By Maggie Haberman, Michael S. Schmidt, Adam Goldman and Annie Karni @ NYTimes.com, 34 min. ago

By Julia Jacobo @ ABCnews.go.com, Feb. 25

The Texas man compared the costs, and Holiday Inn won out.

from Kaiser Family Foundation

A tweet that deserves to go viral if ever I saw one. Such blatant unashamed gangster behavior from a Congressperson! Don't need to check "context", don't care if intended as a joke, whatever: it's just outta line.

By Ben Hubbard and David E. Sanger @ NYTimes.com, Feb. 25

ISTANBUL — Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif of Iran announced Monday that he was resigning, in what seemed a sudden end to the tenure of one of the Islamic Republic’s best-known figures abroad. Mr. Zarif, an American-educated diplomat who was an architect of the Iranian nuclear deal, announced that he was stepping down in a post on his Instagram account.

It was not immediately clear why he was quitting or whether his resignation would be accepted. In the post, Mr. Zarif said he apologized “for my inability to continue serving and for all the shortcomings during my service.”

His resignation announcement also was reported by Iran’s Fars News Agency. Mr. Zarif’s public resignation in a country where governance is usually conducted behind closed doors seemed to indicate escalating tensions between the country’s hard-liners and President Hassan Rouhani [....]

By Amanda Schaffer @ NewYorker.com, Feb. 22, 2019

[....] the price of insulin has unaccountably surged. Between 2012 and 2016, it doubled in the United States, so that today it can cost diabetics as much as a thousand dollars a month. Eli Lilly in particular more than doubled the price of its blockbuster insulin analogue, Humalog, during the tenure of Alex Azar, who was then president of the company and is now President Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. Roughly a quarter of people with diabetes take less than the amount of insulin they are prescribed because the drug is so expensive [....]

[.....] the House Committee on Oversight and Reform has launched an investigation of skyrocketing drug prices, and the Senate Finance Committee will convene hearings on drug pricing next Tuesday. One congressional aim is to increase transparency around discounts and rebates, which primarily benefit intermediaries such as pharmacy-benefit managers rather than patients like Skipper, because companies use discounts and rebates to compete with each other rather than competing on the list price of the drug [....]

[.....] “Now I work at a call center. I have Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance through my job, and I can go to a primary-care doctor and an endocrinologist. But, even with insurance, my insulin costs a thousand dollars for a thirty-day supply. I can’t tell you the last time I was able to fill a prescription. I get samples from my endocrinologist. My sister also gets free insulin through a health center, because her income is lower than mine. So we’ve been sharing that [.....]

For the college-educated elite, work has morphed into a religious identity—promising identity, transcendence, and community, but failing to deliver.

By Derek Thompson @ TheAtlantic.com, Feb. 24

[....] Keynes predicted a 15-hour workweek in the 21st century, creating the equivalent of a five-day weekend. “For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem,” Keynes wrote, “how to occupy the leisure.” This became a popular view. In a 1957 article in The New York Times, the writer Erik Barnouw predicted that, as work became easier, our identity would be defined by our hobbies, or our family life. “The increasingly automatic nature of many jobs, coupled with the shortening work week [leads] an increasing number of workers to look not to work but to leisure for satisfaction, meaning, expression,” he wrote.

[....] The economists of the early 20th century did not foresee that work might evolve from a means of material production to a means of identity production. They failed to anticipate that, for the poor and middle class, work would remain a necessity; but for the college-educated elite, it would morph into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community. Call it workism.

1.             THE GOSPEL OF WORK

The decline of traditional faith in America has coincided with an explosion of new atheisms. Some people worship beauty, some worship political identities, and others worship their children. But everybody worships something. And workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants [....]

based on Bloomberg's Innovation Index for 2018 @ World Economic Forum, Feb. 6