Have you ever tried to read a book while being stimulated to orgasm with a vibrator? GOOD MORNING.
What books should you be reading this year? The Millions has rounded up a fine list of books to keep an eye on. Part 2 will come later in the year. It would be great to see more small press books on that list but fortunately, the tireless Michael Seidlinger is compiling an ongoing list of 2015 small press releases.
Michelle Catalano wrote a really powerful essay on becoming comfortable with the medication combination that makes a decent life possible.
It was just a short email from Walgreens that set me off. Just a few words. “Unable to submit payment to your insurance carrier.” If I wanted to pay the out of pocket expense for my Abilify, it would be $1027.99. A month.
I immediately called the Walgreens pharmacy. They didn’t have any explanation and told me to call my insurance carrier. While I was on hold with Aetna I did a little research. Turns out the patent for Abilify had expired, and the generic wouldn’t be available until April. Meanwhile, Aetna wouldn’t cover it anymore, pending a switch over to the generic. That I couldn’t get for three months.
The phone call with Aetna got dropped and I didn’t bother calling back. It was Sunday evening and I didn’t think I’d get anywhere, anyhow. I looked at the clock. Twelve hours until I could call my doctor and wait for him to give me a good reason why I shouldn’t panic about this.
Are you a prose writer? Do you want some money? What’s your dream? Everybody’s gotta dream. This is Hollywood. Yes, I made an announcement about the NEA grant and a Pretty Woman joke at the same time.
There is some computer event going on where companies are introducing things we will spend our money on that will end up in landfills eventually, making the world more toxic. Anyway, Mercedes introduced a self-driving concept car. I want this car real bad.
Speaking of struggles, the telescope struggle is extra real right now.
It’s a big universe, but it’s full of small planets.
Astronomers announced on Tuesday that they had found eight new planets orbiting their stars at distances compatible with liquid water, bringing the total number of potentially habitable planets in the just-right “Goldilocks” zone to a dozen or two, depending on how the habitable zone of a star is defined.
NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, now in its fifth year of seeking out the shadows of planets circling other stars, has spotted hundreds, and more and more of these other worlds look a lot like Earth — rocky balls only slightly larger than our own home, that with the right doses of starlight and water could turn out to be veritable gardens of microbial Eden.
As the ranks of these planets grow, astronomers are planning the next step in the quest to end cosmic loneliness: gauging which hold the greatest promise for life and what tools will be needed to learn about them.
Here’s a thing I’ve been thinking about—how in crime procedurals and movies of that nature, the way we understand that someone is good or at least seemingly good is that they have no record, not even a parking ticket. Also, I’m pretty sure parking tickets don’t show up in FBI databases so it doesn’t even make sense.
I’m in Florida where it is very hot. Elsewhere it is very cold. A new season of The Bachelor has started and it’s going to be mighty interesting. I don’t have a link here. I just felt like stating the obvious.
Michele is one of my favorite writers (and one of my favorite people). I’m so happy to see her featured here.
I know this isn’t the point of the essay (which was short and powerful, just a really important work), but…
I’m waiting for anybody ANYBODY to have a compelling argument for insurance carriers in a capitalist health care market. Working in an administrative role in a hospital, I feel like they (as a whole, not necessarily the individuals employed by them) are just awful. Awful. I’ve seen so many patients denied essential care or meds for arbitrary reasons, usually related to cost. GARRRRRR
(back on the phone to try to obtain precertifications for my patient’s meds)
When my mother was undergoing chemotherapy, she required a shot that would have cost us $700 a shot every time she had a chemo treatment. Every. Single. Time. the insurance declined it until my father got on the phone and yelled and got it sorted. But seriously, every goddamn time. I can’t imagine what would have happened if they were uninsured at the time.
(Thankfully my mother is fine now, but those were some scary times.)
Something that gives me the HUGE icks every time I come into contact with the American health care system (and, tbh, the Canadian as well) is what it must be like to be someone who is not so well-equipped to advocate for themselves or their family.
My grandmother died in the US last year. She had AMAZING insurance, because she was a vet, and so was my grandfather. Like, the best insurance you could get unless you were a multi-millionaire. She had two daughters, one a practising doctor, one a former nurse. I, her granddaughter, am a lawyer. We all speak English, and are white, and are well-educated, and can afford to dress well, etc.
It was a NIGHTMARE. A total hellish nightmare, navigating the hospital and the nursing homes and so on.
We were sitting in the waiting room at the hospital, and another patient’s family was there, and they did not speak English. And my heart was just breaking. If this was all so hard for us, what was it like for them?
And look, it’s not like being well-off and educated and white in Canada doesn’t have benefits, BELIEVE ME IT DOES. But at least it is a unified system that is designed to help people, and not on a for-profit basis. I think that helps.
It’s true! My grandmother also died last year after a lengthy illness. She was lucky enough to be able to afford really fantastic health insurance and all the extras that insurance didn’t cover AND she had a daughter able and willing to ask all the questions and understand the answers, but that still didn’t really help. It’s just so insanely confusing. Even now my mother kicks herself thinking of what more she could’ve done for her mother if she’d just understood better, but those poor patients without anyone able to advocate for them. What do they do?
I don’t like the American system at all. I’m sure you can get some of the best healthcare here, but that doesn’t mean you actually will if you can’t sort everything out for yourself.
A compelling argument really doesn’t exist. Most arguments about insurance from a capitalist standpoint attempt to apply models of competition that just don’t work in context. Healthcare as we understand it in America is inherently a collectivist act. Doctors specialize, hospitals are massive institutions that already pass on costs to patients unequally (based on insurance, ability to pay, ability to barter them down, etc), but insurance is also organized in terms of a collective. You pay in and you may or may not withdraw, and the system depends on people paying in during times when they won’t use services, and later using services with an expense disproportionate to what they’ve paid in recently or, sometimes, ever.
That is a collectivist model! It’s just a horribly inefficient one because when insurance companies are for-profit, there’s active incentive to deny benefits that people are entitled to. Add that to the fact that if you’re denied healthcare, you’re 1) at risk of injury or death, and 2) can’t just go out and do your own open heart surgery or find someone else to do it, and what you have is a model that INHERENTLY doesn’t work with free market capitalism. It’s not even that libertarian/free market principles are wrong, exactly (I mean, obviously they have problems, but specifically with regards to healthcare) – it’s that they patently don’t apply. Anyone who argues differently is clinging to a model of medicine that no longer exists. And, given the proliferation of snake oil type treatments even 100 years ago, that model they love so much was arguably based in a complete lie: that doctors of the time knew significantly more than the average layperson.
