This weekend on This American Life, a replay of 81 Words: The story of how the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness. In 1973 I was a young runaway still in Harrisburg, PA. After a serious auto accident that my parents used as an excuse to try to commit me, a psychiatrist threw his card on my hospital bed and said I could get help if ever I wanted it. Months later I went to that clinic and cried, “I’m a homosexual, please fix...

Andrew Koenig appears to have completed suicide in Vancouver. My condolences to his family and friends. My heart goes out to them. A certified suicide prevention trainer, I’ve put suicide in the context of health care reform before. Commenters object, saying I use suicide to try to score a political point. I disagree. Going back to Kitty Dukakis and Betty Ford we have tried to raise awareness of mental health in order to have these issues taken seriously — and covered by health insurance...

Expectations for today’s health summit could hardly be lower. Details of Obamacare Plan B are here and the WSJ is saying he’s got a Plan C: His leading alternate approach would provide health insurance to perhaps 15 million Americans, about half what the comprehensive bill would cover, according to two people familiar with the planning. It would do that by requiring insurance companies to allow people up to 26 years old to stay on their parents’ health plans, and by modestly expanding...

Ironically, on the same day that JD Powers announced Hummer ranks highest among mass market brands. Costing up to 3,000 jobs, the deal to sell to a Chinese manufacturer fell apart after that government declined to approve the sale. China has a new emphasis on the environment and slowing oil consumption. GM will shut down production: Over the years, Hummer shifted from a brawny status symbol that drew attention on the road into an automotive pariah. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California helped...

That’s the AP take-away from a new Pew Research report (pdf) released today. From the Executive Summary: Politically, Millennials were among Barack Obama’s strongest supporters in 2008, backing him for president by more than a two-to-one ratio (66% to 32%) while older adults were giving just 50% of their votes to the Democratic nominee. This was the largest disparity between younger and older voters recorded in four decades of modern election day exit polling. Moreover, after decades...

Marketplace looks at one impact of the new rules for credit cards that went into effect today — a profit shift from penalties to perks. Banks used to make money on interest-rate increases and fees. With those (loosely) regulated now… RON SHEVLIN [a banking products analyst for the Aite Group]: The best customers for the credit card issuers are going to be people who pay the balances off every month but make a lot of use of the card on a regular basis. That’s going to drive a lot...

Vudu is a three-year-old Silicon Valley startup that has never turned a profit, but in its press release, Wal-Mart says: VUDU is a revolutionary service, built into a growing number of broadband-ready TVs and Blu-ray players, that delivers instant access to thousands of movies and TV shows directly through the television. Customers with broadband Internet access and an Internet-ready TV or Blu-ray player can rent or purchase movies, typically in high-definition, without needing a connected computer...

ChatRoulette, the web sensation that enables anonymous video and text chats, was written by a 17 year-old boy, Andrey Ternovskiy, who some suggest could be the next Mark Zuckerberg (he’s caught VC Fred Wilson’s attention). He learned to code beginning at age 11 and his family is said to have invested in the ChatRoulette site as it scaled up. Here Andrey turns up in the NYtimes [Techmeme discussion]; here a Russia Today video interview with Ternovsky; here a sampling of ChatRoulette screenshots...

Listeners to NPR were treated in recent weeks to not one but two versions (and a couple follow-up blog posts) of Planet Money’s adulatory veneration of a self-described “Gerber baby” look alike efficiency expert, Matt Leblanc. Planet Money explains that Matt works for a “giant global logistics company” and “it actually turns out his process is really scientific.” You know, “he uses a stop watch and does all these calculations and he has this huge whiteboard...

Here’s how you can watch the Tiger Woods’ press event live online from the PGA’s headquarters in Florida today at 11 a.m. EST: ESPN will have live streaming video online. So will CBS News’s USTREAM. YouTube is also broadcasting it live on its politics channel CitizenTube. Both the PR pros and the sports business types agree: this apology strategy doesn’t fit the typical mold and is not likely to work for Woods. His transgression was not against golf fans; his sponsors and...

