Freelancers Union To Sponsor Innovative New Health Care CO-OPs

When we spoke with Freelancers Union Advocacy and Policy Director Althea Erickson back in November, she told us that the organization was developing some exciting new health care options for the freelance workforce. Now, with some help from the US Department of Health and Human Services, one of those options is on its way to becoming a reality.

Starting in New York, New Jersey and Oregon, the Freelancer's Union will be sponsoring Consumer Operated and Oriented Plans. CO-OPs, as they're called, work much like other private insurance companies, but with one key difference: they don't try to turn a profit. These new plans will compete with private insurers on the open market, giving individuals and small businesses a better and more fair alternative to current offerings, which are primarily designed to benefit large corporations.

The Department of Health awarded the Freelancer's Union $340 million in low-interest loans to sponsor these three state-level CO-OPs. The union plans to begin enrollment for the plans in Fall 2013, with coverage starting in 2014. In New York it expects to enroll 100,000 people in the next seven years.

As CO-OPs are part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Supreme Court's upcoming decision on the act could have an effect on their future. We're staying optimistic, though, and looking forward to a health care innovation that helps the growing independent workforce.

For more info, check out the Freelancers Union's CO-OP page and FAQ.

--John Ruscher

Call for Entries: Write the Worst Sentence In 25 Words or Less

Though we usually prefer applauding a job well done, sometimes when a job is done so poorly we have to stop and take notice. We don't think we're the only ones who enjoy contests like the Literary Review's annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award. The last winner was Snow Falling on Cedars author David Guterson for his fifth novel, Ed King, a modern interpretation of Oedipus that apparently uses one too many coy metaphors like "back door" and "front parlour." Guterson even bested Haruki Murakami's embarrassing comparison of "a freshly made ear and a freshly made vagina" in 1Q84.

But we digress.

The point is, we're equally excited for the Lyette Lyon contest--AKA the worst sentence written in 25 words or less. This one's an open call: Meaning you can either create your own terrible ode to the English language or nominate a particularly egregious sentence born from someone else's ill-fated pen. 

Last year's Lyette Lyon winner was a woman by the name of Judy Dean--and her entry went a little something like this:

"The red hot sun rose in the cold blue sky."

Here's contest founder Adam Cadre explaining their choice for the crown:

"First, you’ve got the eyeroll that comes from the ham-handed contrast between ‘red hot’ and ‘cold blue’ — and then a second later you realize that ‘red hot’ actually means a temperature of about 1000 kelvin, and is therefore hilariously inadequate as a descriptor of the sun, a gigantic nuclear furnace with a core temperature of roughly ten million kelvin. Intentionally writing a sentence that seems unintentionally bad is hard; writing one that suggests an author going for hyperbole and accidentally winding up with woeful understatement is masterful."

Meanwhile, we've got ourselves a couple more favorites--one being Jordan Brown's:

"The detective could smell the murder on the knife."

And then this little gem courtesy of James Gilker:

"A wind was blowing from east to west, as if it were the sun, blowing instead of shining."

Think you can down take those nightmarish (but kind of perfect) passages of prose? You have until April 15th to submit your sentence. On the other hand, if you'd actually like to write something not terrible, take a quick glance at some of our writing classes; we swear you won't end up in Lyette Lyon's Hall of Shame.

-- Perrin Drumm

Your Daily Insight as told by Khalil Gibran

Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.

Artist Profile: Photographer Damien Rudd

A recent graduate from the University of Melbourne's photography program, Damien Rudd's oldest work dates back only to 2010, but in two years he's managed to create an impressive body of work with a distinctive voice. Among (we feel) his best work is "The sexual behavior of young people," a series inspired by a 1968 book of the same name.

Each of his series seeks to explore some major idea like death, time or love. Whatever his initial impulse is, however, we're far more interested in his use of color and soft light. His tone and composition vacillates between William Eggleston's alternately bright and muted snapshots to small scale Gregory Crewdson's in the striking use of artificial lighting and purposeful compositions. Some of his images take a different turn, integrating geometry, as in "Attraction and Repulsion" or, one of our personal favorites, "Taken Only Road." (We sincerely urge you to seek them out.)

It's thrilling to catch onto an artist when they're just striking out, and Rudd is definitely one to watch. Feeling particularly inspired by Rudd's work below, go ahead and peruse one of our Photography classes.  Though first:

 

Tiny Lightbulbs: Where Crowd-funded Projects Get a Second Life

If you've ever tried to raise funds for a product on Kickstarter and been fortunate enough to succeed, you may have found that after all your backers have received their incentive gifts and that initial buzz quiets down. As a small, independent entrepreneuur, it's difficult to keep up the momentum.

This exact thing happened to Matthew McLachlan, a gent whose Kickstarter-funded iPad amplifier, SoundJaw, saw a speedy decline in sales after its initial Kickstarter hype. But instead of spending a bunch of money on advertising, McLachlan saw the bigger picture: This January he and his brother Mark launched Tiny Lightbulbs, an online marketplace for post-Kickstarter projects. If you remember a project or backed something and want to know where it is now, there's a good chance it's available on Tiny Lightbulbs. 