END RANT, I was sent to libertarian brainwashing camp as a teenager and did medical billing for awhile, so…I have feelings.
Do you think that politicians/the public will ever come around? There was so much resistance just to Obamacare, which didn’t even change that system much.
I can’t even explain what it was like to work at a fairly large insurer in 2012. It was spectacularly furious for the whole year. Based on that experience, no, they won’t.
It’s interesting, though; whenever MrChouffe and I talk about it, we inevitably come back to the differences between his mother’s treatment for breast cancer in the UK and my (uninsured) mother’s treatment for it in the US. Guess which had longer waits, bigger surgeries, and far more stress. Go ahead, guess. That’s usually the story that gets people on the “maybe the ACA isn’t sooooo bad” train–a 60-year-old woman in the US had to let her cancer progress while she applied for grant funds to pay for her care, which by the time of surgery involved a total mastectomy, infusion and oral chemo, and radiation (lingering aftereffects of shingles and lymphedema), while the effectively-same 60-year-old woman in the UK got her lumpectomy within a week of seeing her GP and had six months of oral chemo and has been completely fine ever since.
I lived in the UK for just over a year, and despite the complaints of its citizens about the healthcare system, I still feel that the success stories far outnumber the failures. One of the reasons: preventive care!!! People don’t wait to see the doctor in the UK nearly as much as they do in the US because there aren’t financial stresses associated with going to the doctor in the UK. Therefore, problems are detected earlier, health care is focused on HEALTH instead of trying to “fix” disease processes that are long in the making, and the population as a result is generally healthier.
When you consider that many healthcare systems in the US are focused on revenue, the scenario becomes much darker: opting to give people repeated cardiac surgeries instead of intensive lifestyle coaching which gives better results because you don’t get paid tons of money from insurance companies for having a patient attend a group class on reducing sodium intake or creating a reasonable and do-able exercise regimen. THE WHOLE THING IS JUST SO GROSS SOMETIMES.
One of the reasons: preventive care!!! People don’t wait to see the doctor in the UK nearly as much as they do in the US because there aren’t financial stresses associated with going to the doctor in the UK. Therefore, problems are detected earlier, health care is focused on HEALTH instead of trying to “fix” disease processes that are long in the making, and the population as a result is generally healthier.
And the NHS loves preventative healthcare because it’s more cost-efficient (I believe) – what costs less to treat, something you can discover early and head off before it gets too serious, or something that’s discovered at a late stage and requires huge amounts of intervention and ongoing problems? It’s win-win.
that same cost-efficiency is why the American health care system is loathe to adopt similar practices, because if it doesn’t cost much money, SOMEONE along the way isn’t getting paid as much.
Capitalism + Healthcare is not a good thing.
it is 100% more cost-effective, which is one of the reasons why health care costs overall go down.
Thiiiis! Whenever I talk to US friends I have to mentally adjust my thinking a lot when talking about illness. ‘Cause I mean, if I have even just a sore throat for more than four or five days I just automatically go to book an appointment without even thinking about it, and realising how much of a luxury that is really threw me.
Man, I wish we could have a system like that. I’ve had insurance since the age of 18 but when it was my parents’ the copay was always too much for me to afford and now I have my own and have gone the more affordable but more risky route of choosing the exact same plan, and I don’t even have a doctor to book appointments with because I go so infrequently. I go to Urgent Care as a walk-in when I’m running an active fever or know I have a bad infection, and that’s about it, and I dread getting the bill for the appointment PLUS the lab tests, which is a different company PLUS the cost of the prescription. I feel lucky to even be in a position where I *can* pay those things out of pocket, but they’re not cheap.
Yeah, I’m Canadian, and both my parents have had significant cardiac surgery, and basically GOD BLESS CANADIAN HEALTH CARE.
I’m not as up on how likely legislation is to actually happen, but I’d be shocked if anything happened without some kind of major upheaval. Insurance companies work very hard to protect their interests in Congress, healthcare is tied up with vehement racism/classism, and gerrymandering has led to an incredibly inefficient Congress that’s less likely than ever to be capable, much less willing, of making major changes.
It is so hard to imagine change, and I say that as a fairly imaginative person. 🙂 What we are losing in this conversation is that healthcare, as an industry, is a huge (HUGE) employer in the US. In the city where I live, if just the insurance industry disappeared, we’d be talking about thousands of jobs lost. In the long term, on a national level, it would be great. In the short term, on a personal level, who is going to hire those people at a comparable salary? You lose everyone at the insurance company, but you also lose a few hundred billers and coders and who knows how many ancillary services. I am sure that is what the insurance industry tells politicians every time reforms come up.
I work at a hospital, and we certainly share some of the blame. The stories I could tell…
I really feel like the answer is the British example: One morning we wake up and we have a new system. If we try to get people to agree to change incrementally, it’ll never happen.
you said it all, everything I feel. Add to it that insurance companies are so ridiculously successful at making a profit (on denying people things they need for their health, barf) and it makes my blood boil.
YEP, and honestly it ties into a lot of other things – like the fact that even with significant labor reform, you’re still looking at huge chunk of people’s benefits being difficult, if not impossible, to use, because of deductibles and so on. It’s messed up.
Preach, sister.
but…tort…reform? Surely THAT would solve our healthcare problems!
It doesn’t make sense to me for any kind of insurance to be a for-profit enterprise. It is literally just a pool of money with some administrative overhead and maybe anti-fraud measures. Why should that of all things require shareholders, etc.?
Well, ironically/tragically, as far as I can tell, the history of modern insurance is deeply rooted in early capitalism and was crazy corrupt pretty much from the start (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_insurance#Modern_insurance). I think since a lot of the more well-known collectivist ideologies place emphasis on political structure and overall economic system, the differences in different industries become easier to write off or ignore. If you’re not going to go full Marxist, then by God everything should be available to the market! I’ve read, among others, Mises’ Human Action, and he lays out certain assumptions about how a free market should operate. Many of them hinge on an ability to replicate a product if you feel the price is unreasonable: you can live in a different area or even build your own house, you can grow your own food to some extent, and so on. But as globalization has taken hold, we’ve created numerous collective systems, including insurance, that can’t be justified in the free market. Adam Smith’s invisible hand is virtually impossible to apply to a system where the product (healthcare) is proven to be literally the difference between life and death, while simultaneously being almost impossible to provide for yourself. At that point, you’re looking at extortion more than open trade.
