Month: May 2013

Which Employers Will Drop Coverage?

Next year when Obamacare comes into effect, Casey B. Mulligan expects certain employers with lots of low-wage workers to stop offering health insurance:

To qualify for subsidized exchange plans, workers cannot be offered affordable insurance by their employers. Paradoxically, employers will create subsidy opportunities for their middle- and low-income employees whenever they fail to offer health insurance.

On the other hand, an employer dropping its health insurance next year will put its high-income employees in a tough spot, because they will have to buy insurance on their own without the tax advantages they had in the past by obtaining health insurance through their employer. As a result, employers with relatively many high-income employees will be under pressure to keep their insurance, whereas an employer of middle- and low-income employees may find them asking for health insurance to be dropped from the employee benefit menu.

Recent Dish on healthcare reform’s nightmare scenarios here.

The Artist In Rebellion

Raja Adbulrahim profiles Haj Kadour, whose paintings of Bashar and Hafez Assad are being destroyed by Syrian rebels:

Their faces have dominated walls, storefronts and car windows all over Syria, a visual declaration of loyalty to the dictators. Their images — sometimes partially hidden behind sunglasses, other times in military uniform but always stern and slightly foreboding — were the ubiquitous reminders that Big Brother was watching. Haj Kadour painted hundreds of the portraits. “We don’t need to dwell on that,” he said. …

[A]s the revolt against Assad continues, the 66-year-old artist has seen the portraits he spent his career producing torn down and ripped apart. Once, local opposition figures came to his house in Syria and apologized for defacing his paintings.

“I told them, ‘You don’t have to get my permission; go destroy them.’ “

Wikipedia’s Blog Problem

Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Brookings’ Lawfare blog, and colleague Stephanie Leutert tried to edit the Wikipedia page for “Lawfare”:

Rather to our surprise, our edits were almost immediately undone; the material we added was, literally within minutes, removed. The reason? The disreputable nature of blogs. Wikipedia is, as we shall explain, somewhat inconsistent on this point, but as to the word “lawfare,” it enforced its no-personal-blog rule with a brutal kind of rigor. The consequences are bizarre: As a result of this rule, Wikipedia denies its readers access to the thoughts of an active-duty brigadier general who currently serves as chief prosecutor of the U.S. military commissions, as well as those of a Harvard Law School professor who happens to be among the world’s most renowned national security law scholars. …

There is an almost comic irony here: Wikipedia, an experiment in new media that has succeeded beyond anyone’s imagination, is so prejudiced against new media that it cannot see value in an active duty military officer’s blogging from Afghanistan. The site’s greatest strength—its ability to flexibly construct knowledge as events occur and new sources emerge—is ultimately undermined by its inability to provide clear and flexible guidelines that allow common-sense source judgments.

The Daily Wrap


Today on the Dish, Andrew defended Jason Richwine against the presumption of racism while applauding Ron Unz’s careful analysis of his work, saw room for long-term spending reform in the latest deficit numbers, and cheered Bret Easton Ellis. He gagged at Politico’s insider take on the current spate of scandals, tried to put Benghazi in perspective, and struggled to pick sides in the Syrian civil war. Elsewhere, he found hope for Obama in Dick Morris’ dire predictions and compared the dangers from prescription drugs and pot.

In political coverage, we examined end-of-life decisions for countries and filled in the details of the IRS and DOJ scandals, while Krauthammer provided a Republican voice of reason on Benghazi. Harvey Silverglate cast doubt on the FBI’s policy of not recording interrogations as sexual assault issues continued to plague the military, and we debated geoengineering while looking ahead to how climate change will create refugees in the not-so-distant future.

In miscellaneous coverage, Angelina Jolie made a private health decision in public while we pondered the recent SCOTUS case on patentable genes, and loneliness led to genetic mutations. While Tesla struggled to break out of the classic car dealership model, Alex Mayyasi studied the high cost of academic papers and education failed to entertain. Jonathan Rauch was unflinchingly honest about his past denial, PTSD sufferers benefited from a puff, drugs carried heavier sentences than murder, and rhino horns enticed poachers.

Meanwhile, Sadakichi Hartmann discovered the private significance of scents and Sue Halpern and Pransky calmed a troubled senior. Linda Holmes reminisced about the days when MTV played music, Jeff Koons revitalized pop art, and we found out how to get, how to get to Sesame Street. Pig poop foam threatened farms, Julia Ioffe smiled at comical spy gadgets, we reclined on Freud’s couch and meditated on music’s ability to move us. We took in a stunning view of New Orleans in the VFYW, creatively cracked a few beers in the MHB, and uncovered one of Communism’s victims in the FOTD.

