British Socialized Medicine Refused to Save Life of Critic Who Loved America

(p. A29) A. A. Gill, an essayist and cultural critic whose stylishly malicious restaurant reviews for The Sunday Times made him one of Britain’s most celebrated journalists, died on Saturday [December 7, 2016] in London. He was 62.
Martin Ivens, the editor of The Sunday Times, announced the death, calling Mr. Gill “the heart and soul of the paper.” The cause was lung cancer.
. . .
In a long article published Sunday [December 8, 2016], after his death, Mr. Gill wrote, without rancor, that Britain’s National Health Service had refused to pay for immunotherapy that he said might have extended his life.
. . .
As a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he dismissed the pâté at the beloved Paris bistro L’Ami Louis as tasting like “pressed liposuction.” The shrimp and foie gras dumplings at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Asian restaurant 66, in Manhattan, were “fishy liver-filled condoms,” he wrote, “with a savor that lingered like a lovelorn drunk and tasted as if your mouth had been used as the swab bin in an animal hospital.”
Vituperation was not his only mode. He could praise. He could turn an elegant phrase and toss off a pithy bon mot. “America’s genius has always been to take something old, familiar and wrinkled and repackage it as new, exciting and smooth,” he wrote in “The Golden Door: Letters to America” (2012), published in the United States in 2013 as “To America With Love.”
. . .
“When people fatuously ask me why I don’t write constructive criticism, I tell them there is no such thing,” he wrote in his memoir. “Critics do deconstructive criticism. If you want compliments, phone your mother.”

For the full obituary, see:
WILLIAM GRIMES. “A. A. Gill Dies at 62; Skewered Britain’s Restaurants.” The New York Times (Tues., DEC. 13, 2016): A29.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed dates, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date DEC. 12, 2016, and has the title “A. A. Gill, Who Gleefully Skewered Britain’s Restaurants, Dies at 62.”)

Gill’s book praising America, is:
Gill, A.A. To America with Love. Reprint ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.

Pope Francis Has “a Great Allergy to Economic Things”

(p. A7) ABOARD THE PAPAL AIRPLANE — Pope Francis has dedicated his papacy to the plight of the poor and delivered severe critiques of economic systems that benefit the rich. But flying back to Rome from his eight-day visit to Latin America, Francis admitted he had overlooked a group.
He has delivered few messages for the global middle class.
“Thank you,” he replied, after a German journalist, Ludwig Ring-Eifel, asked about the omission. “It’s a good correction, thanks. You are right. It’s an error of mine not to think about this.”
. . .
In fact, the pope expressed “a great allergy to economic things,” explaining that his father had been an accountant who often brought work home on weekends.
“I don’t understand it very well,” he said of economics, even though the issue of economic justice has become central to his papacy.
. . .
“Then, on the middle class, there are some words that I’ve said — but a little in passing,” he said, musing. “But talking about the common people, the simple people, the workers, that is a great value, no? But I think you’re telling me about something I need to do. I need to delve further into this.”

For the full story, see:
JIM YARDLEY. “In His Focus on Rich and Poor, Pope Admits to Overlooking the Middle Class.” The New York Times (Tues., JULY 14, 2015): A7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JULY 13, 2015, and has the title “Pope Francis Says He’s Overlooked the World’s Middle Class.”)

Solar Power Plants Generate Far Less Electricity than Predicted

(p. B1) Some costly high-tech solar power projects aren’t living up to promises their backers made about how much electricity they could generate.
Solar-thermal technology, which uses mirrors to capture the sun’s rays, was once heralded as the advance that would overtake old fashioned solar panel farms. But a series of missteps and technical difficulties threatens to make newfangled solar-thermal technology obsolete.
The $2.2 billion Ivanpah solar power project in California’s Mojave Desert is supposed to be generating more than a million megawatt-hours of electricity each year. But 15 months after starting up, the plant is producing just 40% of that, according to data from the U.S. Energy Department.
. . .
One big miscalculation was that the power plant requires far more steam to run smoothly and efficiently than originally thought, according to a document filed with the California Energy Commission. Instead of ramping up the plant each day before sunrise by burning one hour’s worth of natural gas to generate steam, Ivanpah needs more than four times that much help from fossil fuels to get the plant humming every morning. Another unexpected problem: not enough sun. Weather predictions for the area underestimated the amount of cloud cover that has blanketed Ivanpah since it went into service in 2013.
Ivanpah isn’t the only new solar-thermal project struggling to energize the grid. A large mirror-powered plant built in Arizona almost two years ago by Abengoa SA of Spain has also had its share of hiccups. Designed to deliver a million megawatt hours of power annually, the plant is putting out roughly half that, federal data show.

