It’s been a particularly vicious election season, and it’s not over yet. Dangerous rhetoric, including Trump goading his supporters to violence, has produced an environment of rancor that seems designed to bring out the worst in people. Yet among each day’s new stories of political grandstanding and admissions of sexual assault, two stories of people
Don’t get up, gentlemen, I’m only passing through. —”Times Have Changed” The news that Bob Dylan has been awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature brings with it, appropriately enough, a conundrum: Does Dylan deserve the Nobel, and does the Nobel deserve Dylan? The answer is that, like a pair of lovers from one of
I was wandering down the internet rabbit hole the other day when I came across one of those jokes that can be found in various versions in several places around the web. One version goes like this: A man is convinced he is dead. His wife and kids are exasperated. They keep telling him he’s not
Externalities are everywhere, once you start looking for them. These are the costs (or, sometimes, the benefits) that accrue to those outside of an economic transaction who likely didn’t consent to pay for them. I’ve written about them before, such as how WalMart profits by not having to pay for security services that are provided
United States Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) has written a letter urging the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to reject the proposed $465 million settlement reached between the government and Mylan, Inc. after it was discovered the beleaguered corporation, responsible for increasing the price of the life-saving EpiPen to $600 per 2-pak in August of this
After reports of former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson’s $20 million settlement with the network over allegations of sexual harassment by then CEO Roger Ailes, several more allegations against Ailes began to surface, with a number of female employees claiming they, too, had been harassed by him. Some chose to remain anonymous, while others chose
On Friday, October 14, Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara N. Bellis dismissed a lawsuit brought by nine surviving family members of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary school massacre against the gun company who manufactured the gun used by Adam Lanza to carry out the shooting. The lawsuit alleged both the manufacturers of the
Imagine receiving a diagnosis of cancer, complete with a treatment protocol that included grueling chemotherapy treatments, radiation and a surgically-placed port in your chest, only to learn a year later you never actually had the disease and were the victim of a misdiagnosis. I think in most cases, patients would not only want answers, but
In what quickly became a viral sensation, Outside magazine reporter Rowan Jacobsen, who writes about food and travel for the publication, wrote an homage to the Great Barrier Reef in the form of an obituary, stating it had “passed away in 2016 after a long illness. It was 25 million years old.” The story about
There’s no denying the upcoming presidential election has exposed a dark, sick, seedy side of our society in which sexual assault, harassment, and abuse targeted toward women has become a staple of our day-to-day conversations, and how seemingly desensitized we’ve become to it. I can’t think of another point in history when we have had