| Those Protesting Harvard Professors Have a Point |
[08 Jan 2015|12:48am] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/01/harvard_professors_protesting_health_care_actually_we_re_all_still_paying.html It’s hard to see the Harvard University faculty’s fury over their health insurance as anything but comic. The school began the new year by requiring its employees to pick up a great percentage of their health care bill—a change the school partially attributed to the very Affordable Care Act many of its professors once argued for. Now those academics are pushing back, but for those of us living in the real world, the amount in dispute sounds ridiculous. From no deductible to $250 per person? This is worthy of a protest movement? When the New York Times reported on the dispute earlier this week, the Internet laughed. I did. You probably did too.
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| No, the Internet Is Not Killing Culture |
[08 Jan 2015|01:51pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/01/culture_crash_the_killing_of_the_creative_class_reviewed.html Scott Timberg’s Culture Crash begins with a harrowing and by now familiar personal narrative of the Great Recession. In 2008, Timberg, an arts reporter for the Los Angeles Times, was laid off, a casualty of the infamous Sam Zell regime; soon after, the bank foreclosed on his family’s house. These back-to-back misfortunes made Timberg worry about more than making ends meet: They shook his faith in the entire enterprise of American creativity. “I saw myself in the third generation of people who had worked in culture without either striking it rich or going broke,” he writes, but such a career path no longer seemed available in the 21st century, and he wanted to understand why. Though there was a temptation to blame the awesome leveling power of the Internet, he concluded that “this was about more than just technology. … Some of the causes were as new as file sharing; others were older than the nation. Some were cyclical, and would pass in a few years; others were structural and would get worse with time.”
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| The Superheroes of Your Dreams |
[08 Jan 2015|02:47pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/01/superhero_comics_series_astro_city_by_kurt_busiek_reviewed.html Say you’re a grown-up who likes superhero comics but hasn’t kept up with them. Or else you want to like them or used to like them. Maybe you liked The Avengers or Batman Begins. Maybe you liked comics when you were 10, or 15, and now that you’re 29, or 69, or 15, you seek virtues you found in other art forms: reflective, slowly changing protagonists, meticulous world-building, or political thought. Maybe you’ve sought those virtues in current Marvel and DC titles; maybe, at times, you found them, only to give up after facing tangle of back stories, retcons, reboots, and crossover events. Or maybe you read the supposed apex of literary superhero stories, Watchmen, and threw up your hands: Its characters—delusional, cruel, or desperately ineffective— felt more like attempts to kill off a genre than like ways to give it new life.
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| Most Influential Behind-the-Scenes Voices in Comedy |
[08 Jan 2015|05:25pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/video/video/2015/01/comedy_behind_the_scenes_of_portlandia_and_broad_city_are_these_influential.html At any given moment, there are a few comedians who rise to the level of household names, and a great number of younger up-and-comers striving for more exposure. But, there are also a number of producers, directors, editors, executives, and teachers who profoundly affect the forms and styles of modern comedy without popular knowledge or recognition. Here are some of the behind-the-scenes voices shaping what we see—from Bob’s Burgers to Broad City—who you may never have heard of.
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| Did Scott Walker Just Become the Newest Obamacare Defender? |
[08 Jan 2015|08:15pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/01/scott_walker_s_unexpected_defense_of_obamacare_the_wisconsin_governor_may.html Obamacare advocates have had a rough time of it lately. In November, the Obama administration admitted to erroneously overstating the number of enrollees by counting people who signed up for dental plans. In December, MIT economist and Affordable Care Act architect Jonathan Gruber got dissected by a House panel for a string of excruciatingly candid comments about the law’s design. (Its success, Gruber had previously argued, was in part due to “the stupidity of the American voter.”) And this month, the New England Journal of Medicine is running a paper saying the ACA’s supporters “have good reason to worry” about an upcoming Supreme Court decision that could gut the law.
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| The Gatekeepers |
[08 Jan 2015|09:21pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/01/longtime_book_editor_daniel_menaker_on_amazon_authors_united_and_the_future.html One day about three years after I’d left the New Yorker to become a book editor, Alberto Vitale—former CEO of Random House, Inc., a genial, intelligent, and remarkably tan businessman, originally from Italy and Olivetti—stopped me in the hall outside my office. “Profesore, how are you?” Alberto said. Fine, I said. “Good,” he said. “I think you are doing well here,” he went on in his Chico Marxist accent, “but don’t forget that we always have to move the units.” Yes, I said. “The main thing is to sell the books,” he said. He clapped me on the shoulder and went on his beaming way.
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| Melo Drama |
[08 Jan 2015|11:01pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2015/01/carmelo_anthony_and_the_new_york_knicks_how_did_we_get_here.html On Tuesday the New York Times made the unusual announcement that basketball reporter Scott Cacciola would be removed from his beat covering the New York Knicks. Cacciola, the editors wrote, “deserves to see the game played at a higher level.” The Grey Lady has apparently given up on the Knicks, on the heels of the Knicks finally giving up on themselves. On Monday evening, with their record standing at 5-31, the team shipped off mercurial scorer J.R. Smith and cultishly adored defensive stopper Iman Shumpert for the proverbial “three players with nonguaranteed contracts,” all of whom were promptly waived. The Knicks will likely lose their 14th game in a row tonight against the Houston Rockets, a contest that will inexplicably be shown on national television.
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