What We Lose When We Push Our Kids to ‘Achieve’

When I was 12, I disappeared into my bedroom with a $40 folk guitar and a giant book of Beatle songs, with elementary, large-type “E-Z” chord diagrams to follow. I had no musical gift, as a series of failed music lessons had assured me — it was actually the teachers who assured me; the lessons were merely dull — and no real musical training. My fingers stung as I tried to press down on the strings without making them buzz and my left hand ached as I tried — and for a long time failed — stretching it across the neck. Nonetheless, I worked my way through “Rain” (abbreviated to two chords) and “Love Me Do” (three) and finally “Yellow Submarine” (four chords, or was it five?) and discovered by myself the matchless thrill of homemade musical harmony.

No one asked me to do this, and surely no one was sorry the door was closed as I strummed and stumbled along after the nirvana of these simplified songs. But the sense of happiness I felt that week — genuine happiness, rooted in absorption in something outside myself — has stayed with me.

Fifty years later, I am still not a very good guitar player, but that week’s work, and the months and years of self-directed practice on the instrument that followed it, became a touchstone of sorts for me, and a model and foundation for almost every meaningful thing I’ve done since. It gave me confidence, often wavering but never entirely extinguished, that perseverance and passion and patience can make one master any task.

So it seems suitable at this season, as the school year ends and graduates walk out into the world, most thinking hard about what they might do with their lives, to talk about a distinction that I first glimpsed in that room and in those chord patterns. It’s the difference between achievement and accomplishment.

Achievement is the completion of the task imposed from outside — the reward often being a path to the next achievement. Accomplishment is the end point of an engulfing activity we’ve chosen, whose reward is the sudden rush of fulfillment, the sense of happiness that rises uniquely from absorption in a thing outside ourselves.

Our social world often conspires to denigrate accomplishment in favor of the rote-work of achievement. All our observation tells us that young people, particularly, are perpetually being pushed toward the next test, or the “best” grammar school, high school or college they can get into. We invent achievement tests designed to be completely immune to coaching, and therefore we have ever more expensive coaches to break the code of the non-coachable achievement test. (Those who can’t afford such luxuries are simply left out.) We drive these young people toward achievement, tasks that lead only to other tasks, into something resembling not so much a rat race as a rat maze, with another hit of sugar water awaiting around the bend, but the path to the center — or the point of it all — never made plain. (...)

I know there are objections to his view: At some moment, all accomplishment, however self-directed, has to become professional, lucrative, real. We can’t play with cards, or chords, forever. And surely many of the things that our kids are asked to achieve can lead to self-discovery; taught well, they may learn to love new and unexpected things for their own sake. The trick may lie in the teaching. My sister Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist and author, puts this well: If we taught our kids softball the way we teach them science, they would hate softball as much as they hate science; but if we taught them science as we teach them softball, by practice and absorption, they might love both.

Another objection is that accomplishment is just the name people of good fortune give to things that they have the privilege of doing, which achievement has already put them in a place to pursue. But this is to accept, unconsciously, exactly the distinction between major and minor, significant and insignificant tasks, that social coercion — what we used to call, quaintly but not wrongly, “the system” — has always been there to perpetuate.

Pursuit of a resistant task, if persevered in stubbornly and passionately at any age, even if only for a short time, generates a kind of cognitive opiate that has no equivalent. There are many drugs that we swallow or inject in our veins; this is one drug that we produce in our brains, and to good effect. The hobbyist or retiree taking a course in batik or yoga, who might be easily patronized by achievers, has rocket fuel in her hands. Indeed, the beautiful paradox is that pursuing things we may do poorly can produce the sense of absorption, which is all that happiness is, while persisting in those we already do well does not.

by Adam Gopnik, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Millennium Images/Gallery Stock

Joro Chen (?), two men wearing headphones, crowded jazz club, small explosions around them, in the style of Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, via DALL-E

via: (The Active Voice)

Leaving the Cradle

Leaving the Cradle

Image: NASA’s Cassini spacecraft during one of its final dives between Saturn and its innermost rings (source: NASA/JPL-Caltech — Public Domain)

Humanity has always wondered what is over the next hill, around the bend, on the other side of the river, or across the sea; and now we are finally at a point where our technology has caught up to our natural inclination and desire to ‘go and see for ourselves.’ (...)

We started off strong. A mere 66 years after the Wright brothers made their historic flight, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon. The 1969 landing on our nearest celestial neighbor marked a turning point in human history. No longer were we confined to the planet that gave us birth; we could step out and start to see for ourselves what wonders, treasures and challenges await us outside the borders of our first and still only home. Sadly, it was not to be. After the triumph of Apollo 11, only 6 more manned missions to the Moon took place; and in 1972 the last of the only 12 humans to have ever set foot on another world left and came home. We have yet to return. (...)

Now that finally seems to be changing.

Scientists Dramatically Extend Cell Lifespan in Anti-Aging Breakthrough

Scientists have achieved a significant breakthrough in the effort to slow the aging process with a novel technique that increased the lifespans of yeast cells by a whopping 82 percent, reports a new study.

By programming cells to constantly switch between two aging pathways, researchers were able to prevent them from fully committing to either deteriorative process, a method that nearly doubled the lifespan of the cells. In other words, rather than the entire cell aging at once, the aging process was toggled between different physical parts of the organism, extending its life. This synthetic “toggle switch” offers a potential roadmap toward treatments that could one day extend human longevity, though that future is highly speculative at this time.

We are born, we age, we die—so goes the story of humanity since time immemorial. However, this familiar progression could be shaken up by enormous advances in genetics that have opened new windows into the underlying biological mechanisms that cause us to age, raising the possibility that they could be rewired to extend our lifespans.

Now, a team of scientists at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), have developed a new solution to this age-old problem that essentially tricks cells into waffling between two common deteriorative processes in cells. Using synthetic biology, the researchers genetically reprogrammed a circuit that chooses between these divergent paths toward death, causing it to constantly oscillate between its fates instead of actually dedicating itself to one.

These “oscillations increased cellular lifespan through the delay of the commitment to aging,” a result that establishes “a connection between gene network architecture and cellular longevity that could lead to rationally designed gene circuits that slow aging,” according to a study published on Thursday in Science.

