Every week reporter Ankita Rao selects interesting reading from around the Web.
The New Republic: Held Hostage By A Hospital
When the billionaire owner of the Minnesota Vikings football team decided last year he wanted a new, $1 billion stadium, he did what sports franchise owners often do: threaten to relocate to another state-;at least implicitly-;and thereby wrung nearly $500 million dollars from taxpayers. … this year, a different kind of local juggernaut threatened to take its business elsewhere unless Minnesotans helped pay for a multibillion-dollar new development: The Rochester-based Mayo Clinic. … the state legislature in May approved $585 million in city, county and state funds for infrastructure upgrades to accommodate Mayo’s 20-year, $5.6 billion expansion. (Mayo itself is covering $3.5 billion of the cost, while healthcare-related businesses are expected to contribute $2.1 billion.) Worried that Obamacare will hurt its bottom line, Mayo is betting its future on its ability to lure an greater percentage of the wealthiest and sickest patients to its dazzling high-tech hospitals (Ilan Greenberg, 7/24).
The New Yorker: Tweeting Death
In the week before her death, Simon began live-tweeting his mother’s final days to his almost 1.3 million followers from her hospital room. The tweets were poignant and haunting, and have brought Simon-;already a mini-celebrity-;a new level of renown. Total strangers read what he wrote and responded deeply. … The tweets, which felt almost aphoristic (a mere hundred and forty characters each), underscored one of the strangest things about being with someone at the end of her life: the surreality of time, the way that time bends and distorts, becomes material. … It’s our equivalent of the ringing of church bells in the town square, for better or for worse (Meghan O’Rourke, 7/31).
The New York Times: Status And Stress
Although professionals may bemoan their long work hours and high-pressure careers, really, there’s stress, and then there’s Stress with a capital quotS.quot The former can be considered a manageable if unpleasant part of life; in the right amount, it may even strengthen one’s mettle. The latter kills. What’s the difference? Scientists have settled on an oddly subjective explanation: the more helpless one feels when facing a given stressor, they argue, the more toxic that stressor’s effects (Moises Velasquez-Manoff, 7/27).