Flickr: Dave KnapikWe've been posting an increasing number of law- and litigation-related items on Fat City. Whether that's simply because legislatures are in session, or due to a busy new administration or several food movements reaching maturity I do not know. The latest comes not from law but from academia, where Kelly Brownell and Kenneth Warner, Yale and Michigan professors respectively, argue that the food industry's -- they call it "Big Food" -- products carry many of the same dangers tha
Flickr: Valerie EverettIf you smoke, this post won't be news because you've noticed the price of cigarettes jump in the past two weeks. Tobacco companies are getting ready for the increased federal tobacco tax by raising their own prices. (Can someone explain how tobacco companies raising the price of a pack 80 cents will help consumers "adjust," as the companies have put it? It just seems a way to eke more profit.)On Wednesday, the federal tax will go from 39 cents per pack to $1.01. All the ex
I started working on this week's cover story, "The Cure from Kansas," after discovering how much Big Healthcare money was pouring into the campaign fund of Kansas Rep. Brenda Landwehr, a Wichita Republican who heads the House Health and Human Services Committee. Landwehr's committee had proposed a particularly inhumane piece of legislation that made me wonder WTF they were thinking. Landwehr's campaign contributions told me everything I needed to know. What I found out was disturbing enough that
​When I was 15, my friend Lindsey and I would sneak out of summer camp to smoke skinny, leaf-wrapped cigarettes called bidis. They came in exotic-looking, triangular packages decorated with pictures of whatever they were supposed to taste like -- vanilla beans, strawberries -- though they mostly just tasted like burning. We felt satisfyingly rebellious, even though I'm sure we just looked like a pair of dizzy dorks.Still, I'm disappointed that, back in June, President Barack Obama robbed our