“The circuit resembles a toggle switch that drives the fate decision and progression toward aging and death,” said Nan Hao, a professor of molecular biology at UCSD and a senior author of the study, in an email to Motherboard.

“Once the fate of a cell is determined, then it will have accelerated damage accumulation and progression to death,” continued Hao, who also serves as co-director of UCSD’s Synthetic Biology Institute. “[I]t became obvious to us that if we could rewire this naturally-occurring toggle switch circuit to an oscillator, it will make the cell to cycle between the two pre-destined aging paths and prevent the cell from making this fate decision toward deterioration and death, and it will make the cell live longer.”

Hao and his colleagues have been working on cellular aging for seven years, focusing on the concept of an oscillator for much of that time. In 2020, the researchers published another study, also in Science, that identified two major fates for budding yeast cells. About half of the cells they observed aged due to the deterioration of structures within the cellular nucleus, a cluster that holds most of an organism’s genome. The other half aged when the energy production units of the cell, known as mitochondria, started to break down over time.

Those observations transformed the oscillator concept from “an abstract idea to an executable idea,” Hao said. To build on the 2020 findings, the researchers used computer simulations of aging-related genetic circuits to develop a synthetic strain that could spark the desired feedback loop between the nucleolar and mitochondrial aging processes. In the new study, they introduced the synthetic oscillator into cells of the yeast species Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a model organism that has already shed light on many of the genetic factors that influence longevity in complex organisms, such as humans.

The approach resulted in an 82 percent increase in the lifespan of cells with the synthetic oscillators, compared with a control sample of cells that aged under normal circumstances, which is “the most pronounced life-span extension in yeast that we have observed with genetic perturbations,” according to the study.

“A major highlight of the work is our approach to achieve longevity: using computers to simulate the natural aging system and guide the design and rational engineering of the system to extend lifespan,” Hao told Motherboard. “This is the first time this computationally-guided engineering-based approach has been used in aging research. Our model simulations actually predicted that an oscillator can double the lifespan of the cell, but we were happily surprised that it actually did in experiments.”

The study is part of a growing corpus of mind-boggling research that may ultimately stave off some of the unpleasant byproducts of aging until later in life, while boosting life expectancy in humans overall. Though countless hurdles have to be cleared before these treatments become a reality, Hao thinks his team’s approach could eventually be applied to humans.

by Becky Ferreira, Vice | Read more:
Image: Kateryna Kon/Science Photo Library via Getty Images

[ed. See also: Vice, Decayed Digital Colossus, Files for Bankruptcy (NYT).]

Runway Brings AI Movie-Making to the Masses

Runway AI, the generative AI company whose video editing tools were critical to making "Everything Everywhere All at Once," has made parts of its toolkit available to the public — so anyone can turn images, text or video clips into 15-second reels.

Why it matters: There's grave and justifiable concern about AI's potential for abuse. But the flip side is that tools like Runway's are unleashing all manner of artistic creativity and giving rise to new AI-generated art forms.

Driving the news: Runway just granted public access to its image-to-video model, Gen-1, and, in a more limited release, to its text-to-video product, Gen-2.

• Gen-1 is available on a mobile app that lets users take or upload a picture or video and instantly generate a short video clip based on it — applying filters like "Claymation" or "Cloudscape."

• Gen-2, which Runway says is the first publicly available text-to-video product, is available now in limited form via chat platform Discord (and will soon be available more widely).

• These fun and highly preliminary features are just a small, public-facing snapshot of the powerful suite of back-end tools available to video professionals who've been drawn to Runway's products like catnip.

Backstory: Runway was a co-creator of Stable Diffusion, a breakthrough text-to-image generator.

• Runway's creative suite has been a loosely kept secret among filmmaking cognoscenti, who use it to save countless hours on editing tasks traditionally done by hand.

• The company's AI Magic Tools let users edit and generate content in dozens of ways — by removing backgrounds from videos, erasing and replacing parts of a photo, or blurring out faces or backgrounds, for example.

What they're saying: Runway's technology is like "having your own Hollywood production studio in your browser," Cristóbal (Cris) Valenzuela, the company's CEO, tells Axios.

• Its tools — and others, like ChatGPT — are "democratizing content creation" and "reducing the cost of creation to almost zero," he said.

Where it stands: Runway's tools have been used to help produce the "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," build sequences for MotorTrend's "Top Gear America," design shoes for New Balance, and make videos for Alicia Keys.And they're a growing staple in creating visual effects (VFX) for amateur and professional films.

by Jennifer A. Kingson, Axios |  Read more:

Images: Aïda Amer/Axios; Runway AI

Cultural Appropriation is an American Asset

There is no American culture without appropriation, the whole world is doing it now, and we’re the only ones who feel bad about it.

When I was young, I noticed that some people on TV saw fried chicken, greens, cornbread, and black-eyed peas on a plate and called it Soul food. At some point, I learned that up north, this was considered black people’s cooking, but for me, it was my grandmother’s. There’s no difference between Southern food and soul food, apart from the name, but this hasn’t stopped the professional activist class from asserting racial ownership over the cuisine when it is presented without “context.” In 2021, Travon Jackson, executive director of the African American Cultural Center of the Capital Region in Albany, New York, told Times Union that white people could only avoid cultural appropriation while eating fried chicken if it is exhibited in “historical context”. According to Jackson, the “historical context” is that slaves served fried chicken to white people — which is true, but it's also true for virtually every dish which was ever eaten by a member of the Planter oligarchy. If you care to imagine a world without cultural appropriation, imagine being chased around an Upstate New York Cracker Barrel by a waiter yapping about slavery forever.

 

Like most things in America, fried chicken is a byproduct of cultural synthesis — in this case, Scottish and African. The contemporary American fixation on cultural appropriation is a strange one. It’s part of a larger attempt to replace the idea of America as a melting pot with multiculturalism. The melting pot has become seen as somewhat synonymous with assimilation, but it isn’t quite that. Melting may be a form of destruction, but it is also a method of production. This is why America has created so many new forms of music, literature, and art. Multiculturalism, on the other hand, is interested in the polite construction of a human zoo. It is a cosmopolitan ideal that fetishizes difference and seeks to preserve and ghettoize culture under the guise of diversity. Put cultures in cages, and you can gawk at them, coddle them, admire them even, but they'll never produce anything new. Destroying these artificial barriers and allowing cultures to co-mingle, collaborate, and borrow freely from one another is a dynamic, if somewhat Darwinian, process of cultural creation, and one which has served American culture well. Diversity isn’t our strength. Appropriation is.

