by Jeroen van Baar

Since the murder of UnitedHealthcare (UHC) CEO Brian Thompson drew everyone’s attention to the insurance company, two reports on its dealings have made my blood boil. Background info: UHC’s parent company, UnitedHealth, also owns a service provider branch called Optum and a pharmacy branch called OptumRx. The Wall Street Journal wrote in December that UnitedHealth had bonused Optum doctors to diagnose elderly patients with conditions that did not require treatment but did allow UHC to claim more money from the federal Medicare Advantage fund. Weeks later, the Federal Trade Commission alleged that OptumRx unnecessarily marked up the prices of some life-saving drugs by more than 1,000% to boost revenue, which was made possible by controlling companies throughout the drug supply chain. The profits, of course, were billed to by tax payers and consumers.

It’s particularly easy for me to get mad at all this because—perhaps you guessed it—I am a UHC customer. When I acquired U.S. health insurance last September, I was initially pleased. UnitedHealthcare sounded great: who wouldn’t want to be united, healthy, and cared for? The name of my plan—Choice Plus 80—sounded even better. And I trusted my employer, Columbia University, to select the right insurer for me. I rested easy, knowing I could not be blindsided by Kafkaesque communications and frivolous bills.

That trust is now thoroughly shattered. When I need medical attention, my insurance company might try to draw extra profit. If I just need rest, I might get a costly referral. If I need medication, I might be overcharged. And everyone I deal with in these interactions might secretly be working for The Company. Instead of cared for, I feel exploited; rather than protected, I feel exposed.

At the face of it, the American health insurance debacle is in line with other products’ recently losing their appeal. In online platforms such as Facebook and X, ‘enshittification’ has made the user experience progressively worse as tech companies start to sacrifice quality for advertiser revenue and eventually shareholder value. Aerospace giant Boeing revealed its incompetency when a door plug fell off a plane mid-flight last year, causing passengers to rush to Airbus-only filters on booking sites. And even mundane items like clothes are of much poorer quality than even ten years ago. We tend to respond to all this with a shrug of resignation. Oh well, we say, it’s a shame we can’t trust classic brands anymore, but we’ll just shop around for an alternative.

But insurance is a special case. With insurance, the trust is the product. Indeed, trust itself produces the outcome health insurance is meant to promote in the first place: health. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Tim Sommers

In Bowers v Hardwick (1986), the Supreme Court Case that affirmed the government’s right to criminalize sodomy, Justice Antonin Scalia famously insisted there that there was no “right to homosexual sodomy.” This was disingenuous in more than one way. First, the statue in question criminalized sodomy in general and not homosexual sodomy in particular. But, more fundamentally, no one was arguing for sodomy as a basic right. They were arguing for a basic right to be free to make their own decisions about their own bodies, consensual intimate relations, and families – including intimate relations and the families shared by people of the same sex.

Such a right, if it exists, is unenumerated. That is, it’s not specifically mentioned in the Bill of Rights. On the other hand, the Ninth Amendment says, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The tricky bit, of course, is how to know which other rights might be retained by the people though unenumerated.

In Roe v. Wade, Justice Douglas cited a “line of decisions” that established a “penumbra” of privacy. He was much lampooned for his language, “penumbra” in particular, but there’s a relatively straight forward line of reasoning available here. One way to derive an unenumerated right is to show that it is implied by, or follows from, an enumerated right. The enumerated right of citizens to be secure in their persons, houses, and papers and effects (the 4^th), for example, makes no sense without the underlying assumption that you have a right to be in control of your person in the first place. Further, the “liberty” and “property” that the 14^th Amendment says shall not be denied “without due process of law” surely includes the right to some degree of control over your own body.

One of the few things that Justice Alito gets right in the Dobbs (2022) decision (allowing States to criminalize any kind of abortion and, to some extent, birth control) is that he doesn’t describe the issue primarily as “privacy” – but rather as an appeal “to a broader right to autonomy.”

The relevant string of cases that develop and extend this right to autonomy and, yes, privacy, too, includes (at a minimum) Loving v The State of Virginia (the most aptly named SCOTUS case in history since it decriminalized interracial marriage), Griswold v Connecticut (access to birth control for married people), Roe v Wade (abortion decisions are left to pregnant people), Lawerence v Texas (reversing Hardwick, it decriminalized same-sex intimacy), and Obergefell v Hodges (legalized same-sex marriage). Defenders of this tradition argue that it, like the Bill of Rights itself, this is not part of a haphazard list of freedoms, but what follows from a cohesive conception of liberty. “The only freedom which deserves the name,” John Stuart Mill wrote, “is that of pursuing our own good in our own way.” Read more »

Anjum Saeed. Untitled (After Rumi). 2012.

