulldogs made a run to the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament, becoming synonymous with success as the program continued to grow.

Under the guidance of coach Mark Few, Gonzaga became a national powerhouse, reaching the NCAA Tournament 19 straight times with multiple trips to the Sweet 16.

That snarling bulldog is now on the sport's biggest stage as Gonzaga gets set to play mighty North Carolina in Monday night's national championship game.

"We don't pretend or think we're anywhere near the level with the tradition of Carolina or Duke or Kentucky," Few said. "But at the same time, I think we do feel we've been a national entity for quite some time. The product, the brand, the players, the team that we're putting out there on the floor we feel can compete with anybody in the country on any given night."

The basketball program's success has brought national attention to a school in the inland Northwest that likely would have otherwise remained mostly anonymous outside of Spokane, Washington.

The more the basketball team won, the more people became interested in learning about Gonzaga and Spokane. That interest turned into a familiarity as the Zags continued to win.

With that exposure came massive growth on the campus along the Spokane River.

Enrollment has nearly doubled to 7,800 over the past 20 years, with the number of full-time faculty up 55 percent. New buildings dot the campus, with more under construction, including the Volkar Center for Athletic Achievement next door to The Kennel, where the Zags play. Budgets have increased as the school's endowment has climbed over $200 million.

"The visual part of that brand has been out there for a long time and when people see that mark, they think Gonzaga basketball and that helps the brand of the institution beyond that," Roth said. "We want them to see that, wow, that's a great place to get an education, wow, that's a great place to be an engineer, they have a great school for business.

"To me, that's what we've been able to accomplish over all these years with this basketball program," Roth said. "The brand has given people the window in Gonzaga University and now even a window into Spokane."

by John Marshall, AP |  Read more:

Image: David J. Phillip/AP via:
[ed. Go Zags. Update: Alas, not to be.]

via:

The Struggle is Real for Millennial Homebuyers

After years of many experts lamenting how Millennials weren't interested in becoming homeowners, it turns out many are actually diving in. But they're facing a lot of competition.

Millennials are the largest group of homebuyers, according to Ellie Mae, a software company that analyzes mortgage data. In January, Millennials represented around 45% of all purchase loans, up from 42% the same month in 2016.

And many expect more Millennial house hunters to jump into the market this spring buying season.

But their path to homeownership won't be easy.

"Millennials are mostly first-time buyers and they are competing against repeat buyers who have more buying leverage and experience," said Javier Vivas, manager of economic research for Realtor.com. He added that Millennials recently became the dominant group of users searching for homes on the website.

New buyers this spring will also be up against buyers who started looking last year, but still haven't bought a home.

A shortage of available homes has driven up prices -- particularly among starter homes that tend to fall within first-time buyers' budgets.

There were 3% fewer homes on the market in February compared to a year ago, according to a recent report from Zillow, and home values are up nearly 7%.

That's led to bidding wars and fierce competition, especially in the lower end of the market.

When Andy Greene and his wife Jenna began looking for their first home together near Columbus, Ohio, they found themselves in a super competitive market.

"We would get a notification that a house went on the market. You had to go see it that night ... you had to go the same day it was out," said Greene.

They thought they found their perfect home early in their search and put in an offer. But they weren't the only ones. The seller received 13 bids.

Despite going $10,000 above the asking price, the Greenes were not the winning bidders.

"It was a little defeating," said Greene. "It made us wonder if we were actually going to be able to make it work and second guessing if we could find something we could afford."

by Kathryn Vasel, CNN | Read more:
Image: markk

Dirty Birds (Dutch Harbor, AK)
Image: Corey Arnold

The Other Favorites

[ed. Fun Beatles song (to play, not sing), inspired by Paul McCartney's dog Martha. Here are a couple other excellent versions: Gerald Edward and Laurence Juber (instrumental). Also, another fine tune from these guys: Folsom Prison Blues. Nice to see the next generation stepping up.]