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Chronicling a four-decade fight over campaign finance, and how American politics is fueled by secret spending.

For decades, the campaign finance wars have pitted two ideological foes against each other: one side clamoring to dam the flow while the other seeks to open the floodgates. The self-styled good-government types believe that unregulated political money inherently corrupts. A healthy democracy, they say, needs robust regulation—clear disclosure, tough limits on campaign spending and donations, and publicly financed presidential and congressional elections. The dean of this movement is 73-year-old Fred Wertheimer, the former president of the advocacy outfit Common Cause, who now runs the reform group Democracy 21.

On the other side are conservatives and libertarians who consider laws regulating political money an assault on free markets and free speech. They want to deregulate campaign finance—knock down spending and giving limits and roll back disclosure laws. Their leaders include Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), conservative lawyer James Bopp Jr., and former FEC commissioner Brad Smith, who now chairs the Center for Competitive Politics, which fights campaign finance regulation.

“Follow the Dark Money.” — Andy Kroll, Mother Jones

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Follow the Dark Money

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Chronicling a four-decade fight over campaign finance, and how American politics is fueled by secret spending.

“For decades, the campaign finance wars have pitted two ideological foes against each other: one side clamoring to dam the flow while the other seeks to open the floodgates. The self-styled good-government types believe that unregulated political money inherently corrupts. A healthy democracy, they say, needs robust regulation—clear disclosure, tough limits on campaign spending and donations, and publicly financed presidential and congressional elections. The dean of this movement is 73-year-old Fred Wertheimer, the former president of the advocacy outfit Common Cause, who now runs the reform group Democracy 21.

“On the other side are conservatives and libertarians who consider laws regulating political money an assault on free markets and free speech. They want to deregulate campaign finance—knock down spending and giving limits and roll back disclosure laws. Their leaders include Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), conservative lawyer James Bopp Jr., and former FEC commissioner Brad Smith, who now chairs the Center for Competitive Politics, which fights campaign finance regulation.”

Author: Andy Kroll
Source: Mother Jones
Published: Jun 19, 2012
Length: 31 minutes (7,806 words)

A man with hypochondria attempts to understand his disorder:

Eleven years ago, when he was still a medical resident at Columbia University, Fallon was asked to help a man who was convinced, despite medical results to the contrary, that he was saddled with a brain tumor. ‘He tried Prozac, and it made a dramatic change,’ Fallon says. ‘He went from irritable and hostile to grateful and happy that something was helping him. I thought, ‘Wow, this is fascinating.’ Because at that point so little was known.’

The use of Prozac and similar medications is now under formal study. Columbia’s Fallon and Arthur Barsky, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, are conducting the largest trial ever undertaken of the disorder. They are enrolling 264 hypochondriacs in a randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial comparing cognitive behavioral therapy, Prozac, and a combination of the two. They suspect that CBT and the drug will be equally effective, but that combination therapy will be even more effective for ‘this major public health disorder.’ ‘I don’t know what to expect,’ says Fallon. ‘But it will be very interesting.’

“Hypochondria: The Impossible Illness.” — Jeff Pearlman, Psychology Today, Jan. 1, 2010

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Hypochondria: The Impossible Illness

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A man with hypochondria attempts to understand his disorder:

“Eleven years ago, when he was still a medical resident at Columbia University, Fallon was asked to help a man who was convinced, despite medical results to the contrary, that he was saddled with a brain tumor. ‘He tried Prozac, and it made a dramatic change,’ Fallon says. ‘He went from irritable and hostile to grateful and happy that something was helping him. I thought, ‘Wow, this is fascinating.’ Because at that point so little was known.’

“The use of Prozac and similar medications is now under formal study. Columbia’s Fallon and Arthur Barsky, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, are conducting the largest trial ever undertaken of the disorder. They are enrolling 264 hypochondriacs in a randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial comparing cognitive behavioral therapy, Prozac, and a combination of the two. They suspect that CBT and the drug will be equally effective, but that combination therapy will be even more effective for ‘this major public health disorder.’ ‘I don’t know what to expect,’ says Fallon. ‘But it will be very interesting.'”

Published: Jan 1, 2010
Length: 9 minutes (2,409 words)

There are roughly 7,000 languages in the world, but 78 percent of the world’s population only speaks the 85 largest languages. Thousands of languages are on the edge of disappearing.

After dinner Nimasow disappeared for a moment and came back with a soiled white cotton cloth, which he unfolded by the flickering light of the cooking fire. Inside was a small collection of ritual items: a tiger’s jaw, a python’s jaw, the sharp-toothed mandible of a river fish, a quartz crystal, and other objects of a shaman’s sachet. This sachet had belonged to Nimasow’s father until his death in 1991.

‘My father was a priest,’ Nimasow said, ‘and his father was a priest.’ And now? I asked. Was he next in line? Nimasow stared at the talismans and shook his head. He had the kit, but he didn’t know the chants; his father had died before passing them on. Without the words, there was no way to bring the artifacts’ power to life.

