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It is hard to find the words to describe it. On The Daily Show, talking to a critical demographic with respect to Obamacare, the HHS secretary was so incoherent, so incapable of even basic reasoning, so tied to exhausted talking points, so unable to concede, let alone explain, error, that she would be fired if she were a spokesperson for a minor member of Congress. And yet she is allegedly in charge of the most important domestic policy initiative of this administration and has presided over a rolling disaster in terms of its critical first week.

Dish readers have done a better job at explaining the huge snafus on the various Obamacare websites. (And The Daily Show – see above – might want to get in a defensive crouch on malfunctioning websites since its own clip of Sebelius is currently as unavailable as Obamacare’s). Today we got a better explanation:

The technical problems that have hampered enrollment in the online health insurance exchanges resulted from the failure of a major software component, designed by private contractors, that crashed under the weight of millions of users last week, federal officials said Monday.

Why was she incapable of saying that?

Why was she incapable of explaining the huge crush of demand or the fact that 32 states refused to cooperate, making the feds’ task that much more difficult? Why could she offer no plausible reason for why corporations with over 50 employees got an extra year to comply, while individuals don’t? This was a very friendly media environment, and she was given acres of time to give even a small explanation. And she was worse than useless.

Part of an official’s job is to be able to be accountable to the public for failures, to help explain them, to give an idea of how they are going to be addressed. She failed. Another part of an official’s job is to make sure that critical programs under her jurisdiction run smoothly – especially when they are as critical as Obamacare. She has failed at that as well. Why is the president content with that kind of grotesque incompetence and lack of accountability? And when will she be fired?

In honor of @EsteeLauder‘s @BCAcampaign, our tower is glowing pink tonight. #BCAstrength #BreastCancerAwareness pic.twitter.com/XQYoogba3H

— Empire State Bldg (@EmpireStateBldg) October 1, 2013

What happens when at least 11 advocacy and awareness campaigns fall on the same month? Competition:

Rita Smith was watching football in 2009 when she noticed – as if it were possible not to – that the players were newly outfitted in pink socks and gloves. Her heart sank. “I was pretty sure we were toast,” she says. “There was no way we were ever gonna match them.” Smith is executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which also claims October as its awareness-raising month.

Why it’s hard to compete with cancer:

Breast cancer is, as many critics have pointed out, the perfect issue for corporate-funded cause marketing. It’s got an unambiguous villain (CANCER) and a natural constituency (women). Saving boobies is a friendly cause that everyone – even frat boys and NFL players – can get behind. A straightforward health issue.  By comparison, domestic violence is downright controversial. It touches on complicated issues like power, rape culture, victim-blaming, and gender roles, and stirs up uncomfortable emotions. …

One in eight women will suffer from breast cancer in her lifetime. One in four will experience domestic violence. Good luck finding that statistic on a yogurt lid this month.

Update from a reader:

Cancer can’t even compete with cancer! Breast cancer does not kill as many women in the US (41,000) as lung cancer (70,000), but you never hear about this from the pink ribbon brigade

The genesis of the classic American term:

Cool has come a long way, literally. In a 1973 essay called “An Aesthetic of the Cool,” art historian Robert Farris Thompson traced the concept to the West African Yoruba idea of itutu—a quality of character denoting composure in the face of danger, as well as playfulness, humor, generosity, and conciliation. It was carried to America with slavery and became a code through which to conceal rage and cope with brutality with dignity; it went on to inform the emotional textures of blues, jazz, the Harlem Renaissance, and more, then percolated into the mainstream. [Scholar Peter] Stearns argues that cool’s imperatives of flexibility and fluidity helped Americans escape rigid Victorian morality into modernity and developed along with mass production and mass media as a new individualist ethos.

Carl Wilson continues with a meditation on its meaning:

To be cool is to have cultural and social capital, and most urgently it is to be not uncool—a hang-up most of us pick up in adolescence that’s damnably hard to shake even if it mellows with age. Cool is an attitude that allows detached assessment, but one that prizes an air of knowingness over specific knowledge. I think that’s why it doesn’t become dated, unlike hotter-running expressions of enthusiasm like groovy or rad. As Stearns says, cool is “an emotional mantle, sheltering the whole personality from embarrassing excess. … Using the word is part of the process of conveying the right impression.”

Slate continues its month-long series on the meaning of cool with Mike Vuolo delving deeper into the etymology and Mark Joseph Stern focusing on the coolness of Cary Grant.