Oil on canvas.

“I am the dust particle in sunlight. I am the round sun … I am the wind … I am a tree … Rose, and
the nightingale lost in the fragrance … You the One in all, say who I am. Say I am You.”
Jalaluddin Rumi

With permission from the artist.

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by Katalin Balog

In the past, when I asked students if they would want to enter the Experience Machine – a fictional contraption thought up by the philosopher Robert Nozick – they would generally say no. In the Experience Machine, one would have virtual experiences: for example, of a life blessed with mountains of pleasure, great love, monumental achievements. But one would lose touch with one’s actual life. My students did not want to leave their actual lives behind. In the last few years, things have changed. Most of them now proclaim their readiness to ditch it all for the virtual pleasures of the Experience Machine.

My students’ recent eagerness for the virtual is a symptom of our culture’s alienation from the world. During my life, I have witnessed the slow but unstoppable advance of commodification and technology, which has brought us to the threshold of escape from the world – certainly in fantasy, but perhaps in reality, sometime soon.

1 Consuming Experiences

When I was young in my native Budapest, we – my family and friends – didn’t think of life in consumerist terms. We couldn’t, as it was communism, and there was not much to consume – but in any case, the idea of collecting pleasant experiences seemed frivolous and alien. Beautiful Budapest was run down, its buildings still showing bullet holes decades after the war. Tourists didn’t crowd around its “attractions”. It was our city. Sure, we listened to music and attended plays, there were parties where everyone wanted to be, we bought ice cream and cakes, but we didn’t make a habit of maximizing pleasurable, beautiful, or edifying experiences; we didn’t have a plan that would ensure the best results. Much was left to chance and improvisation, as life in those days was hard-scrabble, and things could – and often would – go wrong. Everyday necessities were sometimes hard to obtain, and we had to stand in line a lot. People were generally rude and wielding whatever little power they had in a hostile manner. Our goal was just… to live our life and have the experience that comes with it. But we were also not fazed or annoyed by unexpected obstacles in the way a more committed consumer or tourist would be. Of course, some people I knew went skiing and climbing in remote and beautiful places; that was a thing one could do as well. But most of the time, normal people did normal things, and that was our life. Communism, for a while at least, constrained the consumer in us. I am not idealizing this state of affairs – I was in the underground resisting the oppression that maintained it; just pointing out the difference it made in our attitude to life.

I noticed the contrast between this and what was normal in the West especially clearly when, after moving to New York, I was already between worlds. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

By “worm” I mean not earthworm but larva of the infamous lepidopteran, Cydia pomonella, or codling moth. The pom in its species names comes from the Latin root “pomum,” meaning “fruit,” particularly the apple (which is why they’re called pome fruits), wherein you’ll find this worm. It’s the archetypal worm inside the archetypal apple, the one Eve ate. (Not. The Hebrew word in Genesis, something like peri, just means “fruit.” No apple is mentioned. And please, give the mother of all living a break.)

The imperative Let in the title is a bit rich, given that this worm does not need your permission to decimate the core: It will do so anyhow, once you have let it in. Short of destroying the apple, there is nothing you can do about it.

This worm is quite the animal. In spite of humanity’s scorched earth campaign against it in orchards worldwide, this worm persists. There is great irony in this: Persistence proceeds not just from chemical resistance but from the simple fact that, in addition to poisoning this worm, we continually feed it. It basks in our attentions, however antithetical. Plant an orchard, it is there. In the presence of so much fruit, the fruit-eater becomes, well, fruitful.

We’re quite chummy with this worm in our tiny northern New England grove. Decades (which seem centuries) ago, we planted a few dozen heritage seedlings and counted on our organic virtue to see us through seasons of pruning and growth, to autumns of cider and pies. We patrolled the orchard with backpack sprayers full of kaolin clay mix (basically diluted kitty litter) hoping to impede and disrupt the worm’s feeding. Seeing holes in fruit, we immediately zapped them. To no effect.

