With few healthy options for reasonable prices, it is no wonder that those with low incomes find it difficult to avoid sugary foods and the risks associated, explains Beatrice Walton for the Harvard Political Review. The main issue is availability, a particular problem in Boston, which “ranks third from the bottom nationally in terms of having enough supermarkets with adequate [...]
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In a bold step intended to reduce poverty, the European Union will soon be providing some of the Continent’s poorest citizens with subsidized plane tickets and hotel rooms. The Toronto-based National Post reported on Monday that the European Union has declared traveling for tourism a human right, and is launching a scheme to subsidize vacations with taxpayer money for those [...]
This is a response to Max and Cathy, which got a little long for the comments section in the original post. Max, I agree with you that government subsidies for corn and sugar are bad. However, whereas you say that “the food industry” is “majorly dysfunctional,” I would argue that federal food policy is majorly dysfunctional. Moreover, I can agree [...]
Consider yourself enlightened. In The Times this week: Buried deep in the health care legislation that President Obama signed on Tuesday is a new requirement that will affect any American who walks into a McDonald’s, Starbucks or Burger King. Every big restaurant chain in the nation will now be required to put calorie information on their menus and drive-through signs. Now [...]
Shocking new evidence that Obama is secretly a Muslim: he’s hosting a Passover seder at the White House! Seriously though, this Times article about the Obama Seder warms my young Jewish heart. Like most holiday celebrations done well, theirs has nothing to with politics and little to do with religion; it’s just extremely sweet: Then came what is now remembered [...]
A lengthy NYT article on the Tea Partiers — which Sam comments on below — does a good job of sheding light on what this movement is all about. The Tea Party is obviously one of the biggest topics in American politics right now. Their recent convention showed that they are here to stay for quite a bit. But how [...]
If you’ve seen Avatar and haven’t yet read Annalee Newitz’s article “When will white people stop making movies like this?” then you’re missing out. Avatar — putatively anti-racist, seemingly simple and beautiful and extraordinarily entertaining — is in fact, she argues, mired with subtle racial biases and white ethnocentrism. She writes: These are movies about white guilt. Our main white [...]
Life after losing the Presidency Among the flurry of political maneuvering and intrigue surrounding the vacancy of Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat came the interesting proposition that a suitable placeholder might have been found in 75-year-old Michael Dukakis, a man The Boston Globe assured had “put his political ambitions behind him.” What seemed strange about this idea is not that Dukakis [...]
The U.S. Supreme Court may be about to render the most important business decision of the decidedly pro-business Roberts era, but one might not know it from the details of the case. The plaintiff is a small conservative advocacy group, not a major corporation; the focal point is a corporate-funded anti-Hillary Clinton documentary that was banned by the FEC, as [...]
