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Although many may think today that we have always had employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI) in this country, that is not the case. While some companies offered coverage in the 1930s, the basic concept gained momentum only after the start of World War II. The war effort required a rapid buildup of industrial capacity in the face of a severe labor shortage as many men went off to war. Employers needed a healthy workforce, and needed to compete for

Jim LaBarbara’s new biography, “The Music Professor,” has a section in his book about my dad.
LaBarbara said that Big Joe McNay “was bigger than life. He was friends with everyone from (Johnny) Bench and Pete (Rose) to the big politicians. I think he introduced me to half the people in town, everyone seemed to like him.”
I didn’t like dad; I loved

By now millions of people know about how the Occupy Wall Street Movement has spread to dozens of cities. OWS has gone viral on the Internet and people know that thousands of committed progressives are lending their bodies to a movement that challenges a basic premise of American society: fundamental social inequality. Pundits have either dismissed OWS or have applauded its social, economic and cultural significance. People wonder what social and political impact will OWS have? Will its core set of radical ideals been co-opted? Will this social movement have an impact similar to the sweeping cultural revolution of the late 1960s?
Although these questions are fascinating, I wonder if our concentration on them and on the ongoing OWS movement is not diverting our attention from an emerging Republican/Tea Party political culture? When anthropologists conduct research, we attempt to understand human behavior, including, of course political behavior, by living among the people we are attempting to

Pygmalion meets Frankenstein by way of the imagination of Pedro Almodovar in The Skin I Live In, as tensely creepy and compelling a film as the Spanish maestro has yet made. And that’s going some.
Almodovar, reunited with Antonio Banderas, uses the star’s matinee-idol looks to mask the unhinged psyche that guides this character: a grief-stricken plastic surgeon whose quest for vengeance takes him to uncharted territory. Did I say mask? Almodovar’s film is about the faces we show and the faces we hide — and also about how much of our personality we owe to the face we are born with.
Banderas is Dr. Robert Ledgard, first seen doing skin grafts on a woman in a body stocking, Vera (Elena Anaya), who could be his patient (in a lock-down ward of some

Last night we finallywatchedthe latest episode of Glee,Asian F. Yes, I like Glee. Get over it.
For those who have watched Glee from the beginning, you know that there have been ups and downs in the pace and content of show. In this third season, episode 3 is one of the best episodes in terms of content and

What does Occupy Wall Street want? This has been the continual question from the media, and the critique from skeptics. The question “what do they want?” has been used to dismiss the nascent Occupy Wall Street movement as ineffectual, aimless, or worse, a self indulgent spectacle.
Still, the question is legitimate; and as Occupy Wall Street continues, it will be come crucial. Asking what someone, or a group of people, wants is not really a question directed at policy or electoral politics, which seems to be the answer that outsiders are looking

In 1981, filmmaker David Cronenberg made the movie, Scanners, about an underground movement of people who are able psychically to make your head explode. It turns out that this is the same, sneaky plan of the Republican Party.
Democrats have been trying to expose the shameless hypocrisy of the GOP ever since George W. Bush ran for president as a “compassionate conservative,” only to gut America’s middle class, while enriching Big Oil and Wall Street.
Of course, that only touched the surface of Republican shameless hypocrisy — from a “Clear Skies Initiative” which actually cut environmental protections, to crying about “The National Debt” under President Obama without once uttering a peep when George Bush doubled that very debt. And so much more.
So much that it’s made “hypocrisy” an almost pointless word from

The markets expect a Greek default and time is running out. However, banks still haven’t recognized enough of this loss, highlighting the pent-up risk in the sector. Deep-seated skepticism continues to drive market volatility and this will continue until a credible plan is on the table.
A Greek default due
Markets are pricing in a 93% probability Greece will default, with the country missing its deficit reduction targets, contracting greater than anticipated (-5.5%

Considering quitting Facebook? Here’s what happens when you do.
Forget relationship status updates or enviable vacation photos. If you really want to create a buzz on Facebook, deactivate your account.
That’s what happened to me this summer when I pulled the plug. And apparently, I was just in time. Now there are thousands of current users who are up in arms, threatening to defect over the new layout and growing privacy

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Thirteen years ago Matthew Shepard was clinging to life as a result of a brutal, anti-gay attack. The voices of my mom and brother still haunt me: “That could have been Mark.” It was only a few weeks prior to Matthew’s attack that I was contemplating suicide, having endured years of anti-gay bullying and torment.
Even though it was over a decade ago, I vividly remember the harassment I endured: older boys pushing me against the metal lockers pretending to rape me, carvings in my desk that said “fag,” my German project defaced with “Mark loves men,” the spitballs hitting the back of my head on the bus, my heals being kicked as I walked down the hallway, teachers turning around when they saw me in fistfights, and the police telling me there was nothing they could do.
I would skip gym class because “the fag” was never picked to be on anyone’s team, and once, other students had urinated on my clothes and put them in the shower. I would hide behind the school on the stoop, even as I heard the muffled announcement through the intercom, “Mark Snyder, report to the office.” I would stay home sick until my parents received threatening letters about how many days I could legally skip class.
My father’s black, shiny handgun to my head, I painfully decided not to take my own life but to make one last plea for help. Fortunately, my parents heard me and helped me find a public school in a bigger, slightly more liberal

I will never forget the moment that I saw my daughter’s heart beating inside her chest.
Two years ago, an equality of estrogen and testosterone returned to our expanding household with the birth of our beautiful daughter. Several months prior to her birth, during a prenatal visit to the doctor’s office, our nurse furrowed her brow as she studied pictures of the sonogram. She hurriedly departed to get the