It took some time and training to learn that prophylaxis is key. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

Andreas Grüntzig’s plane blew a 38-foot-wide crater in the Georgia dirt where it crashed. Investigators needed several days to collect and identify the remains of the famous physician, his second wife, Margaret, and their two Irish setters, Gin and Tonic. People who write about Grüntzig after his death compare him to a shooting star, a comet, or the incautiously winged Icarus. This is to be expected when the subject is a high-flying medical hero who dies hitting the earth at an estimated 300 miles per hour.

The journal Cardiology called Grüntzig “the father of modern cardiology.” His story is told in engrossing detail in David Monagan’s book Journey into the Heart, whose introduction declares, “Grüntzig, once derided as another charlatan, changed the course of medicine … His work inspired an arc of discovery that has never stopped rising.”

Grüntzig invented balloon angioplasty, today one of the most commonly performed complex medical procedures. The technique has been adapted for use throughout the body, but its marquee application is the treatment of coronary artery disease, a leading cause of death and disability worldwide.

Balloon angioplasty is not an obvious idea. A catheter (thin, flexible wire) with a small, deflated balloon at its tip is inserted into the target artery and guided to the site of the blockage. Once in place, the balloon is inflated, compressing the plaque against the artery walls and restoring blood flow.

If not for Grüntzig, there is no guarantee balloon angioplasty would ever have happened. He alone, it seems, had the vision to imagine the device, the diligence to build it, and most crucially, the power of personality to win over a hostile and skeptical medical world. Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

The big blue behemoth of a garbage truck came barreling toward me. I knew I was going to die. I was in the middle of an intersection about to make a left turn. One moment the intersection had been clear, with the truck about a half mile distant.

In the next moment, the truck had sped up and was almost on top of me. I couldn’t turn in any direction without driving into traffic. I had about three seconds left to live…

This day, possibly the last day of my life, started out as a normal spring day in April. My husband, Rick, and I had errands to run in Michigan City. We were driving our cars in tandem to the tire store, so we could drop his car off for new tires and drive home together. He was in front of me and made the left turn; I followed. As I explained above, I was caught in the intersection with no place to turn.

I was about to be hit by a truck, and there was a good chance it would kill me.

I didn’t panic. I was not afraid to die. I just relaxed and waited for the end.

Time moved slowly. I was never unconscious, but I have amnesia for a good part of the event. The car was struck on the left side, which triggered the left side airbags. The impact pushed the car into the next lane, where it was struck on the right front fender. I don’t remember hearing or feeling the first impact, but I do remember the second. By this time, Rick had reached my car, and looked in to see if I was okay. He was the first person there. I told him I was fine except for chest pain (due to hitting the steering wheel). The paramedics arrived shortly thereafter, and soon I was settled in an ambulance with oxygen. I was taken to a nearby hospital where I spent 2 days, until I no longer needed oxygen. Afterwards, recovery was fast, and (eventually) the insurance company totaled the car and sent me a check to cover the purchase of an equivalent, replacement car.

It takes a close call like this to realize how poorly prepared one is for death, and to give some thought to what death might be like. Read more »

by Adele A. Wilby

The Australian author Richard Flanagan is the 2024 winner of the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction for his book Question 7. The book is a brilliant weaving together of memory, history, of fact and fiction, love and death around the theme of interconnectedness of events that constitute his life. Disparate connections between his father’s experience as a prisoner of war, the author H.G. Wells, and the atomic bomb all contributed towards making Flanagan the thinker and writer he is today. The book reveals to us his humanity, his love of family and of his home island of Tasmania; it is what Flanagan expects of a book when he says, ‘the words of a book are never the book, the soul is everything’, and this book has ‘soul’.

The book opens with Flanagan visiting the site of Ohama Camp where his father was interned as a slave labourer in the undersea coal mines in Japan during World War II. There is ‘no memorial, no sign, no evidence’ of the camp or the suffering that existed on that spot; all that remains is a ‘love hotel’, but his visit to this site establishes the first link in a chain of interconnected events in his life.

Flanagan’s father never expected to survive the cruelty of the guards and the grinding work as a slave labourer in the coal mines, yet faraway in Europe, unbeknown to him, scientific minds were actively working on the idea of a bomb with extraordinary lethal potential, a bomb that would save his life and have  a profound impact on the  future of humanity and shape world events. The Japanese city of Hiroshima became the experimental testing ground for this atomic bomb and tens of thousands of ‘unknown souls’ perished, ‘vaporised’, by the force of the energy of such a lethal weapon. The atomic bomb brought the war to an end, saved Flanagan’s father’s life and ultimately brought Flanagan himself into existence. Read more »

My wife (offering me an apple) and me on a late Sunday afternoon walk near Brixen, South Tyrol.

