Click here to view the embedded video.

For that we can thank actor James Gandolfini, the star of HBO’s The Sopranos from 1999 to 2007, who managed to bring out the humanity in a violent mob boss and remind us that even an evil man can be beset by the same insecurities, frustrations and yearnings as the most mild-mannered solid citizen.

Here are some contrasts and similarities between Gandolfini, who died on June 19 of an apparent heart attack at the age of 51 in Rome, and the fictional character he made so memorable:

• Like Tony Soprano, Gandolfini grew up in an Italian-American family in New Jersey. Unlike Tony, whose father was a criminal, Gandofini’s father was a law-abiding janitor, bricklayer and cement mason. In the 2012 film Not Fade Away, Gandolfini played a character that he loosely based on his father. The actor described his father as “old school” in a Los Angeles Times interview, noting: “He didn’t understand me or my generation. He took care of his family, took care of his children. What we as children didn’t realize is our father was a man who had dreams, aspirations and maybe there were things he wanted to do and places he wanted to go and he couldn’t because he had a family. When I realized that as a kid, I wished I was a better son.”

• Like his most famous character, Gandolfini attended Rutgers University. Unlike Tony, who left after failing to succeed on the football team, Gandolfini graduated in 1983 with a bachelors degree in communications, according to Gawker.

• Like Tony Soprano, Gandolfini was a real-life tough guy. He was an enthusiastic student of Krav Maga, the Israeli martial art, and even helped bankroll the opening of two training centers in New Jersey, according to the New Jersey Jewish News.

• Like Tony Soprano, Gandolfini had a son and a daughter.

• Like Tony Soprano, Gandolfini drove an SUV. But unlike Tony’s maroon Chevy Suburban, which was auctioned off on eBay in 2007, Gandolfini drove a Toyota hybrid, according to a 2009 Vanity Fair article.

• The fictional Soprano family lived in a lavish suburban mansion (actually located in North Caldwell, N.J., according to this 2007 Forbes article). In real life Gandolfini owned a slightly less spectacular $1.5 million home in Tewksbury, N.J., which featured two tw0-story fireplaces, a cathedral ceiling and a jacuzzi, according to NJ.com.

• Both were interested in military history. Tony Soprano loved watching World War II documentaries, while in real life Gandolfini produced HBO’s 2007 documentary Alive Day: Home from Iraq and 2010′s Wartorn: 1861-2010.

• Unlike the charming sociopath that he portrayed on the small screen, Gandolfini admitted to being frequently appalled by his character’s brutish behavior. He told Fox News in 2007 that, after a scene in which Tony did something especially despicable, he found himself chastising the fictional character. “I would shake my head and say, God, what a [expletive].” Here’s the famous final scene of “The Sopranos.”

  Click here to view the embedded video.

Photo: Isabelle Vautier via Wikipedia

Start with a report released June 19 by the Government Accountability Office, the first in-depth look at the sprawling system.

The upside: “Much progress has been made in establishing the regulatory framework and guidance required for this undertaking, and [the administration] is currently taking steps to implement key activities of the [online insurance marketplaces],” the report said. (Read the full document at this .pdf.)

The hedge: “Nevertheless, much remains to be accomplished within a relatively short period of time.”

And then there’s “Get Covered America,” a campaign launched June 18 by a nonprofit group Enroll America to spread the word about the law to the uninsured Americans it targets.

The upside: The campaign will start by sending volunteers door to door and handing out brochures at farmers markets and churches in 18 states, including California, Florida and Texas.

The hedge: “Seventy-eight percent of the uninsured aren’t even aware of what’s coming their way,” says Anne Filipic, the president of Enroll America who previously worked in the White House.

One of the most critical pieces of the operation is a computerized clearinghouse for the entire system – a federal “data hub” that’s supposed to offer instant rulings on consumers’ eligibility. It hasn’t had a full test run.

Here’s how AP writer Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar sums it up: “Translation: most of the specs have been written, but the all wiring hasn’t been laid, and what will happen when they flip the switch nobody really knows. And remember, Oct. 1 is less than four months away.”

