Since the implementation of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act—and the mandatory coverage it brought—most patients needing a procedure such as an echocardiogram can count on some form of insurance. But Obamacare put no controls on the pricing of drugs or clinical care, leaving the profit-driven health industry mostly intact. As a result, patients are too often required to pay large out-of-pocket costs while insurance premiums have continued to rise.
bookreview
Afghanistan: It’s Too Late
To continue seeing the conflict in Afghanistan only through the prism of war and troop numbers as the US does will only lead to continuing erosion of the government’s legitimacy. and loss of territory. Taliban attacks will increase, there will be continued loss of territory, and the government may collapse. This is a recipe for failure.
Consciousness: Who’s at the Wheel?
Parks: Where does that leave the concept of free will?
Manzotti: We often confuse freedom with arbitrariness, as though freedom were tantamount to doing something in a random way. But we are only really free, or rather we savor our freedom, when what we do is the necessary expression of what we are.
Lost in Arabia
The 1761-1767 doomed Danish expedition to the Middle East was little known for many years. In Felix Arabia, an account of the expedition recently published in a new edition, Thorkild Hansen sometimes doubts the expedition’s influence. But since, its reputation has burgeoned. Despite the losses and decay suffered by its findings, the maps, studies in zoology and botany, and other discoveries were a gift to the future. In 2011, the 250th anniversary of the expedition’s departure was celebrated with pride.
The New Face of Russian Resistance
As long as some Russians, including some very young ones, are willing—as they were on Monday—to brave streets filled with riot police, they keep an unreasonable hope alive, and they increase the chances that opposition activist Alexei Navalny will survive and stay out of prison. That’s not nothing.
Words Still Matter
James Comey’s June 8 hearing proved that it is still possible for politicians to speak in complete sentences, to display a familiarity with history, to strive for linguistic and moral clarity: to make sense. But we are still waiting to hear from the senators and representatives with the fortitude to say lie as often as Trump’s supporters repeat not under investigation.
Lygia Pape’s Radical Banquet
By the time she made it, Brazilian artist Lygia Pape’s career had evolved through two schools of geometric abstraction—Concretism and its less rigid Rio de Janeiro counterpart Neo-Concretism. She had made paintings, sculpture, artists’ books, films, installations, and performance art. A retrospective of Pape’s work currently at the Met Breuer—her first solo exhibit in the United States—is highly conceptual, drawing on semiotics, architectural theory, and anthropology, but never losing a deep connection with the visceral realities of daily life.
A Mystic Monumentality
In recent years Louis Kahn’s messy personal history has threatened to overshadow his immense professional accomplishments, yet his aura has grown steadily, not just for what he achieved but also because of what has taken place in the built environment since his death. After he almost single-handedly restored architecture’s age-old status as an art form, his legacy was quickly squandered by younger coprofessionals. From the mid-1970s onward they have careened from one extreme, short-lived stylistic fad to the next—Postmodernism, Deconstructivism, Blobitecture—and lost sight of the profound values Kahn wanted to convey: timelessness, solidity, nobility, and repose.
A Voice for the Voiceless
From the age of fourteen until he graduated from high school in 1946, Philip Levine worked summers and after school, first at part-time jobs in the neighborhood and then in factories. Even after he got his bachelor’s degree from Wayne State University in 1950, he continued working the same type of jobs. As his witty mother used to joke, “Philip set out to prove there is social mobility in America, so he got born smack-dab in the middle of the middle class, grew up in the lower middle class, and then as an adult joined the working class.”
Britain: The End of a Fantasy
Brexit is an elite project dressed up in rough attire. Because Theresa May doesn’t actually believe in Brexit, she’s improvising a way forward very roughly sketched out by other people. In Britain’s recent election, May’s phony populism came up against the Labour party’s more genuine brand of anti-establishment radicalism that convinced the young and the marginalized that they had something to come out and vote for.
Sig Nordal 