D:
At least we don’t live in 17th century London I guess. TRULY a blessing for us all.
Interesting that it was like that from the very start. But yeah, never under-estimate (some) people’s ability to turn anything into a profit.
KIND of unrelated, but:
I recently saw a movie from the early 1930s called Don’t Bet on Blondes which is ALL ABOUT the early insurance industry and basically it’s the same as a replacement for a gambling racket that kept getting shut down by the cops.
I mean, it’s a pre-code film and fictional, so it was going to extremes, but it did sort of put things in perspective for me. (Also, insurance dude takes $$$$$ from old guy, promising to pay out 3x$$$$$ if his daughter gets married before old guy’s book is finished. the plot is about trying to prevent that marriage, so that insurance dude gets to keep the $$$$$ for himself.)
Oh wow, that’s really interesting! As a kid I read a lot of books with insurance salesmen being basically con men with a slightly nicer job title. I didn’t think much of it, but looking back, those roles were a lot less fictional than kid!me assumed.
And you can’t figure out the costs of your healthcare ahead of time, because you’re not the expert who’s going to be determining what care you need.
In other news, one of the many reasons I had to stop watching House was the huge battery of tests they put every patient through, usually without compelling reasons. Because just one of those tests stands a reasonable chance of putting any given patient into staggering amounts of debt you guys, oh god please stop. America: where doctors can look like dicks for providing too many medical tests.
What always makes me blink as someone from the UK and therefore a country without the whole insurance deal is- surely there’s little to no incentive for companies to approve things the first time around? Surely there’s reason to be like, let’s reject most people for things of any real cost and a good 75% of them probably won’t challenge it.
That happened over here when the decision making for who was declared unfit for work was outsourced. Suddenly they pretty much rejected by default and hoped people wouldn’t challenge it. Does anything similar happen with insurance in the US?
Unfortunately, yes. It’s not supposed to, of course, but there are many, many (anecdotal) stories I’ve heard of exactly that – step one being “reject” for any non-standard/unexpected treatment. It theoretically happens less in recent years, at least in part because clinicians have learned how to phrase things to avoid rejections – which are damaging for patients and more work for care providers – but it has happened.
Also, Aetna is especially terrible and unconscientious. Fuck Aetna.
Am obviously not clicking that first link at work, but is it Clayton Cubitt’s Hysterical Literature series? (I mean, how many series with that specific subject matter can there be?)
yup!
A self-driving car would just be so great. I hope to someday have one.
My fellow transportation planners/engineers and I are pretty excited. Even cars that are partially automated will have huge benefits to safety, mobility, and possibly also reducing greenhouse gas emissions, (although I think there is still some uncertainty about that last one). Still, it’s exciting!
Interesting. But won’t self-driving cars contribute to traffic in the same way that regular cars do? How is it genuinely going to be helpful for urban planning?
Actually, self-driving cars will probably INCREASE emissions, as well as traffic. One of the reasons people typically don’t commute long distances is the work-time lost during the drive. If the car does the driving, the commute becomes part of the work day, which essentially makes the car into an office.
I think one of the reasons it would help traffic is because it would smooth out the driving process a bit. Like for instance now, someone not paying attention slams on their brakes on the highway, and this has a ripple effect on traffic all the way up the line, getting worse and worse. Since self-driving cars would all be networked and know the optimal way to navigate between each other this should happen less (in theory, and this is assuming all cars on the road are self driving and communicating with each other).
Also maybe Seattle traffic would improve with people/cars finally learning to zipper merge.
Ha! No kidding. Why is this such a difficult concept here?
It depends. With self-driving cars, you’d theoretically be able to put many more cars on the same amount of road, because the cars can be closer together. So the traffic capacity would increase without having to increase infrastructure capacity by widening/adding roads (theoretically). Also, you’d almost eliminate driver error, which has immense benefits to safety, since driver error is a major cause of accidents. Self-driving cars would also mean less congestion/traffic jams, since the cars could network to avoid delays.
You’d also be able to increase the number of people who are able to “drive” that otherwise would be limited (like seniors), which has mobility benefits.
The case for emission reduction is a bit spotty and is based on the logic that less congestion from things like traffic jams would lead to lower GHG emissions. Not sure I buy that one, because of the potential for increases in the number of people who are able to drive. Still, exciting things to think about! And, in my case, watch webinars about at work!
I wonder if there is research/thought going into how to make them tiny buses? Like some automated carpool thing, where you can check to see if any cars are going where you need to go, and ask the car to pick you up? This would presumably be not-personally-owned vehicles.
My theory is that the biggest adopters initially will be the car services like Uber and Lyft, since these cars are likely to be expensive but they could keep them on the road 24 hours a day to offset the expense. It would also mean they could eliminate the trickiest part of their business and the biggest bottleneck to expansion which is the HR piece. Assuming this is true, I could absolutely see them doing a car sharing thing since they’ve already rolled out that in some areas (where you pay less if you share with another client and are willing to make multiple stops).
Really? I think I would be terrified the whole time it was not going to work and would be keeping a beady-eye on it and therefore not enjoy it. Unless it ran on a track the way tramcars do and was therefore less likely to run into other stuff. It just seems like… such a bad, risky idea. Though maybe it is also because I live in a chaotic urban environment where things and people pop up in the street all the time when you are driving — just can’t imagine any car conceivably adjusting for that.
Also, don’t we have self-driving cars already in the form of public transportation, i.e. buses and trams and so on? Maybe we could just have more of those?
As someone who loves to drive, self-driving cars make me a little nervous. Not that I begrudge those who want them, but I hope those of us who don’t want them won’t be forced to give up our babies. I’m a throwback who prefers to drive a standard, for godssake. I’ve got enough worries about whether to get an engine for my hotrod that will be convertible to flex -fuel, ethanol, or diesel. I don’t wanna worry about whether I’ll even be able to drive it at all in twenty years.
