Further proof that God is a 1%er:
Snow in the forecast this weekend!
As a freshman, instead of trying to join the Harvard Crimson, Abramson wrote profiles and theatre reviews for the weekly campus paper, the Independent. “I thought of Jill as an artsy person,” her colleague Stephen Adler, who is the editor-in-chief of Reuters, recalls. As a junior, Abramson became the editor of the arts section, under Allison Mitchell. “I would never have predicted she would become the editor of the New York Times,” Mitchell says. “The people who thought they wanted to go into journalism and make connections went to the Crimson.” One of Abramson’s Harvard friends, Peter Kaplan, who is the editorial director of Fairchild Fashion Media, says, “Jill always had a swagger. It was as if she were in a romantic comedy. She had the same feeling that Rosalind conveys in ‘As You Like It.’ In the last act, everything would work out. She wasn’t like the other girls at Harvard. Most of my crowd were either wonks or tough feminists who would chew your balls off. But Jill was the witty cosmopolitan who gave running commentary that was like a voice-over narration from a Billy Wilder movie.
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This week’s New Yorker profile of Jill Abramson.
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!!! I don’t even know what emoticon to deploy.
![wearethe99percent:
even in canada, we are the 99 %
Um, this rather muddles the message. I’m pretty certain that the reason she can’t get a “decent doctor” or “affordable coverage” is because, as a civilized country with a national health system [they even call it “Medicare” (for all)], Canadian medicine is healthily skeptical about the existence of fibromyalgia as a discrete disease, or at least it’s treatability as one.
Actually, among the more grotesque innovations and exports of 1% everything-for-sale America is all the paradiseases and other medical quackery that people convince themselves they have the right to have taken seriously: see vaccines-cause-autism, or colon cleansing, or, my favorite, Morgellon’s disease. In a single-payer, truly universal health insurance scheme—which I’m pretty sure everyone can agree is the only rational thing to have, if you were starting from scratch—fibromyalgia would rightly be taken less seriously than cancer, or diabetes, or the common cold. Indeed, coverage for fibromyalgia might be “rationed,” or even denied entirely, if it happens to be a bad year for colds. In medicine and otherwise, some form of triage is the only way to fairly meet the needs of the 99%.
Do little personal stories (claims, if you will) like these actually undermine the solidarity of the 99%? It’s perhaps easier to believe in a society where if I had more money, people would have to fix my problem even if it has no obvious etiology, diagnostic criteria, or physical manifestation.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lswwvhiFND1r25y9yo1_400.jpg)
even in canada, we are the 99 %
Um, this rather muddles the message. I’m pretty certain that the reason she can’t get a “decent doctor” or “affordable coverage” is because, as a civilized country with a national health system [they even call it “Medicare” (for all)], Canadian medicine is healthily skeptical about the existence of fibromyalgia as a discrete disease, or at least it’s treatability as one.
Actually, among the more grotesque innovations and exports of 1% everything-for-sale America is all the paradiseases and other medical quackery that people convince themselves they have the right to have taken seriously: see vaccines-cause-autism, or colon cleansing, or, my favorite, Morgellon’s disease. In a single-payer, truly universal health insurance scheme—which I’m pretty sure everyone can agree is the only rational thing to have, if you were starting from scratch—fibromyalgia would rightly be taken less seriously than cancer, or diabetes, or the common cold. Indeed, coverage for fibromyalgia might be “rationed,” or even denied entirely, if it happens to be a bad year for colds. In medicine and otherwise, some form of triage is the only way to fairly meet the needs of the 99%.
Do little personal stories (claims, if you will) like these actually undermine the solidarity of the 99%? It’s perhaps easier to believe in a society where if I had more money, people would have to fix my problem even if it has no obvious etiology, diagnostic criteria, or physical manifestation.
Is it wrong to be super-excited…
by the prospect of a Franco-German–backed Czech invasion of Slovakia?
keyholez: Yom Kippur!
Reminder: this holiday is mainly about pushing a goat off a cliff, to serve the demon god Azazel. From Leviticus 16:
Aaron shall take the two he-goats and let them stand before the LORD at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting; and he shall place lots upon the two goats, one marked for the LORD…
This reminds me of a passage from my bible, The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat by Paul Lendvai:
It was not only blind advocates of Magyar superiority who aggravated the national conflicts, but noble idealists labouring under delusions played an unwitting and tragic part too. As a result of the historical strokes of fate described in earlier chapters, anxiety complexes always existed which, in both literature and politices, influenced national attitudes to Vienna and the nationalities. Szechenyi wrote: ‘Many people think that if they see an animal with two horns in Vienna it is the devil, though it is only an ox.’ In other words, it was not always ill-will, but also stupidity and inefficiency, which in the pre-revolutionary period of 1848 shaped the policies of the Court toward Hungary.
The double anxiety about Vienna and the numerically superior but culturally inferior nationalities was the reverse side of a power psychosis nurtured by romantic nationalism….
The fix is in…
Were we really to expect the people who gave their name, via Thirty Years War, to the most amazingly disgusting torture method ever to actually believe in global fellowship and (inter)cultural justice less than 400 years hence, just because the dynamite guy said so? Sweden accounts for 0.137% of the world’s population. With this week’s awarding of the 2011 prize to Tomas Transtromer—the poet; no, not this one—Swedes are now 8 of the 107 all-time Nobel Laureates in Literature, or 7.48%.**
Are there any honest people in Scandinavia? Yes! The Nobel Peace Prize—the only one of the lot that’s picked by the Norwegian Parliament instead of the Swedish Academy (plucky Norway finally divorced semi-abusive Sweden in 1905, nine years after Nobel’s death)—has been awarded to 101 people and 20 organizations. Two Norwegians won back-to-back in 1921 and 1922. The first choice was an example less of jingoist national feeling than an even narrower breed of chauvinism; Christian Lange was named “for his work as first secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.” But in post-‘22 modern times, the Norwegians have been models of global-citizen restraint, refusing to honor another one of their countrymen, despite their being far bigger players in the peace industry than Swedes in the book trade. If they acted like their former overlords, they surely would have given the Prize to Trygve Lie for being the first U.N. secretary-general, and Gro Harlem Brundtland for running the WHO and various other good works, and the city of Oslo for hosting the eponymous Accords, and the Norway-led Sri Lankan Monitoring Mission for appeasing the Tamil Tigers, etc., etc…
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**The numbers are even more scandalous if you consider how many non-Swedes could/would realistically read Great Swedish Books, or to put it another way, the commonsensical importance of the swedophone canon to literature as such. Obviously, all the major European tongues—French, German, English, Spanish—are also super-overrepresented on an absolute proportion basis, but at least those are the official/predominant languages of more than one country (German: ~5; French ~29), and have as many, or many times as many, second-, third-, and tenth-language readers as native speakers.
Jobs report today is really depressing.
Is this actually a joke on the BLS’s jobs report, which is to come out tomorrow morning at 8:30, and will surely be incredibly depressing?
Hahaha…Actual organized labor is like the Muslim Brotherhood of America.
Umm…
The committee appoints several “pacekeepers” for every march, who make sure it doesn’t go too fast or too slow, and it is they who decide on the direction. There are also informal “scouts”, who keep an eye on progress, and “runners” who run back and forth between the various organisers telling them of any problems arising. One of the problems of the Brooklyn bridge march, they decided, was that warnings from pace-makers at the front about the threat of arrest if protesters moved onto roadway were not communicated to those further back. So the committee agreed to put in place a more formal system of scouts, runners and pace-keepers for the next march. Do they not know you can text message on iphones now?