– D.A.

What Makes Music Emotional?

Colin Schultz sets up the above video from Joe Hanson:

Forget the message carried by the lyrics of a love song or the chorus of a party anthem. How do the rise and fall of the melody or the pace of the tempo convey emotion? Is there something inherent to music, wrapped up in the way it interacts with our brains and the way we think that causes it to make us feel so many feelings? Or is the wail of the sad trombone just a piece of cultural baggage, something we’ve picked up from societal norms?

Mike Rugnetta’s thoughts on the subject, also in video form, here.

When A Town Wins The Lotto

Michael Paterniti profiles Sodeto, a Spanish village of 250 which won “El Gordo,” Spain’s enormous Christmas lottery. Some of the consequences:

Paco buys Marisol, his hairdresser wife, a new wedding ring. Marisol goes to New York with her sisters and stands in Times Square, an unimaginable dream, which is when it occurs to her that she’s really won. At home, Paco and Marisol buy a bigger tank “for pig pee and excrement,” to make fertilizer. “When you have 2,500 pigs and you go from 600- to 800-liter tanks, it saves a lot of time,” says Paco. “And your quality of life gets a little better.”

Meanwhile, others buy new cars, Audis and BMWs. Carmen buys a couple of Harley-Davidsons. Someone vacations in Venice, another in Mexico. They return from their trips exhausted. After eating every day of their lives at 1 p.m. at the kitchen table in their house, they’re overwhelmed by the outside world, by all the choices, hundreds and thousands of possible restaurants serving food at all hours. “That was fourteen days of panic,” they say when they return. “It’s loco out there.”

Why would anyone want to leave this place called Luck?

Everyone seems to have their kitchen redone, replacing the old with the modern—appliances, cabinets, and counters—bordering on the garish. One farmer, Pedro Luis, guts his abode across the road and in its place builds—in village terms—a mansion. He installs a window in the kitchen, to look out into his garage. That way he can make dinner while keeping a close eye on his new tractor.

Why We Wanted Our MTV

Linda Holmes takes a trip down memory lane:

It’s hard to remember now, but at one time, MTV really was watched just like commercial radio was listened to: you would turn it on and see what came around, and if you particularly liked a video, you’d wait a while and hope you heard it. That’s what half the slumber parties of my adolescence were about: waiting for Michael Jackson or Duran Duran.

We don’t wait very much anymore. It’s not just that this model of MTV largely went away, or that getting most of your music listening through the radio faded. It’s that the entire idea of ephemeral availability — that you would have to sit and wait for something to be played for you, and that at other times you had to do without it — is simply not how people expect to digest much of anything anymore.

She notes the influence of MTV Unplugged:

MTV Unplugged played a critical role in the development of authenticity policing. The idea that pop stars — entertainers — had to prove themselves in stripped-down formats went hand in hand with the suspicion that they were inauthentic in the first place, an idea that music videos didn’t invent but certainly advanced. (Milli Vanilli released Girl You Know It’s True in 1989, the same year MTV debuted Unplugged.) …

In the end, MTV pushed spectacle in music, but simultaneously created a market for an authenticity proving ground, which it then filled. Just as “Money For Nothing” could be both of MTV and suspicious of MTV, artists could combat their MTV images … on MTV. That was the way in which the channel was revolutionary: for a brief cultural moment, it was both the disease and the cure – both supply and demand.

Should Human Genes Be Patentable?

Florence Williams asks why a company should be allowed to patent the genes that prompted Jolie’s double mastectomy:

Although they reside in our bodies, the BRCA genes are effectively owned by a bio-tech giant, Myriad Genetics, which patented the genes in the mid-1990s. Should a single corporation control access to DNA that exists in every human cell? Numerous scientific organizations and consumer health groups have decried the patents, saying they restrict critical research and prevent many women from having access to the tests. The patents also mean women can’t seek second opinions from other labs and they mean that the BRCA genes must be excluded from other more comprehensive test panels, which are offered elsewhere for much less money. The company argued before the U.S. Supreme Court last month that the patents are appropriate because of its technology used to isolate and analyze the genes, and that without patent protection it would not be able to recoup its research development costs.