While open enrollment for new health insurance plans starts Oct. 1, coverage becomes effective in January 2014.

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If so, you undoubtedly remember all those commercials that peddled “Not Sold in Any Store!” record albums and cassette tapes by a singer you’d never heard of whose most distinguishing features were a pencil-thin mustache, outlandishly flared sideburns and a towering lacquered widow’s peak. He  warbled country ballads in a mellifluous high voice, occasionally breaking into a full-throttle yodel that put Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music to shame.

Slim Whitman was his name (off the stage he was Ottis Dewey Whitman Jr.), and the announcer proclaimed not only that “his heart-touching voice has captured America,” but also that he’d sold more records than Elvis and the Beatles combined, or something to that effect.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Whitman, who died on June 19 at age 90 in his native Tampa, Fla., wasn’t just some telemarketing hype. Discovered in 1948 by Elvis Presley’s future manager Col. Tom Parker, Whitman quickly rose to become one of the biggest stars in pop music in the early 1950s. He became a regular on The Louisiana Hayride, a popular country music radio show. Whitman had a modest hit in 1949 with “Casting My Lasso Toward the Sky,” which showcased his yodeling ability.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Whitman’s first really big hit was his 1951 cover of ”Indian Love Call,” a song that had been recorded in operetta style in 1936 by Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy and then reinterpreted as an instrumental by county guitarist Chet Atkins. But Whitman’s version, with its otherworldly, theremin-like wail, is the one everybody remembers. It became a million-seller.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In 1955, Whitman released a single, “Rose Marie,” which flopped in the United States but became a huge crossover hit in England, holding the top spot on the charts for 11 weeks straight. Its lavish, baroque arrangement and vocal pyrotechnics exemplified Whitman’s distinctively unorthodox style.

Click here to view the embedded video.

By then, the ascendance of rock-and-rollers such as Chuck Berry, Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis already had stamped an expiration date on Whitman’s stardom on the pop charts.  (In a BBC story, he recalled appearing on a concert bill with young Elvis in 1955: “He was just a guy on the show. And then he started wiggling and then he took over the show.”)

But as country music historian Richard Carlin notes, Whitman remained a star in England and Europe, where his fluttery, flowery singing and heavy reliance on pedal-steel guitar seemed to perfectly fit how overseas listeners expected an American country singer to sound. Here’s his song “I Remember You”:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Whitman’s virtuosity also inspired parodies, such as this 1980s SCTV skit, in which Joe Flaherty portrayed how Whitman might have sounded as a singer in a Bollywood musical.  

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Between October 2011 and June 2013, an astounding $28 million in benefit payments had been stolen.

On June 19, the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging brought together a panel of advocates and victims to examine the issue and figure out what can be done to mitigate these crimes. For the many people who live solely on Social Security income, paying for groceries, medication, utilities and other bills becomes impossible when payments are hijacked.

Related: Would Your Bank Help Scammers Rip You Off?

Here’s how scam artists are working the system: They get a beneficiary’s personal information (perhaps a scheming telemarketer pressures an elder for their Social Security number and bank account info). Then the fraudster contacts Social Security or bank officials, identifying himself as the account holder, and requests that the monthly benefit be redirected to another account (his own). Thieves are also hacking into people’s new online Social Security accounts and changing where the beneficiary’s Social Security payments are deposited.

One woman, Alexandra Lane, 73, testified before the Senate committee that three months of her Social Security electronic benefit, $3,500, were redirected from her bank account. It took her 50 days and a seemingly endless amount of appeals to her bank, Social Security field offices, police departments, government officials and finally to Sen. Bill Nelson, the committee chairman, before her benefits were reinstated.

She was among the more fortunate. Rebecca Vallas, an attorney at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, told the committee that thieves stole six months of Social Security disability payments from a pre-paid debit card belonging to a 57-year-old woman. Officials with the Direct Express debit card refused to reimburse the woman, claiming they weren’t obligated under government rules. When the woman couldn’t pay her apartment rent, she was evicted.

