March 2012
92 posts
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Obamacare Is On Trial. So Is the Supreme Court.
Jonathan Cohn
Rarely in American history has the Court struck down laws in decisions that would have such quick, widespread impact. In the modern era, only two cases come to mind: Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade. Both were acts of ambitious, even audacious judicial activism. But, in two key repsects, they were different from a potential ruling against the Affordable Care Act.
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Marx, Population and Plenitude
John Lanchester
A final challenge to Marx’s model, and also to his picture of the future, comes from something he did see very clearly and prophetically, the extraordinary productive power of capitalism. He saw how capitalism would transform the surface of the planet and impact on the life of every single person alive. There is, however, a crack or flaw close to the heart of his analysis. Marx...
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Dirt Don't Hurt
Exposure to germs in childhood is thought to help strengthen the immune system and protect children from developing allergies and asthma, but the pathways by which this occurs have been unclear. Now, researchers have identified a mechanism in mice that may explain the role of exposure to microbes in the development of asthma and ulcerative colitis, a common form of inflammatory bowel disease.
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“This morning in America’s highest court, freedom seems to be less about the...”
– Dahlia Lithwick
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Obamacare is Unconstitutional? Now They Tell Us
By Michael Kinsley
Now, maybe the court has been wrong all this time. Maybe the federal government’s authority under the Commerce Clause is much narrower. Maybe that authority doesn’t extend to requiring individual citizens to have health insurance or pay a fine. But if so, it is not only the future of Obamacare that will suddenly be shaky. Every piece of legislation for about the last 70 years...
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The Brain on Love
By DIANE ACKERMAN
A RELATIVELY new field, called interpersonal neurobiology, draws its vigor from one of the great discoveries of our era: that the brain is constantly rewiring itself based on daily life. In the end, what we pay the most attention to defines us. How you choose to spend the irreplaceable hours of your life literally transforms you.
All relationships change the brain — but most...
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A LOT OF GAS
Elizabeth Kolbert
Like almost anything that the Republican candidates can manage to agree on, the Obama Administration gas-price-hike conspiracy theory is nearly a hundred-per-cent hokum. The fakery begins with the theory’s premise: that the President could, if he wanted to, reduce the price of oil. Oil, as it is well known, is a global commodity traded on a global market. Gasoline prices...
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“Hitting the favorite button on the first episode of “Mad Men” is a remarkably...”
– DAVID CARR
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Stag Party
By Frank Rich
It’s not news that the GOP is the anti-abortion party, that it panders to the religious right, and that it’s particularly dependent on white men with less education and less income—a displaced demographic that has been as threatened by the rise of the empowered modern woman as it has been by the cosmopolitan multiracial male elites symbolized by Barack Obama. That aggrieved class...
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Research wrests partial control of a memory
Scripps Research Institute scientists and their colleagues have successfully harnessed neurons in mouse brains, allowing them to at least partially control a specific memory. Though just an initial step, the researchers hope such work will eventually lead to better understanding of how memories form in the brain, and possibly even to ways to weaken harmful thoughts for those with conditions such...
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Health Insurance Is for Everyone
By FAREED ZAKARIA
The centerpiece of the case against Obamacare is the requirement that everyone buy some kind of health insurance or face stiff penalties—the so-called individual mandate. It is a way of moving toward universal coverage without a government-run or single-payer system. It might surprise Americans to learn that another advanced industrial country, one with a totally private...
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Should Science Pull the Trigger on Antiviral...
By Carl Zimmer
We do currently have “antiviral” drugs, but they’re a pale shadow of their bacteria-fighting counterparts. People infected with HIV, for example, can avoid developing AIDS by taking a cocktail of antiviral drugs. But if they stop taking them, the virus will rebound to its former level in a matter of weeks. Patients have to keep taking the drugs for the rest of their lives to...
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“The three words Buchheit came up with would become the most well-known corporate...”
– FARHAD MANJOO
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Trickle-down consumption
Chrystia Freeland
We know now that trickle-down economics doesn’t really work – the past decade in the United States has seen incomes at the very top soar, while the earnings of the middle class stagnated or declined. But a growing body of academic research is suggesting that this benign force’s wicked stepsister, a phenomenon two economists have dubbed ‘‘trickle-down consumption,’’ is having a...
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Looking Back on the Limits of Growth
Recent research supports the conclusions of a controversial environmental study released 40 years ago: The world is on track for disaster. So says Australian physicist Graham Turner, who revisited perhaps the most groundbreaking academic work of the 1970s,The Limits to Growth.
