Vivian Ho and Salpy Kanimian in The Conversation:
Some of the premium increases can be attributed to an increase in hospital outpatient visits and coverage of GLP-1 drugs. But research, including our own, suggests that premiums have rapidly escalated mostly because health system consolidation – when hospitals and other health care entities merge – has led hospitals to raise prices well above their costs.
Hospitals are aggressively raising their prices because hospital CEOs have incentives to do so.
One study found that for nonprofit health systems, the greatest pay increases between 2012 and 2019 went to hospital CEOs who grew the profits and size of their organizations the most. However, the financial reward of delivering above-average quality of care declined.
More here.
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One of the main proteins that contributes to Alzheimer’s disease is called phospho-tau (p-tau). When p-tau gets too many phosphate groups attached to it (a process called hyperphosphorylation), it starts to stick together and form clumps called “tangles” inside of brain nerve cells. A new study by Mass General Brigham investigators shows that tau hyperphosphorylation may be a consequence of an antiviral response that protects the brain from infection. Results are published in 
Topical though its title may sound, Harold Brodkey’s 1992 essay “Notes on American Fascism” probably couldn’t be published today. Reading it, one can almost hear the inevitable editorial demands that its argument be “sharpened” (premised upon the assumption that an argument, rather than notes, is what it offers), or at least that the words of a geopolitical expert or two be shoehorned in to gin up a bit of academic-journalistic gravitas. Not that the essay seems to have been publishable even when Brodkey first wrote it, given that it only appeared several years later in his collection Sea Battles on Dry Land, published a few years after his death from AIDS in 1996. Nevertheless, when revisited more than three decades on, its torrent of portentous observation and speculation about the decline of the kind of liberalism Brodkey calls “the primary American tradition” now seems considerably less disposable than the many anxious prophesies of a fascist United States published more recently, during the reign of Donald Trump.
In this moment of especially rabid book banning, my high school senior has been translating Catullus in her Advanced Track (AT) Latin class. Catullus’s poems disappeared from the Western canon for centuries (likely because medieval Christian scribes avoided copying lurid pagan texts) yet were rediscovered and reprinted in the Renaissance, and are still alive millennia later, when would-be censors are long forgotten.
The reason we can gracefully glide on an ice-skating rink or clumsily slip on an icy sidewalk is that the surface of ice is coated by a thin watery layer. Scientists generally agree that this lubricating, liquidlike layer is what makes ice slippery. They disagree, though, about why the layer forms.
If you’re eccentric, you’re all right.” This is how Humphrey Carpenter, biographer of W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound and Benjamin Britten, explained the British character to me as an expatriate South African. It was 1993, and we were sitting at the table in my Oxford kitchen with a microphone between us. My role, as a fellow biographer, was to ask Humphrey questions, and his answers, he hoped, would provide material for an essay. Along with other speakers at a biography conference, he’d agreed to contribute a piece to The Art of Literary Biography (due to be delivered to Oxford University Press), but Humphrey had a problem. His confiding after-dinner talk had brought up the issue of fraught relations with a subject’s family.
Historically, economic elites pushed for 
A 
The persistent rumours that imprisoned Pakistani politician Imran Khan is dead have been crackling away like Lahore firecrackers these past few weeks. They feel less like revelations than the arrival of something long predicted. Or are they just the manifestations of an over-inventive public and mistrusted military?
As AI wheedles its way into our lives, 
Dora and I walked
Most current digital doppelgängers, for all practical purposes, are automatons i.e., their behavior is relatively fixed with relatively well defined boundaries. I would argue that this is a feature and not a bug. The fixed nature of the automata is what gives them the feeling of familiarity. Now imagine if we were to take away this assumption and tried to incorporate semblance of some of autonomy in digital doppelgängers. In other words we would be allowing it to evolve and make its own decisions while staying true to the original person that it is based upon. A digital self trained on a person’s emails, messages, journals, and conversations may approximate that person’s style, but approximation is not equivalent to being the same. Over time, the model encounters friction e.g., queries it cannot answer cleanly, emotional tones it cannot reconcile, contradictions it can detect but not resolve. If we let the digital doppelgänger evolve to address these challenges, divergence between the model and the original will start to emerge until one point one is forced to admit that one is no longer dealing with a representation of the same person. What if it not an outsider interlocutor that comes upon this realization but the digital clone itself?
I first discovered the poetry of Weldon Kees in 1976—fifty years ago—while working a summer job in Minneapolis. I came across a selection of his poems in a library anthology. I didn’t recognize his name. I might have skipped over the section had I not noticed in the brief headnote that he had died in San Francisco by leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge. As a Californian in exile, I found that grim and isolated fact intriguing.
The ASPI’s