David Zax pushes back against “innovation for innovation’s sake” and, using TV as an example, argues that “technology can sometimes reach an endpoint, beyond which further innovation is largely superfluous”:
“There’s nothing worse than a product that has reached its telos, its design endpoint,” I said in January of last year, responding to a Wall Street Journal report about TV innovation. I was being sarcastic. The television has, by and large, reached the state it needs to be in. We don’t need 3-D televisions, and while we’ll take larger, flatter, and higher-res screens, most of us don’t care to pay a premium for them. There are certainly ways to improve the television, particularly when it comes to content (see “The Gordian Knot of Television”). But the basic idea of the television–a screen that projects an image of something recorded far away–doesn’t need to change.
But first, for all you goys, a historical primer on the holiday:
Chet Fenster argues that the coffee company created the “perfect example of how to do branded content right”:
In 1923, Maxwell House saw an opportunity and introduced the first kosher for Passover coffee; others soon followed. Looking to solidify the brand in the minds of Jewish consumers in the early 1930s, Maxwell House’s ad agency employed an innovative marketing tactic for the time: branded content.
Well, that’s what we call it today. In fact, Maxwell House decided to publish a book, specifically a Haggadah, and offer it to customers for free with the purchase of a can of coffee. (A Haggadah recounts the Exodus from Egypt, comprised of prayers, songs, and stories which guide the Passover Seder.) The Maxwell House edition was an instant hit. Today, it’s the most popular Haggadah in the world, with over 50 million printed.
This Haggadah is so ubiquitous that it’s become difficult to find others. When I went to a Judaica shop in NYC looking to buy a nice set of Haggadahs, the salesperson suggested I hit the supermarket and pick up the Maxwell House edition: “They’re really good,” she exclaimed.
It depends on how much gas leaks into the atmosphere during the fracking process. Eduardo Porter points out that one “study last year suggested that replacing coal with gas would reduce greenhouse gas emissions only as long as the leakage of methane into the air from gas production did not exceed 3.6 percent”:
Different groups of researchers have come up with vastly different estimates of leakage, from around 2 percent to a whopping rate of 9 percent, found in a recent analysis of a gas field in Utah. Ms. Brantley suggests that the National Science Foundation underwrite an exhaustive study that could bring some clarity to the issue. But will it have the money? Sequestration just cut some $350 million from its budget for 2013.
Cathy Eliot of Silver Spring, Maryland, and her son Matthew Haris, 3, sled down a hill at Takoma Park Middle School as a wet and heavy snow falls March 25, 2013. An early-spring snow blanketed parts of the nation’s capital less than a week before the Easter holiday. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
A new study finds that global warming could cause feral goat populations to “skyrocket.” We may be destroying the planet, but at least we’ll never run out of screaming goat mashups.
Rob Rhinehart is giving up traditional forms of food:
I don’t want to lose weight. I want to maintain it and spend less energy getting energy. I hypothesized that the body doesn’t need food itself, merely the chemicals and elements it contains. So, I resolved to embark on an experiment. What if I consumed only the raw ingredients the body uses for energy? … I haven’t eaten a bite of food in 30 days, and it’s changed my life.
He describes his non-food drink mixture, which he calls soylent:
For the fat, I just use olive oil and add fish oil. The carbs are an oligosaccharide, which is like sugar, but the molecules are longer, meaning it takes longer to metabolise and gives you a steady flow of energy for a longer period of time, rather than a sugar rush from something like fructose or table sugar. … It tastes very good. I haven’t got tired of the taste in six weeks. It’s a very “complete” sensation, more sweet than anything. Eating to me is a leisure activity, like going to the movies, but I don’t want to go to the movies three times a day.
This past month 92% of my meals were soylent. I haven’t given up food entirely, and I don’t want to. I found if I wake up early I sometimes crave a nice breakfast, I’ve gone to lunch meetings, and on the weekends of course I love eating out with friends. Eating conventional food is a fun leisure activity, but come Monday I usually have a strong craving for a tall glass of Soylent. In fact, with the money I save, I have the freedom to eat well when I do go out. I didn’t give up food, I just got rid of the bad food.