There's currently no listing fee for sellers, but Tiny Lightbulbs does take a 13% commission. Though the idea is to maintain your visibility until you can get your e-commerce sea legs and launch your own sales platform. Featured products right now include the iLatch, a hanging iPad case that fits over car headrest and kitchen cabinets and Frank, the clever bunny-faced coatrack. 

Meanwhile, if you want to take McLachlan's lead and go into business for yourself, you've got a few options with 3rd Ward's Professional Development classes, from making a business plan to bookkeeping to the elusive art of branding. 

Your Daily Insight as told by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

Kickstarter Pick: CitySprout, A Revolution in Food Distribution

When you want local produce you have two options: You can go to a farmer's market, or grow the fruits and vegetables yourself.

While farmers' markets are a wonderful resource, many are only held on the weekends and sometimes inconvenient locations. And though most apartment dwellers we know would love to grow their own food, we're limited by a few small pots crammed onto our windowsills and fire escapes. Which brings us to our Kickstarter pick for the week:

CitySprout, a project that aims to help close the gap between local farmers and city folk by hosting an online marketplace for the two to connect. It works like this: You enter your zip code to see what farmers are going to be bringing to your neighborhood, when they'll be there and how much it will cost.

"For example, if you live in Williamsburg, you may see that there are several drop-off locations spread throughout the borough, one for each day of the week." You can see that on Monday, between 9-11am, Farmer Ned will be two blocks away with crates of carrots, apples, tomatoes, onions, lettuce, peppers, potatoes, green beans and broccoli for $25 a crate. You pay for your share ahead of time and then head over on the assigned day to pick it up. No ordering a month's supply like some produce delivery services. You pay on an as-needed basis.

CitySprout is only feasible if enough people in your zip code express an interest. You can sign up now so that by the time it launches your neighborhood will already be on the list. Better yet, back the project. Incentives include free shares you can use to order produce once the service launches.

Journalist Jonah Lehrer on "How Creativity Works"

IMAGINE: How Creativity Works from Flash Rosenberg on Vimeo.

Maria Popova recently posted this teaser video for Jonah Lehrer's new book, "Imagine: How Creativity Works,"on her site Brain Pickings. Lehrer explores how creativity "works" by debunking the common misconception that all great ideas are preceded by the elusive a-ha! moment, the moment the proverbial lightbulb goes off. Instead, he insists that frustration is part of the process. Consider us 100% on board.

Lehrer kicks off the book with this intro:

"The sheer secrecy of creativity — the difficulty in understanding how it happens, even when it happens to us — means that we often associate breakthroughs with an external force. In fact, until the Enlightenment, the imagination was entirely synonymous with higher powers: being creative meant channeling the muses, giving voice to the ingenious gods. (Inspiration, after all, literally means ‘breathed upon.’) Because people couldn’t understand creativity, they assumed that their best ideas came from somewhere else. The imagination was outsourced.”

In relation (we believe), Nietzsche may have put it best in his 1878 book, "Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits:"

"Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration… shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects… All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.”

So don't give up if your "seething cauldron of ideas," as Lehrer puts it, seems unintelligible or fruitless. It's all part of the process, folks.

-- Perrin Drumm

Your Daily Insight as told by Coco Chanel

Success is often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.

Klaus Pichler's Subversive Still Lifes of Rotting Food

You may have heard about the UN's shocking announcement that one-third of the world's food is left to rot (as in, 1.3 billion tons.) It didn't take Austrian artist Klaus Pichler long to connect that finding to the fact that one in twelve people are malnourished and 16,000 children die each day from hunger-related causes. That's one child every five seconds.

So for his next body of work, Pichler decided to focus on all that wasted food in the photo series "One Third."

Images of beautifully-lit food at their peak of decay are shown side-by-side with reports issued by the UN"s Food and Agriculture Organization. Pichler's photos also play up the Food Supply Chain, the journey an agricultural item takes from the time it's picked, to the moment you toss it in the trash, tracking its origin, time of harvest, means of transportation, distance traveled and its carbon footprint.

"Unsurprisingly," Pichler says, "the worldwide percentage of food waste per person varies greatly: In Europe and North America, each consumer wastes between 95 and 115 kilograms of food, whilst only between 6 and 11 kilograms of edible goods are discarded per person in Sub Saharan Africa and South/ South East Asia. Considering the underlying reasons for food waste, however, comparisons between the global north and south seem to make a lot less sense: Taking a look at the ‘Food Supply Chain’, ranging from production, logistics and retail to the end con- sumer, it becomes apparent that losses occur at different stages of the process, depending on the standards of living in individual countries."

Read more of the report and see all the images, and if you're feeling particularly inspired by Pichler's (subversively) gorgeous still lifes, go ahead and check out one of 3rd Ward's photography classes.

Meanwhile:

-- Perrin Drumm