Are we being naive ourselves because this article and its author’s product hint at entertainment and literary skill? They seem to do so without the import and weight that time and wisdom bring to the often important weekly topics that are assigned to young writes today.  These are seemingly hurried assignments by magazine Execs that have to be creative and prolific at a rate only made possible by perhaps young and creative kids passing as the wise and testy intellectuals of yesterday’s paper media.

Read the article below and come back to the Policy ThinkShop

and tell us what you think…

“Part of my suspicion of rereading may come from a false sense of reading as conquest. As we polish off some classic text, we may pause a moment to think of ourselves, spear aloft, standing with one foot up on the flank of the slain beast. Another monster bagged. It would be somehow less heroic, as it were, to bend over and check the thing’s pulse. But that, of course, is the stuff of reading—the going back, the poring over, the act of committing something from the experience, whether it be mood or fact, to memory. It is in the postmortem where we learn how a book …”

More via The Curse of Reading and Forgetting : The New Yorker.

“As government officials, community organizations and advocates gear up the consumer information and assistance efforts that will surround this fall’s open enrollment for the health insurance exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), much of the public remains confused about the status of the health law, according to the April Kaiser Health Tracking Poll. Four in ten Americans (42 percent) are unaware that the ACA is still the law of the land, including 12 percent who believe the law has been repealed by Congress, 7 percent who believe it has been overturned by the Supreme Court and 23 percent who don’t know whether or not the ACA remains law. And about half the public says they do not have enough information about the health reform law to understand how it will impact their own family, a share that rises among the uninsured and low-income households.”

More via Kaiser Health Tracking Poll: April 2013 | The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

“Select a subcategory on the left to see how the indicators compare across the states. Results will be shown as a table, map, or trend graph as available.”

via Women’s Health | The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

“The Obama administration went on record four years ago supporting a proposed international treaty to make books more accessible to the blind.

But as world leaders prepare to gather in Morocco next month to finalize a deal that Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay proposed in 2009, the administration is mum on whether it supports a treaty that would, for the first time, loosen …”

via Obama Stops Championing Treaty That Gives the Blind Better Access to E-Books | Threat Level | Wired.com.

Apple and other mega technology winners are cashing in on profits by avoiding domestic tax codes offshore.  They are also using sweatshop labor in Asia.  Ironically, their biggest customers are the “occupy generation” of so called young, highly educated and liberal.

“COMPANIES such as Apple and Google are renowned for their ground-breaking technological innovations. They have also put a great deal of effort into reducing the amount of tax they pay on the mountains of cash those innovations produce. Their tactics are now attractiboth arguments are wright?

Apple and other mega technology winners are cashing in on profits by avoiding domestic tax codes offshore.  They are also using sweatshop labor in Asia.  Ironically, their biggest customers are the “occupy generation” of so called young, highly educated and liberal.

via Apple’s tax arrangements: Biting criticism | The Economist.

What is this world coming to?  Our use of technology to share thoughts and images is creating billion dollar companies and changing commerce.  The internet economy and the gadgets that support it are impacting what we do, how we spend our money and how companies influence what we do and how we spend our money.

Yahoo is making an aggressive move to stay afloat with the cyber giants allowing it to tumble with the best…

Do you Yahoo and tumble?

“AT A recent conference, Ken Goldman, the chief financial officer of Yahoo, admitted that the internet giant had an aging audience and was looking for things to “make us cool again”. The firm’s senior executives appear to think Tumblr can give it a …”

MORE via Yahoo: Rough and Tumblr | The Economist.

“A giant tornado, a mile wide or more, killed at least 51 people as it tore across parts of …”

via Vast Oklahoma Tornado Kills at Least 51 – NYTimes.com.

The Koch brothers continue to be the target of media attention and this time they are not strategizing or paying for it.  They are getting a freebee.  It appears that an environmental secretion from their pursuit of wealth function has piled up higher and deeper in the  eye of the media and in the middle of the “pristine” great lakes region.  Oil… of course.  Texas gold, or US black mud… or whatever earth exploiters and investors call it these days.  Environmentalists and world builders are colliding once again as they accuse one another about tree hugging the world on the one hand and exploiting it for  greed on the other.  In the meantime the real lesson at hand here goes unnoticed.

The key and central problem we see on the horizon today is not piles of environmental waste but the proverbial “free rider problem” which is as old as cave metaphors and necessary untruths.   It is big corporate money (to be sure corporate profits in the hands of ideologues) applied to our political discourse.  The NYTs points it out… but what are we to do?

“Assumption Park gives residents of this city lovely views of the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit skyline. Lately they’ve been treated to another sight: a three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire city block on the other side of the …”

via Mountain of Petroleum Coke From Oil Sands Rises in Detroit – NYTimes.com.

via Meg Jay: Why 30 is not the new 20 | Video on TED.com.

• “This month’s Visualizing Health Policy infographic provides information about the role of Medicaid and Medicare in women’s health care: the proportion of US women who are covered by Medicaid and Medicare; how women comprise the majority of those covered by the Medicaid and Medicare programs and the majority of those receiving long-term services and supports (such as home health care); how women on Medicaid are poorer and sicker than women with private coverage; how Medicaid is a primary payer for women’s reproductive health services; and how women on Medicare spend more than their male counterparts on medical care and also have higher rates of health problems and social challenges.”

via Visualizing Health Policy: The Role of Medicaid and Medicare in Women’s Health Care | The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.