Graeme Wood: Subu Must Die
newrepublic.comThe New Republic || May 7, 2013
How Georgia Ended its Subutex Addiction.
“I can absolutely assure you that ITVS does not want your film to be buried.” She said of the title [Citizen Koch], “I think you understand why it’s problematic… . We live in a world where we have to be aware that people with power have power.”
—How Far Did PBS Go to Avoid Offending a Sponsor? : The New Yorker
“What is it we’re looking for in Moscow? During the Cold War, some 40 percent of the CIA was dedicated to spying on the Soviet Union. One old hand described meeting a woman whose full-time job at the Agency was tracking the canned-goods industry in the USSR. Since the end of the Cold War over two decades ago, counter-terrorism has become the priority, and Russia has become, for the most part, just another country. These days, we’re mostly concerned with Russia’s still well-stocked nuclear arsenal and their counterterrorism operations in the volatile North Caucasus.”
—The Spy Who Shot Himself in the Foot by Julia Ioffe
“Acting on the suggestion of her top data crunchers at the department’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius released an enormous data file on May 8 that reveals the list—or “chargemaster”—prices of all hospitals across the country for the 100 most common inpatient treatment services in 2011. It then compares those prices with what Medicare actually paid hospitals for the same treatments—which was typically a fraction of the chargemaster prices. As a result, Americans are a big step closer to being able to compare what hospitals charge them for goods and services with what they actually cost. CMS public-affairs director Brian Cook told me that Sebelius’ action today comes in part as a response to “Bitter Pill,” TIME’s special report on health care pricing practices in the March 4 issue.”
—This is some of the best reporting Time has ever done. Congrats to Steve Brill on for journalism that will make a real difference.
(U.S. Health Care: Is an End to Medical-Billing Secrecy Near? | TIME.com)
Al Gore on His Golden Years and Why He Thinks Obama Has Failed on Climate Change -- New York Magazine
nymag.com“And, of course, he’s also gotten very, very rich, another CEO credential. Besides his Current TV payout, he is chairman of his own investment firm and a partner at a venture-capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Al Gore played a supporting role in inventing the Internet as we know it—but the Internet has played a much larger role in reinventing him. He is a director at Apple and purchased stock options for a fraction of their value, and as a senior adviser to Google, he was able to buy a substantial chunk of options before the company went public—for just a few cents per share, said one business partner.”
Al is now richer than Romney.
“Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.”
—Fear of a Black President - Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic“To Creed, the partnership between Taco Bell and Frito-Lay is more than a one-off collaboration. Like Android is to Google or iOS is to Apple, Doritos-based flavors represent a whole new framework for Taco Bell to build on. “It’s not just a product; it’s now a platform—Nacho Cheese, Cool Ranch, Flamas,” Creed beams. “We’re going to blow everyone away in the next few years in terms of how big this idea and platform will become.”
—Deep Inside Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Taco | Fast CompanyThe Jewish prisoner
In a piece published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, David Arenberg describes his experience as one of the very few Jews in the state prison in which he’s currently incarcerated.
I am always the last person to eat. It’s part of a compromise I worked out with the skinheads who run the western state prison complex where I am incarcerated. Under this compromise, I’m allowed to sit at the whites’ tables, but only after the “heads,” and then the “woods,” and then the “lames” have eaten. I am lower on the totem pole than all of them, the untouchable. I should feel lucky I’m allowed to eat at the whites’ tables at all.
Not that there’s anywhere else I could eat. The prison yard is broken down into five distinct racial categories and segregation is strictly enforced. There are the “woods” (short for peckerwoods) that encompass the whites, the “kinfolk” (blacks), the “Raza” (American-born people of Mexican descent), the “paisas” (Mexico-born Mexicans), and the “chiefs” (American Indians). Under the strict rules that govern interracial relations, different races are allowed to play on the same sports teams but not play individual games (e.g., chess) together; they may be in each others’ cubicles together if the situation warrants but not sit on each others’ beds or watch each others’ televisions. They may go to the same church services but not pray together. But if you accidentally break one of these rules, the consequences are usually pretty mild: you might get a talking to by one of the heads (who, of course, claims exemption from this rule himself), or at worst, a “chin check.”
Eating with another race, however, is a different story. It is an inviolate rule that different races may not break bread together under any circumstances. Violating this rule leads to harsh consequences. If you eat at the same table as another race, you’ll get beaten down. If you eat from the same tray as another race, you’ll be put in the hospital. And if you eat from the same food item as another race, that is, after another race has already taken a bite of it, you can get killed. This is one area where even the heads don’t have any play.
