Snow day

The snow was nowhere near as heavy as the dire predictions. Good reason to work at home, though. The feeling of being snowbound, even if it's an illusion, helps improve concentration when working on deadline. Fewer distractions than in the office. Now if that cat would just get off my lap...

Hand-written letters — a dying custom, or just a new market niche waiting to be filled?

The old fashioned art of letter writing, if not quite dead yet, is certainly moribund, according to the NYT. With a few exceptions:

Of course, there are letter-writing holdouts. Even though Jill L. Johnson, 48, relies on e-mail messages in her job as a marketing executive for an insurance company in Madison, Wis., she corresponds with certain friends the old-fashioned way.

"You have to put something more into it," Ms. Johnson said. "Putting script to paper connotes something special."

She writes down thoughts, reminiscences or quotes she has read and sends them to her father and other relatives, friends and her four children, including her college-age daughter in Washington. She also jots missives to her fiancé, Joel Chapiewsky, who also lives in Madison, and who "just eats it up that I send him notes," Ms. Johnson said.

The speed and convenience of e-mail seem to be the main reason for the decline in snail mail correspondence. But there’s apparently another culprit. More and more people just cannot conceive of writing anything without seeing their words on a screen and running them through a spell-checker.

Recently, Mr. Kowtoniuk, the Harvard graduate student, bought a card for his mother's birthday and added his own handwritten message. But first he typed out what he wanted to say on his computer. Then he spell-checked it, found a pen and wrote his message in ink on the card.

"I was afraid of making a mistake," he explained. His painstaking efforts to get it just right were appreciated. His mother, he said, "was surprised and cried when she opened the card."

If people are willing to employ such a complex "high tech, high touch" methodology to create a hand-written note, surely this represents a nascent market niche. What about a software program that would digitize your handwriting and use it to create your own personal note font? Naturally, it would also automate the process of printing out your “handwritten” note on matching notecards and envelopes.

Hallmark, are you listening?

Why would anyone name a sitcom after a punchline in the first episode?

The return of Julia Louis-Dreyfus to sitcom country helped CBS win the ratings last night. Loved the show, hated its name — “The New Adventures of Old Christine.” If you know the gag (the younger woman her ex is seeing is also named Christine, so Julia’s “the old Christine), the title is redundant. If you don’t, it makes no sense. And either way, it’s too long and klunky. But there’s nothing klunky about JLD, and the whole show is well-cast. Hope it makes it and finally breaks the “Seinfeld Jinx.” Julia deserves it, and so do we.

New York Times Ambien Watch

First it was "sleep-driving." Now it's "sleep-eating." What's next — "sleep-journalism"? Would that be anything new? How would we know? What are the signs?

The elephant in the room

Everybody agrees not to talk about it. The elephant has been standing in the room for nearly five years (and yes, the room is getting a little ripe), and yet nobody refers to it, preferring to ignore it altogether or talk around it. And it's not just the mainstream media, but the alternative media and the blogosphere as well. You could call it a repressed memory.

The elephant represents what it was that so terrified the American public, the media and our congressional representatives in the fall of 2001 that they began buying Bush's war on terror, including the Iraq war, almost without question. It related to terrorism and WMD. But it was not the 9/11 attack. The attack was tragic and brutal, horrible to contemplate — but everyone knew that nothing quite like that could happen again in quite the same way. It was a fiendish one-off. Anyhow, it was clear Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with it. It was not Saddam's alleged nuclear capabilities — it was pretty clear at the time that was a crock — but it did relate to a different kind of WMD.

The elephant in the room that nobody talks about today and scarcely seems to remember is anthrax — specifically the attacks in the fall of 2001 that brought the U.S. Postal Service to its knees and traumatized not only the American public but their targets in the news media and in Congress. That's really when everything changed and fear became a driving force in our political life in a way it had not since the nuclear hysteria of the early cold war. It was the fear of anthrax, not nukes, that gave Colin Powell's presentation to the UN what credibility it had. It was fear of anthrax, more than anything else, that drove us into Iraq. The FBI eventually said the strain of anthrax used in the attacks came from U.S. weapons labs, the perpetrator has never been caught and — theoretically — could strike again, but the entire country acts as if this were unimportant, not worthy of discussion. Strange. We're probably still afraid.

It's time we started talking about it.

Here’s an idea that’s probably too simplistic to work, but I’m not sure why.

From the New York Review of Books overview by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells of the health insurance crisis and what should be done about it:

We're talking about large cost savings. Indeed, the available evidence suggests that if the United States were to replace its current complex mix of health insurance systems with standardized, universal coverage, the savings would be so large that we could cover all those currently uninsured, yet end up spending less overall. That's what happened in Taiwan, which adopted a single-payer system in 1995: the percentage of the population with health insurance soared from 57 percent to 97 percent, yet health care costs actually grew more slowly than one would have predicted from trends before the change in system.

They make it clear that the path to reform won’t be easy, given the tenacity of the special interests and the cowardice of our elected representatives.

We believe that the compromise plans being proposed by the cautious reformers would run into the same political problems, and that it would be politically smarter as well as economically superior to go for broke: to propose a straightforward single-payer system, and try to sell voters on the huge advantages such a system would bring. But this would mean taking on the drug and insurance companies rather than trying to co-opt them, and even progressive policy wonks, let alone Democratic politicians, still seem too timid to do that.

So what will really happen to American health care? Many people in this field believe that in the end America will end up with national health insurance, and perhaps with a lot of direct government provision of health care, simply because nothing else works. But things may have to get much worse before reality can break through the combination of powerful interest groups and free-market ideology.

My question is this: Given that our current system seems to be falling apart faster than we can patch it (employers dropping health plans, employees facing rising costs, not to mention the growing numbers of uninsured) and given that there’s no plan for a new system that seems to have any widespread political support, why not start with an existing system that works?

Someday we’ll have universal, single-payer coverage. Why not build a bridge to that outcome by lowering the eligibility age for our current, successful single payer system — Medicare — by a few years each year?

Millions of older workers are working only for the insurance and would retire, work part time at something else, or start their own businesses if they could. Making them eligible for Medicare would create jobs and spur economic activity. Taking older, less healthy workers out of the system would reduce financial pressures on employers and employees alike.

In short, we would begin to relieve the crazy pressures that are building up, while buying time and perhaps some political space to craft a stable long-term solution.