Should-Reads:
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Sarah Kliff: Seven things we now know about Obamacare enrollment: “1…. 8,019,763 people enrolled [via Marketplaces] between October and April…. 2. This is not the number of people who will have health insurance through the exchange this year. People will shift off… and others will shift on… 3. The individual market had lots of flux before Obamacare – and will have lots of flux after it…. 4. Enrollment looks really different from state to state…. 5. Most people who have signed up for plans do seem to be paying their insurance bills…. 6. The exchanges aren’t the only place where people are gaining coverage through Obamacare. About three million young adults signed up for their parents’ plan…. Other people are getting covered through the health care law’s expansion of Medicaid…. 4.8 million people signed up for Medicaid since October, but [HHS] hasn’t specified how many of those people were newly-eligible for Obamacare’s expansion…. Medicaid enrollment grew five times faster in states that expanded the program than those that didn’t. 7. Is 8 million people signing up for private insurance a success? That’s hard to say…. You could see the 8 million as a proof-of-concept: there was a sizable audience of people who decided they wanted what Obamacare was selling. This wasn’t taken as a given at the start of open enrollment, or even as recently as December, when health law sign-ups lagged far behind projections. At the same time, there are lots of people without insurance who didn’t sign up…”
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John Cassidy (2012): Inequality 101: The Picket Fence and the Staircase: “I should acknowledge that many conservatives still believe that inequality isn’t anything to worry about. Some of them say that commonly used statistics, such as the ones I have cited, exaggerate the inequities in the U.S. economy. Others argue that inequality is healthy—a sign that innovation and entrepreneurship are being rewarded…. Diana Furchtgott-Roth… Richard Epstein…. I don’t find these arguments convincing. In the words of the Economic Report of the President: ‘The confluence of rising inequality and low economic mobility over the past three decades poses a real threat to the future of the United States as a land of opportunity’…”
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Virginia Heffernan: Real Reading, Fake Reading: “Here’s where our most sacred class values came in, pounded with a hammer. It’s no surprise that The Atlantic and The New Yorker serve as the old guardians, policing the borders of literacy. Spritz works, they concede, for stuff you have to read—discovery, briefs, memos and social-media ‘updates’ for data merchants and info tradesmen—not for the pleasure reading of books that defines the true man of letters. Juxtaposing a moral line on a class line, Spritz, several reviewers argued, was not for virtuous people who liked to read. It was for subliterate business types who have to read. Separating real from false reading, and real from false readers, has been a power proposition with sinister consequences the 1st century A.D., when sofers argued that reading the then-new codices (books with separate pages) wasn’t really reading. Until you’ve found your way in a maddeningly disorienting Torah scroll, went the argument that safeguarded the scribes’ status as the one literate caste, you haven’t really read at all…. Most of the attacks on Spritz came dressed in scientific jargon. That didn’t make them any less off-kilter…. Spritz’s research show[ed] that readers using it retained as much or more of what they read using traditional technologies (pages, books, scrollable screens)…. Novel-reading is today the defining practice of the sound and literate mind. If you don’t read ‘for pleasure,’ after all—reading, that is, ‘not for work or school,’ in the words of the National Endowment for the Arts—you are not said to read at all…. But in a rousing and beloved 1797 screed called ‘Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity,’ novels are depicted as more sickening than coal dust in a boy’s scrotum…. In impelling women to have premarital and extramarital sex, novels were not said to fill pretty heads with sordid notions (also a rank metaphor), but rather to pollute the bloodstream: ‘Without this poison instilled, as it were, into the blood, females in ordinary life would never have been so much the slaves of vice.’…”
Should Be Aware of:
Continue reading “Things to Read at Lunchtime on May 2, 2014”