• Disney and the Decline of America’s Middle Class (gift link, NYT, Aug 28, 2025), by Dan Currell

• Futurism (July 18, 2025): “[Delta] is looking to push the boundaries of how much passengers are willing to shell out for a plane ticket. By the end of this year, Delta hopes to price 20 percent of its tickets individually, using AI.” ... Al Jazeera (Oct 15, 2025): “Retailers can monitor your online behaviour by recording what you click on, your browsing time, location and device choice and combine all this with your purchase history to determine your ‘price sensitivity.’ . . . To do all this, they use AI surveillance tools to produce pricing recommendations.”

• Your Wealthiest Friend Has a Private Concierge (gift link, NYT, Oct 4, 2025), by Brent Crane:

Private concierges [are] an expensive team of dedicated assistants paid to do your bidding. . . . For up to $75,000 per year these firms will book impossible-to-get dinner reservations, procure your child’s birthday present or personally courier your beach wardrobe from England to the Maldives over the holidays.

. . . Concierge firms compete in offering . . . “hyper-personalization,” knowing and acting upon clients’ individual quirks, desires, tastes and bothers. “Say we’ve booked you at a restaurant and we know you are a sushi fanatic so there’s a tuna tartare waiting for you at the table when you arrive,” she said.

. . . Increasingly, firms partner with luxury brands like Sotheby’s, Formula One, and Aston Martin. In this way, they can offer members “exclusive” and “red carpet” access to events like the U.S. Open or New York Fashion Week or access to hard-to-acquire luxury products.

• How Private Equity Oversees the Ethics of Drug Research (gift link, NYT, Oct 4, 2025):

Many drug trials are vetted by companies with ties to the drugmakers, raising concerns about conflicts of interest and patient safety. . . .

The first ethics panels, created in response to testing scandals in the 1960s and ’70s, were nonprofits based at universities and hospitals. But in recent years, private-equity investors have increasingly reshaped them as for-profit endeavors.

For drug companies racing to develop the next blockbuster, private equity promised quicker, more efficient reviews. At the same time, private-equity ownership has driven the boards’ expansion far beyond their original watchdog role.

• From Matt Stoller, the BIG newsletter, Oct 26, 2025:

[There’s] data coming out about the forthcoming changes in the price of health insurance premiums. And the numbers are jaw-dropping. Here’s the Wall Street Journal, which wrote the cost is now $27,000 for a family plan, according to a KFF study that came out last Wednesday. That’s a jump of 6%. And health care costs were up 7% for the two preceding years. Another major report of health care costs, the Milliman Medical index, indicated with slightly different methodology that the cost for an average family of four in 2025 is $35,000, three times what it was in 2005.

. . . America spends $1.5 trillion a year on hospitals, versus just $450 billion for pharmaceuticals. And hospital spending grew at 10% in 2023 and 9% in 2024, and is on track for another massive year. This money goes to big city academic hospitals, not the rural ones closing down. The Federal government offers these hospitals competitive advantages over potentially cheaper options, they often get huge tax concessions, and they use their cash to buy up doctor’s practices and slap patients with higher prices. Yet, because they are nonprofits and seen as “charity,” donors give money to these hospitals, which is like donating water to the ocean.

. . . When you get your premium increase notification, you will not hear about the urology professor at the University of Miami paid $4 million a year, or the salary paid to the guy playing the piano in a marble medical chateau. You won’t hear about the state-granted monopoly Apexus, which takes a cut of every drug purchased by most hospitals through a special government discount plan called 340b.

• Food Banks Brace for Overwhelming Demand as SNAP Cutoff Looms (gift link, NYT, Oct 26, 2025):

The Trump administration’s slashing of the federal work force earlier this year had already driven up food insecurity in those areas; then the shutdown cut off paychecks for most of those who still had government jobs. . . . cars lined up for blocks in Beltsville, Md., on Saturday, waiting at one of several food distribution events that Ms. Muthiah’s network has held for federal employees who have gone weeks without wages.

After 45 minutes and 320 boxes given away, the Beltsville site ran out of food, and everyone who was still in line had to drive away empty-handed.