The New Yorker, 2006-08-28

[fiefoe]

"The Risk Pool" / Malcolm Gladwell

• The labor movement believed that the safest and most efficient way to provide insurance against ill health or old age was to spread the costs and risks of benefits over the biggest and most diverse group possible.
• “For such a plan to give real security, the financial strength of the company and its economic success must be reasonably secure for the next forty years,” Drucker wrote (in 1950). “But is there any one company or any one industry whose future can be predicted with certainty for even ten years ahead?” He concluded, “The recent pension plans thus offer no more security against the big bad wolf of old age than the little piggy’s house of straw.”
• They got in trouble in the nineteen-nineties because they were around in the nineteen-fifties—and survived to pay for the retirement of the workers they hired forty years ago. They got in trouble because they innovated, and became more efficient in their use of labor.

“Petrified” / John Lahr

__ The experience, with the metabolic changes it sets off - sweating, confusion, the loss of language - is a simulacrum of dying.
__ ...the blissful state of the infant, who develops strategies to insure his mother's collaboration.. Poise is an expression of the desire to be wanted and loved - a form of social security.
__ Fry: "You're trying to recapture the 'first fine, careless rapture.' The first time you felt king of time and space, the first spinning joy of it all."

"Manifold Destiny" / Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber

"Uppie Redux?" / David Denby

• In those early years of the century, socialism was a kind of militant humanism; Sinclair, like many socialists of the period, believed that the scramble for profits degraded relations between people.
• ... a product of that period... in which rapid industrialization and America’s abrupt rise to world prominence created a variety of great two-dimensional characters: Henry Ford, with his anti-Semitism; John D. Rockefeller, with his sour contempt for humanity; D. W. Griffith, with his penchant for Victorian sentimentality and racist fantasy. There was a bit of the crank in all of them, though one has to admit that crankiness, in that unfettered time, may have been part of the strength that allowed them to function so effectively. From our point of view, they understood the secrets of mechanical and industrial dominance—they were literally empowered, and in a rush—but some element of sensibility or just plain sense got lost in their swift ascension.

Peter Schjeldahl: Camp - the savoring of unintended ironies.

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