She Was a Shark Smile in a Yellow Van

Which is a great time to remind you once again that American car deaths are rising, especially people struck by taller SUVs, which are encouraged by our ludicrously out of date CAFE standards. And muscle cars, which have too much power. And our road design standards which emphasize speed over safety. And driver behavior is worse since March 2020, just as cars continue to get bigger and deadlier and faster.

Also killing a lot of us: booze.

Policy

Georgia didn’t expand Medicaid coverage during the Obama era, but they recently implemented a new program called Georgia Pathways to Coverage, which allows more people to qualify for Medicaid. It may surprise you just how stingy the regular benefits are: to qualify for standard Medicaid in Georgia, you must be a child, severely disabled, or pregnant.

The new, more generous Pathways program allows working adults below the poverty line – that’s just over $14,000 per year for a single person — sign up for insurance. “Working” must be at least 80 hours a month, and they generously count education, training, and community service as work. Applicants must submit documentation of their work every month or risk disenrollment.

Last year, I helped with a small portion of the implementation, mostly making sure that instructions were legible at a sixth-grade reading level. At the time I thought it was corrosively bad, clearly designed to allow politicians to issue a press release saying they were helping people without having to pay for any actual care.

Rollout has gone, predictably, very badly.

Meanwhile, in Texas, abortion bans are, predictably, killing people. And the state is, predictably, tormenting those who survive.

Reading

• Brain-computer interfaces are getting better. Alarmingly better.
• A newsletter I don’t usually read does a deep dive into… the ongoing relevance of Pierre Bourdieu?
• Jeet Heer, in The Nation, is usually worth a read, and his explanation of anarcho-capitalism, Javier Milei, and Murray Rothbard really provides a lot of useful context if you want to know WTF is going on in Argentina.
• I thought it was just me trying to recreate my favorite teenage mixtapes, but no, the shoegaze revival is a Whole Thing.

Joy

• Cup o’ Kitten
• This three-minute ad for, of all things… well, try to watch the video without figuring out what the ad is for until the very end.

Housekeeping

Later this month I will migrate this newsletter to a new platform and automatically import your subscription to that new platform. If you don’t want to get any more emails, let me know (or just click the unsubscribe link). I have been migrating old content off this platform and onto SecretlyIronic.com, since I only posted stubs and links to the newsletter for a few years, and I feel like it’d be a shame to lose it all, even if half of it is linkrot and anger. There’s some real bons mots in there!