They finally caught him on the 16 lane downtown connector (for the uninitiated, that’s Interstate 75 and 85 overlapped and weaving through the core of the city with Interstate 20 crossing in the middle). It all went down in the middle of Rush hour! The 12-year-old zebra, named Lima, escaped from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus: The black-and-white striped animal was spotted all over town — in the parking lot near the Richard B. Russell Federal Building, near Centennial...

Not very. In fact, Google, Apple, Yahoo, Oracle and Applied Materials all argued that the race and gender of their work force is a trade secret and so cannot be released. After an 18-month Freedom of Information battle, the San Jose Mercury News won. It’s no wonder the companies wanted to keep the data hidden: The Labor Department data ultimately obtained by the Mercury News shows that while the collective work force of 10 of the valley’s largest companies grew by 16 percent from 1999...

CNet’s headline suggests HBO Go is a Netflix rival. But: Unless you are one of the 38 million cable subscribers who gets HBO or sister service Cinemax, HBO Go won’t be offered to you, the company has said. HBO Go provides subscribers Web access to the same movies HBO screens on cable TV–at no extra charge. This is the on-demand movie provider’s attempt to hang on to subscribers during a down economy, as Netflix and other Web video services attract more and more consumers looking...

Funny. When Google said last week that it was going to think big by offering experimental ultra high-speed Internet access to a small number of trial locations in the U.S. — “100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections” — the company explained that it had urged the FCC to do it through the National Broadband Plan. Today FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said the agency will propose a “100 Squared...

At the New York Toy Fair this morning, Mattel unveiled the results of an online campaign to pick the next in the “I Can Be” Barbie series. The winner, Barbie’s 125th career: Computer Engineer. She’ll be in stores this fall. From the press release: “All the girls who imagine their futures through Barbie will learn that engineers — like girls — are free to explore infinite possibilities, limited only by their imagination,” says Nora Lin, President, Society of Women Engineers....

Joe.My.God quotes Kenya’s newspaper The Daily Nation*: Police on Friday rescued three men accused of being gays in Mtwapa town in Kilifi district from hundreds of angry youth baying for their blood. Subsequently, a same-sex marriage that was planned to take place in the coastal town failed to take off as two men who announced the wedding went into hiding. Police were forced to intervene to save the three men who residents had accused of being “notorious gays” who were behind the...

In Jane Mayer‘s New Yorker piece on Eric Holder and the battle over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Holder is quoted as saying, “What we did is totally consistent with what has happened in every similar case” since 9/11. “There’s a desire to ignore the facts to try to score political points. It’s a little shocking.” Mayer offers compelling evidence that Holder is exactly right: For all the tough rhetoric of the Bush Administration, it prosecuted many more terror suspects as criminals than...

It is well-funded and pursued by mature individuals and groups of professionals with deep financial and technical resources, often with local government (or other countries’) toleration if not support. It is already responsible for billions of dollars a year in losses, and it is growing and becoming more capable. We have largely ignored it, and building our military capabilities is not responding to that threat. That’s from Eugene Spafford, a computer scientist at Purdue and one of the world’s...

Does anyone see a pattern emerging here: Google on Wednesday introduced a plan to offer ultra-high-speed Internet access to consumers in a test intended to showcase the potential new uses of broadband networks once such speeds become commonplace. [...] Google said that over the next six weeks, it would solicit proposals from communities interested in the service, and then announce trial communities later this year. It did not say when it expects the trial service to be up and running. Google cited...

I thought Gerard Alexander’s OpEd in Sunday’s WaPo on Why Liberals Are So Condescending would easily generate a pile of intelligent parsing and effective responses. Instead, most of the reaction I read was along the lines of “I know you are, but what am I?” Not a thing I found is worth quoting. Maybe everyone was busy making Palin crib note jokes. I was entirely unpersuaded by Alexander’s argument. My own view is that the two — liberals and conservatives —...