by Eric Feigenbaum

Two of the most frightening words in America: Medical Debt. And this nightmare is not just something you hear as an anecdote or cautionary tale. One in three of the people reading these words are likely to have medical debt.

In 2022 roughly 100 million Americans – almost one-third of the population – were saddled with healthcare debt. Yet, more than 90 percent of Americans have some form of health insurance – because it’s less frequently a problem of being uninsured, but underinsured that puts people behind the eight ball. Unsurprisingly, when a problem is so impactful and pervasive, at least some members of the media turn their attention to it.

ProPublica journalist Marshall Allen has been researching and writing about medical bills for more than 20 years – following up on readers’ emails and exploring their medical debt stories. From hospitals that gouge to insurance that is unknowingly cancelled because a credit card wasn’t processed correctly, the ways Americans find themselves paying for their most difficult, painful and vulnerable moments are innumerable. And for whatever kindness they may have received when getting treatment, the billers and collections agents who follow can be heartless.

As a result, many developed countries hold America up as the model of what they don’t want in a healthcare system. The thinking is that healthcare is a human right, not a luxury.

The problem in the American system isn’t typically the quality of care – we have some of the best medical facilities in the world along with cutting edge treatments and technology. It’s that the patient can’t typically control the costs. In the midst of needing life-saving medical care, neither patient, patient’s family nor medical providers can or should consider cost.

Only when a car accident or heart attack drives the patient $100,000 into debt, something has gone terribly wrong. Read more »

A surprisingly strong cube I made out of staples after seeing this video.

Yes, I am a nerd!

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by Brooks Riley

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by Monte Davis

12+16+16 = 44. We can all agree on that.

44/12 = 3 2/3. Good so far?

That’s all the math needed to ask some  pointed questions about CCS. That stands for carbon capture and storage (or “sequestration”), a technology discussed and explored at pilot-project scale for decades. Its goal is to separate and collect the carbon dioxide from combustion, before it is released into the atmosphere, then put it in very long term storage so it doesn’t contribute to further climate change. So CCS is really CO₂ capture and storage – and the difference between carbon and carbon dioxide is where the arithmetic above comes in.

Carbon’s atomic mass is 12; oxygen’s is 16. (Never mind isotopes.) So combining a carbon atom and two oxygen atoms – combustion — yields a molecular mass for CO₂ of 44… or 3 2/3 times that of the “unburnt” carbon atom. These numbers are ratios, so the math is the same  for any units: completely burn 12 grams of pure carbon, and get 44 grams of CO₂; burn 12 million tons, get 44 million tons of CO₂. Fossil fuels aren’t pure carbon, of course, and combustion rarely burns every bit of what there is, so the emission ratio varies. Coal typically yields 2.1 times its mass in CO₂; firewood, 1.6 to 1.8 times; gasoline, 2.3 times; natural gas, about 2.8 times.

Pause here, because this is deeply counterintuitive – so deeply that we don’t realize it. We’ve had chemistry for a few centuries, arithmetic for millennia. But we’ve been using fire deliberately for a million or two years, seeing the aftermath of wildfire for much longer. All that experience taught us in our bones that the ashes always weigh less than the fuel did. As for the smoke – why, just look at it! Any hominid can see that it weighs nothing at all!

Because CO₂ swirls invisibly away with that smoke, and soon mixes with the air and dissipates, we’ve learned only in the latest eyeblink of time to account for all the combustion products. It takes an effort to grasp that CO₂ is as much “ash” as the gray powder in the fireplace – ash that weighs more than the logs we burned. The 15 gallons of gasoline in your car’s tank weigh about 100 pounds. When it’s gone, you’ve made a present to the world of about 230 pounds of carbon dioxide, along with much smaller quantities of carbon monoxide, benzene, 1,3-butadiene, etc. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Untitled. June, 2014.

Digital photograph.

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by William Benzon

“Georgia on My Mind” was composed and recorded by Hoagy Carmichael (lyrics by Stuart Gorrell) in 1930. Born in 1899 and dying in 1981, Carmichael composed several hundred songs, many of which became hits, including “Stardust,” “The Nearness of You,” “Heart and Soul,” “Skylark,” and “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening.” These songs are important contributions to an amorphous and sprawling body of popular song sometimes called “the American Songbook.” The composers of these songs are said to be denizens of “Tin Pan Alley,” at the center of which we find the Brill Building, just north of Times Square at Broadway and 49th Street. For a while Carmichael worked for Southern Music, which had its office in the Brill Building.