SCOTUS Blog held a symposium on the Myriad case back in February. Here’s part of Andrew Torrance’s contribution to the debate:

With Myriad, the Court stands on the verge of endorsing a venerable principle in biotechnology patent law:  human beings are improper subject matter for patenting.  Under U.S. law, humans may not be property.  Even human body parts, such asorgans, may usually not be owned and sold as property, whether from the living or the dead.  The evidence from attempts to maintain patent rights covering hESCs, IVC products, human thought, and human genes are in accord:  intellectual property may not confer ownership over human beings or human-related inventions.  Add to this the force of AIA Section 33, banning patent claims “directed to or encompassing a human organism,” and it is likely the Supreme Court will answer its question on appeal in the negative:  human genes are not patentable.  Such a result will roil the biotechnology industry, while delighting the many critics of patents claiming human genes.  However, the full effect on biotechnology may be modest because synthetic genes are quite likely to remain patentable.

Charles Rothfeld’s related argument:

The Court’s doctrine invites it to add up the pluses and minuses of the patent: does it do more good than harm? The context here would seem to make that an easy calculation. On the minus side: documented higher prices and less help for women who fear breast or ovarian cancer; less research; and fewer scientific advances – effects that would be felt widely as other genes are patented. On the plus side: not much. A Court that began its most recent patent decision by worrying about patents that “would risk disproportionately tying up the use of the underlying natural laws” is unlikely to find this a difficult decision.

Robert Merges has a different perspective:

The question is not so much whether the isolated gene is, in its essence, a new thing; it is instead whether it takes significant human intervention to go from the chromosome in its native state to a purified and isolated gene. I think it does; and that the gene as claimed ought therefore be deemed a new (patentable) thing. The fact of significant human intervention, and the importance of purified genes “commercially and therapeutically,” leads me to conclude that we should call them non-naturally occurring inventions.

So does Kevin Noonan:

Any number of biologic drugs have been developed that, according to a recent Federal Trade Commission report, “have improved medical treatments, reduced suffering, and saved the lives of many Americans.”  These drugs were developed by companies that isolated the genes – including, but not limited to, erythropoietin, human growth hormone, interferon, blood clotting Factors VIII and XI, human insulin, tissue plasminogen activator –  encoding them, because only by doing so could these therapeutically important proteins be produced in useful quantities.  The patent incentive was instrumental in supporting investment in these companies, and in developing a biotechnology industry in the U.S. that has been a world leader for twenty-five years.  As anyone following the debate on follow-on biologics will recognize, the need for patent protection to attract investment in what remains a fundamentally risky industry has not diminished.

Recap of oral arguments here. SCOTUS is expected to rule on the case before the end of this term.

Subjective Scents

In 1902, the poet and critic Sadakichi Hartmann attempted a performance described as a “melody in odors”:

In 1906, a movie theater in Pennsylvania hoped to increase interest in its newsreel of the Rose Parade by fanning the room with rose oil, to the complaints of everyone in attendance. A 1960 movie called Scent of Mystery was the only film ever to use a failed invention called “Smell-O-Vision,” a patented system of odors cued to the actions on-screen. At Disneyland’s California Adventure theme park, opened nearly a hundred years after Sadakichi’s performance, a gentle smell of citrus is spritzed on visitors during a ride where they seemingly soar over a grove of orange trees.

The invention of the perfume concert was a singular achievement; the execution of it was something else entirely.

Sadakichi insisted that his concert would represent an advance in technology, that the event had previously never been fully realized “due largely to the lack of an apparatus capable of driving odors forcibly into an audience and of producing precise impressions even at great distances… Such an apparatus has been invented lately.” The “apparatus,” an electric fan, was now blowing over the audience a sickly strong perfume of roses, which spread quickly across the orchestra, rising into the balcony seats. One man shouted that he “did not like the smell of the scuppers and there were too many aboard who were seasick.” Sadakichi responded that they were now arriving in England and were smelling the native wild rose. Another voice shouted that the creeping odor reminded him of the time the gas meter leaked. The audience had begun to turn.

“Now we reach Germany,” Sadakichi continued. The girls slid in a second square of linen, and after another long minute the distinct odor of violets was blown from the stage into the balconies. “Who does not remember plucking violets on a fair morning along the banks of the Rhine?” Sadakichi asked. “The violet is Germany’s flower.” But no one in the theater remembered plucking violets. Violets were soaps and cheap toilet water, saltwater taffy and last night’s whore. Roses were women in fox fur and fake hair, or husbands begging for forgiveness.

The perfumes that Sadakichi assumed would carve out the landscapes of provincial Europe had little or no effect on his audience. The nostalgia was his and his alone.