I like to drive too (and manual as well, though I currently don’t have a manual car). I think it would make sense for your everyday commute boring driving to be something automated, but still allow driving for situations where it is enjoyable, like road trips.
Maybe just concentrate on self-driving cars in dense urban areas? I can imagine that there are some rural areas that wouldn’t have network coverage or whatever and where it wouldn’t work as well anyway.
There’s a lot of problems with that, though. I make trips from my small(ish) town to a big city at least once a week, and driving my sporty little zoom-mobile is the only thing that makes it bearable. When I’m road-tripping, how do I navigate through cities? What would I do if self-driven cars aren’t allowed? Will there be self-driving cars available for use at the city limit? And how will that be affordable or feasible? I’ll just continue to hope I’m allowed to drive as long as I’m safe to drive.
Oh true, there are tons of issues to be worked out. Maybe cars can swtich modes from self driving to auto? I personally would love to see self driving cars in urban areas as a public resource, so you could park at a station and then just hop in one that is available to get around the city, as an alternative to other public transportation. But I recognize that that is unlikely to happen :).
And I’m with you, I love to drive, but I can see instances where it’d make sense to give it up.
I hate driving, I have so much anxiety about driving and I do not want to do it and knowing I will HAVE to do it at various points in the near future is VERY ALARMING please gimme an electric self-driving car-friend, I will talk to it and walk it and pet it just never make me drive ughhhhhhhhhh
I would never try to take away your self-driving car. I just don’t want to lose the privilege of myself driving my car. =D
I feel like people adjust worse to chaotic urban environments than motion sensors, personally. I was definitely way too easily distracted of a driver when I was in my teens (in a chaotic urban environment) and didn’t notice things well enough, or just noticed the wrong things. I’d rather trust a motion sensor than myself, and have myself be free to look out the window or play a phone game or really get into the song I was singing.
I mostly use public transportation now and I’m all for it, but it’s still nowhere near as exact as a car, and stupidly crowded at times (thanks, NS, for never using the larger trains on the Rotterdam-Utrecht route when I need them). So a self-driving car that takes me exactly where I want to go and lets me think about other things while in motion? I’m all for it.
I think that experiences driving during one’s teenage years are probably not representative — driving changes with experience. I am suspicious of one-size-fits-all solutions like motion sensors — they are an unhelpful pain in the ass to most people I know who already have them in their cars. I have to drive in really tight spaces all the time, and parallel park on the left as well as the right sides of the street all the time in my area, and friends with motion sensors just get distracted by those things going off when you are doing something that requires concentration — and is necessary under your conditions — but your conditions are just not spacious suburban or rural conditions.
It is fabulous not to have to drive and to be able to read or knit or whatever while you’re going somewhere. I would like to do that in a beautifully designed space which occasionally features people-watching — a.k.a. a train. Trains are great! And in a train I get to trust my life and physical wellbeing to another *person* who is the driver — not a computer.
Depends on the train. Vancouver’s SkyTrain and London’s Docklands Light Railway are both driven by computers, and I’m sure there are others. Of course, they also have completely separated tracks, which makes them much simpler for computers to drive.
And, a different system again, but airplanes these days are almost all flown on autopilot from my understanding. Even takeoff and landings sometimes (I think I saw a pilot make a comment somewhere that if you’ve ever had a super smooth landing, that it was the autopilot that did it).
Having human overseers is good I think, but trusting a human inherently over a computerized system doesn’t really make sense to me. Humans are very fallible.
ETA: Of course the computerized systems are designed by humans so there is that. But hopefully they can help us get away from the major problems.
Doesn’t mean that 16-year-old me isn’t on the roads now, just because maybe nearly-30-year-old me has learned better. I’m also assuming that when self-driving cars are available for the general public, the motion sensors et al will be better than the ones that are on cars now. The self-driving car in my mind is pretty sci-fi, as far as what it notices and does and reacts to. The point is that it wouldn’t be going of for things you have to concentrate while doing, because you wouldn’t be doing them.
I ride a train every time I go into my office. Trains are great! As of now they’re my favorite mode of transportation. But I still have to get to and from the train, and the “people-watching” is a lot less fun when you’ve had a long day at said office and have to deal with them taking up all the seats, or being obnoxious, or eating something with a lot of garlic sauce, etc. And as nice as the trains I ride regularly are – and they’re pretty nice trains! – I wouldn’t go so far as to call them “beautifully designed.” I’m not going to mourn if my train commute is replaced with a self-driving car in twenty years.
None of this is very logical. There are always 16-year-olds as well as 30-year-olds out there, driving. There is human error, and machines break down. I guess we could assume self-driving cars will function perfectly, never break down, and do whatever we would like without ever causing traffic jams or using up too much fuel as everyone drives their own individual little bubble, but then we are talking about utopian fantasies, which is fine but it is a different activity.
That is too bad if you are not in a place with a cool metro system, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Really great public spaces are a perk of collectivities — because we all put our money and our interests together. Hence the Moscow and the Paris metros, both beautiful spaces to be in. That’s the world I want to live in!
Yeah, but people do terrible jobs of paying attention/driving. It’s not like they mean to or are bad people or whatever, but it definitely happens, and frequently. Just because machines sometimes break (and cars, the ones we have right now, already sometimes break) doesn’t mean that we can ignore that driver error really does cause a lot of car accidents. I can have faith in the goodness or trustworthiness of others while still noting that sometimes they screw up (hence my recollection of my own youth- I certainly didn’t *mean* to be distracted, I wanted to be a good driver, but sometimes…) and that in some cases automation works better than relying on humans to never make mistakes.
Have you ever actually used public transport for more than a vacation’s length of time? Even the “gorgeous” ones turn ordinary when faced with the demands and stresses of everyday life. It might be a pretty station, but that doesn’t really do much when you’re squished in with a lot of other people and then have to walk to/from the station in the sort of rain that’s going on in my city right now. I can even admire the station – the new Rotterdam Centraal is really beautiful – while still being annoyed that the train I need is running late or doesn’t have enough seats or the platform is cold. I certainly prefer when the station is pretty, but it doesn’t shift the annoyances.