Here is Carmichael’s 1930 recording of “Georgia on My Mind.” Many, though by no means all, standards, as they are sometimes called, have the same general form: AABA. Each letter stands for phrase eight measures, or bars, long. The A sections have the same melody and harmony which the B section has a different, and often contrasting, melody (along with its underlying harmony).

This recording begins with a short introduction featuring violinist Joe Venuti, followed by Carmichael coming in on the vocal (c. 0:15). We hit the B section at about 0:51. The B section is often called the “bridge,” presumably because it connects two A sections. Carmichael repeats the A-strain 1:08 starting at 1:08 and ending with a short violin phrase from Venti. Starting at about 1:26 the performance becomes purely instrument. First, we have what sounds like a muted trombone solo, which pretty much sticks to the melody. At 2:01 Venuti plays a violin solo on the bridge. At 2:21 we return to the A-strain with Jack Teagarden on trombone improvising a solo. That ends with the full band playing a chord at 2:39 followed by an 8-bar cornet solo played by Bix Beiderbecke (his last). Venuti, Teagarden and especially Beiderbecke were important musicians in their own right.

Notice Carmichael’s voice. It’s dry, and not particularly mellifluous. His style is relaxed, verging on conversational. It’s a style made possible by technology, a style that would be all but hopeless in live performance without a microphone and amplification. By the same token, it’s a style well-suited to recording, which was still a relatively new medium at the time. It’s a style that owes a lot to Louis Armstrong. Carmichael and Armstrong knew one another and Armstrong performed some of his song’s, e.g. “Rockin’ Chair.” Read more »

Death of Star HD 62166 & It’s Nebula

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by David J. Lobina

An apparently non-negotiable assumption of modern identity politics, though this was not always the case (see this regarding a certain non-philosopher), is that the individuation of personal characteristics is an intrinsic affair – that is, it is down to an individual to determine and state what they are, this often following from lived experience, and thereby constituting an exclusively internal matter. In a loose sense, this is unexceptional; it is common for one to simply assume the truth of what others say about themselves. After all, one doesn’t expect people to lie about where they are from, their background or what they believe in.

Granted that, the individuation of some personal characteristics does not appear to be entirely and absolutely an intrinsic matter: some identities seemingly depend upon the implicit (and sometimes explicit!) recognition of peers – an extrinsic and relational affair. In such cases, individuation would be partly determined by one’s environment, and thus not too dissimilar to what philosophers call “extensional conditions” (see here for an application to the debate around mental content). This specific point is not usually spelled out in discussions of personal identities, but it does turn up here and there. Something along these lines is implicitly assumed, uncontroversially so, I believe, to the individuation of national identities, the case I shall focus on here – and the argument is likely to generalise. Read more »

by Laurence Peterson

I am writing this on Sunday afternoon, the 29^th of September, 2024.  The Guardian (UK version) informs me that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) have confirmed that dozens of Israeli aircraft are attacking what they say to be “military targets belonging to the Houthi terrorist regime” in Yemen, and may be preparing for a ground invasion of Lebanon. This is after a week of bombing in Lebanon that has resulted in at least 650 deaths (500 in one day, about a third of the number slaughtered on October the 7^th of last year) and the assassination of the leader of  Hezbollah, a major political party in Lebanon that has deep roots in the wider Lebanese society. Israel also assassinated a number of other key members of Hezbollah, as well as a senior Iranian official in Lebanon. And this after the remote detonation of pagers and other hand-held devices attached to bombs by Israel that killed maybe a score of people, but wounded thousands, and set much of the country into panic at the thought that any nearby electronic device might blow up and kill or seriously maim simple bystanders. And all this after months of unprecedented carnage and destruction in Gaza and the West Bank.

Not long ago, the incidence of one of these events, or maybe two concurrently, would be enough for me to become very concerned about the possibility of the outbreak of wider war that might just cascade into some kind of confrontation between powers possessing nuclear weapons. Now, though I firmly believe the international situation is as grave as any I have lived through in my 63 years on planet Earth, the constant succession and routinization of these kinds of events these days is taking a kind of toll on me: I am coming, emotionally speaking, to expect that these kinds of happenings that seem to demand immediate and thorough resolution to any sane person will simply pile up, like the bodies of the victims of the tragedies associated with those events. Maybe this is a kind of defense mechanism, like a sort of geopolitical learned-helplessness. Whatever it is, it is disconcerting, disorienting and highly disagreeable. Read more »

Road near Meransen, South Tyrol.