“A single month of lost benefits can lead to enormous hardship,” Vallas said. “If Treasury [officials] require the switch to electronic benefits, they have an obligation to ensure that the methods are secure.”

Sen. Nelseon insisted recipients who’ve been victimized “must be made whole in a timely manner.”

“Social Security is all their income for one-third of the people in Florida” whose electronic payments were rerouted, he said. “Our goal is to prevent this from happening.”

Vallas also urged Treasury officials to expand the conditions under which beneficiaries can waive the requirement to switch to electronic benefits. Currently, beneficiaries can only get waivers if they’re older than 90, mentally impaired or live in a rural area, making it difficult to access a bank.

In addition, she pressed officials to make waiver forms available to the public. To get a waiver, she said, a person must contact the Treasury call center and request the form by mail – but call center representatives often give them a hard time and sometimes refuse to mail one. “Ive had to do battle” to get the call center to send a form, Vallas said.

“People are legally entitled to get that form,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said. If Treasury officials are planning to mail out a letter in July, “threatening” the remaining 2 percent of Social Security beneficiaries who haven’t made the switch to electronic benefits to do so, it must explain that waivers are an option. And the forms must be accessible to the public, she added.

A few things you can do to prevent this kind of fraud:

• Never give out your personal information to unsolicited callers
• Don’t agree to accept pre-paid debit cards or credit cards in another person’s name
• Never send or wire money to an unknown person
• Contact your local SSA office if you receive a call from a person claiming to be from SSA, and that person asks you to provide your Social Security number or other information.

[You can report suspicious activity to the Social Security Fraud Hotline, or by phone at 1-800-269-0271.]

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“What the hell use will that be in world?” he wanted to know.

“I’ll be a better human,” I snarked, stumped for a better answer.

A report released today would have helped my case with dad.

The Heart of the Matter comes from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. It makes the case that educators and policymakers risk failing the country’s students, and its democratic institutions, if the push toward science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education throws the humanities and social sciences overboard.

Related: Boomers Once Led the World in Education. What Happened?

If you don’t want to read the report, you’ll get the gist of it by watching this short film starring scholars, and creative types like actor John Lithgow, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

The commission prepared the report at the request of a bipartisan group of senators and representatives, and included members from business, academia, government and the arts. From the executive summary:

As we strive to create a more civil public discourse, a more adaptable and creative workforce, and a more secure nation, the humanities and social sciences are the heart of the matter, the keeper of the republic — a source of national memory and civic vigor, cultural understanding and communication, individual fulfillment and the ideals we hold in common.

What are the humanities and social sciences? According to the report, the humanities include “the study of languages, literature, history, film, civics, philosophy, religion, and the arts.” Disciplines of the social sciences include “anthropology, economics, political science and government, sociology, and psychology.”

“Together,” the report asserts, “they help us understand what it means to be human and connect us with our global community.”

If that sounds a little touchy-feely, that’s the problem. Voices bemoaning America’s educational failures and slipping world rankings often point to students’ lackluster performance in the hard sciences. The report urges us to look at other aspects of education too.

According to the report, here’s what strengthening America’s commitment to the humanities and social sciences will achieve:

1. Educate Americans in the knowledge, skills and understanding they will need to thrive in a 21st-century democracy.
2. Foster a society that is innovative, competitive and strong.
3. Equip the nation for leadership in an interconnected world.

And that’s how proclamations about something as squishy as the humanities and social sciences are made more palatable to the public: by framing the issue as one of salvaging our democracy, maintaining national security, and improving economic competitiveness.

It’s a stronger argument than the one I rudely made to my dad about why I was studying the humanities.

“So I could thrive in our 21st-century democracy” would have been a lot classier.

Follow @menschmedia (Steve Mencher)

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Cher is no stranger to tabloid fodder.

The 67-year-old singer who has spent most of her life in the spotlight offered this advice to young artists on navigating the world of paparazzi attention: “You’re screwed. That’s my advice.”