My perspective is that I grew up using public transportation pretty much all the time by myself after age 11, and my parents often did not even bother to own a car. Sometimes they did for road trips but mostly not. As an adult I live in the US now but I’ve still only had a car for about 30% of my adult life — and I have to remind myself to use it often enough so that the battery doesn’t die — because I’m still mostly walking or on the subway.
To me the annoyances of maintaining a car, filling it up with gas, keeping up insurance and residential parking stickers, is way worse than buying a transport pass and having totally freedom of the city! and freedom of the city in all weathers, snow included! A beautiful metro station isn’t just beautiful — it gives you a sense of place and connection to history — so you are moving through real places in the world that matter to you instead of cookie-cutter strip malls that are meaningless. Maybe it’s telling that we each prefer the system we grew up with, I don’t know, but yeah — all the annoyances that you list about a train running late (and let’s be honest, in good metro systems with high ridership the train comes every 2-5 minutes), or standing, or a cold platform — they are just minor things to take in stride – they re really not that unpleasant. And meanwhile you are not killing yourself slowly and feeling sedentary and sluggish because you sit in cars all the time going places — I always start feeling metabolically like crap after a while when I visit friends or relatives in car country because of all the sitting. We just have diametrically opposed experiences and viewpoints on this one!
I haven’t had a car for years (even before I moved to the Netherlands) much for the same reasons – it was too much of a pain in the ass to maintain, I don’t like driving – but I didn’t really like public transport, either. It’s not very good in Seattle and I rarely left my neighborhood unless I was working because trying to deal with it was annoying. I was fortunate enough to live in a neighborhood where I didn’t really want to leave, though.
Right now I’m not even thinking about the self-driving car for the sake of getting around in my city. I’m lucky enough to be in the Netherlands where I ride a bike around a cute little medieval town center for everything, and nothing is more than 20 minutes away by bike, so to be honest I haven’t even thought about that aspect. I’m really thinking more about the commute I make to a neighboring city when I go into my office- that’s when the trains get annoying, too full, not frequent enough, etc. If a train is late or not bothering, as it will do sometimes, or I’m a few minutes late to the platform, it can be a half-hour wait. And if I want to have a drink with my colleagues after work, or stay for a concert, or whatever, it can get even longer. I wouldn’t want to drive on the commute because I like train travel and I like being able to read/play phone games/stare into space while I’m heading into work, but a self-driving car, where I can be a little more flexible about when I leave/go home and shave a good half-hour off the commute plus be able to read/play phone games/etc? That would be great. (And have you ever tried getting a bookcase home on a bicycle? I’m not Dutch enough for that.)
If you read some of the developments on Google’s self-driving cars, it is pretty amazing at how good they are at adapting / reacting to chaotic and unexpected events in situations like you describe. Definitely not perfect yet and a ways to go before it’s really road ready, but I think it would work not too long from now.
You’re not terrified that multi-ton projectiles now hurtle at high speed, all but unregulated, piloted by distracted fools who never had to prove their intelligence or capacity for kindness? I see only improvement to safety with any technology that removes any amount of driver error.
Wow! My goodness, no. I do trust my fellow human and think a lot better of him or her than you do, as a democrat lowercase d. Maybe this is why Americans can’t have health care as a country — they don’t like or trust one another very much!
Yes, I’d much rather be in a train or a tram than in my own little private bubble separate from everybody else out there, all isolated and alone. A nice civilized and beautifully designed place like the Paris or Moscow metros that is for everybody, and that I don’t have to maintain or buy — just get a ticket and join the other people around me.
You guys are freaking me out a little bit with your trust in machines never breaking down (this is not realistic in actual life) and your lack of faith in people around you.
It would be so great for people with physical limitations that prevent them from driving – vision problems, senior citizens, etc.
Agreed. I worry that they would only be available to rich folks for quite a while, though, until the technology gets cheap enough and/or some philanthropist decides to make it useful.
This is a pretty excellent (and of course, at time horrifying) article about women in the US Senate: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/se…
(Let’s take guesses at which male senators wanted to swim nude? The weirdos, it’s not a PRIVATE POOL.)
God damn, Strom Thurmond was basically a cartoon of Everything Awful Ever About White Men, wasn’t he?
I would just like to say, this link roundup needs more Kirby Delauter.
SO GOOD. I love everything about that story.
(Did you get permission to mention him in your comment though?)
He who shall not be named.
This blew up on my facespacebook yesterday and I was DELIGHTED to watch it go down. My friend made this facebook page https://www.facebook.com/unauthorizedkirby just for lols about the whole thing.
The editorial that’s an acrostic, that was the best thing! Everyone is having so much fun!
If you google Kirby Delauter, this is the first link. Bless.
http://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/politics_an…
(A friend pointed out that the first letter of each paragraph, strung together, spells KIRBY DELAUTER. Amazing.)
hahaha that just made my day. I would never have noticed otherwise.
Paragraph 5 (the “Y” paragraph) veers into Blunderbuss Candlewyck territory.
I think we should mention him in every comment for First Amendment reasons: KIRBY DELAUTER
I grew up just outside of Frederick and I am SO DELIGHTED by this whole thing.
These link roundups by Roxane are making my reading list impossibly, deliciously long.
Yesterday I sent my bf the link to Mallory’s take down on entitled male laziness and when I walked in the door after work he was unloading the dishwasher.
I hope you don’t have to send it to him every day to get similar results.
The Matriarchal Leviathan in action!
Thank you for inspiring me to google ” Matriarchal Leviathan”. It may be the most satisfying thing I’ve done this morning. Also, you have no way of knowing this, but one of my fav things in life is dramatically re-enacting a monologue against a whale from the Moby Dick fanfic novel “Ahab’s Wife”.
I loved “Ahab’s Wife”!
Amazing. I read it to my boyfriend this morning. He had both not helped make dinner last night, and then fallen asleep on the couch as soon as we had finished eating, leaving me to clean up.*
*Normally he does a TON around the house, but he is currently quitting smoking and having a tough time, and waking up every night at 2 am and not falling asleep, so I gave him a pass. He felt bad. Apparently he felt badly from 2 am on, while I slept beside him blissfully unaware.
Self driving is great, but where are the hover cars? We were all promised hover cars.
I will take a self-driving car over a hover car any day. Humans, by and large, are terrible drivers.
