“Everyone belongs to everyone else” and the American hook-up

Last updated on: April 7, 2017 at 7:40 am By Jane the Actuary

The “hook-up,” as practiced on American college campuses, has changed. That’s what Lisa Wade reports in her new book, American Hookup; The New culture of Sex on Campus. Perhaps you’ve got a vague idea of what hook-ups are about: friends with benefits, for instance, or “f*ckbuddies” and a permissive culture on campus where anything goes. But Wade’s telling, based on student diaries and interviews, is actually more disturbing than that. The hook-up, it seems, has certain rules. She describes a... Read more

is this a dirty little secret about universities and community colleges?

Last updated on: April 6, 2017 at 9:10 pm By Jane the Actuary

Something that I’ve learned in trying to find out more about merit scholarship opportunities: they’re virtually all reserved for students entering as freshman. If you study at a community college, then transfer, you’re out of luck. Is there a risk of losing a chance at a merit scholarship because you combined dual enrollment, AP classes, and even taking a community college class on your own, say, during the summer? An expert at a school parent night seemed to suggest this... Read more

Holocaust, Memory, and Memoir

Last updated on: April 6, 2017 at 10:25 am By Jane the Actuary

I just finished a Holocaust memoir, The Seamstress, by Sara Tuvel Bernstein with Louise Loots Thornton and Marlene Bernstein Samuels. That’s a mouthful: three authors. The first of these was the woman who experienced these events. She sat for extensive interviews with Thornton, who took the resulting material and shaped it into a book, then tried to get it published, but couldn’t find a publisher. Later, after Bernstein’s death, Samuels, her daughter, found the manuscript, missing various pages, in her mother’s... Read more

Mom’s list of 10 things to consider in college selection

Last updated on: April 6, 2017 at 9:43 am By Jane the Actuary

As in, I’m Mom, and this is the list I started as a way of organizing my thoughts on advising my son, after last night’s college fair, on what he should consider, since I’ve been persuaded that there is a reasonable chance of his being offered merit scholarships that would make the cost of midlevel private schools reasonable, even though we wouldn’t qualify for financial aid, so that he doesn’t need to completely restrict himself to state schools. For context,... Read more

Puparazzo, part 2

Last updated on: April 7, 2017 at 7:44 am By Jane the Actuary

So, two years and some months ago, I posted some of my then-2nd grade son’s artwork, e.g.: As it happened, this blog post was immediately preceded by a post on child care tax credits (the idea being that you boost the tax base by getting mothers back to work so that, in principle, they could “pay for themselves” in a way that general per-child tax credits) wouldn’t. I had, as was my practice, tweeted a link to that prior post... Read more

Could Staff Model HMOs rise from the dead?

Last updated on: April 4, 2017 at 8:07 am By Jane the Actuary

I’ve thought, off and on, about the Staff Model HMO concept — that is, the early HMO structure which was based on “prepaid healthcare” with doctors employed by the HMO itself as staff. The idea was that, as employees, they would not be looking to increase the number of services they provide to patients, but instead have an incentive to manage their patients’ health to reduce the overall costs of their healthcare. The overall structure of such as system was,... Read more

My latest family history (non-)discoveries

Last updated on: April 2, 2017 at 9:35 pm By Jane the Actuary

Not long ago, I wrote about my discovery that the answer to all our family questions was seemingly waiting to be uncovered at the St. Louis County Public Library genealogy department. And, over the weekend, as a small trip during the kids’ spring break, we drove down to St. Louis, and spent some time looking at microfilm, to find . . . nothing. No evidence of church membership, baptisms, confirmations, or marriages, at what was supposedly the family church for... Read more

ERISA-exempt church plans and the “little guy”

Last updated on: March 29, 2017 at 9:13 pm By Jane the Actuary

How should the Supreme Court make its decisions? Should they focus on helping the “little guy” seek justice against Big Whatevers? Or should they, y’know, aim to interpret the law? Pension plans made their way back into the news — well, the business section, anyway, this week with Supreme Court arguments over what constitutes a “church plan”; these are pension plans which are not obliged to follow ERISA and subsequent (e.g., PPA) regulations on funding, government reporting, disclosures to employees,... Read more

About the “fearless girl”

Last updated on: March 28, 2017 at 9:08 am By Jane the Actuary

She’s standing up to something. What? She’s standing firm against a bull, about to charge her. But the bull represents, in Stock Market symbolism, a roaring stock market, and prosperity. According to its sculptor, who placed it there after the 1987 crash, his bull represents “strength and power of the American people” (per Wikipedia). So why is this girl opposing it? Does the Fearless Girl sculptor consider Wall Street to be misogynistic? Does the sculptor consider capitalism and the stock... Read more

Tell me about your health insurance

Last updated on: March 27, 2017 at 9:02 am By Jane the Actuary

Just curious – we all form our opinions only partly by what we read in the news, and to a greater degree by our own experiences. Do you have employer-provided health insurance? An individual policy? Something else entirely? And how has that changed over the years? We’ve got a $3,000 family deductible, which we hit once when my middle son broke his arm, and a second time when we had multiple smaller ER visits (two head gashes and a bad... Read more