“You don’t deal with it. You just try to get a place where no one can find you and that’s your little sanctuary,” continued the “Believe” singer in an interview Tuesday. “I have a fabulous house that I love and it’s my sanctuary.”

Looking ever the rock star in leather and studs, Cher took the stage Tuesday for the season finale of NBC’s The Voice. She performed “Woman’s World,” the first single off her upcoming album of the same name — her 26th album since she began recording in the 1960s.

Cher said reality singing competitions are simply a modern incarnation of classic star-makers like The Ed Sullivan Show and Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.

“It’s just another vehicle, you know what I mean? Talent is talent,” she said on the red carpet following the finale which crowned 16-year-old country singer Danielle Bradbery the winner.

See also: The Immortal Betty White — on her burgeoning career and her love for pets (video)

The young powerhouse from Blake Shelton’s team beat out indie rocker Michelle Chamuel and country duo the Swon Brothers for the season four title.

Though Cher has topped the Billboard pop charts throughout the last six decades, she credits luck, not necessarily talent, for her incredible staying power.

“If you have an idea, you tell me because I haven’t got a clue,” she said of her secret to career longevity. “I believe that luck has a lot to do with it. There are lots of people who are more talented or whatever, but somehow this has been my path. So this is what I’m doing.”

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Related: Are We Teaching Our Next Generation the Right Stuff?

The council, a nonpartisan think tank whose 4,700 members include such luminaries as  journalist Fareed Zakaria and actress-activist Angelina Jolie, notes that among people ages 55 to 64, Americans rank first in the percentage who’ve earned high school degrees and third in those who’ve earned college and graduate degrees. But Americans ages 25 to 34 only rank 10th in the world in high school diplomas, and they’ve dropped to 13th in attaining post-secondary degrees.

It’s not that 25-to-34-year-olds are less educated than boomers: 88 percent of them earned high school diplomas, compared with 90 percent of boomers, and they actually managed a tiny edge — 42 percent to 41 percent — in post-secondary degrees. The real problem is that they’re slipping in relation to their global counterparts.

Paradoxically, younger Americans are entering college at a higher rate — 70 percent — than the boomer generation managed. In 1970, only 48.4 percent of high school graduates went on to higher education, according to a study published in 2010 in the American Journal of Applied Economics. But that edge is negated, because fewer than half of today’s students manage to stay in school and earn degrees, a slightly lower completion rate than boomers.  According to the CFR report, the United States has the highest dropout rate in the developed world. A likely reason is the astronomical rise in tuition costs during that time: from 1970 to 2007, tuition costs at colleges and universities rose by nearly 1000 percent, according to personal finance blogger and author Trent Hamm.

Illustration: Council on Foreign Relations

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Christine Porter is hooked on the My Fitness Pal app. In October, after deciding to lose 50 pounds, Porter started typing in everything she eats, drinks and any exercise she gets.

“This is like my main page here,” says Porter, who lost 42 pounds in nine months. “It’s telling me I have about 1,200 calories remaining for the day. When I want to record something I just click the ‘add to diary’ button. I’m on it all day either through my phone or through the computer.”

Health apps such as My Fitness Pal are turning smartphones and tablets into exercise aides, blood pressure monitors and devices that transmit an EKG. And the day is not far off when doctors may be suggesting apps along with prescribing drugs to help patients manage their health. But the explosion of apps is way ahead of tests to determine which ones work.

Porter heard about the app from Ryan Sherman, her health coach at a clinic for employees of Massachusetts General Hospital. Sherman helps clients turn a doctor’s orders into a user friendly action plan for keeping high blood pressure or sugar levels in check.

Increasingly, says Sherman, patients with diabetes or heart problems are coming in, pulling out their phones, and saying hey, have you seen this app?

“There’s a new one every day, so it’s trying to keep up with that,” Sherman says.

