Category Archives: Well Worth Reading

More Onomatopoeia

FLYMF Alums, Well Worth Reading

The summer issue of Onomatopoeia, the online literary magazine by FLYMF alum Bobby D. Lux, is available online! It’s full of great fiction, poetry, essays, interviews and more, so be sure to check it out!

Bobby is the author of the short-story collection, The Exciting Life and Death of the Amazing Henry and Other stories (which I reviewed here). He was also a longtime FLYMF contributor, with a number of stories in FLYMF’s Greatest Hits. Bobby’s FLYMF work includes When The Camera Stopped Rolling, Mike Tyson Movie Reviews, O’Neill ‘Scopes’ An Early Career, Monkey Dance, Outrageous Claims, In Memorium, Adventures In Time Travel, The Worst Story Ever, Batman Begins By Superman, The Coreys, Tonto’s Shocking Discovery, Vegas Wedding, The Solution To America’s Problems, Superman Returns, The Pirates Of Swenxof, and “Sly” Nostalgia.

Killing the Middle Class

Well Worth Reading

Michael Snyder has a Yahoo Finance article detailing the many ways the fortunes of the American middle class are crumbling.

It’s depressing to learn that “66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans” while “As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.” At the same time, Snyder doesn’t offer much in policy prescriptions; he seems to conclude the middle class has been doomed by cheaper overseas competition.

Of course, I think people will find the most fault with the statement that “In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.” In Chicago, at least, we like to blame our budget issues on those blasted public servants who have the temerity to earn a living wage.

It’s easier to complain about the bus driver getting paid vacation than it is to figure out a way to leverage some of those top-1% gains for the greater good of our shared society.

Betting on Lives

Politics, Well Worth Reading

From today’s New York Times:

In the fall of 1999, the drug giant SmithKline Beecham secretly began a study to find out if its diabetes medicine, Avandia, was safer for the heart than a competing pill, Actos, made by Takeda.

Avandia’s success was crucial to SmithKline, whose labs were otherwise all but barren of new products. But the study’s results, completed that same year, were disastrous. Not only was Avandia no better than Actos, but the study also provided clear signs that it was riskier to the heart.

But instead of publishing the results, the company spent the next 11 years trying to cover them up, according to documents recently obtained by The New York Times. The company did not post the results on its Web site or submit them to federal drug regulators, as is required in most cases by law.

The particulars are obviously different from BP’s compromised safety record, but they highlight a shared trend: corporations disregarding any notion of social responsibility in their grab for short-term profits. They’re also laying waste to the conservative argument that corporations can police themselves. This was happening under arguably the best regulatory body we have, the FDA.

If possible, I think the authorities need to look into distributing some serious jail time as a deterrent to future corner-cutters. Perhaps the government should explore revoking GlaxoSmithKline’s corporate charter as well. Of course, given current feelings about corporate personhood, I would wager the literal death penalty has more support.

Lab Rat Race

Science, Well Worth Reading

If the nation truly wants its ablest students to become scientists, Salzman says, it must undertake reforms — but not of the schools. Instead, it must reconstruct a career structure that will once again provide young Americans the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career.

Miller-McCune magazine has an excellent article by Beryl Lieff Benderly on the perverse incentives accompanying graduate education in the sciences (and, I would assume, in other fields as well). Simply put, doctoral students put in stupendous amounts of work for comparatively little pay – often into their late 30s – with the hope of securing a position in academia. However, the number of students receiving Ph.D.s every year is cruelly disproportionate to the number of positions available.

The result? A lot of high-level talent spends decades providing cheap labor before being bounced to another field, one that fails to reward their hard-earned expertise.