In the years leading up to high school, I had already begun to map out detailed plans for how life was going to be like in those four years. I visualized the cliques, wondered about the status of my popularity, questioned the popularity of others, and, ultimately, braced myself for the cruelty that is known in popular culture as The High School Experience.
It never came.
Freshman year came and went, and it took me a good year to look around and figure out that my high school had few, if any, parallels with the high schools depicted in the media. And while there aren’t many who are so disillusioned as to believe that high school is just like High School Musical (1, 2, or 3 — take your pick), far too many teenagers have adopted a Mean Girls-type mentality.
However, the simple truth is that high school is not as bad as a vast majority of society believes. In fact, the reason why so many kids have the stereotypically horrible high school experiences is simply because they allow it to be that

The Treasury Department will soon be releasing guidance on “providing and encouraging lifetime income options” to 401(k) participants by encouraging the use of annuities, according to Mark Iwry, deputy assistant treasury secretary for retirement and health policy. Said Iwry: “We are trying to put pensions back in the pension system,” according to the Bureau of National Affairs.
Really? Or more likely, rather than requiring employers to make 401(k) plans as generous as pensions, the Obama Administration appears to be duping older workers into thinking they are ready — despite the fact that they have only saved one-tenth of what they need — and simply need a product that will stretch their puny nest egg over a lifetime. To make matters worse, it is exposing workers to annuities, the biggest financial rip-off on the planet.
Why are annuities toxic? As an annuity owner you’re not only paying a fortune for an investment product that can’t fill an empty nest egg but you’ll likely be charged huge penalties if you move your money out of one and if you die there’s a good chance the insurance company is the beneficiary, not your spouse. The losers are the surviving spouses who will no longer be able to access the annuity to pay expenses, despite the fact that that’s the point of buying one in the first place.
What’s astounding is that the Treasury Department is going ahead with this annuity scam despite the fact that as a result of being bribed by Wall Street, many members of Congress may prevent Assistant Secretary of Labor Phyllis Borzi from requiring anyone advising 401(k) participants to act as a fiduciary, or in the best interests of their

I am an 18-year-old senior. I am a product of ineffective schooling.
Test scores are falling, teachers are accused of cheating, and education budgets are slowly sinking. Educators and policymakers are trying to find everything and anything to blame for the failures of education.
There are those who are in a frenzy to cure this “education crisis.” Controversial topics are approached such as teachers’ pay, tenure, the difficulty or even effectiveness of standardized testing. The list keeps growing as these educators dream up of ideas to explain lackluster test results and falling student interest.
This education problem is not one that can be easily

Photo: Yoani Sanchez
A woman, the owner of a recently opened snack bar, responds to the inquisitive questions of a reporter about her use of the public space. In the evening, her statements along with many others will be broadcast in an extensive television report about the invasion of common areas by the new private businesses. A very controversial topic. On one side are those spending their own money to build a counter, or to enlarge it to serve more customers, and along comes a demolition order for having extended into areas that don’t belong to

At the end of my sophomore year of high school, I started work as the director of my high school speech and debate team’s middle school program, which put together public speaking workshops and clubs for middle schoolers. When I started with the program, our involvement in the local schools was still relatively small. We worked with about 30 students from each of three different middle schools in San Jose and another 30 from an after-school program made up of students from more than 10 different middle schools. One Saturday in May, we were responsible for putting together a middle school speech and debate

It’s fall, one of my favorite times of the entire year. Though September often means more work, it almost always guarantees something new and exciting — whether that comes in the form of work or play, I’ll take either. My favorite part of fall is the chance of a new year ahead. Though it may loom at times, it is full of

With Beltway Democrats flirting with millionaire taxes, Occupy Wall Street is raising a more existential question: the economic crisis is crushing the hopes of the younger generation. Unemployment in 2010 was 9.6%, but it was 15.5% for Americans between 20-24 and 10.9% for those between 25-29. Astonishingly, people in their early twenties face an unemployment rate similar to high-school dropouts.
Most young households don’t have a rainy day fund to weather the storm. They own less than a fifth of average household

The volume of conversation about education has increased over the last few years and while that’s good, what’s often lost in all this macro reporting are the very real stories of the young people whose lives are impacted and the people and programs that are beating the odds. It’s tempting to focus on the statistics because they are dire and paint a picture of the reality we face, but that alone won’t raise high school graduation rates or keep our kids safe. We have to stop and examine what’s working and replicate that across the country. The good news? There are a lot of examples to choose from.
Take Genine

October is very hard for me.
It’s not that the early autumn in Wyoming isn’t beautiful. If you haven’t experienced the crisp air as the nights come earlier each day, or the last few cricket chirps of the season that follow the brilliant orange sunsets, you can’t really know the peaceful, quiet contemplation this time of year brings those few of us fortunate to make our homes here.
But it’s those cues, these turns of the calendar pages, that remind me of the tragedy that autumn brought us 13 years ago, and start us reflecting on what our family, and our society, have learned from it.
Thirteen years ago this week his father, brother and I were at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colo., with our firstborn son, Matthew Shepard. He was 21, and dying. Just days before, he had been just like millions of American college students whose names are not known to the world — getting the hang of his new classes, adapting to a new campus, making

This is the third installment of Scarlett’s video journal from her trip to Dadaab, Turkana and Lodwar with Oxfam to shine light on the drought and food crisis that continues to unfold across East Africa. You can view the first two installments here and here, and please visit Oxfam for more information and to help out.
We spent our third and final day outside of Turkana in an area called Katiko, where we met with participants of Oxfam’s cash distribution program.
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What do you do when it feels like your life is falling apart? How do you handle emotional pain?
Crises happen. When life gets messy, and it most reliably does, it is at times harder than hard to keep ourselves upright and unified in the middle of the craziness. Our bodies do weird things. Our brains do even weirder things in