effectively against many central tenets of moral philosophy and action theory, and advances a new view of her own. The book is a joy to read—clearly written, clever throughout, and compelling in its descriptions and analyses of some imperfect agents who have been widely misunderstood. Arpaly argues for a view about moral worth, or praiseworthiness. Her central claim is that praiseworthiness is ...

The literary topic of Siamese twins is not unfamiliar. American history tells us the genealogy from Mark Twain’s pseudo-antebellum story Tragedy Pudd’nhead Wilson and Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins (1894), Karen Tei Yamashita’s postmodern metafiction “Siamese Mongoloids: Cultural Appropriation Deconstruction Stereotype via Absurdity Metaphor” (1999), down to Shelley Jackson’s James Tiptree, J...

Ontologies are instruments for capturing and using formal semantics, and are often the result of a "central committee controlled" style of working. A new trend on the Web is the increasing popularity of folksologies in the form of social bookmarking sites. Folksologies provide informal semantics and can be created and adopted by anybody anytime anywhere on the Internet. Shared meaning in a folk...

THE HISTORY OF HEALTH INSURANCE The history of health insurance goes back centuries, possibly to ancient China and the Norman Conquest. Henry I introduced sweeping health care reforms to the newly combined kingdoms of England and Normandy. Soon thereafter, at least one “physician,” “John of Essex,” was receiving an honorarium of one penny per day for his efforts. As historians explained, that s...