Posts with Recent Comments
"Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers."
A Doctor at Cigna Said Her Bosses Pressured Her to Review Patients’ Cases Too Quickly. Cigna Threatened to Fire Her. Nurses in the Phillipines are doing the initial reviews, and making major mistakes. Cigna wants their reviewing doctors to take about four minutes to check the reviews and decide if warranted, or if it should be approved, and penalizing doctors who do the work to know what's really going on. [more inside]
“I still wanted to help. But I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”
The Deaths of Effective Altruism [archive] by Leif Wenar is a critical assessment of the effective altruism movement, taking in Sam Bankman-Fried and billionaires, Peter Singer and other philosophers, and GiveWell and the wider network of charities working off effective altruistic ideas.
Why do Rabbits like IPAs? Because they're hoppy!
I'm the Draft List at This Brewery, and No, You Can't Have a Light Beer
"Sure, we made a 'normal' IPA once. But then we were like, why make a beer that's enjoyable to drink when we could make a beer that's not?" [McSweeneys]
Hardly the attitude of the next poet laureate
A compendium of Signs and Portents
The Book of Miracles unfolds in chronological order divine wonders and horrors, from Noah’s Ark and the Flood at the beginning to the fall of Babylon the Great Harlot at the end; in between this grand narrative of providence lavish pages illustrate meteorological events of the sixteenth century. In 123 folios with 23 inserts, each page fully illuminated, one astonishing, delicious, supersaturated picture follows another. Vivid with cobalt, aquamarine, verdigris, orpiment, and scarlet pigment, they depict numerous phantasmagoria: clouds of warriors and angels, showers of giant locusts, cities toppling in earthquakes, thunder and lightning. Against dense, richly painted backgrounds, the artist or artists’ delicate brushwork touches in fleecy clouds and the fiery streaming tails of comets. There are monstrous births, plagues, fire and brimstone, stars falling from heaven, double suns, multiple rainbows, meteor showers, rains of blood, snow in summer. [...] Its existence was hitherto unknown, and silence wraps its discovery; apart from the attribution to Augsburg, little is certain about the possible workshop, or the patron for whom such a splendid sequence of pictures might have been created.The Augsburg Book of Miracles: a uniquely entrancing and enigmatic work of Renaissance art, available as a 13-minute video essay, a bound art book with hundreds of pages of trilingual commentary, or a snazzy Wikimedia slideshow of high-resolution scans.
Robbi Mecus, Who Fostered L.G.B.T.Q. Climbing Community, Dies at 52
A New York State forest ranger who worked in the Adirondacks, she died after falling about 1,000 feet from a peak at Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska. (SLNYT gift link) [more inside]
The Dark Side of LED Lighting
The global transition to LED lighting seems to be having some concerning impacts on the natural world and human health.
Endangered Ocelots May Be Expanding Their Range in Texas
Endangered Ocelots May Be Expanding Their Range in Texas. DNA testing of an ocelot killed in 2021 raises the possibility that the creatures may be roaming outside their established South Texas territory, which is currently their only stronghold in the country.
Reality TV for Writers
Life After Running
Life After Running Athletes are often defined by their physical strength. Who are they when they lose it?
It is not a replacement for running, but to live with a chronic condition is to become an expert at negotiating between one’s wants and one’s capacities. It means constantly hacking away at the richness of one’s life—there is nothing casual about it.
My life has gone off the map, it seems. Possibly also off the rails.
At the frame shop there is so much beauty, it can’t be real. Maybe this is the afterlife, I think. Or purgatory. ... When my boss stomps up from his frame-building cellar and sees me, he always barks: Are you still here? Which is literal, because I’m new and only working part time, but also existential because how am I still here—or back here? It’s been a year since I returned to Chicago, but it still doesn’t feel like real life from Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife by Wendy Brenner [Oxford American; ungated]
The reason so much of news media sucks is they aren’t writing for you.
Ken Klippenstein resigns from The Intercept. In his announcement released through his newsletter, Ken details some of the machinations between the management class controlling journalism, and the journalists out there trying to do the work.
Klippenstein will continue publishing his work independently along with legendary editor and national security researcher William Arkin, as well as FOIA specialist Beth Bourdon.
Do you know your mollisols from your alfisols?
"So when you say judging, it’s not, this soil is great. This soil is bad. It’s classification and analysis, right?" (scroll to bottom for transcript). To prepare for the National Collegiate Soil Judging Contest, they spent three intensive practice days describing soils derived from glacial till, outwash, lacustrine sediments, and loess. They braved freezing temperatures, snow and sleet, high winds, pits partially filled with water, and muddy conditions before the weather finally cleared up for the two competition days.
By the way, did you know there are state soils? (folder of pdfs for all states & PR & VI) and New Jersey’s is named Downer. [more inside]
By the way, did you know there are state soils? (folder of pdfs for all states & PR & VI) and New Jersey’s is named Downer. [more inside]
Vicky Osterweil on the muddled anti-politics of contemporary movies
Image without metaphor in Dune 2: Because in 2024, I don't find it hard to believe that people are incredibly excited by the vision of an anti-colonial guerilla movement driven by Islamic faith defeating a massive and technologically dominant empire... I do find it hard to believe that more people in 2024 aren't outraged that Dune Part Two literally features a talking embryo.
Civil War, a piece of radical-centrist, middle brow bothsideism is not only sure to be the most successful film he has made, it is also by some margin the worst. But to my pleasant surprise, it's not a completely terrible and evil film. It is just a deeply mediocre one. [more inside]
Civil War, a piece of radical-centrist, middle brow bothsideism is not only sure to be the most successful film he has made, it is also by some margin the worst. But to my pleasant surprise, it's not a completely terrible and evil film. It is just a deeply mediocre one. [more inside]
JZD Slušovice — A Socialist Miracle in Czechoslovakia
JZD Slušovice was a collective farm established in 1952 in the village of Slušovice in the south east of Czechia, at the time in central Czechoslovakia. When 27 year old František Čuba was appointed chairman of the coöperative in 1963, he decided to use the pretext that the farmland wasn't productive as a reason to branch out into alternative. And so, over the next 25 years the small village turned into an industrial powerhouse, developing amongst other things, a holiday resort and the first Czechoslovak Personal Computer. [more inside]
"This is invisible walls explained, once and for all."
PannenKoek2012: "If you’ve wondered where I’ve been for the past 10 months, it was working day and night on this one video." (YouTube, 3hours, 45 minutes) [more inside]
A team of cavers helped rescue a 50,000-year-old kangaroo fossil
and we'll all go together
Jacob Collier, Laufey and dodie perform a stunning rendition of the Scottish/Irish folk song "Wild Mountain Thyme" together with the National Symphony Orchestra and some delightful audience participation, for the series Next at the Kennedy Center, in an episode presented by Ben Folds.
Strippers' bill of rights bill signed into law in Washington state
Strippers' bill of rights bill signed into law in Washington state. The new law requires training for employees in establishments to prevent sexual harassment, identify and report human trafficking, de-escalate conflict and provide first aid. It also mandates security workers on site, keypad codes on dressing rooms and panic buttons in places where entertainers may be alone with customers. [more inside]
Simply put, there is a *ton* of fascist-chic cosplay involved
Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.” [...] “What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said [last October], after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts.TNR: The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco: "If Balaji Srinivasan is any guide, then the Silicon Valley plutocrats are definitely not okay." [more inside]