Film review: Perks of Being a Wallflower

THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER (M) (102 min) Directed by Stephen Chbosky Starring Logan Lerman, Emma Watson, Ezra Miller American teen comedy/dramas set around an intelligent misfit’s first year in high school were once a very common genre. The Perks of Being A Wallflower, based on the cult novel, and written and directed by the novel’s author, is a very informed throwback to those times.

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Why Mississippi Is Reversing Its Prison Policy

On Monday, May 16, Chris Epps, commissioner of Mississippi’s department of corrections, sat at a long conference table, grasping a mound of financial documents. He was preparing to head to the state’s penitentiary, an 18,000-acre old cotton farm in the Mississippi River Delta, for the execution of a man convicted of murder nearly two decades ago.

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Post-HMO Health Care: Are Accountable Care Organizations the Answer?

“Remember the 1990s” retrospective lists always include Nirvana, Monica Lewinsky and Wayne’s World, but leave out another major product that defined American life in the ’90s: the health maintenance organization, or HMO — that nefarious health-insurance plan that seemed expressly designed to prevent you from seeing the doctor of your choice or receiving the treatments recommended by doctors, all under the guise of lowering costs and “improving” medical care.

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A Brief History of Assisted Suicide

Mention the term “euthanasia,” and the first thing most people think of is the epic assisted suicide battle of the 1990s starring Jack “Doctor Death” Kevorkian. But the issue of whether human beings — and more pointedly, doctors — have the right to help others die has been in the public discourse since before the birth of Christ.

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