Consider Selena Quintanilla. The Corpus Christi native has become seen as an emblem of Latin music but there is nothing Latin-American about her or her music, which was distinctly American — more specifically Texan and even more specifically Tejano — a melding of Spanish folk music, waltz, and polka, an organic fusion created by the meeting of Czech immigrants, German immigrants, and Texas Mexicans (Tejanos) in Central and South Texas nearly 200 years ago. This history didn’t matter to her fans, Hispanic or otherwise, and nobody seemed to care that she didn’t speak Spanish fluently and learned her lyrics phonetically. Decades after her tragic murder, another monolingual-English-speaking Tejana named Selena — Selena Gomez — faced backlash for releasing music in Spanish.

What changed?

To keep it short, ideas about “cultural appropriation” were created decades ago in the “ethnic” studies departments — themselves a byproduct of new-left campus activism in the 1970s — but, for the most part, mercifully remained in the academic ghetto until the mass adoption of social media in the 2010s. Though significantly less common than they are now, conversations around appropriation popped up in mass media before the 2010s. For example, in 1994, Ray Charles took umbrage with people referring to Elvis Presley as “the king,” telling NBC’s Bob Costa that “he was doing our type of music,” and noted that while whites celebrated Elvis’s hip-swaying act, Nat King Cole had been run out of town in Alabama for doing a similar one. Ray Charles’ assertion that Elvis “did” black music is closer to the truth than the popular perception today, which is that Elvis “stole” black music. Elvis Presley was not a suburban Jew from New Jersey or a Norwegian farm boy from South Dakota. He was a poor white from Tupelo, Mississippi, who lived in a largely black neighborhood and found his musical inspiration in an Assemblies of God church — a church which, like all Pentecostal churches, traces its lineage to the Azusa Street Revival, a movement which came out of the black church but quickly attracted and accepted disadvantaged people from all walks of life, including the white underclass. United by hard lives and possessed by the holy ghost, poor blacks, Hispanics, whites, and Indians prayed, sang, testified, and spoke in tongues together. Given the segregated history of Protestant Christianity in the United States, this was a radical movement of cross-racial Christian brotherhood and, at least in Jim Crow Mississippi, must have seemed like an act of outright social rebellion. Of course, Elvis sang like a black gospel singer, he grew up in the same religious tradition! He was alleged to have literally stolen a song from a lesser-known black artist — but only decades after the appropriation accusations started. In any case, Ray Charles and black artists of his generation had reason to feel bitterness toward Elvis. White artists did have advantages in the Jim Crow era that black artists didn’t, and it's hard to imagine that Elvis could have replicated his mainstream success if he had been black. (...)

Appropriation and cultural synthesis happen on a global scale now, thanks to the internet, and now foreigners mock Americans for their tsk-tsk-ing about the practice. Earlier this year, Spanish singer Rosalía was criticized (by Americans) for “appropriating” Latin American culture leading to the “widespread misconception that she is Latina,” so says an NPR writer in an article that uses the term “Latinx.” (They talk like that in el barrio Ms. Restrepo?) These “gringo latinos” were later mocked by actual Latin Americans, who didn’t seem to care that Rosalía was a “colonizer.”

by River Page, Pirate Wires |  Read more:

Image: Heinz

[ed. See also: Gwen Stefani: "I Said, 'My God, I'm Japanese'" (Allure); and, The Ed Sheeran Copyright Lawsuit Exposes The Absurdity of Music Ownership (CA).]

Victory Parade on Red Square

Alongside with the President of Russia on the stand were Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan, President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko, President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, President of Kyrgyzstan Sadyr Japarov, President of Tajikistan Emomali Rahmon, President of Turkmenistan Serdar Berdimuhamedov and President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev. Before the parade, Vladimir Putin welcomed the heads of foreign states who had arrived in Moscow for the celebrations, in the Heraldic Hall of the Kremlin.

The parade began with the national flag of Russia and the Banner of Victory carried into Red Square. The parade was led by Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Ground Forces Army General Oleg Salyukov and reviewed by Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu.

The marching column on Red Square included 30 ceremonial regiments of over 8,000 service personnel, among them 530 troops taking part in the special military operation.

The motorised column was headed by the legendary “Victory tank” T-34–85. Tigr-M and BTR-82A armoured personnel carriers, Bumerang infantry fighting vehicles, Iskander-M operational tactical missile systems, S-400 Triumf air defence launchers and Yars mobile ground-based missile systems drove through Red Square. The newest Spartak and 3-STS Akhmat armoured vehicles were presented at the parade for the first time.

The music accompaniment was provided by the combined military orchestra.

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Citizens of Russia,

Dear veterans,

Comrade soldiers and sailors, sergeants and warrant officers, midshipmen and sergeant majors,

Comrade officers, generals and admirals,

Soldiers and commanders participating in the special military operation,

Happy Victory Day!

Happy holiday that commemorates the honour of our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers who glorified and immortalised their names by defending our Fatherland. They saved the humankind from Nazism through immeasurable courage and immense sacrifice.

Today, our civilisation is at a crucial turning point. A real war is being waged against our country again but we have countered international terrorism and will defend the people of Donbass and safeguard our security.

For us, for Russia, there are no unfriendly or hostile nations either in the west or in the east. Just like the vast majority of people on the planet, we want to see a peaceful, free and stable future.

We believe that any ideology of superiority is abhorrent, criminal and deadly by its nature. However, the Western globalist elites keep speaking about their exceptionalism, pit nations against each other and split societies, provoke bloody conflicts and coups, sow hatred, Russophobia, aggressive nationalism, destroy family and traditional values which make us human. They do all that so as to keep dictating and imposing their will, their rights and rules on peoples, which in reality is a system of plundering, violence and suppression.

