How American Health Care Killed My Father - The Atlantic (September 2009)
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care

I’m a businessman, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the persistence of bad industry practices—from long lines at the doctor’s office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths—seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause. There needs to be a business reason why an industry, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor customer service, unaffordable prices, and uneven results—a reason my father and so many others are unnecessarily killed.

This was the system's great flaw, and it enraged us. A pure meritocracy, we'd discovered, can only promote; it can't legitimize. It can confer success but can't grant knighthood. For that it needs a class beyond itself: the high-born genealogical peerage that aptitude testing was created to supplant with a cast of brainy up-and-comers. But we still needed to impress them: the wasp New Englanders with weekend coke habits, well-worn deck shoes, and vaguely leftish politics devised in reaction to their parents' conservatism, to which they'd slowly return as they aged. They didn't have our test scores, but they had style, a charismatic aura of entitlement, and V and I were desperate for a piece of it.

A pure meritocracy, we'd discovered, can only promote; it can't legitimize. It can confer success but can't grant knighthood. For that it needs a class beyond itself: the high-born genealogical peerage that aptitude testing was created to supplant with a cast of brainy up-and-comers. But we still needed to impress them: the wasp New Englanders with weekend coke habits, well-worn deck shoes, and vaguely leftish politics devised in reaction to their parents' conservatism, to which they'd slowly return as they aged. They didn't have our test scores, but they had style, a charismatic aura of entitlement, and V and I were desperate for a piece of it.

Percentile is destiny in America. That's why we're here: we all showed aptitude. Aptitude for showing aptitude, mainly. That's what they wanted, so that's what we delivered. A talent for nothing, but a knack for everything. Nobody told us it wouldn't be enough. I'd never bothered to contemplate the moment when the quest for trophies would end and the game of trading on them would begin. Once, I'd had nowhere to go but up. Now, it seemed, I had nowhere to go at all.

James Warren article

By James Warren, former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune

rticle on the state of newpapers, and their imoprtance to our culture

A former managing editor of The Chicago Tribune probes the collapse of the newspaper industry and tries, mostly in vain, to find hope for the future of journalism.

In journalism’s new Internet-dominated landscape, in which attitude and attack are often valued more than precision and truth, handiwork like Crewdson’s is seen as taking too long and costing too much. His situation is hardly unique—the other investigative reporter at the Tribune’s D.C. bureau was told to leave at the same time, as was the top investigator at the Washington bureau of The Los Angeles Times, which is also owned by the Tribune Company. But as an example of journalism’s very best, Crewdson's dismissal is a symbol of the extent to which the news media are imploding. And that implosion is a development with far-reaching implications.

Good essay by a journalist on the current disintegration of paid journalism, but it is exactly this writer's attitude about the noble and essential role of journalism in a democracy that has set the project up for destruction.

"In journalism’s new Internet-dominated landscape, in which attitude and attack are often valued more than precision and truth, handiwork like [John] Crewdson’s is seen as taking too long and costing too much. His situation is hardly unique—the other investigative reporter at the [Chicago] Tribune’s D.C. bureau was told to leave at the same time, as was the top investigator at the Washington bureau of The Los Angeles Times, which is also owned by the Tribune Company. But as an example of journalism’s very best, Crewdson's dismissal is a symbol of the extent to which the news media are imploding. And that implosion is a development with far-reaching implications...."

hink cleanup is easy enough. Depending on where I am, I put coffee grounds (not espresso grounds) down the sink drain. This h

“In a magazine of ideas, writers depend on words to build their arguments, but we didn’t want The Atlantic’s pages to look like homework,”

redesign da revista The Atlantic

The Atlantic Magazine 2008 redesign

Peantagram Luke hayman

Breve descrição sobre a mudança visual da revista The Atlantic Monthly.