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Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters

Director: Thor Freudenthal

Genre: Adventure, Family, Fantasy

Running Time: 106 minutes

Rated PG for fantasy action violence, some scary images and mild language

With Logan Lerman, Alexandra Daddario, Brandon T. Jackson

(Recommended)

In Choire Sicha's Very Recent History; An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City, a voice from our future looks back at events taking place in a "massive" east coast metropolis, its citizens perpetually gripped with "a quiet panic" while living in a gritty landscape of iron and excess. Throw in a mysterious virus, a rich, blind governor, a sketchy mayor campaigning for a third term, and this novel gets even more curious.

Guiding us through this is John, a young man so poor he can't even afford socks or regular haircuts. His days are spent working in a dreary office, making less money now that he has a "real" job than he did freelancing. Sicha spins a compelling allegory of New York City and its residents. Here's a tangled fable of greed, consumption, and isolation in a place where characters grapple with profound feelings of isolation despite too many friends, too many romantic flings, and too many choices.

John spends his nights partying with his tight-knit group. There's the sensible Chad, a tutor to the children of the city's wealthy, and Chad's boyfriend, Diego, who he met on a dating website aptly called DList, the likeable Kevin and his "incredibly symmetrical face," with whom John sometimes has sex, and the beautiful Tyler Flowers whose skin is "so pale that you [can] see into his head a little."

As the novel progresses, the city sinks deeper and deeper into a recession, the shadowy virus gradually claims more victims, our imperious mayor spends more money on a re-election campaign based on fear and intimidation, and John and his friends find themselves increasingly lost in a labyrinth of smoky bars, hook-up sites, and sex clubs.

But, even as they glibly rant about cigarettes and social media, wealth and power, Sicha portrays this group of gay men not as vapid and shallow products of their time, but as compelling, keen, and intensely complex individuals yearning to be heard and remembered in the face of so much annihilation. In the relentless bombardment of text messages and non-sequiturs, one-night stands and obsessions about money and jeans, we encounter incisive musings on love and worth at a time when it seemed as though the entire world would unravel.

Choire Sicha's writing charms and delights, but beneath the biting wit and cynicism, I found a book that dares to explore the darker underbelly of human avarice and capital, a book that's equal parts blindingly terrifying and smartly humorous, and one of the most clever reads I've encountered in a long time. This novel forces us to consider the cyclical nature of profits and losses, forces us to remember that friends and fads come and go, and that some things survive while others die off.

For it's only when we closely examine our own very recent history can we better learn to understand, and embrace, the very possible future we'll inevitably inherit.

Alex Espinoza is the author of Still Water Saints and The Five Acts of Diego Leon.

Silly me. I thought "rent-seeking" was something only landlords did.

But economists have their own way of looking at the world. To them, rent-seeking is a term for describing how someone snags a bigger share of a pie rather than making a pie bigger, as the venerable Economist explains it.

So, a drugmaker can be seen as a rent-seeker if it cajoles doctors to prescribe more of a particular brand of medicine at the expense of a rival pharmaceutical company's wares.

Now, how do they do it? A company provides some form of compensation (free meals, paid speaking gigs or a consulting deal) to doctors, and, lo and behold, its share of prescriptions goes up. Now, this connection isn't exactly earth-shattering news. But there are some new ways to look at how it works in practice.

Some researchers pored over databases compiled by ProPublica, a nonprofit journalism outfit, of drug company payments made to doctors and the prescriptions doctors wrote for Medicare patients.

They found some provocative associations.

Male doctors appeared twice as likely as female colleagues to be influenced by drug industry blandishments. "This confirms experimental and field evidence suggesting that women are more honest and less corruptible than men," the researchers write.

Doctors practicing in states where crimes of corruption are more common, such as Louisiana, were more likely to be influenced by drug company payments than those in states with fewer corruption-related crimes, such as Oregon.

Shots - Health News

Top Medicare Prescribers Rake In Speaking Fees From Drugmakers