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End-Of-Life Costs

In his recent interview with the New York Times's David Leonhardt, President Obama said that a key step to health care reform will be having a "very difficult democratic conversation" about the high cost of end-of-life care in the United States, which accounts for up to 80% of health care costs. Judy Bacharach, columnist at Obit Magazine and The Checkout Line, imagines what such a national conversation would look like.

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Paroling the Dice

Angela Jimenez, director of Downstate Operations, New York State Division of Parole, and Yvonne Oliver, a parole officer at the Harlem Parole Reentry Court, talk about the work of parole officers and the challenges faced by former prisoners to find work and build stable lives.

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Writing Themselves In

Jeff Yang, "Asian Pop" columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and one of the editors of Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology (New Press, 2009), Asian Americans are well represented among the writers, artists and readers of contemporary comics, now they have a place among the superheroes.

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Fighting Words

David Kilcullen, adviser on counterinsurgency to General Petraeus and the author of The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (Oxford University Press, 2009), talks about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and his op-ed against the use of drones in the May 17th edition of the New York Times.

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Sharp Tongue

Linguist and author Geoffrey Nunberg discusses his new book The Years of Talking Dangerously and the way in which the media, politicians, and all of us use words to not say what we really mean.

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Don't Say That, Literally

John Flansburgh of the band They Might Be Giants discusses the running list the band keeps of "things we can no longer say." (a few examples: "my bad" "don't go there" "one hundred and ten percent" and "voted off the island")

What would be on your list of banned words or phrases? Comment below!

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