They seem to have forgotten what the Nazis’ insane claims of global dominance led to. They forgot who destroyed that monstrous, total evil, who stood up for their native land and did not spare their lives to liberate the peoples of Europe.

We see how in certain countries they ruthlessly and cold-bloodedly destroy memorials to Soviet soldiers, demolish monuments to great commanders, create a real cult of the Nazis and their proxies, erase and demonise the memory of true heroes. Such profanation of the feat and sacrifices of the victorious generation is also a crime, an outright revanchism on the part of those who were cynically and blatantly preparing a new march on Russia and who brought together neo-Nazi scum from around the world for this.

Their goal – and there is nothing new about it – is to break apart and destroy our country, to make null and void the outcomes of World War II, to completely break down the system of global security and international law, to choke off any sovereign centres of development.

Boundless ambition, arrogance and impunity inevitably lead to tragedies. This is the reason for the catastrophe the Ukrainian people are going through. They have become hostage to the coup d’état and the resulting criminal regime of its Western masters, collateral damage in the implementation of their cruel and self-serving plans.

The memory of defenders of the Fatherland is sacred for us in Russia, and we cherish it in our hearts. We give credit to members of the Resistance who bravely fought Nazism as well as the troops of the allied armies of the United States, Great Britain and other countries. We remember and honour the feat of Chinese soldiers in the fight against Japanese militarism.

I strongly believe that the experience of solidarity and partnership during the years of fighting a common threat is our invaluable heritage and a secure foothold now when the unstoppable movement is gaining momentum towards a more just multipolar world, a world based on the principles of trust and indivisible security, of equal opportunities for a genuine and free development of all nations and peoples.

It is crucial that leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States have gathered here in Moscow today. I see it as appreciation of the feat of our ancestors: they fought and won together since all the peoples of the USSR contributed to our common Victory.

We will always remember that. We bow our heads in cherished memory of those who lost their lives during the war, the memory of sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, grandfathers, husbands, wives, sisters and friends.

I declare a minute of silence.

(A minute of silence.)

Citizens of Russia,

The battles that were decisive for our Motherland always became patriotic, national and sacred. We are faithful to our ancestors’ legacy and have a deep and clear awareness of what it means to be up to the mark of their military, labour and moral achievements.

We take pride in the participants in the special military operation, all those fighting on the frontlines, those who deliver supplies to the front and save the wounded under fire. Your combat activities now are of paramount importance. The country’s security depends on you today as does the future of our statehood and our people. You commendably perform your combat duty fighting for Russia. Your families, children and friends stand behind you. They are waiting for you. I am sure you can feel their unfailing love.

The entire country has united to support our heroes. Everyone is ready to help, everyone prays for you.

Comrades, friends, dear veterans,

Today, every family in our country honours Great Patriotic War participants, remembers their family members and their heroes, and lays flowers to military memorials.

We are standing on Red Square, a place which remembers retainers of Yury Dolgoruky and Dmitry Donskoy, the people’s militia of Minin and Pozharsky, soldiers of Peter the Great and Kutuzov, the military parades of 1941 and 1945.

Today we have here participants in the special military operation – regular servicemen and those who joined the army ranks during the partial mobilisation, troops of the Lugansk and Donetsk corps, many volunteer units, personnel of the National Guard, Interior Ministry, Federal Security Service, Emergencies Ministry and other security agencies and services.

My greetings to all of you, friends. My greetings to everyone who is fighting for Russia in the battlefield, who is now in the line of duty.

Our heroic ancestors proved during the Great Patriotic War that nothing can beat our strong, powerful and reliable unity. There is nothing stronger than our love for the Motherland.

For Russia! For our glorious Armed Forces! For Victory!

Hooray!

by Vladimir Putin, President of Russia |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. A lot to unpack. But also, where else do you find a current speech by the President of Russia (un-hamburgered by the US Media)? Here.]

PBMs, the Brokers Who Control Drug Prices, Finally Get Washington’s Attention

On the one hand, if you read the business press, you encounter enough discussion of the role of pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, to work out that they are very large and profitable and wield enormous influence in the pharmaceutical business…but it’a all a bit fuzzy how they do that.

Kaiser Health News, now rebranded as KFF Health News, has a new article on PBMs, with the news hook that the Senate just held hearings on PBMs before a vote on PBM legislation….with the description of what PBMs do, exactly, and what the legislation entails peculiarly hazy.

Matt Stoller, in his post The Red Wedding for Rural Pharmacies, gave the 50,000 foot description of how PBMs work and how they abuse their monopoly position. A key section:

PBMs handle the drug benefit piece of insurance plans. They maintain a list of drugs for insurance companies, they negotiate drug prices, and they manage reimbursements to pharmacies. 

The original idea behind PBMs is they would be able to get enough bargaining power by representing multiple insurance companies that they could negotiate to bring down drug prices. And accumulate bargaining power they did, merging until three PBMs control 80% of the insurance market. They are also vertically integrated with insurance companies and drug store chains. The top three PBMs are owned by CVS, United Health, and Cigna.

Unfortunately, because of an exemption from anti-kickback laws, PBMs don’t use their bargaining power to reduce consumer prices. Instead, they force pharmaceutical firms to compete over who will give the PBM the biggest kickback, which in the industry is known as a rebate. Take insulin. In 2013, Sanofi gave a 2-4% kickback to PBMs to prefer their product to customers. In 2018, that number went up to 56%. In other words, more than half of the price of insulin is going to a middleman who does nothing more than push around paper.

The many bad practices of PBMs are legendary. PBMs often force customers to buy more expensive drugs over their generic counterparts, likely because they get kickbacks when customers do so. This ends up making this obscure group of firms a lot money. The combined revenue of the top three firms, who comprise just a small part of the U.S. health system, is larger than the entire amount France spends on all medical care for its entire population.

It gets worse. PBMs all own mail-order pharmacies, and they are increasingly mandating that patients use those mail-order pharmacies instead of the local pharmacy around the corner. Moreover, PBMs now have so much power they are able to claw back money randomly from pharmacies months after a drug was dispensed, using something called a Direct and Indirect Remuneration fee. (DIR fees are only used for Medicare plans, but that is still 37% of the market.) For independent pharmacies, DIR fees are impossible to plan for, they are opaque, and they end up raising prices for consumers.