Yeah, ESPECIALLY if they’re going to be hovercars, flying around and such, I don’t want some stupid human behind the wheel. We still get into accidents on bicycles.
don’t compromise. demand self driving hover cars!
Perfection.
If not hover cars, at the very least personal jetpacks.
http://youtu.be/G5ZhBAylbN4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzm6pvHPSGo
I just put a ton of books on my library request page. A Bad Character, “Delhi is no place for a woman in the dark,” Kapoor writes, “unless she has a man and a car or a car and a gun.” Idha, the narrator of Kapoor’s debut novel, is young, middle-class, and bored. Her car allows a measure of freedom, but not enough, and when she meets a somewhat unsuitable older man, the temptation to capsize her life with an affair is irresistible. Both a coming-of-age story and a portrait of New Delhi. YES PLEASE GIVE ME THIS BOOK.
And also The World Before Us In Hunter’s eerily compelling new novel, an archivist at a small London museum embarks on a final project before the museum’s impending closure: she is searching for information related to a woman who disappeared over a century ago from a Victorian asylum. The project holds some personal interest: when the archivist was fifteen years old, a little girl whom she was babysitting vanished in the woods near the asylum, and the archivist has begun to suspect that the two events were connected. I’LL READ THAT TOO. (And both are by women for those of you doing the all-female-authors thing in 2015!)
I NEED TO READ THESE.
Another 2015 read, coming out in February:
TOUCH by Claire North
A poetic, meditative story from the POV of a bodyjumper whose experiences in the bodies of both men and women lead him/her to a number of ethical dilemmas…and a certain enlightenment.
Ignore the awful book cover…the inside is gold. I’ve read about 40 books since I first read this, and this is the one I still keep thinking about.
man am i the only person who doesn’t like that whole hysterical literature thing. isn’t it like, three years old by now.
I’ve only seen one of them once upon a time, but it didn’t do much for me. I mean, neat idea, but I just sort of think “man that is some awkward multitasking.”
Did anyone watch Agent Carter last night? Thoughts? I wanted to love it so much much but I was disappointed…
That’s how I feel about Netflix’s Marco Polo series. I don’t get how Netflix knocked it out of the park with OITNB and then they turn around and make this mess of Orientalist racism and absurd dialogue that sounds like a horoscope being solemnly spoken out loud.
UGH my husband and I were looking forward to Marco Polo, but it is just SO disappointing.
I will admit that I burst out laughing when the Chancellor said “MY MANTIS IS GREAT” and it’s become a meme for me and my BFF, who suffers through the show with me. That mantis is my favourite character and the main reason I’m still watching.
I will admit to giggling for awhile when the one guy says “Marco…Polo.”
As it happens! I wrote some specific things here:
http://threatquality.com/2015/01/07/some-thoughts…
But the long and the short of it is that Hayley Atwell is great, and this was a really killer idea, but the engine behind Marvel/Disney’s movies and shows and such is so desperately anodyne and formulaic that it squeezed every possible source of emotional conflict or ingenuity out of the premise.
Everyone welcome Peggy Carter, Marvel’s newest addition to their team of tough-but-vulnerable heroes who go get a glowy thing before the thing happens and the guys do the thing. Hero!
That’s pretty much what I thought too. I was hoping Disney/Marvel would take this as an opportunity to do something a little different. And they really didn’t. Plus they still only managed to have like 2 female characters somehow?
It honestly seems like they just threw the whole thing together at the last minute. I’m sort of only now realizing that Peggy Carter works for an agency that we don’t know what it’s job is or what it’s supposed to do, stocked with guys where we don’t know what THEIR jobs are or why they’re there in the first place, and the only thing it seems to exist for is chasing Howard Stark down and that guy literally used to work with them until a year ago. Does no one remember him? Are these all new people? What is happening here?
But questions are useless, because I don’t think anyone even bothered to figure this stuff out ahead of time.
(Similarly, they keep talking about “America’s enemies”, but it’s 1946. Who the hell are America’s enemies at this point? It must be the Soviet Union, but why wouldn’t they just say that? The whole show is filled with this generic, placeholder language in a way that just drove me nuts.)
True, I did spend a lot of the time going “Communists. It’s got to be Communists, right?”
It’s a shame they haven’t gotten the rights back to Doctor Doom and Latveria, because now would be a perfect time to introduce Latveria.
Still, though, Marvel has got a hundred different made-up Eastern European countries they could use, what a perfect opportunity to introduce the beginnings of the Cold War, but now with the kind of moral ambiguity that’s been carefully excised from history’s of the US’s anti-communist interventions!
Bluh.
I really liked it, but my threshhold for what I expect from any superhero/spy/adventure show or movie is fairly low. I found it fun, venturing on campy, but still exciting enough to hold my attention. I didn’t really expect it to be much more than that, to be honest.
I also deeply appreciated the look on her face every time the Captain America Adventure Hour came on. As though she would have crushed every radio within a 100-yard radius if she could have, just with that look. That pleased me.
It was everything I wanted and more, so sorry for stealing your enthusiasm. I love it for a lot of the same reasons I love The Flash (fun! campy! not et up in it’s own GRIMDARKness) and I just want to roll around in it forever.
Not at all! I want everyone to love the show so that other lady-centric shows get to be made! I think I just had a very specific view of what I wanted it to be in my head and it wasn’t that.
Yay, I’m glad others are enthusiastic about Agent Carter – I loved it!! Good-hearted historical action adventure with a dash of scifi and a lady protag? Yes!
The fight scene cutting back and forth to the Captain America Adventure Hour was DELIGHTFUL.
It reminds me of Alias in a lot of ways, and I loved the first few seasons of that show, so I am ALL ABOUT Comic Book-y Alias in the 1940s. The casting is wonderful, I hope Angie gets to join in on the spy fun, because Alex from Nikita shouldn’t be wasted like that. And the Howling Commandos in the previews!
My favorite part of the CAAH stuff was showing how they did the sound effects! So neat! Such fun!
SAME! I also loved how PERFECTLY it nailed the tone of a ’40s serial without being TOO campy or over-the-top. It reminded me of the fun parts of Dick Tracey. I really thought it was smart to juxtapose the spot-on ’40s serial tone w/ the overly campy Captain America Radio Serial.
