Dear bloggers and magazine writers, New Rule, no more articles or blog posts titled The Audacity of ______, or _____ We Can Believe In

RE: Matt's piece on restaurants, I'm just going to duplicate my comment here, because his "MORE GROWTH BETTER" rhetoric may - just may - not be fully-considered.

I don’t know about DC’s liquor laws, but I will suggest that they might be a component of this legislation. Here in Pittsburgh, one of the city’s most vibrant neighborhoods is being choked by traffic at its bars - retail businesses are being driven out of business by competition from bars, which cater to college students who do things like fight on the sidewalks and piss in the neighbors’ flowerbeds. This neighborhood has been a massive success, returning from post-steel devastation to a diversely-populated, economically thriving success - one of the few places in a Rust Belt city that can tell developers what to do, rather than beg them to come in at any cost. It’s always had bars and nightlife, but the balance has tipped. Homeowners are moving out, and buildings are flipping to de facto dorms.

I’m sure this sounds like paradise to Matt, but it’s screwing up a formula that’s been successful for 20+ years, and there’s no reason to think that the new formula will be sustainable.

Anyway, that may have nothing to do with ARTS, but it does suggest that neighborhood health can be a bit more complex than “In general, a smart city or neighborhood will welcome as much economic activity as possible.”

Reading the article about elite hospitals, I was struck by how similar the problem with measuring success of performance in medicine is to the problem in education. We would like to pay for performance, but don't know how to do it correctly.

Ezra:

The Boston Globe piece was a hit job on Brigham/Mass Gen by the insurance industry. Don't buy it. Argument made in more detail (with considerably more snark) over at Movin' Meat.

Cheers,

SF

That analysis at Movin' Meet pointed to by shadowfax is extremely important. I hope you'll read it before you write about the Boston.com article, Ezra.

I don't know if it's completely correct, but it asks really important questions.

The NH anomie article is really interesting reading, but I think it says less than it thinks it does in the end.

The bagel link briefly discusses the mainstreaming of the bagel. My perspective:

From 1993 to 1998, I lived and worked in Bristol VA/TN, a state-line-straddling town of about 50,000 in south-central Appalachia.

A year or two before I got there, a local woman opened a bagel bakery on the main street in this rural burg. Right around the time I left, she went out of business because the grocery chains that served the area were baking bagels fresh daily in their stores.

So there's the last two milestones on the bagel mainstreaming timeline: quality bagels reach the hinterlands in the early 1990s, though still as a specialty item. But just a few years later, fresh-baked bagels can no longer be sold as a specialty item - they're totally mainstreamed, even in the boonies.

That's a bastard of a slate article.
Who's gonna buy the guy's book about the history of the bagel now that all the explosive material has been given away for free.

Though I appreciate the timeline of the bagel's development, I'd note that the author does not describe the declining quality bagels correlating with their mainstream acceptance. Lenders? Dunkin Donuts bagels? Oh please.

A REAL bagel must have a certain taste and consistency. Lenders is just another roll with a hole in it.

Although it's a subject of many heated debates, I find it curious that I've never had a "real" bagel outside of the New York City/Metro area. Even at Brandeis (yes, Brandeis!) we couldn't get decent bagels during any of my four years. Some say it's something about New York water used to boil the bagels. I say it's a conspiracy ...

I can't get too worked up about the elite hospitals charging more. Hospitals always have to shift costs to make up for the uncompensated care they provide, and Partners is just more successful at it than most of their peers. And it's disingenuous to suggest that $800 million more in payments to Partners translates into $800 million more in premium charges, because there's a lot more that goes into calculating premiums. I went into more detail at The Pump Handle - but, basically, I can't get as worked up at the hospitals as the article seems to want me to.