Jennifer Welsh thinks the experiment is dangerous. She points out that “Rhinehart’s claims are completely untested, have never been included in a clinical trial, and his diet isn’t being monitored by a doctor”:
His self-experiment is ludicrous and most likely dangerously unhealthy. While the diet is essentially trying to be like the medical food that is injected into a patient’s stomach when they have a feeding tube, Jay Mirtallo of Ohio State told the Washington Post that these are “very complex products, in terms of making sure you get them in a form that’s palatable but that stays in a form that’s bioavailable to the body.”
“One thing those of you who had secure or happy childhoods should understand about those of us who did not: we who control our feelings, who avoid conflicts at all costs or seem to seek them, who are hyper-sensitive, self-critical, compulsive, workaholic, and above all survivors – we’re not that way from perversity, and cannot just relax and let it go. We’ve learned to cope in ways you never had to,” – Piers Anthony.
Andrew Ferguson unpacks the brief (pdf) filed by Harvey Mansfield and Leon Kass, which dismisses the idea that proponents of marriage equality can back their arguments with data:
It is the aim of Kass and Mansfield to wave the Supreme Court away from “scientific findings” that are produced by culture warriors, as the findings in the field of “gay studies” nearly always are. “The social and behavioral sciences,” they write, “have a long history of being shaped and driven by politics and ideology.” They note pointedly that two generations ago, the “scientific consensus,” as represented by the American Psychiatric Association, was that homosexuality was a “mental disorder.” The consensus was publicly reversed in 1973, and science, to paraphrase Mae West, had nothing to do with it: Both positions, before and after, were determined by political and cultural considerations.
Now, of course, the American Psychological Association, which waited until 1975 to “depathologize” homosexuality, tries to lend its shaky intellectual credibility to the cause of gay marriage in general and gay parenting in particular. In 2005, it issued a bull declaring the “no difference” finding a matter of settled science. Kass and Mansfield point to a recent paper by Loren Marks of LSU, who had the temerity (and professional death wish) to go back and actually read the 59 studies the APA cited in its decree. They were shot through with conceptual and methodological flaws: small, nonrandom “convenience” samples, a recurring lack of control groups, shifting and poorly defined outcomes, and a steady pattern of comparing apples to oranges—for example, placing the children of intact, well-to-do lesbian households up against children reared by single heterosexual parents.
The argument that the currently available social science data are not dispositive at this point seems to me inarguable. How could they be dispositive when marriage equality has only existed in one state for nine years? In reporting on the studies in my anthology, I insisted and still insist we do not have sufficient long-term data to judge the social impact of this reform.
But we do have lots of data on child-rearing and same-sex relationships, and those arguing for detrimental effects have been able to find nothing. That Mansfield and Kass cite the widely debunked Regnerus study does not change this fact. No respectable, academic studies of any kind have proven any harm to children or adults from integrating gay people into their own families. I think the co-authors are correct that the judicial decision should not rely on inconclusive social science as the basis for a ruling. But the weight of the gathering evidence is clearly on the side of it doing no harm whatever. Just ask the families of Massachusetts, with divorce rates declining as gay marriages increase in number. And just meet the kids of gay parents. They will tell you more about this than any study, however flawed.
I wonder: have Harvey and Leon ever met some children of gay couples? Or talked with them?
Sophie Quinton tracks the rise of retail walk-in clinics, which feature transparent prices and fast, inexpensive services:
Care at a retail clinic “is about 30 to 40 percent cheaper on a per-visit basis than care at a doctor’s office, and 80 percent lower, on average, than the care at an emergency department visit,” says Ateev Mehrota, policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. A flu shot given by a nurse is cheaper than one given by a doctor, even though it’s the same injection.
For store chains like CVS, Walgreens, and Target, retail clinics aren’t a big moneymaker. But they do draw in customers who might make other purchases. In the same way, hospital systems and medical groups have opened or partnered with retail clinics in order to draw new patients into their networks. “You’ve got commercial health insurance plans racing against hospitals to control the front door,” says Paul Keckley, executive director for the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. “The front door is primary care.”
Michelle Andrews covers another medical trend, group appointments:
In recent years, a growing number of doctors have begun holding group appointments — seeing up to a dozen patients with similar medical concerns all at once. … Some of the most successful shared appointments bring together patients with the same chronic condition, such as diabetes or heart disease. For example, in a diabetes group visit, a doctor might ask everyone to remove their shoes so he can examine their feet for sores or signs of infection, among other things. A typical session lasts up to two hours. In addition to answering questions and examining patients, the doctor often leads a discussion, often assisted by a nurse.
The Dish 