By Arthur Allen, a KFF Health News Senior Correspondent, previously worked for Politico, and before that was a freelance writer for publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, Lingua Franca magazine, The New Republic, Slate, and Salon. Earlier in his career, he worked for The Associated Press. Originally published at KFF Health News

For two decades, patients and physicians eagerly awaited a lower-cost version of the world’s bestselling drug, Humira, while its maker, AbbVie, fought off potential competitors by building a wall of more than 250 patents around it.

When the first Humira biosimilar — essentially a generic version — finally hit the market in January, it came with an unpleasant surprise. The biosimilar’s maker, Amgen, launched two versions of the drug, which treats a host of conditions including rheumatoid arthritis. They were identical in every way but this: One was priced at about $1,600 for a two-week supply, 55% off Humira’s list price. But the other was priced at around $3,300, only about 5% off. And OptumRx, one of three powerhouse brokers that determine which drugs Americans get, recommended option No. 2: the more expensive version.

As Murdo Gordon, an Amgen executive vice president, explained in an earnings call, the higher price enabled his company to give bigger rebates, or post-sale discounts, to Optum and other intermediaries. Most of that money would be passed on to insurers, and patients, he said. Gordon did not mention that the higher-priced option would leave some patients paying much more out-of-pocket, undermining the whole rationale for generic drugs.

The Optum-Amgen announcements perfectly elucidated why, after years of thundering against drugmakers, Congress and the administration have now focused on regulating the deal-makers known as pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ health committee grilled a panel of PBM and pharmaceutical executives Wednesday in preparation for a vote on PBM legislation, expected Thursday.

The three biggest PBMs — OptumRx, CVS Caremark, and Express Scripts — control about 80% of prescription drug sales in America and are the most profitable parts of the health conglomerates in which they’re nestled. CVS Health, the fourth-largest U.S. corporation by revenue on Fortune’s list, owns CVS Caremark and the insurer Aetna; UnitedHealth Group, a close fifth, owns Optum; and Cigna, ranking 12th, owns Express Scripts. While serving as middlemen among drugmakers, insurers, and pharmacies, the three corporations also own the highest-grossing specialty drug and mail-order pharmacies.

“John D. Rockefeller would be happy to be alive today,” said David Balto, a former Federal Trade Commission attorney who represents clients suing PBMs. “He could own a PBM and monopolize economic power in ways he never imagined.” (...)

All this makes the PBMs ripe targets for politicians of both parties. Yet the complexity and obscurity of their role in the drug marketplace have skeptics wondering whether legislation advancing in the House and Senate will actually help patients or lower prices at the pharmacy counter.

“We may try to make things better and actually make things worse,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said at Wednesday’s hearing.

by Yves Smith, Matt Stollar, Arthur Allen, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: Game of Thrones, Red Wedding

The Mining Regulatory Clarity Act: Corporate Welfare For the Critical Mining Boom

On April 25th, Senators Catherine Cortez-Masto (D-Nev.) and Jim Risch (R-Idaho) introduced the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act - a bill that represents an unprecedented rollback of protections for federal public lands and prioritizes the interests of mining companies above all other land uses, including recreation, conservation, clean energy development, and the sacred sites of Indigenous peoples. Alaska has more federal public land by acreage than any other state. The implications of this legislation could be devastating for our intact ecosystems, healthy watersheds, and the communities who rely on them.

The bill would make it easier for mining companies to stake claims on public lands by allowing mining claimants - including international mining conglomerates - to permanently occupy federal public lands for a nominal fee. Proponents of the legislation assert that the bill represents a return to the status-quo, by undoing the precedent set by the recent Rosemont decision - a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that blocked the Rosemont copper mine near Tucson, Arizona. In reality, the bill makes industrial-scale mining easier and reduces the opportunity for local stakeholders to determine their own futures.

 

If enacted, the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act would allow companies to use existing mining claims to dump mine waste onto neighboring federal lands, expedite the permitting process for mining activities, and reduce opportunities for concerned stakeholders to intervene via lawsuit by ‘streamlining’ the permitting process.

This legislation is being touted as crucial for our clean energy future. Contrary to the corporate narrative - and goldrush greed - we can meet our need for critical transition minerals through both carefully sited and intensively managed mines, operating under the strictest environmental standards, and robust investment in a circular minerals economy that emphasizes recycling and reusing the critical minerals that have already been extracted from the Earth.

The mining law of 1872 is already remarkably permissive—mining activities have polluted the headwaters of 40% of western watersheds, remediation attempts are not grounded in ecological reality, and the polluting corporations pay no royalties for the minerals they extract from public lands.

True regulatory reform is needed to protect our watersheds, ecology, and communities from the impacts of the mining industry. Despite its misleading name, the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act does the exact opposite.

by Tyler Huling, Cook Inletkeeper | Read more:
Image: The Lavender pit mine, where a copper operation stopped in 1974, sits outside Bisbee, Ariz., on May 12, 2019. AP Photo/Anita Snow, File

[ed. Generations of landowners, conservationists, recreationists, and others have died fighting this antiquated law, which still governs mining activities today. See also: Planned Senate bill would counteract Mining Law ruling (AP); and, The Mining Law of 1872: Digging a Little Deeper (PERC):]

"The Mining Law emerged as a product of the California Gold Rush and the other western mining booms of the mid-19th century. Mineral deposits in the West were found predominantly on federal lands, but there was no law governing the transfer of rights to these minerals from public ownership to miners. So miners implemented their own customs, codes and laws, which Congress codified and amended as the Mining Law of 1872. This legislation gave broad discretion over the use of public land resources to the private sector, requiring little in the way of public administration. The central provisions of this legislation remain intact today.

The Mining Law allows United States citizens and firms to explore for minerals and establish rights to federal lands without authorization from any government agency. This provision, known as self-initiation or free access, is the cornerstone of the Mining Law. If a site contains a deposit that can be profitably marketed, claimants enjoy the “right to mine,” regardless of any alternative use, potential use, or non-use value of the land."