For the full story, see:
CASSANDRA SWEET. “High-Tech Solar Plants Fail to Deliver.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., June 13, 2015): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 12, 2015, and has the title “High-Tech Solar Projects Fail to Deliver.”)

Americans Increasingly Buying Guns for Self-Defense

(p. A11) A new study of gun ownership in the United States notes a shift: Americans are increasingly interested in handguns, the types of small weapons that are easily hidden and used for self-defense, rather than rifles and shotguns used for hunting and shooting sports.
The study, conducted in 2015 by researchers from Harvard and Northeastern, sought to better understand the size and composition of the country’s gun inventory. It found that handguns made up 42 percent of the country’s privately owned firearms, up from 34 percent in 1994.

For the full story, see:
JULIE TURKEWITZ and TROY GRIGGS. “Looking for Security, More in U.S. Pick Up a Handgun.” The New York Times (Sat., OCT. 15, 2016): A11.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 14, 2016, and has the title “Handguns Are the New Home Security.”)

Hitler Could Not Face Reality (or His Conscience?) Without Opiates and Cocaine

(p. C1) Given the sheer tonnage of books already devoted to the Nazis and Hitler, you might assume that everything interesting, terrible and bizarre is already known about one of history’s most notorious regimes and its genocidal leader. Then along comes Norman Ohler, a soft-spoken 46-year-old novelist from Berlin, who rummages through military archives and emerges with this startling fact: The Third Reich was on drugs.
All sorts of drugs, actually, and in stupefying quantities, as Mr. Ohler documents in “Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany,” a best seller in Germany and Britain that will be published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in April [2017]. He was in New York City last week and sat for an interview before giving a lecture to a salon in a loft in the East Village, near Cooper Union.
. . .
. . . the most vivid portrait of abuse and withdrawal in “Blitzed” is that of Hitler, who for years was regularly injected by his personal physician with powerful opiates, like Eukodal, a brand of oxycodone once praised by William S. Burroughs as “truly awful.” For a few undoubtedly euphoric months, Hitler was also getting swabs of high-grade cocaine, a sedation and stimulation combo that Mr. Ohler likens to a “classic speedball.”
. . .
(p. C4) “There are all these stories of party leaders coming to complain about their bombed-out cities,” Mr. Ohler said, “and Hitler just says: ‘We’re going to win. These losses make us stronger.’ And the leaders would say: ‘He knows something we don’t know. He probably has a miracle weapon.’ He didn’t have a miracle weapon. He had a miracle drug, to make everyone think he had a miracle weapon.”
Lanky and angular, Mr. Ohler quietly conveys the mordant humor that occasionally surfaces in his book, which has a chapter titled “High Hitler.”

For the full interview, see:
DAVID SEGAL. “How Hitler’s Henchmen Were Kept Hopped Up.” The New York Times (Fri., December 10, 2016): C1 & C4.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date Dec. 9, 2016, and has the title “High on Hitler and Meth: Book Says Nazis Were Fueled by Drugs.”)

The book mentioned in the interview, is:
Ohler, Norman. Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Northwest Passage Cruise Ship Sells Out in Three Weeks

(p. B1) Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen took three years in the early 1900s to complete the first successful navigation of the Northwest Passage, the ice-choked arctic sea route connecting the Pacific and Atlantic. Only in 1944, did a ship make it through in a single year.
This summer, the Crystal Serenity–a 820-foot-long, 13-deck cruise ship with a casino, a movie theater, six restaurants and a driving range–is planning to steam through in less than a month.
Operated by Los Angeles-based Crystal Cruises LLC, the trip sold out in three weeks, with some 1,000 would-be passengers paying about $22,000 each.
. . .
About 200 ships have traversed the 900-mile route since Amundsen’s voyage between 1903 and 1906. But most of those have gone through just in the last decade as ocean warming diminishes ice cover further, and for longer, during the summer months.

For the full story, see:
Costas Paris. “Luxury Cruise to Conquer Northwest Passage.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., May 11, 2016): B1-B2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 10, 2016, and has the title “Luxury Cruise to Conquer Northwest Passage.”)