I have so many thoughts about the show – 80% of them are just :D! – but the other 20% is stuff that I think the creators actually intended, which is great because it does seem like the parallels and themes and other issues are ones they wanted to address. The execution thereof is a thing people will debate I’m sure, but I’m just so happy. Supernatural is still on the air, Ant-man exists when a Black Widow movie doesn’t, and this is just fucking delightful.
oh, ALSO! The typewriters were a really neat touch, because they had a similar look/feel to enigma machines, so it really kept it all w/i that Post-War kind of feel.
In college I toured the Google campus (awesome off-campus study course) and they got a few people from the self-driving car team to talk to us. It was exactly as cool as you think it’d be.
I would love to have a self-driving car. I’d spend all my driving time reading. Heading to work? Read a chapter. Going home for a weekend? Read an entire book each way. Cross-country vacation? Forget flying; I’ll kick back and drive.
When I had a rough commute, I would check out audio books from the library. Total life saver.
Insurance companies are evil: Part 2098712
While I was undergoing my $2500 monthly IV, they suddenly decided that they would not pay the supplier in Virginia. And I’m sick and exhausted and in pain and I have to then fight with insurers. They are the worst
I believe insurance companies factor a certain amount of attrition into their business models – they think that if they make things difficult enough, people who “don’t really need” the care or medicine will stop fighting for it. I shudder to think how difficult it may be for someone without the resources, education, or wherewithal to keep battling their insurance.
Two public service announcements!!
1) The Hubble Space Telescope will have been in space for 25 years this coming April! NASA is releasing super high res images to celebrate, and they are obviously spectacular.
2) It’s now legal to carry pepper spray on your person in MA, so for all of my Boston Toasties, get on it! You just have to order it from a certified arms dealer, which my partner did over the Internet. Now when I walk the streets of Cambridge, I feel much safer from the likes of William Giraldi.
you mean you can get/carry it without a permit?? I’m in Cambridge too and am freaked out after hearing about that assault IN BROAD DAYLIGHT right off the bike path!
Yep! As long as you obtain it from a real actual legal dealer, you can carry it freely and happily!
This morning as I was walking to work, I was reminded of something a very wise person once said to me. “If the question is, ‘Is that ice?, the answer is always, emphatically, ‘YES.” My commute was very slippery, and I was thankful more than once for good footwear.
Be safe getting to work or wherever you’re going, Toasties!
Have you ever tried to read a book while being stimulated to orgasm with a vibrator?
I mean, isn’t that how we ALL read “Outlander”?
As if I needed the vibrator for that book
I’m in pretty much the same camp: liked it, but also had super-low expectations.
FWIW, I just couldn’t get into Agents of SHIELD even though I wanted to like it, but the story in Agent Carter held my interest for the whole 2 hrs. Maybe I just need a lot of punching/face stapling to keep me focused?
[EDIT: Augh, this is obviously supposed to be a response in the Agent Carter thread :-/]
SHIELD has gotten much better in the second season (pretty much started to improve vastly after Winter Soldier came out) if you ever are thinking of giving it another chance.
On TV though I still prefer Arrow and Flash for superhero shows.
I’m sorry this has nothing to do with the links posted, but I need to share I had a dream about Mallory last night. Namely, she was on the Conan O’Brien Show, when it was still over at NBC. Her whole shtick was that she was a honey taster[1] and somehow[2] she was actually trolling Conan and the whole audience. Something, something, flies with honey, not vinegar? I don’t know.
[1] somehow this was related to her book
[2] dream logic
GOOD MORNING INDEED
(I’ve had this gif for AGES and have been waiting for a good time to use it)
Niiice!
“Have you ever tried to read a book while being stimulated to orgasm with a vibrator?”
God I love this website.
You guys, Nicole is going to be a judge for this year’s Tournament of Books!
http://www.themorningnews.org/article/announcing-…
(This is the first year I’ve payed attention to it in earnest. Does it always take place in March? That’s way too long to wait!)
Go All The Light We Cannot See and books in general!
I have paid attention to it in earnest for the past three years! It is always in March. Without fail, there is only ever one book I am really interested in reading, and yet I read all the judgements anyways because I find the book discussion/elimination fascinating.
Plus there always seems to be that one judgement where the judge does something wacky, and I love reading the comments on those ones.
I love the wacky judges. One year they had Andrew WK. And he was actually a really good judge!
Love the ToB. I can never read all the entries before they start up though. This year I’m ahead of the game a bit at least, as I’ve read the VanderMeer and The Paying Guests. Plus I have teh Bone Clocks and will read soon.
I WAS SO EXCITED TO SEE THAT!! (Also – congrats to Roxane for An Untamed State being in the finals – though according to everyone on my Goodreads Rooster group that was a totally forgone conclusion.) (So much love for that novel. Obviously.)
https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/66595
This is the Rooster group (not “the” Rooster group – just a bunch of us who comment on TOB regularly who went off and formed it a few years ago so we could keep talking about books all year. Come join us! I’m moderating so if you do join say howdy – I’m Melanie.)
AHHHH ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE AHHHHHHH THAT BOOK FOREVER
OK I finally joined goodreads so I can keep track of all these delightful recommendations. Is there a Toast group or anything? I don’t really know how it works
Never mind, found it! 🙂
There is a toast group! I can’t link while at work but you should be able to search for it? If not let me know and I’ll link you tonight.
I’m on Librarything instead of Goodreads and now I’m wondering if I’m the only one.
I was a faithful librarythinger for a long time but in the past year or two I stopped using anything. I’m going to try to read only or mostly books by women, PoC, and queer people this year, though, and I thought I should keep track of that. I still prefer LT for unknown reasons but everyone else seems to be on Goodreads.
I picked Library thing because it’s less “commercial” than Good reads. I simply wanted to catalog my library at the time. Now that the task is complete I use it to track my reading and chat.
I’m on LibraryThing! We should definitely have a ToastThing group.
Do let’s! I’m HRHTish there.
https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/127766-the-t…
for anyone else looking!
Yay, Finally a reason to get on Goodreads again!
ETA: This is a goldmine already! I’d forgotten all about the [Verb]ing with Dragons series! I loved those!
I had also forgotten about my Goodreads account, but now I’m back. And I’m totally going to finish reading things this year, instead of starting and abandoning them!
