Longreads

On the way to visit my mother one recent rainy afternoon, I stopped in, after quite some constant prodding, to see my insurance salesman. He was pressing his efforts to sell me a long-term-care policy with a pitch about how much I’d save if I bought it now, before the rates were set to precipitously rise. For $5,000 per year, I’d receive, when I needed it, a daily sum to cover my future nursing costs. With an annual inflation adjustment of 5 percent, I could get in my dotage (or the people caring for me would get) as much as $900 a day. My mother carries such a policy, and it pays, in 2012 dollars, $180 a day—a fair idea of where heath-care costs are going.

09 DECEMBER, 2011 by Maria Popova What Aristotle has to do with the women’s suffrage movement, Darwin, and M. C. Escher. Last year, we explored what it means to be human from the perspectives…

ABSTRACT: A REPORTER AT LARGE about the deaths of more than seventy people during a police and military assault on the Tivoli Gardens neighborhood of Kingston, Jamaica, in May of 2010. The trouble…