Mice Genome Reprogrammed to Rejuvenate Organs and Extend Life

(p. A22) At the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., scientists are trying to get time to run backward.
Biological time, that is. In the first attempt to reverse aging by reprogramming the genome, they have rejuvenated the organs of mice and lengthened their life spans by 30 percent. The technique, which requires genetic engineering, cannot be applied directly to people, but the achievement points toward better understanding of human aging and the possibility of rejuvenating human tissues by other means.
The Salk team’s discovery, reported in the Thursday issue of the journal Cell, is “novel and exciting,” said Jan Vijg, an expert on aging at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
Leonard Guarente, who studies the biology of aging at M.I.T., said, “This is huge,” citing the novelty of the finding and the opportunity it creates to slow down, if not reverse, aging. “It’s a pretty remarkable finding, and if it holds up it could be quite important in the history of aging research,” Dr. Guarente said.
. . .
Ten years ago, the Japanese biologist Shinya Yamanaka amazed researchers by identifying four critical genes that reset the clock of the fertilized egg. The four genes are so powerful that they will reprogram even the genome of skin or intestinal cells back to the embryonic state.
. . .
Dr. Izpisua Belmonte believes these beneficial effects have been obtained by resetting the clock of the aging process. The clock is created by the epigenome, the system of proteins that clads the cell’s DNA and controls which genes are active and which are suppressed.
. . .
Dr. Izpisua Belmonte sees the epigenome as being like a manuscript that is continually edited. “At the end of life there are many marks and it is difficult for the cell to read them,” he said.
What the Yamanaka genes are doing in his mice, he believes, is eliminating the extra marks, thus reverting the cell to a more youthful state.
The Salk biologists “do indeed provide what I believe to be the first evidence that partial reprogramming of the genome ameliorated symptoms of tissue degeneration and improved regenerative capacity,” Dr. Vijg said.

For the full story, see:
NICHOLAS WADE. “Scientists Learn About Human Aging by Lengthening the Life Span of Mice.” The New York Times (Fri., DEC. 16, 2016): A22.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 15, 2016, and has the title “Scientists Say the Clock of Aging May Be Reversible.”)

1.87 Births Per U.S. Couple in 2015

(p. A2) The U.S. is experiencing a baby lull that looks set to last for years, a shift demographers say will likely ripple through the U.S. economy and have an impact on everything from maternity wards to federal social programs.
. . .
Demographic Intelligence, a Charlottesville, Va., firm that forecasts birth trends, projects there were about 4 million babies born in the U.S. in 2015, up slightly from the 3.99 million babies born the previous year. The total fertility rate–a snapshot that measures the number of births the average woman will have during her lifetime–is expected to rise to 1.87 in 2015 from 1.86 the previous year, according to the firm. It says its projections, which rely on unemployment rates, consumer-confidence measures and other variables, have been about 99% accurate in recent years.
That is well below the relatively strong fertility rates that started during the late 1980s and lasted until 2007, when the total fertility rate peaked at 2.12 babies per woman.

For the full story, see:
JANET ADAMY. “Low Birth Rate Poses Economic Challenge.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., May 11, 2016): A2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 10, 2016, and has the title “Baby Lull Promises Growing Pains for Economy.” The passages quoted above include a sentence (at the end of the second quoted paragraph) that appears in the online, but not in the print, version.)

Kahneman Was “Consumed with Despair” Over Writing “Thinking, Fast and Slow”

(p. C23) Mr. Lewis has always had a knack for identifying eccentrics and horde-defiers who somehow tell us a larger story, generally about an idea that violates our most basic intuition. In “Moneyball,” he gave us Billy Beane, who rejected the wisdom of traditional baseball scouts and rehabilitated the Oakland A’s through statistical reasoning. In “The Big Short,” he gave us an assortment of jittery misfits who bet against the housing market.
In “The Undoing Project,” Mr. Lewis has found the granddaddy of all stories about counterintuition, because Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Tversky did some of the most definitive research about just how majestically, fantastically unreliable our intuition can be. The biases they identified that distort our decision-making are now so well known — like our outsize aversion to loss, for instance — that we take them for granted. Together, you can safely say, these two men made possible the field of behavioral economics, which is predicated on the notion that humans do not always behave rationally.
. . .
In a remarkable note on his sources, Mr. Lewis reveals that for years he watched Dr. Kahneman agonize over his 2011 book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” which became both a critical and a fan favorite. “Every few months he’d be consumed with despair, and announce that he was giving up writing altogether — before he destroyed his own reputation,” Mr. Lewis writes. “To forestall his book’s publication he paid a friend to find people who might convince him not to publish it.”

For the full review, see:
JENNIFER SENIOR . “Books of The Times; Two Men, Mismatched Yet Perfectly Paired.” The New York Times (Fri., December 2, 2016): C21 & C23.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 1, 2016, and has the title “Books of The Times; Michael Lewis on Two Well Matched (but Finally Mismatched) Men.”)

The book under review, is:
Lewis, Michael. The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2016.