Alaska Abundance

Respite

Valisa Higman

via: here and here

Unwarranted Influence, Twenty-First-Century-Style

Honestly, it should take your breath away. We are on a planet prepping for further war in a staggering fashion. A watchdog group, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), just released its yearly report on global military spending. Given the war in Ukraine, you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that, in 2022, such spending in Western and Central Europe surpassed levels set as the Cold War ended in the last century. Still, it wasn’t just Europe or Russia where military budgets leaped. They were rising rapidly in Asia as well (with significant jumps in Japan and India, as well as for the world’s second-largest military spender, China). And that doesn’t even include spiking military budgets in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere on this embattled planet. In fact, last year, 12 of the 15 largest military spenders topped their 2021 outlays.

None of that is good news. Still, it goes without saying that one country overshadowed all the rest — and you know just which one I mean. At $877 billion last year (not including the funds “invested” in its intelligence agencies and what’s still known as “the Department of Homeland Security”), the U.S. military budget once again left the others in the dust. Keep in mind that, according to SIPRI, Pentagon spending, heading for a trillion dollars in the near future, represented a staggering 39% of all (yes, all!) global military spending last year. That’s more than the next 11 largest military budgets combined. (And that is up from nine not so long ago.) Keep in mind as well that, despite such funding, we’re talking about a military, as I pointed out recently, which hasn’t won a war of significance since 1945.

With that in mind, let Pentagon experts and TomDispatch regulars William Hartung and Ben Freeman explain how we’ve reached such a perilous point from the time in 1961 when a former five-star general, then president, warned his fellow citizens of the dangers of endlessly overfunding the — a term he invented — military-industrial complex. Now, let Hartung and Freeman explore how, more than six decades later, that very complex reigns supreme.

Unwarranted Influence, Twenty-First-Century-Style
Not Your Grandfather’s Military-Industrial Complex

The military-industrial complex (MIC) that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans about more than 60 years ago is still alive and well. In fact, it’s consuming many more tax dollars and feeding far larger weapons producers than when Ike raised the alarm about the “unwarranted influence” it wielded in his 1961 farewell address to the nation.

The statistics are stunning. This year’s proposed budget for the Pentagon and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy is $886 billion — more than twice as much, adjusted for inflation, as at the time of Eisenhower’s speech. The Pentagon now consumes more than half the federal discretionary budget, leaving priorities like public health, environmental protection, job training, and education to compete for what remains. In 2020, Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in Pentagon contracts, more than the entire budget of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined.

This year’s spending just for that company’s overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft equals the full budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And as a new report from the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies revealed recently, the average taxpayer spends $1,087 per year on weapons contractors compared to $270 for K-12 education and just $6 for renewable energy.

The list goes on — and on and on. President Eisenhower characterized such tradeoffs in a lesser known speech, “The Chance for Peace,” delivered in April 1953, early in his first term, this way: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…”

How sadly of this moment that is.

New Rationales, New Weaponry

Now, don’t be fooled. The current war machine isn’t your grandfather’s MIC, not by a country mile. It receives far more money and offers far different rationales. It has far more sophisticated tools of influence and significantly different technological aspirations.

Perhaps the first and foremost difference between Eisenhower’s era and ours is the sheer size of the major weapons firms. Before the post-Cold War merger boom of the 1990s, there were dozens of significant defense contractors. Now, there are just five big (no, enormous!) players — Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. With so few companies to produce aircraft, armored vehicles, missile systems, and nuclear weapons, the Pentagon has ever more limited leverage in keeping them from overcharging for products that don’t perform as advertised. The Big Five alone routinely split more than $150 billion in Pentagon contracts annually, or nearly 20% of the total Pentagon budget. Altogether, more than half of the department’s annual spending goes to contractors large and small.

In Eisenhower’s day, the Soviet Union, then this country’s major adversary, was used to justify an ever larger, ever more permanent arms establishment. Today’s “pacing threat,” as the Pentagon calls it, is China, a country with a far larger population, a far more robust economy, and a far more developed technical sector than the Soviet Union ever had. But unlike the USSR, China’s primary challenge to the United States is economic, not military.

by Ben Freeman and William D. Hartung, TomDispatch |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. See also: Death Merchants? (Sidecar/NLR)

So... a Moose Walks into an Alaskan Movie Theater

Eats popcorn and leaves.

A young moose made national headlines last week when it wandered into the lobby of a movie theater in Kenai, Alaska. An employee captured video footage of the animal as it calmly browsed on buttered popcorn before raiding the contents of a nearby garbage bin. The footage has since gone viral on the employee’s personal TikTok page, amassing nearly 400,000 views.

A time stamp on corresponding security footage shows that the incident took place at 8:08 p.m. on April 19. There is a velvet-rope stanchion set up to usher customers into the theater. Employee Jasmynne Palmer is in the background tending the concession stand. She has a smile on her face, one phone in her hand recording the moose, and a second phone glued to her ear.

Another ear appears in the bottom corner of the camera frame. Then a face. Then a neck and a large hump before the entire moose comes into view. It negotiates the velvet rope and steps toward the concession stand. Palmer backs into the corner and continues recording. That’s when the moose turns to a counter on the right and begins snacking on some unattended popcorn.

“Oh my Gosh bro,” Palmer says to the movie-going moose. “Go outside. That’s where you belong.” Outside is indeed the proper place for a moose in Kenai. The peninsula on which the town sits is home to some 6,000 of them, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. It’s a world-renowned destination for both wildlife watchers and moose hunters alike.