Twitter is yet another, more subtle & subversive way of hiding oneself in public.

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) October 7, 2013

Zach Schonfeld checks in with the bookies monitoring the literature contest:

The critically acclaimed Japanese writer Haruki Murakami currently leads the pack, boasting projected odds of 3/1, while American author (and frequent tweeter) Joyce Carol Oates follows closely behind with 6/1 odds. (Bob Dylan, if you’re wondering, drags behind with a 50/1 chance of winning, by Ladbrokes’ count.)

Recent Dish on Dylan’s chances here. In a come-from-behind twist, the odds for Norway’s Jon Fosse has shot from 100/1 to 9/1:

What gives? As we’ve previously covered, the bookmakers’ methods have little to do with the actual quality of the literature.

They’re just thumbing through blogs and mainstream media outlets in a mad dash to figure out which authors are getting the most buzz in the weeks leading up to the announcement. This method, however unscientific and fraught, has provided Ladbrokes with an impressive accuracy rate in past years. … Fosse’s temperature is pretty hot right now. Ladbrokes cut its odds on the playwright dramatically after noticing several surprisingly large bets on him in his home country of Norway. According to the company, “Fosse has come from out of nowhere to become the hottest writer, and it’s not inconceivable that he could become favorite to win before the announcement is made.”

Track the latest odds here.

Neil deGrasse Tyson tore into the new blockbuster with a series of tweets. An example:

Marsha Ivins, an astronaut, had mixed feelings about the movie:

I can almost forgive the liberal use of artistic license in violating the laws of physics because they got some things very right. The views of the Earth and the sunrise, the lighting on Sandra Bullock’s face (light in space is so different from light in the atmosphere)—perfect. Her body positions inside the spacecraft, the astronauts’ tether protocol during the space walks, the breathing in the helmet, even the real life, excruciatingly slow movement of the Soyuz undocking from the Space Station—spot on. These things made me happy.

The massive, fatal, horrific, total destruction of every single spacecraft? Not so much.

I guess I take spacecraft destruction personally, movie or not. For me, it’s just too hard to watch. The scene in which debris is falling through the atmosphere, breaking up into streaking balls of white finality brought slamming back to mind the real life image burned there forever of the last moments of the Columbia Shuttle. And I had to look away.

Scott Parazynski, another astronaut, gives the movie much higher marks. On the reality of space debris:

[W]e have taken lots of orbital debris. In fact, every shuttle flight that we flew, there would be dings on the windows, as well as to the Shuttle’s tiles. I actually have experience seeing debris damage when floating by a radiator panel. I was at the very tip of the space station; it was a much larger piece of debris, but it went all the way through the panel, and it looked like a bullet had been shot through it. There were curved metal ridges that showed the spiral pattern. It was probably just a washer from a spent booster or something that ended up crossing the station’s path. These things have incredible energy. Even a fleck of paint traveling at those kinds of speeds could wreak havoc for a space walker.

More Dish on the dangers of space debris here. Meanwhile, in the following video from Gravity director Alfonso Cuarón and re-recording mixer Skip Lievsay, the latter discusses how they “split the difference in terms of the science” between the need for sound effects and the lack of air (and thus sound) in space, relying heavily on the vibrations that the astronauts would hear through their spacesuits:

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SoundWorks Collection: The Sound of Gravity from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

Nancy Folbre digs up an AP survey on racial attitudes taken just before the 2012 election:

28 percent of respondents believed that [Obama’s] policies had made black Americans better off, compared with only 15 percent who believed they had made white Americans better off.  I don’t know of any analysis of the president’s economic stimulus program – or any other policy – purporting to show that blacks benefited more than whites. …

Respondents predisposed to believe that a black president will try to benefit blacks more than whites are likely to view the Affordable Care Act through a racial lens, which helps explain the results of a recent Pew survey showing that almost 91 percent of blacks currently approve of the law, compared with 29 percent of whites.

Relatedly, TNC recently argued that the ACA is likely to benefit African Americans less than other groups:

When President Obama leaves office there will almost certainly be efforts to ascertain the impact of our first black president on the black community. Defenders of the president’s record will likely point to Obamacare as the kind of program that expanded the safety net for everyone but specifically for those in need — a class in which African Americans are overly represented.

I have, of late, been anxious to add an asterisk to this accolade. As I’ve noted before, black people are also disproportionately represented in many of the states which are refusing the Medicaid expansion. Thus the idea that Obama has aided poor black people through a broad race-blind expansion of the social safety net deserves some scrutiny.