To Save Administrative Costs, Health-Care Providers Give Discounts for Paying Out-of-Pocket

(p. R6) As consumers get savvier about shopping for health care, some are finding a curious trend: More hospitals, imaging centers, outpatient surgery centers and pharmacy chains will give them deep discounts if they pay cash instead of using insurance.
When Nancy Surdoval, a retired lawyer, needed a knee X-ray last year, Boulder Community Hospital in Colorado said it would cost her $600, out of pocket, using her high-deductible insurance, or just $70 if she paid cash upfront.
When she needed an MRI to investigate further, she was offered a similar choice–she could pay $1,100, out of pocket, using her insurance, or $600 if she self-paid in cash.
Rather than feel good about the savings, Ms. Surdoval got angry at her carrier, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona. “I’m paying $530 a month in premiums and I get charged more than someone who just walks in off the street?” says Ms. Surdoval, who divides her time between Boulder and Tucson. “I thought insurance companies negotiated good deals for us. Now things are totally upside down.”
Deep discounts
Not long ago, hospitals routinely charged uninsured patients their highest rates, far more than insured patients paid for the same services. Now, in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of health-care prices, the opposite is often true: Patients who pay up front in cash often get better deals than their insurance plans have negotiated for them.
That is partly due to new state and federal rules aimed at protecting uninsured patients from price gouging. (Under the Affordable Care Act, for example, tax-exempt hospitals can’t charge financially strapped patients much more than Medicare pays.) Many hospitals also offer discounts if patients pay in cash on the day of service, because it saves administrative work and collection hassles. Cash prices are officially aimed at the uninsured, but people with coverage aren’t legally required to use it.
Hospitals, meanwhile, have sought ever-higher rates from commercial insurers to make up for losses on other patients. Insurers pass those negotiated rates on to plan members, and given the growth in high-deductible plans, more Americans are paying those rates in full, out of pocket, than ever before.

For the full story, see:
Beck, Melinda. “Here’s a Way to Cut Your Health-Care Bill: Pay Cash.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Feb. 16, 2016): R6.
(Note: bold heading in original.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Feb. 15, 2016, and has the title “How to Cut Your Health-Care Bill: Pay Cash.”)

Glorious Colors of Fall Leaves Last Longer with Global Warming

(p. A20) IONA, Nova Scotia — A century ago, the flaming fall foliage in Nova Scotia would have long faded by early November. But today, some of the hills are still as nubbly with color as an aunt’s embroidered pillow.
Climate change is responsible, scientists say. As the seasonal change creeps later into the year, not only here but all across the northern United States and Canada, the glorious colors will last longer, they predict — a rare instance where global warming is giving us something to look forward to.
“If climate change makes eastern North America drier, then autumn colors will be spectacular, as they are on the Canadian Shield in dry summers, especially the red maples,” said Root Gorelick, a biology professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. The Canadian Shield is a broad ring of forests and ancient bedrock that extends hundreds of miles from the shores of Hudson Bay.
Over the very long term, the warming planet may have a negative effect on fall foliage, but even then any adverse impact is uncertain. It is not just an aesthetic question, but an economic one as well: The changing colors drive billions of dollars in “leaf peeping” tourism in Canada and the United States.
“From a peeper’s point of view, it’s good news,” said Marco Archetti, the lead author of a 2013 paper at Harvard on predicting climate change impacts on autumn colors in New England.
. . .
The Harvard study, which looked at the percentage and duration of autumn color in Harvard Forest in central Massachusetts from 1993 to 2010, predicted that with current climate change forecasts, the duration of the fall display would increase about one day for every 10 years. Look at it this way: Children born this year could have an extra week to enjoy the colors by the time they are 70.
The study further analyzed data for trees that turn red: red maple, sugar maple, black gum, white oak, red oak, black oak, black cherry and white ash. Only in white ash trees did the duration and full display of color decrease. In the others, the amount and duration of red leaves increased over the course of 18 years.
The Harvard study used data collected by John O’Keefe, the museum coordinator, now emeritus, at Harvard Forest, who made his observations by eye — estimating the percentage of colored leaves for each species and the duration from when 10 percent of a tree’s leaves turned color to when 90 percent had turned.
Those observations have been validated by Andrew Richardson, a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard, who has since set up a network of 350 “phenocams,” cameras that quantify the duration and intensity of autumn colors in locations from Alaska to Hawaii, Arizona to Maine and up into Canada.
“John’s direct observations on the ground line up pretty well with the camera data,” Professor Richardson said.

For the full story, see:
CRAIG S. SMITH. “How a Changing Climate Helps Add Color to a Leaf Peeper’s Paradise.” The New York Times (Thurs., NOV. 3, 2016): A20.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date NOV. 2, 2016, and has the title “How a Changing Climate Is Shaping a Leaf Peeper’s Paradise.” )