| Sick and Far From Home |
[13 Oct 2015|10:00am] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2015/10/sick_mormon_missionaries_denied_access_to_adequate_health_care.html Oliver had never left the United States when the Mormon church sent him on a mission in Chile in 2002. Eager to serve, the 19-year-old dove into missionary work. But after a few weeks, he began to experience crippling stomach pain. At first, Oliver was embarrassed by his ailment and tried to conceal it. After he lost 30 pounds, he approached the mission president’s wife—who was responsible for granting access to medical care—for help. She instructed him to sprinkle fiber powder on his breakfast and refused to let him seek medical treatment. Over the next few months, he lost 20 more pounds and finally demanded that he speak to a doctor. The doctor prescribed deworming pills. Soon after he took them, Oliver excreted a several-inches-long parasite. His stomach and intestines were irreparably damaged.
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| Enhanced Introduction |
[13 Oct 2015|02:31pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/10/martin_o_malley_jim_webb_and_lincoln_chaffee_s_first_democratic_debate_how.html LAS VEGAS—Donald Trump has changed a great many things about the way presidential primaries are supposed to work. Most obviously, he isn’t supposed to still be around right now. He’s also skewed people’s expectations of what’s supposed to happen in a first presidential debate. Typically we’d get a bit further into the season before candidates start directly insulting each other about their looks. If we recall any election before this one, we would remember that the first debates are supposed to be the ones in which candidates “introduce themselves to the country.”
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| How the Internet Killed Playboy |
[13 Oct 2015|06:56pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/users/2015/10/playboy_to_stop_publishing_nude_photos_of_women.html Starting next March, Playboy will stop publishing photographs of naked women. The cheesecake will be dialed back to a “PG-13” rating, the New York Times’ Ravi Somaiya reported Monday night. Playmate photos will look “more like the racier sections of Instagram” than the adult section of the bookstore. In place of nude women, the magazine will highlight its “tradition of investigative journalism, in-depth interviews and fiction.” It will target “young men who live in cities.” According to Playboy CEO Scott Flanders, the Internet is to blame. “You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free,” Flanders told the Times. “And so it’s just passé at this juncture.”
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| The DraftKings Crash |
[13 Oct 2015|08:47pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2015/10/the_insider_trading_scandals_could_bring_down_draftkings_and_fanduel.html It was a banner week for daily fantasy sports. FanDuel and DraftKings, the two companies that tower over the DFS landscape, set records for number of entries (7.52 million) and total revenue ($45.6 million) in the fifth week of the NFL season. That news was just the latest in a run of explosive growth for the enterprises. The two companies’ ads have dominated the airwaves since pro football started back up again last month. And most teams in the NFL are taking in big sponsorship money from the two DFS kingpins. But recent revelations, and facts likely to spill out over the next few months and possibly years, threaten to bring the party to a crashing end. At the very least, increased federal and state oversight seems a good bet in the wake of what amounts to damaging allegations of insider trading. Despite the lack of current regulations on the industry, the legal case against DFS appears to be a strong one.
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| What Twitter and Trump Are Saying About CNN’s Democratic Debate |
[13 Oct 2015|10:02pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/10/twitter_and_trump_commentary_about_cnn_s_democratic_primary_debate.html Five Democratic presidential hopefuls will go toe to toe in the party’s first debate of the primary season on Tuesday night. Yes, five; beside Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders there are apparently at least three other Democrats running for president: Former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, and former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb. The debate, which airs at 8:30 p.m. on CNN, will be the first of only six Democratic debates, so you better pay close attention. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun while doing it. Although the notion of a Trump-less debate may seem strange and tedious to us now, Republican front-runner Donald Trump—due to popular demand—has promised to fill any potential entertainment void and live-tweet the whole thing. And he’s not the only off-screen personality worth watching.
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| The Books of Jobs |
[13 Oct 2015|10:11pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/10/steve_jobs_what_the_movies_and_biographies_tell_us_about_the_apple_founder.html When people feel compelled to tell each other the same story over and over again, there’s usually something about it they can’t quite work out. Each iteration promises, yet fails, to finally make sense of it. The life and work of Steve Jobs is that kind of story, and our preoccupation with telling and retelling it points to some sizable cracks in the American psyche. In addition to Steve Jobs, the just-released Danny Boyle/Aaron Sorkin biopic, we’ve had Jobs, a limp 2013 film starring Ashton Kutcher, and a critical documentary released earlier this year, Jobs: The Man in the Machine by Alex Gibney. In print, the bible remains Walter Isaacson’s best-selling authorized biography Steve Jobs, published just after the Apple founder’s death in 2011, but Jobs’ friends, colleagues, and family have recently advanced an alternative, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli.
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| Is Life Retroactive? |
[13 Oct 2015|11:46pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/supreme_court_dispatches/2015/10/supreme_court_dispatch_montgomery_v_louisiana_asks_the_justices_to_weigh.html At the white-hot center of retroactivity doctrine and federal/state jurisdiction roils an oral argument that may or may not have something to do with sentencing juveniles to life without parole. This morning, during arguments in Montgomery v. Louisiana, we hear a good deal from the Supreme Court about the forced incarceration of witches and lots more about the eternal raging war between “substantive” and “process” changes to the law. Whether that will come to mean much of anything for the more than 2,000 people sentenced as juveniles to life without parole before the Supreme Court ruled that such sentences—when mandatory—violate the constitution is anybody’s guess.
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