In an interview with Alaska News Source (ANS), Kenai Cinemas General Manager Ricky Black, Jasmynne’s uncle, said the moose must have been tired of eating bark for the winter. “They were just letting some of the cold air in, and that’s how this happened,” Black explained. “We prop the door open quite often this time of the year because it’s just so nice outside, and you want to let some of that fresh air in.”

by Paul Richards, Field & Stream |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

[ed. This isn't unusual in Alaska. Black bears also invite themselves in through open doors (or just by crashing through windows) from time to time. But perhaps the most famous urban moose was the party animal Buzzwinkle. See: Recalling Alaska’s most notorious drunken moose, the street-smart Buzzwinkle (ADN):]

"Buzzwinkle's name was coined by Anchorage Daily News columnist Julia O'Malley in November 2007 after a moose downed a few too many fermented crabapple cocktails in the courtyard of Bernie's Bungalow Lounge, across the street from the Nordstrom store in downtown Anchorage. When O'Malley and I arrived, the massive bull was standing rigid, knees locked, with his wide-set eyes fixed in an inscrutable expression. A long strand of small white lights tangled in his antlers attested to some careless twig noshing in Town Square earlier in the day. The most obvious sign of life was the cloud of vapor venting from his nostrils with every deep exhalation. He was blotto, and he knew it. Too large to fit in a taxi, we left him to sleep it off in the fenced courtyard. After he revived, Anchorage Daily News photographer Erik Hill captured Buzzwinkle's unapologetic, nonchalant departure -- party lights still firmly affixed.

Although nameless before that incident, Buzzwinkle had been a well-known character in downtown Anchorage for years. He was often seen strolling slowly along urban sidewalks or crossing streets surrounded by what in Alaska passes for skyscrapers. Buzzwinkle was street smart. When I worked as an Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist, I once watched him wait patiently for a red light to stop traffic on West Ninth Avenue before confidently stepping onto the crosswalk and ambling into the Delaney Park Strip. He specialized in foraging on ornamental shrubs and the vestiges of birch and other native trees that remain in the city's center. Undisturbed moose are notoriously phlegmatic. Buzzwinkle was unperturbed by people and traffic. He was large enough to command respect from awestruck commuters and shoppers. It was seldom necessary for him to throw his weight around."

Taylor Swift 'Eras' Tour Facts

A Taylor Swift concert is a combination of music concert and broadway play costing over $100M. Ever wonder what the logistics is for the one of the most expensive concert tours in history?

• The logistics and transport costs alone are more than $30M for the tour. 

• A trucking fleet of 90 at least trucks will stay with the tour the entire time and cost as much as a half million dollars a week.

• But this is only one part of the logistics cost for the tour - backup singers, support, production, roadies and team also have to be transported, fed, and accommodated, this will triple the weekly logistics cost. 

• The tour has a large logistics team that oversees transport, build out and coordination. Nothing is left to chance. They have duplicates and backups of everything. 

• The stage is massive, spanning beyond the width of a football field. It takes 2-3 weeks to assemble in each city. 

• 
  They use multiple stages and crews in different cities to keep the tour rolling. One city may have its concert that week, while another is being built out at the same time. 

• Swift will only pick large markets and venues, hosting multiple concerts on subsequent days. Almost all concerts dates are on the weekend. This helps her maximize the profit per city.

• The concert schedule was picked intentionally to minimize in-climate weather, with ideal temps for outside concerts or inside ones that wouldn’t have snow or hurricanes to deal with. Start in the sunbelt in early spring, NE and Midwest in summer, and conclude out West in Aug. 

• Swift doesn’t ride around on a bus between cities. She flies in a $44M Falcon 900 at 550 MPH.

• While the tour is very expensive to produce, it’s a fraction of what she will net on tour. Forbes estimates that she will personally gross $620M and net over $480M after all her expenses have been paid. This will double her net worth and crown her Era Tour as the most profitable concert in history. End.

by Craig Fuller, Twitter |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. See also: Taylor Swift Could Earn $620 Million On ‘Eras’ Tour While Ticketmaster Makes A Pittance (Forbes).]

Next Generation Nuclear Power: Smaller, Cheaper, Safer

Smaller, cheaper, safer: The next generation of nuclear power, explained (Vox)
The nuclear industry’s big bet on going small.

Image: Paige Vickers for Vox

via:

Shufu Miyamoto, Cherry Blossoms Under The Moon 2020

via:

Image: via

Dumb and Getting Dumber

Red-state efforts to dumb down their universities will provoke a brain drain

Back in 2015, Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker thought to burnish his culture warrior cred in advance of a bid for the presidency by taking arms against the University of Wisconsin.

Walker cut the state university’s budget. His handpicked board of regents gutted tenure protections for its faculty.

He and his legislative allies disdained the university’s traditional role of producing broad-based academic scholarship to deepen its students’ understanding of the world and talked instead as though the university were a glorified vocational or trade school — “connecting students and workers with the skills needed in today’s workforce,” as a university spokesperson put it at the time. (...)

Critics predicted that Walker’s policies would exacerbate a faculty flight caused by the university’s low pay compared with that of its peer state universities, while reducing its competitiveness for federal research grants.

That’s exactly what happened. UW administrators said their professors were being poached by academic institutions — not only Ivy League schools and elite public institutions, but universities that could never have hoped to attract Wisconsin faculty in the past.

Local newspapers and education journals published columns by UW teachers explaining regretfully why they were leaving the state. Retention bonuses paid to dissuade valued professors from moving soared into the millions.

The university slid down the rankings of recipients of federal research and development grants — from 10th among recipients of National Science Foundation grants in 2010, to 16th in 2021. The university’s overall research and development spending, the third-highest in the country in 2010, fell to eighth in 2021.

Walker’s presidential aspirations didn’t last long. He announced his candidacy for the GOP nomination in mid-July 2016 and was out of the race by the third week of September. He did leave a significant partisan legacy, however: His model for appealing to a rabid far-right electoral base by targeting higher education institutions and their faculty has been taken up by Republican politicians in Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. You can expect the movement to expand, spreading intellectual benightment across red-state America.

In its most common form, these attacks focus on efforts to foster diversity, equity and inclusion on campus. Banning “DEI” has become a rallying cry for the mob, augmenting attacks on the previous shibboleth of critical race theory (CRT).

In Florida, House Bill 999 would bar any program espousing “diversity, equity, and inclusion or Critical Race Theory.” Majors and minors involving “Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, or Intersectionality, or any derivative major or minor of these belief systems,” are outlawed. (“Intersectionality” is the concept that race, class and gender are all interrelated in ways that can foster discrimination and social oppression.)

Such strictures and others are invariably paired with the evisceration of tenure protection. The reason is obvious: Restrictions couldn’t be imposed on university faculty members unless the teachers feared for their livelihoods if they flouted the rules. Tenure is what protects teachers from punishment for resisting political interference, so it has to go.

