| Docs on Wheels |
[14 May 2015|03:16pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2015/05/mobile_health_clinics_outcomes_community_relationships_privacy_concerns.html In the early 1960s, my grandfather traveled from village to village in South India to treat his patients at makeshift medical camps. He would set off in a jeep in the morning with a nurse, a drug compounder, and a helper. They’d park their jeep at a set spot, often under a tree at the village’s boundaries. Though they were called camps, that word is a little elaborate. Often, the clinic simply unfolded as a table and a chair under the tree. Patients waiting for the arrival of the jeep would queue up, and the sessions would begin—conversations, diagnoses, advice, prescriptions, and referrals for follow-ups at bigger clinics. Within an hour my grandfather’s team would pack up and head off to the next location, covering about four or five villages by noon. The idea was simple. If you did not have access to a doctor, or could not get to one, the doctor would come to you.
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| Atswhatimtalknbout |
[14 May 2015|05:02pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2015/05/preakness_2015_here_s_how_racehorse_names_like_american_pharoah_got_so_long.html One of the best parts of Triple Crown season is seeing what strange and wonderful names the winning horses inevitably have. This year, American Pharoah—with his untraditional spelling—crossed the line first in the Kentucky Derby, beating out horses like Danzig Moon, Mubtaahij, and Ocho Ocho Ocho. But it wasn't always the case that every racehorse had a mouthful of a name. Ever heard of the winner of the 1889 Belmont Stakes? It was Eric. Not Eric the Pharoah, Eric Moon, Erictaahij, or Ocho Ocho Eric—it was just Eric. When the horses turned down the stretch, the drama hinged on Eric.
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| Style in Numbers |
[14 May 2015|05:41pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/life/doonan/2015/05/pitch_perfect_2_s_a_cappella_fashions_are_bringing_back_the_uniform.html Once upon a time, I donned a black turtleneck, black jeans, and a black Patsy Cline wig. I then hit the mean streets of New York City. The year was 1985, and I was headed to Area, the club of the moment. Back then you took your life in your hands just popping out to the convenience store to get a Cup O’ Noodles, with or without a Patsy Cline wig. So what happened next? Nothing. I avoided catastrophe on that fateful night because I was accompanied by a dozen friends, and we were all wearing black turtlenecks and Patsy Cline wigs. It was an ad-hoc, impromptu bit of guerrilla performance art, with the emphasis on guerrilla. As we, in our menacing phalanx, walked down the street, the other pedestrians averted their gazes. Think Reservoir Wigs. The moral of the story: If you feel like throwing on a daffy outfit, keep in mind that there is, and always has been, safety in numbers.
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| The Land Taxers of Fairhope |
[14 May 2015|06:05pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/metropolis/2015/05/the_land_tax_what_happened_to_towns_like_fairhope_alabama_that_tried_georgism.html In 1879 the American political economist Henry George proposed a policy to address economic inequality: Tax land—not what’s built on top of it. Tax a parking lot, a seven-story building, and a skyscraper based solely on the value of their footprints. Tax landowners that way, George reasoned in Progress and Poverty, and they couldn’t afford not to develop their holdings. The “single tax” on land would create a strong incentive for bigger buildings, more offices, and more apartments, lowering costs for businesses, shops, and residential tenants. It would remedy the regressive advantage of the urban landowner, to whom George wrote: “[W]ithout doing one stroke of work, without adding one iota of wealth to the community, in ten years you will be rich!"
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| The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Gunner |
[14 May 2015|06:37pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2015/05/ethan_hawke_in_drone_drama_good_kill_reviewed.html The omnipresence of drones in the world’s skies—haunting Afghanistan, hovering over Yemen, delivering your tacos—has lately found its equivalent in world culture and art. Thinkers and creators in many genres have been wrestling with the unsettling implications of this new aerial technology, with its pilotless cockpits and all-seeing eyes. The French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou’s A Theory of the Drone, published last year and recently translated into English—you can read a four-chapter excerpt here—is an unabashedly polemical investigation of the historical, geopolitical, and ethical questions raised by remote-controlled high-tech war. (Chamayou has in turn been criticized, in articles nearly as linguistically dense as A Theory of the Drone itself, for things like stacking the evidentiary deck in his own favor and romanticizing the myth of the boots-on-the-ground “noble soldier.”) In a much-reproduced series of tweets billed as “seven short stories about drones,” the novelist Teju Cole mordantly imagined seven great protagonists of world literature destroyed by fire from the sky before their stories could even begin. At New York’s Public Theater, Anne Hathaway is starring in Grounded, a one-woman show directed by Julie Taymor in which Hathaway plays an alienated former F-16 pilot going slowly insane as she wages remote-controlled war in Afghanistan from in front of a screen in Nevada. Slate’s war correspondent Fred Kaplan recently wrote of Grounded: “As drama, it’s overwrought; but as prediction, there’s something to it.”
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