Hannah Levintova

Obama Admin Ignores FDA on Plan B

| Wed Dec. 7, 2011 6:32 PM PST

Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services upheld their decision to dispense Plan B One-Step—a one-pill emergency contraceptive—to young women only with a doctor's prescription, overruling an FDA request to make the drug available over the counter to women of all ages. The restriction only applies to women under the age of 17. In a statement on the HHS website, Secretary Kathleen Sebelius outlined the administration's reasoning: The FDA's conclusion that the drug is safe, she says, did not contain sufficient data to show that people of all ages "can understand the label and use the product appropriately." The outliers, she says, are the 10 percent of girls who are physically capable of child-bearing at 11.1 years old, and "have significant cognitive and behavioral differences." HHS makes no mention of women older than 11 and younger than 17—statistically, those far more likely to be having sex, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

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The Little Office Behind Obama's Big Enviro Flops

—By Hannah Levintova

| Thu Dec. 1, 2011 4:00 AM PST

President Obama and Cass Sunstein, OIRA administrator, chat near the West Wing.

For a while now, Obama's environmental record has been mixed—at times great, at others shoddy. But a new report (PDF), released Monday from the Center on Progressive Reform (CPR), suggests that when it comes to dismantling environmental reforms, Obama's administration is actually on par with that of former President George W. Bush. What's worse, the report shows, is that their combined decade of damage has a common denominator: an elusive federal entity called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) that has, under the auspices of both administrations, waged war on environmental, health, and safety protections.

[Read more in the Blue Marble blog]

2-Stepping With the Blind Boys of Alabama

—By Hannah Levintova

| Mon Nov. 21, 2011 4:00 AM PST

After seven decades, you wouldn't expect the Blind Boys of Alabama to be dabbling in reinvention. After all, with five Grammys, more than 60 albums, and a spot in the Gospel Music Hall of Fame under its belt, this legendary group has quite clearly cracked the elusive code to stardom.

And yet, the Blind Boys are always shaking something up: Their classic songs of praise have backed everything from cuddly Disney movies to gritty TV dramas like The Wire and Lost. Bucking partisanship, they've performed at both the Bush and Obama White Houses. These seven men—four blind, three sighted—have taken their sound far beyond religious settings, sharing a stage with Prince, sampling styles from rock to reggae, and even treading the late-night circuit—Leno, Conan, Letterman—with unflappable poise. Now on tour for Take the High Road, their first ever country-gospel record, their quiet rebelliousness is alive and well.

But if you ask what drives their medley of achievements, the answer is streamlined and unequivocal: "It all has to be centered around gospel," says vocalist Jimmy Carter. "We don’t deviate from that."

[Read more in the Mixed Media blog]

DJ Spooky's Icy Philharmonic

—By Hannah Levintova

| Mon Oct. 17, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

Where most artists hone in on one medium, DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid—né Paul Miller—has spent his career breeding a tizzying, singular brand of organized, multimedia chaos. He's all over the place, and yet remarkably put together. One reviewer called him "Einstein with a better haircut."

Spooky's The Book of Ice, released this past summer, is a motley collection of photos, essays, data, and relics of an imagined People's Republic of Antarctica. It's also just one chapter of Spooky's Antarctic opus, which includes a film (North/South), and Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica—an acoustic portrait of melting ice molecules that's part science experiment, part symphony, and part cautionary climate-change narrative.

Climate change is just one of several causes Spooky, 41, has tackled over the years. His 2009 album, The Secret Song, slams corporate America with tunes like "The War of Ideas," a new version of The Coup's "5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO," and a title track whose lyrics are based on economist Adam Smith's "invisible hand" theory. "The Secret Song," Spooky says, is the sound of "credit card fraud and jazz motifs made into stock exchanges." The album's brainy tracks are also supposedly hidden in smart-phone-scannable barcodes scattered around Manhattan. (Occupy Wall Streeters, after all, could perhaps use some additions to their repertoire.) His remake of D.W. Griffith's 1915 film "Birth of a Nation" turns the original—a glorification of racism and the Klan—on its head, making a once-silent film into one of rich sound and transforming a work of bigotry into a powerful educational tool.

[Read more in the Mixed Media blog]

Boycott Minerals From Congo? Not So Fast

—By Hannah Levintova

| Thu Sep. 29, 2011 8:00 AM PDT

A UN peacekeeper takes stock of weapons collected as part of the demobilization effort in eastern Congo.

As the fact-checker for Mac McClelland's "To Catch a Warlord," I started thinking about the topic of her piece as the "Bosco Paradox." The feature is about ICC-indicted Congolese warlord Bosco Ntaganda, and it investigates the competing priorities that have made his arrest (which should be easy–even Mac has his home address) a near-impossibility. Delving into DRC history, I saw that the Bosco Paradox is just one example of a long-standing pattern: In Congo, obvious solutions often aren't implemented because they'll simply create other problems.

This idea has cropped up recently in reference to a small, Congo-related provision of the year-old Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act. The rule—Section 1502—aims to regulate four of Congo's "conflict minerals:" gold, wolframite, cassiterite, and coltan. These are key for producing popular electronics like laptops and cell phones, and their trade has, for decades, financed DRC human rights abuses. So, Section 1502 requires US companies getting minerals from the DRC to disclose how they're doing so, submitting reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on the measures they're taking to ensure that their business isn't benefiting DRC rebel militias.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]