“Vanishing Voices.” — Russ Rymer, National Geographic

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Avi Rubin, a 44-year-old computer science professor at Johns Hopkins, is obsessed with the math behind Texas Hold ‘em:

When he began studying poker, Rubin frequently thought in terms of how a computer might model the game. Several disciplines were applicable—game theory, expert systems, machine learning, combinatorics. The latter is a branch of mathematics concerned with finite countable structures. The various combinations of cards in a poker hand are finite countable structures. As he trained himself to be a better player, Rubin would make up combinatorics poker problems, then solve them on a computer. He has considered studying the game by creating decision trees, branching diagrams that plot a chain of if-then options and are routine for a computer scientist. For example, he could start with a single hand, then chart all the variables—his position in a round of betting, the texture of the flop (that is, does it have potential to create strong hands like straights or flushes), whether he is playing against three others or heads-up against a single remaining opponent—to see what might happen. ‘For any given spot in the decision tree,’ he says, ‘I could come up with a probability distribution of different plays. Then I could write a learning program that I could use as a simulator on the computer and play a thousand times with particular settings, then tweak the settings and run it again to see if I do better, and work backward from it to infer why that was a better play in that situation. The thing is, there are so many variables and so many factors you rarely find yourself in a precise situation that you’ve studied. What you have to do is abstract out the reasoning used to get to that decision, then apply that logic and process to whatever situation you’re in.’

“Computing Texas Hold ‘em.” — Dale Keiger, Johns Hopkins Magazine

More on poker

Computing Texas Hold ’em

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Avi Rubin, a 44-year-old computer science professor at Johns Hopkins, is obsessed with the math behind Texas Hold ’em:

“When he began studying poker, Rubin frequently thought in terms of how a computer might model the game. Several disciplines were applicable—game theory, expert systems, machine learning, combinatorics. The latter is a branch of mathematics concerned with finite countable structures. The various combinations of cards in a poker hand are finite countable structures. As he trained himself to be a better player, Rubin would make up combinatorics poker problems, then solve them on a computer. He has considered studying the game by creating decision trees, branching diagrams that plot a chain of if-then options and are routine for a computer scientist. For example, he could start with a single hand, then chart all the variables—his position in a round of betting, the texture of the flop (that is, does it have potential to create strong hands like straights or flushes), whether he is playing against three others or heads-up against a single remaining opponent—to see what might happen. ‘For any given spot in the decision tree,’ he says, ‘I could come up with a probability distribution of different plays. Then I could write a learning program that I could use as a simulator on the computer and play a thousand times with particular settings, then tweak the settings and run it again to see if I do better, and work backward from it to infer why that was a better play in that situation. The thing is, there are so many variables and so many factors you rarely find yourself in a precise situation that you’ve studied. What you have to do is abstract out the reasoning used to get to that decision, then apply that logic and process to whatever situation you’re in.'”

Published: Jun 15, 2012
Length: 14 minutes (3,533 words)

How rhetoric from an evangelist talk-show host led to the resignation Mitt Romney’s openly gay national-security spokesman:

Fischer’s attack against Grenell started on Friday, April 20th, with a post on Twitter. ‘Romney picks out & loud gay as a spokesman,’ he tweeted, soon after learning of the hire. ‘If personnel is policy, his message to the pro-family community: drop dead.’ The next Monday, Fischer opened his show—which is broadcast, he likes to say, on ‘the most feared radio network in America!’—by telling his listeners that he had ‘kicked up a dust storm in the Twitterverse.’

“Bully Pulpit.” — Jane Mayer, New Yorker

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Over the last four decades, at least 18 women have disappeared from British Columbia’s Highway 16. Inside the investigation:

In testimony to B.C.’s Missing Women Commission of Inquiry—formed in 2010, mainly to investigate why it took law enforcement so long to catch Willie “the Pig Farmer” Pickton, a serial killer who preyed on Vancouver women from 1995 through 2001—First Nations bands and local community groups claimed that as many as 43 women have been killed or gone missing along Highway 16. In 2005, the RCMP created a special unit calledE-Pana (E is the RCMP designation for all things British Columbian, and Pana is an Inuit god who caretakes souls in a frozen underworld before reincarnation) to examine some of the disappearances and to determine whether another serial killer was at work. Its investigators eventually sorted through hundreds of unsolved murders, missing women, and sexual assaults in B.C. over the past four decades and found that 18 cases shared enough similarities to be possibly linked.

“The Vanishing.” — Bob Friel, Outside

More from Outside

A new lab-brewed drug epidemic has law-enforcement officials scrambling to contain it

The last four decades have seen plenty of whipped-up hysteria about various fad intoxicants of the moment. But the fear generated by bath salts seems well earned. Dr. Mark Ryan, director at the Louisiana Poison Center, called bath salts ‘the worst drug’ he has seen in his 20 years there. ‘With LSD, you might see pink elephants, but with this drug, you see demons, aliens, extreme paranoia, heart attacks, and superhuman strength like Superman,’ Ryan has said. ‘If you had a reaction, it was a bad reaction.’

Starting in late 2010, an influx of violent, irrational, self-destructive users began to congest hospital ERs throughout the States. A 19-year-old West Virginia man claimed he was high on bath salts when he stabbed his neighbor’s pygmy goat while wearing women’s underwear; a Mississippi man skinned himself alive while under the influence. Users staggered in, or were carried in, consumed by extreme panic, tachycardia, deep paranoia, and heart-attack symptoms. (Perhaps the most infamous incident tied to bath salts is Rudy Eugene’s horrific naked face-eating attack in Miami in May, although conclusive toxicology reports have yet to be released; still, the fact that this feels like the closest thing to a credible explanation for chewing a homeless man’s head for 18 minutes speaks volumes about the drug’s reputation.)

“Bath Salts: Deep in the Heart of America’s New Drug Nightmare.” — Natasha Vargas-Cooper, Spin