When I read Michelle Catalano’s article, I started to panic a little bit myself. I think a lot of mentally ill people have had the experience of having to quit anti-psychotics and mood stabilizers cold turkey, and endured months of withdrawal effects, 24 hours a day of: puking, shaking, no sleep, extreme mood swings, tardive dyskenisia … or I guess I can just copy and paste from Wikipedia’s anti-psychotic *withdrawal syndrome* page:
” Withdrawal symptoms can include nausea, emesis, anorexia, diarrhea, rhinorrhea, diaphoresis, myalgia, paresthesia, anxiety, agitation, restlessness, and insomnia. ”
At the time, I tried using Canadian drug stores to get my meds, but I could only afford to buy the smallest possible doses.
The other thing that no one talks about is that if you go off of a (psychotropic) drug or drugs that you’ve been stabilized on, sometimes it is impossible to get stabilized on the ** same ** drug/drugs months or years later. So while insurance companies and politicians play with laws, there are bunch of people out there losing their stability who might not get it back again. And this was the reason I panicked a little: I don’t know if the author knows of this possibility. There are a lot of things that pdocs just won’t tell you and that politicians don’t give a fuck about.
In fact, one experience in a psych ward caused me to call a few politicians in my state to talk about the fact that health care policy should aim for keeping the mentally ill on drugs that stabilize them. Regardless of the cost to the state. One patient had schizophrenia and had been in the pscyh ward for 3 months while his psychiatrist was trying to get him re-stabilized on meds. The guy had been running a half-way house for the mentally ill, had been stabilized on a med cocktail for a few years, when changes in health care laws caused him to go on and off meds because he couldn’t afford/the state no longer paid for his drugs.
Instead of paying for his drugs, the state decided that it could afford to pay $1000 to $2000 per week to keep the guy hospitalized. So, 3 months, 12 weeks, that’s $12,000 to $24,000 … and I don’t actually know how much longer the guy stayed.
And after going off of my meds, it took 4 years to get restabilized. So if Michelle has to go off Abilify, she may have to endure years of withdrawal syndrome … depending, I guess, on how long she’d been on the drug. This isn’t a small thing, this is her LIFE.
Edit: Oh, regarding the long psych ward stay & my conversations with politicians: the state responded by trying to limit psych ward stays.
I didn’t know any of this and I’m glad I do now but it’s making me so angry and sad.
Jesus. I was already counting my blessings for only experiencing hot flashes, disorientation, and vertigo on those occasions where I experienced Zoloft withdrawal; now I’m adding in the blessing of not having had a worse time when I went back on it.
I am looking at that NEA grant and crying bitter, bitter tears because I can’t apply for it because I live in Canada, and the Canada Council For The Arts only gives grants out to “established” writers. WHY.
Never you mind, NEA’s requirements are also for published (by a press, with selection criteria, so screw me & my self-pub books) authors.
I got really excited to see Michele getting some recognition for her amazing writing. I yelled a little. People in my office are mad.
I
what
no
what
NOOOOOO
http://pagesix.com/2015/01/06/benedict-cumberbatc…
Time to read all the books about women in WW2… and re-read Code Name Verity and Rose Under Fire.
Do let's! I'm HRHTish there.
I picked Library thing because it's less "commercial" than Good reads. I simply wanted to catalog my library at the time. Now that the task is complete I use it to track my reading and chat.
Wow! My goodness, no. I do trust my fellow human and think a lot better of him or her than you do, as a democrat lowercase d. Maybe this is why Americans can't have health care as a country — they don't like or trust one another very much!
Yes, I'd much rather be in a train or a tram than in my own little private bubble separate from everybody else out there, all isolated and alone. A nice civilized and beautifully designed place like the Paris or Moscow metros that is for everybody, and that I don't have to maintain or buy — just get a ticket and join the other people around me.
You guys are freaking me out a little bit with your trust in machines never breaking down (this is not realistic in actual life) and your lack of faith in people around you.
None of this is very logical. There are always 16-year-olds as well as 30-year-olds out there, driving. There is human error, and machines break down. I guess we could assume self-driving cars will function perfectly, never break down, and do whatever we would like without ever causing traffic jams or using up too much fuel as everyone drives their own individual little bubble, but then we are talking about utopian fantasies, which is fine but it is a different activity.
That is too bad if you are not in a place with a cool metro system, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Really great public spaces are a perk of collectivities — because we all put our money and our interests together. Hence the Moscow and the Paris metros, both beautiful spaces to be in. That's the world I want to live in!
It must be hard, have only 90% of your available audience (all of humanity) give a shit what you have to say. Why, time was when a white man could stand up and say his piece, secure in the knowledge that anybody who had the gall not to care would still have the decency to shut up and not acknowledge their lack of interest in his life and opinions.
And re-watch "Wish Me Luck" on Netflix.
They don’t have to never break down to be worth the switch. They just have to screw up or break down less often than humans, and based on what I’ve read about this technology, that seems like a goal that is within reach.
And I can have faith in people around me and still think that a computer would do some things better than them.
My perspective is that I grew up using public transportation pretty much all the time by myself after age 11, and my parents often did not even bother to own a car. Sometimes they did for road trips but mostly not. As an adult I live in the US now but I've still only had a car for about 30% of my adult life — and I have to remind myself to use it often enough so that the battery doesn't die — because I'm still mostly walking or on the subway.
To me the annoyances of maintaining a car, filling it up with gas, keeping up insurance and residential parking stickers, is way worse than buying a transport pass and having totally freedom of the city! and freedom of the city in all weathers, snow included! A beautiful metro station isn't just beautiful — it gives you a sense of place and connection to history — so you are moving through real places in the world that matter to you instead of cookie-cutter strip malls that are meaningless. Maybe it's telling that we each prefer the system we grew up with, I don't know, but yeah — all the annoyances that you list about a train running late (and let's be honest, in good metro systems with high ridership the train comes every 2-5 minutes), or standing, or a cold platform — they are just minor things to take in stride – they re really not that unpleasant. And meanwhile you are not killing yourself slowly and feeling sedentary and sluggish because you sit in cars all the time going places — I always start feeling metabolically like crap after a while when I visit friends or relatives in car country because of all the sitting. We just have diametrically opposed experiences and viewpoints on this one!