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by David J. Lobina

A new year, and a new opportunity to write on some more contentious topics (and/or be cancelled), my new year’s resolution in 2024. I wrote about universality and diversity last year, as well as on the identity conditions of, well, identities, and I now start the year 2025 by reviewing a book published by Oxford University Press on inclusion in linguistics. I should warn any potential readers that this is possibly the worst book I have ever read in my career, and that it is hardly about inclusion to boot, but to understand what I mean by this one will have to read the 4000-word review I have written. I would say enjoy, but…(NB: the review is due to appear on LinguistList at some point, unless they change their minds).

*

The volume Inclusion in Linguistics showcases the work of over 40 authors across 20 chapters on what is perceived to be a lack of inclusion in the field of linguistics, with North America as the main focus of attention (with some exceptions). Edited by Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz, this collection of papers is part of a project that includes the volume Decolonizing Linguistics, also published by Oxford University Press. The overall project started in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter movement and its stated aim is to achieve equity and justice in linguistics on the basis of race, disability, gender, sexuality, class, immigration status, Indigeneity, and global geography (p. 2). As an instance of a social justice endeavour, therefore, the contributions are mostly focused on the sort of actions needed to achieve greater inclusivity in the field, and in these very terms, the editors encourage readers to use both volumes as guides for scholarly work as well as for pedagogical purposes, with further material to be had on a dedicated website.

I shall very briefly summarise each chapter first and then I will engage with parts of the content below, where I shall name the respective authors when pertinent to do so. The volume itself is divided into 4 thematic parts. Part 1 focuses on intersectional models of inclusion; Part 2 details possible institutional pathways to achieve more inclusion in linguistics; Part 3 is devoted to some of the resources available to teachers and lecturers to build more inclusive classrooms in schools and universities; and Part 4 outlines various examples of inclusive public engagement in the field. The background to the overall project is chronicled in the book’s preface whilst the Introduction describes the general approach as well as each contribution, with the Conclusion highlighting the lessons learned. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Richard Farr

After I moved from the UK to the US it took me only a couple of years to cede to my friends’ pleas and start driving on the right. When in Rome, and all that. But I still like to irritate Americans by maintaining that we Brits are better at this essential mechanical skill. I mean, when we drive, we drive. Or, OK, we drive while texting, shaving, putting on makeup, or having sex. However, we absolutely draw the line at driving with a gallon of Coke in one hand and a three-pound tub of fries clutched between our sweating thighs, while using a dripping Deluxe Double Bacon MegaBurger with Extra Pepper Jack as the sole point of contact with the steering wheel. 

My wife still teases me about my unwillingness to eat while driving, and conceivably I’m wrong to suspect that getting a spear of dill pickle in the eye increases accident rates on American roads. But on a related safety issue my prejudices have been given support recently both by unimpeachably anecdotal evidence and, better yet, a random video I found on YouTube. 

The typical American freeway has three to five lanes. (If nineteen, you’re in L.A.) Widespread laws ban trucks from the far left lane. A large majority of states have at least something on the books requiring all traffic to move over unless exiting or overtaking. Even those members of the Union in a primitive stage of legal development (Hello CA! Hello MA!) at least encourage this behavior, because everyone who’s ever thought about it agrees that “lane discipline” improves both efficiency and safety.

Yet many American drivers seem never to have thought about it. Whether burger-steering at the speed limit or at that most annoying 4 mph less, they love to camp out in the middle lane or even the left one, sometimes for days at a stretch, strenuously exercising their Constitutional right never to look in the mirror or exhibit any awareness of the traffic around them. Recently on I-5 near Seattle my car and several others were stuck for miles, at sixty-something in a seventy limit, behind three cars that were flying next to one another as if in formation, one per available lane. It was like trying to shop in a hurry at Costco on Saturday.

A video explainer by Christophe Haubursin and Joseph Stromberg, available on Youtube, confirms my darkest suspicions: this one particular national driving tradition / habit / symptom / affliction / pathology, so immediately striking to foreigners, (a) messes with the national blood pressure averages, (b) makes Eisenhower’s magnificent highway system far less efficient than it might be, and (c) kills large numbers of people.  Read more »

Sughra Raza. Ephemeral Apartment Art. Boston January 4, 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by Bill Murray

The same media that warned us against Donald Trump now warn us against tuning out. Though our side has lost, we must now ‘remain engaged’ with the minutiae of Mike Johnson’s majority and all that, strap in, batten down and pay attention.