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by Azadeh Amirsadri

I lived in Philadelphia in 1977 and would go to the Gallery mall on Market Street, a walking distance from our river front apartment. One day, around lunch, I decided to get Chinese food at the food court and looking for a place to sit, I asked two older ladies if I could sit at their table, since the place was packed. As I was picking through the food, separating the celery and water chestnuts, one of the old ladies said “It looks like you are digging for gold.” I not only didn’t understand what she meant,I wasn’t even sure she was talking to me. She pointed to her rings and then to my ring and enunciated “looking for gold” with a smile. I had a game I played when I wasn’t in the mood to speak English, so I said I didn’t understand, which was true in this case. She pointed to my ring and said “You are looking for gold” and again I smiled politely and went on separating the food and trying not to make eye contact and not to engage. She told her friend “I wonder where she is from” and later “I bet she is rich because she is wearing a lot of jewelry” and they went on talking about me and I went on pretending I didn’t understand what they were saying.

Another time, I was at the window seat of a domestic flight and didn’t want to speak to anyone. The couple next to me was anxious and they were catastrophizing about their luggage not arriving at their destination, about the drinks and snacks not being enough and were trying to reel me into their conversation. I looked at them, shook my head and smiled, and pretended I didn’t understand them. I was trying to sleep anyway, but when the flight attendants came with the drinks cart, the couple got agitated and woke me up saying Coke? Coke? Then they talked about how I will miss getting a drink, and returned to all the bad things that were about to happen.

Learning English was rather easy for me; perhaps because my mother had told me from an early age that I was good with languages. Also, speaking two other languages made it easier to learn a new language. I attended classes in Falls Church, VA in a trailer behind an elementary school with other adults who were new to the country. Our group was made up of a lot of Vietnamese people who had arrived as boat people, Central Americans running from civil wars, and of course Iranians. Our teacher was Mrs. B and I was amazed at how cool it was to just have a letter for a last name. Of course, I had no idea that ESL teachers do this to simplify their longer names for their students who are already struggling with learning a new language. The Iranians in class were mostly kind to each other, respecting our social norms, yet also very competitive. Since we couldn’t communicate with the other groups, we kept our dramas within our own. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Jeroen van Baar

In the chart-topping podcast The Rest is History, British historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook discuss key events from the past at great length and in sumptuous depth. I was listening to their fourth episode on the French Revolution when a detail caught my ear. Part of the reason the Revolution could occur, Tom and Dominic argued, is that a nasty opinion publique had taken hold in late-eighteenth-century Paris. Pamphlets filled with inflammatory rumors were sold by the tens of thousands and read aloud on street corners. Some of them spread fables about the alleged sexual escapades of the young queen Marie Antoinette, which eroded the authority of the monarchy and set the stage for its bloody demise.

It is all too reminiscent of public opinion today. In the recent Trump-Harris presidential debate, for instance, Trump alleged that Democrats were condoning post-birth abortions. “Her Vice-Presidential pick […] says execution after birth is OK,” Trump said. And later: The “former governor of Virginia said we put the baby aside and then we determine what we want to do with the baby.”

To those uninitiated in Republican propaganda, the comment must have sounded like yet another ridiculous falsehood made up on the fly by the former president. But as a political neuroscientist, I recognized it from five years ago. In 2019, I was a researcher at Brown University studying how the brains of political partisans color their perceptions (of an inauguration crowd, perhaps). 43 committed Democrats and Republicans watched political videos in our brain scanner. One of the videos we used was a PBS news segment on abortion, in which then-Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, a pediatrician and a Democrat, described what happens in the tragic scenario when a fetus is not viable outside the womb: resuscitation is attempted if the parents so desire. Despite numerous clarifications from Northam, this was gleefully interpreted by Republicans to mean that Democrats condone “legal infanticide”. The fact that Trump is still touting this conspiracy theory five years later speaks to its effectiveness at riling his base.

In our study, we discovered that neural processing of the PBS video was more similar between two people who had the same political orientation than across the aisle. Why? Read more »