| In Defense of Room Service |
[29 Jul 2015|09:44am] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2015/07/in_defense_of_room_service_hotels_are_phasing_it_out_but_delivery_will_never.html Back in 2013, New York City’s largest hotel, the Hilton Midtown, discontinued room service to its 2,000 bedrooms, replacing it with a one-size-fits-all café. They weren’t the first or the last to ditch the tradition. Chains across the world from Embassy Suites to Hyatt have been cutting back delivery hours, adding grab-and-go markets, or forgoing room service all together. Even some designer boutique hotels, which theoretically home in on individual customer experience, are reassessing their dining strategies. A hospitality consultant from PricewaterhouseCoopers told Reuters that room service is “a drain on [a hotel’s] ability to perform” due to cost ineffectiveness. (This imbalance is why hotels charge such an astronomical amount for everything on the menu—they are trying to make up for the even more astronomical cost of running a full kitchen all hours of the day.)
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| How to Fix Our Interstates |
[29 Jul 2015|03:55pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/07/interstate_highway_system_how_to_fix_a_broken_expensive_harmful_system.html I hate the Interstate Highway System. I realize that this is an awkward time to bring this up. Many of you are no doubt planning road trips, and I’m sure you’re grateful for the fact that you do not have to traverse dirt roads in your Conestoga wagon en route to the Grand Canyon. Though I don’t know how to drive myself, I can absolutely see the appeal of barreling down the highway at top speed, singing along to Top 40 radio between bites of my delicious egg and cheese biscuit taco. I don’t begrudge you your love of the interstate, nor would I dream of dynamiting it into oblivion. Now that we have these wildly expensive marvels of modern engineering, we shouldn’t allow them to crumble, to the point where only Imperator Furiosa and Mad Max would have the guts to drive them. But we have to do something about the interstate highways, because as things stand, crumbling highways are exactly what we’re going to get.
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| How to Fix Our Interstates |
[29 Jul 2015|03:55pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/07/interstate_highway_system_how_to_fix_a_broken_expensive_harmful_system.html I hate the Interstate Highway System. I realize that this is an awkward time to bring this up. Many of you are no doubt planning road trips, and I’m sure you’re grateful for the fact that you do not have to traverse dirt roads in your Conestoga wagon en route to the Grand Canyon. Though I don’t know how to drive myself, I can absolutely see the appeal of barreling down the highway at top speed, singing along to Top 40 radio between bites of my delicious egg and cheese biscuit taco. I don’t begrudge you your love of the interstate, nor would I dream of dynamiting it into oblivion. Now that we have these wildly expensive marvels of modern engineering, we shouldn’t allow them to crumble, to the point where only Imperator Furiosa and Mad Max would have the guts to drive them. But we have to do something about the interstate highways, because as things stand, crumbling highways are exactly what we’re going to get.
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| It’s Not Donating. It’s Selling. |
[29 Jul 2015|05:58pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_chicago/2015/07/egg_donation_price_fixing_lawsuit_did_fertility_clinics_conspire_to_limit.html If a woman supplies one of her own eggs to a fertility clinic, how much should she be paid? Under the economic laws of supply and demand, the price of the egg will reflect a balance between the willingness of one party, usually an infertile couple, to pay and the cost in pain, risk, and trouble undergone by the woman who provides the egg. Prices could be as high as $50,000, or more. But women are typically paid $5,000–$10,000. That’s because of a price-fixing conspiracy among medical clinics—according to a lawsuit that is making its way through federal court.
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| Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp |
[29 Jul 2015|10:26pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2015/07/wet_hot_american_summer_first_day_of_camp_review_of_netflix_s_revival_with.html “The end” does not mean what it used to. Which is to say, it does not mean the end. Once, Veronica Mars, Arrested Development, Full House, Coach, The X-Files, Heroes, 24, Roots, Twin Peaks, and The Muppets had all ended. Now, they have not. In 2015, any TV series with an ardent fan base can be revived, given new life by the combination of network desperation and streaming platforms’ bountiful budgets. Whatever one makes of this trend as a trend—and preliminary research suggests a person can wring her hands about the dearth of original ideas while using those very same hands to set her DVR to never, ever miss a moment of fresh Mulder and Scully—its results should vary widely. (What would a really good version of Full House look like? Not Full House.)
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