The changes in tenure rules take many forms. Some allow for reviews of tenure grants after specified periods — five years, say, or even annually. Others take the decisions out of the hands of departments and turn them over to political appointees. (...)

Tenure “reformers” typically describe their goals as depriving undeserving layabouts of an unwarranted privilege. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a driving force behind a bill that would permanently forbid public universities in the state to grant tenure to any new hires, explained after the Senate passed the tenure bill that “tenured university professors are the only people in our society that have the guarantee of a job.” [ed. ... supreme court justices excepted, of course.] (...)

Universities in these states are on the glide path to uselessness, especially since the assault on higher education is unfolding in the same states that are at war with women’s reproductive health and voting rights. Already we have seen faculty candidates, college-age students and medical professionals checking these states off their lists.

by Michael Hiltzik, LA Times |  Read more:

Image: AP

How's That 'Brexit' Thing Going?

We're all worse off.

If you walked into a British supermarket this past winter, you were likely to see bare shelves in the salad aisle. Customers might have been limited to purchasing lettuce and tomatoes, if there were any lettuce or tomatoes to be found in the first place. Ask the grocers, and you’d hear technical explanations for the scarcity. High energy prices raised costs at British greenhouses; imports from warmer countries were curtailed by bad weather in Southern Europe. Behind all of these situational explanations, however, loomed a larger problem.

From the time a tomato is harvested, every minute counts en route to the purchaser’s table. In March, the BBC reported that Britain’s departure from the European Union has added 10 to 20 minutes of additional paperwork to every truckload of tomatoes shipped from Spain—longer if the truckload mixes different produce varieties. Ten to 20 minutes may not sound like much. But multiply that burden by thousands of trucks, squeeze the trucks through the bottleneck of the single underwater tunnel that connects Britain to freight traffic from Europe, and costs and delays accumulate. The result: winter tomato gluts on the continent, winter tomato shortages in the United Kingdom.

The temporary disappearance of some fresh fruits and vegetables for a few weeks in winter may be only a nuisance. Yet such nuisances are ramifying throughout the British economy, signals and symptoms of larger, system-wide trouble. British consumers are spending less on new clothes and shoes than they did in 2018 and 2019. The British are holding on to their cars longer: The average age of the vehicles on British roads has reached 8.7 years, a record. The British made about 2 million fewer trips abroad in 2022 than they did in 2018 and 2019, an almost 20 percent decline. Lingering COVID concerns offer a partial explanation. But the UK and most of its European Union neighbors had dropped most travel restrictions in January 2022 and the remainder by March.

Altogether, Britain is expected to be the worst performing of the world’s 20 biggest economies this year. The British government’s official forecaster predicts that after-inflation household incomes will decline by an average of 7.1 percent over the three years ending in spring 2024. On the present trajectory, Britain will not return to 2019 levels of disposable income until 2027. By 2024, the average British household will likely have a lower living standard than the average household in Slovenia. On present trends, the average British household will be poorer than the average in Poland by 2030.

The pandemic has not helped, but the slowdown of the British economy cannot be explained by COVID. Italy has suffered more deaths from COVID than any other major European country has, yet its economy had mostly recovered to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2021.

Britain is now paying the price for its decision to leave the European Union. Britain voted to exit in the summer of 2016. The departure was formalized on December 31, 2020. Since then, new barriers to trade, investment, and movement have risen between Britain and its nearest neighbors. Investment in Britain has tumbled, and the British economy has shrunk. By one authoritative estimate, Britain is 4 percent poorer today than if it had stayed in the EU.

Many in the British government are reluctant to acknowledge this reality. Huw Pill, the Bank of England’s chief economist, lamented in a recent podcast interview, “What we’re facing now is that reluctance to accept that, yes, we’re all worse off.”

These costs don’t necessarily make Brexit a “mistake.” Brexit was a trade: less prosperity for more sovereignty. Countries reasonably make such trades all the time. My native Canada would dramatically increase its prosperity if it abandoned its sovereignty and merged with the United States. By their continued independence, Canadians implicitly choose otherwise, and nobody criticizes them for “Canxit.” They know the cost, and they accept the cost as worth it.

But the British were not honestly alerted to the cost of their choice. In 2016, future Prime Minister Boris Johnson campaigned for Brexit in a big red bus carrying a huge printed message: We Send he EU £350 Million a Week. Let’s Fund Our NHS Instead.

The British were promised that Brexit meant more: more resources for public and private consumption. Instead, Brexit has predictably turned out to mean less, and the British are surprised, baffled, and angry. (...)

The British will vote in a national election probably sometime in 2024. You would think this coming election would be the appropriate time to assess the country’s choices and consider whether to choose a different path. You’d think wrong.

by David Frum, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Matthew Horwood/Getty

[ed. "Thank you sir, may I have another?" (Animal House/YouTube)]

Health Insurance Claim Denied? See What Insurers Said Behind the Scenes

When a health insurance company is deciding whether to pay for your medical treatment, the company generates a file around your claim. All the records associated with your case should be part of your file. This includes documents explaining the reasons your claim was denied.

You have a right to see this file. Federal regulations require most health insurance plans to give people an opportunity to review documents related to their claim for free. So if your insurer talks to your doctor, if a nurse takes notes, or if two people speak about it on the phone, all of those records should be available to you.

“It’s a treasure trove of information,” said Juliette Forstenzer Espinosa, a health lawyer and senior lecturer of health policy at George Washington University. “But most people have no idea how to get it.” (...)

Taken together, these documents can offer a window into the opaque system of health insurance denials. Details in them have helped us report on some of the country’s largest insurance companies and their attempts to cut costs at the expense of patient well-being.

We have spoken with patients, health care providers, former and current health insurance employees and health policy experts to better understand how people facing denials can request their information. We believe it is important to share with our readers what we are learning about this process. To that end, we have collected advice on requesting your claim file and answers to common questions you may have, including a template you can use to get your request started.

by Maya Miller, Patrick Rucker and David Armstrong, ProPublica | Read more:
Image: Daniel Fishel for ProPublica