Written by MIT researchers for an international think tank, the Club of Rome, the study used computers to model several...
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Romney’s defense budget target is lofty
It is one of Mitt Romney’s most striking anecdotes. The US Navy, he says, has fewer ships today than in 1917, and the US Air Force is smaller than it was in 1947. Notwithstanding that today’s fleets are far beyond the capability of those from yesteryear, Romney says it is evidence that America’s military dominance is at risk.
Romney’s solution is one of the most far-ranging, expensive, and...
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“One of the technical things we always optimize is where to put our front...”
– The Pirate Bay
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'Big Government' Isn't the Problem, Big Money Is
Robert Reich
Conservatives love to rail against “big government.” But the surge of cynicism engulfing the nation isn’t about government’s size. It flows from a growing perception that government doesn’t work for average people but for big business, Wall Street and the very rich—who, in effect, have bought it. In a recent Pew poll, 77 percent of respondents said too much power is in the hands of...
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Nokia is looking into haptic tattoos to help you...
Nokia wants to take haptic feedback to a level you haven’t previously encountered. Haptic tech is employed, for example, when your phone vibrates as you type on its touchscreen. Haptics deal with appealing to your sense of touch by applying forces or vibrations to your skin.
Which is exactly what Nokia wants to do, proposing the application of tattoos with ferromagnetic inks, that will vibrate...
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“The crucial thing to understand about Ryan is that he is not a fiscal...”
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Matt Miller
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How to Mend a Broken Heart
Four-year-old Angela Irizarry was born with a single pumping chamber in her heart, a potentially lethal defect. To fix the problem, Angela is growing a new blood vessel in her body in an experimental treatment that could advance the burgeoning field of regenerative medicine. Doctors at Yale University here implanted in Angela’s chest in August a bioabsorbable tube that is designed to...
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“Unless one is seized by avarice or psychotic obsession, all a human being wants...”
– Franco Berardi Bifo
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Amazon Adds That Robotic Touch
In the battle between man and machine, the robots just scored a victory in the world of e-commerce.
Amazon.com Inc. AMZN +0.25% said Monday it is buying Kiva Systems Inc., which makes robots used in shipping centers. The $775 million acquisition comes as Amazon continues its heavy spending on fulfillment centers to help fuel its business.
While the Seattle-based retailer has used some...
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Legitimization of the Access Economy
By Lesley Lammers
“Sharing is caring,” or at least that is what they teach you in kindergarten. With the advent of such service platforms as Craigslist, Netflix and ZipCar, one might say that tech and social entrepreneurs took this lesson to a whole new level. But the idea of sharing the commons for the common good is nothing new. Community development resource-sharing initiatives like bike...
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HOLDING COURT
by Jeffrey Toobin
The legal challenges to ACA, which the Supreme Court will hear next week, center on its key provision, the individual mandate. The mandate essentially requires all adults to obtain health insurance, either through their employers or by buying it themselves. (There will be subsidies for those who cannot afford it.) The idea of a health-insurance mandate first came to wide...
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George and Mitt Romney & the Death of Moderate GOP
Mitt’s father, George, was once the great hope of moderate Republicans., Art Shay / Polaris
by David Frum
The moderate Republicans of the 1960s were supporters of the free-enterprise system. They distrusted the then-overwhelming power of trade unions. They disliked the bureaucracy of the New Deal spending programs. Yet they did not altogether oppose social insurance. They favored...
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Fanatics and Fanciers
By Stephen L. Carter
There is a kind of fan who is indeed a fanatic, for whom every call against his team represents an occasion to doubt the competence or impartiality of the officials. Then there is the kind of fan who is a fancier, who may root for a team but whose real passion is for the sport itself. The fanatic is the one who screams at the referee that the receiver was pushed out of...
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Timing is Everything: On The Limits of...
by John Cassidy
The reputations of our Presidents often turn on economic factors beyond their control. The Great Depression was a global event. The contractions in the early nineteen-eighties and in the early nineteen-nineties were driven by the Federal Reserve, as Paul Volcker sought to bring down inflation and Alan Greenspan sought to head it off before it got established. Sometimes changes...
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“[The central idea of the book is that religion supplies lots of useful and...”
– Alain de Botton
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To Cut The Risk Of A High-Fat Meal, Add Spice
No need to be stingy with spices. Research from Penn State finds heavily spiced meals — think chicken curry with lots of turmeric, or desserts rich in cinnamon and cloves — may do the heart good.
