If I ever meet Atul Gawande, I’m giving him a high-five, a hug, and then I’m going to try to talk to him for about fifteen minutes about why I think he’s special. From “The Cost Conundrum,” in the new New Yorker:

No one teaches you how to think about money in medical school or residency. Yet, from the moment you start practicing, you must think about it. You must consider what is covered for a patient and what is not. You must pay attention to insurance rejections and government-reimbursement rules. You must think about having enough money for the secretary and the nurse and the rent and the malpractice insurance…

When you look across the spectrum from Grand Junction [Colorado] to McAllen [Texas]

Looking to the east for clues to the future (or the past) of the west isn’t the least bit new, but these two recent takes (both in the NYT, as it happens) offer some interesting contrasts.

First, Paul Krugman looks at Hong Kong:

Hong Kong, with its incredible cluster of tall buildings stacked up the slope of a mountain, is the way the future was supposed to look. The future

From a BBC radio debate with her husband (and publisher) Leonard, titled “Are Too Many Books Written and Published?“:

Books ought to be so cheap that we can throw them away if we do not like them, or give them away if we do. Moreover, it is absurd to print every book as if it were fated to last a hundred years. The life of the average book is perhaps three months. Why not face this fact? Why not print the first edition on some perishable material which would crumble to a little heap of perfectly clean dust in about six months time? If a second edition were needed, this could be printed on good paper and well bound. Thus by far the greater number of books would die a natural death in three months or so. No space would be wasted and no dirt would be collected.

Via the New Yorker’s Book Bench.

Clusterflock‘s skeleton crew has some nice nineteenth-century stuff this weekend:

• First Barbary War (May 1801-1805)
• First edition of Byron’s Don Juan
• Dandyism
• Tabloid write-up of Richard Wagner’s affair with Franz Liszt’s daughter Cosima
• Blogging about Van Gogh
• Dancing “the German”
• William Carlos Williams’s Birth Announcement
• 1883 Dinner Menus from the New American Hotel
• Gayetti’s Medicated Paper for the Water-Closet
• My favorite — pictures of the first postage stamp used for the penny post in the UK
• Victorian Pornography

And many more!

Have a good weekend, you guys.

File under: “Why didn’t you just Twitter this, again?” I’ve been shopping for a laptop bag as we speak, so I am 100% primed for this, but I still love Lifehacker’s “What’s In Our Bags” series. Gina Trapani just posted her bag + contents, shouting-out a bagufacturer I’d never heard of, and an awesome idea I’d never thought of — headphone splitters so two people can watch a movie on a plane or train!

Me, I keep insane junk in my bag — whatever the Bookstore was selling the day my old whatever the Bookstore was selling up and quit on me — for way too long — receipts and airplane stubs, books and student papers (oops), pens in zippered components that don’t even work (the pens, not the zippers). The only constant companion is laptop plus plug. Even then, sometimes I discover (as I did on a trip to central NY for a job talk) that there’s a scone from Au Bon Pain where my plug should be.

But I wish, nay long for, a genuine system! And the Lifehacker folks actually seem to have one!

It’s also positive proof that the dematerialization thesis (you know, the idea that objects themselves don’t matter, everything is up in the cloud, etc.) is bunk at worst, needs to be qualified at best. We just pretend that matter doesn’t matter, until you can’t get your Prezi on the screen ’cause you forgot your DVI-VGA thingy, if you ever even took it out of the box in the first place.

Here are people living the life digitale to the fullest, and what do they do? Schlep their stuff around in a bag, just like us jerks. And when they have a good idea, do they whip out their magic pen-with-a-microphone for instant digitalization? Only if they’re jotting it down on a 99-cent spiral notebook. All this is very reassuring to me.

This Kids in the Hall sketch has come up twice in conversation this week. I consider it, like the film that gives it its name, essential viewing. Enjoy.

I like this so much. From io9.com:

The attraction, called “Professor Cline’s Dinosaur Kingdom,” imagines a lost chapter from Civil War history. It supposes that in 1863, a group of paleontologists inadvertently stumbled upon a valley of live dinosaurs. The discovery comes to the attention of the Union Army, who, recognizing the destructive power of the giant lizards, decide to capture them and unleash them on the Confederate Army. Naturally, it results in Jurassic Park-inspired carnage.

H/t to friend (and former student) Drea Nelson.

If only I had 6 million EUR lying around:

Ch

So there’s this huge political money scandal in the UK. The Telegraph’s Simon Heffer says, let’s get Puritanical — as in the real Puritans:

Image via Wikipedia

What is now needed is the Cromwellian touch, for I do not believe Parliament’s standing has been lower since Oliver dismissed the Rump in April 1653. Mr Cameron should sack from his front bench all those exposed in unacceptable use of taxpayers’ money. Central Office should ask chairmen of constituency parties whose MPs have behaved disgracefully to consider whether the chances of the seat being held at the next election would be helped by the selection of a new, financially untainted candidate. To take this swift action now would secure Mr Cameron’s moral advantage; it would greatly damage the Prime Minister and the Labour Party; it would put pressure on Mr Brown to do precisely the same.

Heffer even busts out one of my favorite Cromwell stories:

However, we all know what Mr Brown should do, and again Cromwell provides us with our lead. Remember the words he uttered to the Rump, in his anger at its failure to consolidate the new England after the second civil war: “It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt for all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage… Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your god; which of you have not bartered your conscience for bribes?… Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; ye were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress’d, and are yourselves gone… In the name of God, go!”

The trouble is, this is EVERYBODY’s favorite Cromwell speech, and he probably never said most of it. Mercurius Politicus has got the goods:

The earliest record I can find of it is in Thomas Mortimer