I was persuaded by media warnings against Donald Trump. Now that we must rise and shine and juice our kale, celery and Granny Smiths over Morning Joe at peril of losing our democracy, I am not so sure.

Last month The Atlantic declared “Decivilization May Already Be Under Way.” The Atlantic is perfect for an article like that. What do you bet the only difference between Jeffrey Goldberg and his readers is, somebody juices his apples and kale for him. Well, that, and that even his friends call him ‘Jeffrey.’

‘Decivilization’ is just overwrought. Except, when I raise my eyes to my bookshelves I find How Civil Wars Start, Why Nations Fail, How Democracies Die, Why Liberalism Failed, Liberalism Against Itself, Tyranny, Inc. and Autocracy, Inc.

Wait! Wait! Wait! What am I doing!?

It’s clearly time for a break. Not because I’m abandoning America. Not to flee MAGA (well, not entirely). It’s time for a little recentering and for the solace of a road trip. So where to go? Read more »

Fire in the Brain

God is a fire in the brain Nijinsky said
which is as close to the truth as
anything a dancer might dance
with a bonfire burning in his head

God may put you in a trance
with the fluttering of cardinal wings
or with the way the moon looks
mounting the mountain’s back
on the other side of the river
—a bright hole in the dark
a splinter of hope
a sliver

Sometimes beyond the blazing bars
of your incarceration
you hallucinate stars

You surmise the sun’s a substantiating eye
but fear that every distance is not near
(not close enough to make the untellable clear)

You dream days
You dream nights

Sometimes you lie without a clue
in the hour of the wolf
waiting for the wolf to bite,
or waiting for the blue to light.
When it does you see crocuses

You taste a cloud of honeysuckle
that sweetly drifts across the yard
where at a certain spot
between the garden and the shed
you swear paradise is here
—precisely here where a skunk
shredded grass the night before
grubbing while you were in bed,
grubbing with a skunky conflagration
in her head

God may burn a brain and brand it
God may shrink it or expand it

This is the bed in which
our ignorance reposes which,
by every blister on our brain,
is both a bed of coals
and roses

by Jim Culleny, 1/22/11
from Odder Still
Lena’s Basement Press, 2015

__________________________________________

(Fire in the Brain is one of 120 poems in my book Odder Still, available at Amazon)

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by Mike O’Brien

I recently read a post by Agnes Callard discussing a philosophical novel (how dreadful) entitled “The Man Without Qualities”. The titular character is an essayist, a figure standing in stark contrast to philosophers. The essayist seeks novelty and surprise, the ephemeral glitters of new and interesting “perspectives”. He lacks the courage for the philosopher’s burdensome and risky enterprise of seeking long and hard for answers that may never reveal themselves. “Thinking long and hard”, writes Callard, “makes sense if you want answers; it makes less sense if the highest reward you anticipate from your intellectual efforts is surprise”.

I was already conscious of the distinction between the writing that I do, and what is done by the philosophers whose work I discuss. But it stings a little more when someone else points it out. Thanks, Agnes.

Casting “The Man Without Qualities” as a cautionary tale of stunted intellectual life, Callard writes that “[t]he book … shows us what it is like to be a thinker without a quest; perpetually idle in spite of all one’s ceaseless, restless intellectual activity.”

Such a description could find no more unfitting targets than Jonathan Birch and his latest book, “The Edge of Sentience”. This publication, like the rest of Birch’s voluminous output, exemplifies the ethic of philosophy as productive work, rather than some kind of divine communion, or clever puzzle-building, or sly apologetics. Birch clearly explains his project to the reader, and frequently re-iterates the book’s key principles and criteria to keep that project firmly in view. He is not trying to surprise or dazzle, or hide gems for only the most insightful and subtle readers to discover through exegetical pilgrimage. This book is not trying to showcase Birch’s talents or seduce the reader into sharing Birch’s prejudices, but rather seeks to clearly convey relevant information and to articulate a consistent set of proposals with reasonable chances of implementation in public institutions. “The Edge Of Sentience” is a book with a public agenda, and Birch executes it well. A recent review in Nature called it “a masterclass in public-facing philosophy”, in case my opinion isn’t authoritative enough for you. Read more »