“Elevated triglycerides are a risk factor for heart disease,” explains researcher Sheila West.
Her study found that a spicy meal helps cut levels of triglycerides, a type of fat, in the...
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We Are All Born Believers
The vast majority of humans are “born believers”, naturally inclined to find religious claims and explanations attractive and easily acquired, and to attain fluency in using them. This attraction to religion is an evolutionary by-product of our ordinary cognitive equipment, and while it tells us nothing about the truth or otherwise of religious claims it does help us see religion in...
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Study: Exercise can lead to female orgasm, sexual...
Findings from a first-of-its-kind study by Indiana University researchers confirm anecdotal evidence that exercise — absent sex or fantasies — can lead to female orgasm.
While the findings are new, reports of this phenomenon, sometimes called “coregasm” because of its association with exercises for core abdominal muscles, have circulated in the media for years, said...
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Fun with Trends
by Richard Heinberg
Because projecting future magnitudes according to current trends requires relatively simple math, and because doing so sometimes enables analysts to make accurate short-term forecasts of things like population, sales volumes, and commodity prices, trend watching can confer a sense of mystical power. We can predict the future—and maybe even profit by doing so!
But, as...
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Murder Is Not an Anomaly in War
By Chris Hedges
The war in Afghanistan—where the enemy is elusive and rarely seen, where the cultural and linguistic disconnect makes every trip outside the wire a visit to hostile territory, where it is clear that you are losing despite the vast industrial killing machine at your disposal—feeds the culture of atrocity. The fear and stress, the anger and hatred, reduce all Afghans to the enemy,...
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Automation of the Fourth Estate
The world of modern finance is increasingly dependent on automated trading, with sophisticated computer algorithms finding and exploiting pricing irregularities that are invisible to ordinary traders.
Meanwhile, Forbes—one of financial journalism’s most venerable institutions—now employs a company called Narrative Scienceto automatically generate online articles about what to expect from...
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Right Minds
By Samuel Goldman
The French Revolution was not the first revolution in human or even European history. Mobs had ruled the streets before; princes had often enough been deposed. Yet Burke insisted that that the Revolution was “the most astonishing thing that has hitherto happened in the world.” What was so astonishing about it?
Burke’s answer was that the French Revolution was the consequence of...
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Nanopills Release Drugs Directly from the Inside...
Researchers at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB) have created nanoparticles which could release drugs directly from the cells’ interior. The technology, which has been named “nanopills,” was licensed to the firm Janus Developments of the Barcelona Scientific Park, which verified its tolerance by administering it in vivo.
UAB researchers developed a new vehicle to release...
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Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail
By Matt Taibbi
It’s been four years since the government, in the name of preventing a depression, saved this megabank from ruin by pumping $45 billion of taxpayer money into its arm. Since then, the Obama administration has looked the other way as the bank committed an astonishing variety of crimes – some elaborate and brilliant in their conception, some so crude that they’d be...
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“If you took the greed out of Wall Street all you’d have left is pavement. The...”
– Robert Reich
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Return of the Commons
The commons is a key piece of building a sustainable, healthy and fair society. At the Story of Stuff Project, we’re concerned about the hyper-individualization and consumer-mania that has taken over our society. It’s a problem because we’re consuming more resources than the planet can produce each year and creating more waste than it can assimilate. The Global Footprint Network says we’re using...
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The President and the Pump
The average American motorist is now paying $3.80 a gallon, a record for the time of year. As prices have risen, all the Republican candidates have been selling the idea that the blame for this rise belongs primarily with Mr Obama—not with the market’s fear of a war with Iran, climbing demand in China or any other more plausible explanation. Unhappily for the president, many voters appear to be...
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Scary Oil
Nouriel Roubini
Gasoline prices in the US are approaching $4 a gallon, a damaging threshold for consumer confidence, and will increase further during the high-demand summer season.
The reason is fear. Not only are oil supplies plentiful, but demand in the US and Europe has been lower, owing to decreasing car use in the last few years and weak or negative GDP growth in the US and the eurozone....
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“Some depressing facts: Nearly half of people ages 16 to 29 do not have a job. A...”
– NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ
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The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy...
Established as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught offguard by an escalating series of terrorist attacks—the first World Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Colein Yemen, and...
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What Isn’t for Sale?
The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the reach of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms. To contend with this condition, we need to do more than inveigh against greed; we need to have a public debate about where markets belong—and where they don’t…
When we decide...