Which is one reason why many doctors are suggesting, but not prescribing apps. Doctors aren’t sure which of the roughly 40,000 available apps do what they claim to do. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration divides health apps into two categories: those that help with healthy lifestyles and those that turn your phone into a medical device to, say, record blood pressure or an EKG, and then send those readings to a doctor.

The FDA is revising regulations for apps in the medical device category. It does not plan to regulate diet or exercise apps. A few private companies are stepping in to do that task. Ben Chodor started Happtique, a company that reviews apps and gives those are at least perform correctly, a seal of approval.

“It’s the Wild West and someone needs to come in and at least help the consumers and the clinicians and the payers sort through the 40,000-plus apps that are already out there,” says Chodor.

Happtique will not say which apps work better than others or guarantee their safety. Still, some doctors say apps that work are transforming medicine. Dr. Eric Topol, the chief academic officer at Scripps Health in San Diego, says apps that monitor blood pressure or glucose rates can be more valuable than prescriptions to keep these conditions in check.

“When we use a medication we don’t know if it’s going to work or not.  It’s much better when a person’s taking their blood pressure on a frequent basis,” says Topol.

Some apps work with another device, such as when a person wears a blood pressure monitor that transmits the data to the person’s phone. “The average person looks at their smart phone 150 times a day,” says Topol. “All of a sudden, they’re able to diagnose if their blood pressure’s adequately controlled and what are the circumstances when it’s not.”

Topol says apps that control blood pressure will help prevent strokes and heart attacks and may mean doctors should prescribe phones and tablets in addition to apps. But Dr. Laura Ferris at the University of Pittsburgh, urges patients to use apps cautiously.

“It does make sense that people who download these apps and use them really understand that they are doing so at their own risk,” says Ferris.

Ferris ran a study of apps that claim to detect cancer based on a picture of a mole. Only one of the apps sends the  picture of your suspicious mole to a dermatologist. It was right 98 percent of the time.

Three others, says Ferris, could be dangerously wrong: “The best of them missed melanoma 30 percent of the time. The worst of them missed melanoma over 90 percent of the time.”

Despite the growing interest in medical apps, there are many unresolved questions about their use: Should all the information patients collect become part of their medical record and how? Who in the doctor’s office analyzes patients’ numbers? Will insurers cover the cost of apps?

Dr. Ben Crocker, at the Mass General clinic that is testing a few apps, says those are questions doctors will have to answer.

“This is what’s engaging patients,” says Crocker. “Patients are coming to their doc for the first time saying, ‘I’ve been collecting some information or I’ve been using this application.’  And that, I think we can’t ignore no matter where this is taking us, no matter how Wild West it feels.”

This story is part of a partnership that includes WBUR, NPR, and Kaiser Health News.

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The U.S. spends $200 billion each year — about 8 percent of the nation’s health care tab — on medical care stemming from improper or unnecessary use of prescription drugs, a new report out Wednesday says.

Much of those costs result from unneeded hospitalizations or doctor visits, according to the study by the IMS Health’s Institute for Healthcare Informatics, which provides data and other consulting services to the health care industry. Medical costs are driven up by patients who don’t get the right medications or fail to take their drugs, the misuse of antibiotics, medication errors and inadequate oversight when patients take multiple drugs.

Even though the use of lower cost generic drugs is high, further increases could shave $10 billion in costs, the report says.

Some private and government pilot programs aiming to better coordinate patient care have helped reduce the problems, the report said. Some provisions in the federal health law that create financial incentives to better coordinate care and to reduce hospital readmissions may further that progress, said author Murray Aitken, executive director of the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics.

The report notes “that even though avoidable costs are significant, encouraging progress is being made in addressing some of the challenges that drive wasteful spending in many parts of the healthcare system. Medication adherence among large populations of patients with three of the most prevalent chronic diseases – hypertension, (high cholesterol) and diabetes – has improved since 2009 by about 3%. The proportion of patients diagnosed with a cold or the flu – both viral infections that do not respond to antibiotics – who inappropriately received antibiotic prescriptions has fallen from 20% to 6% since 2007. And, for diseases where lower-cost generic medications are available, use of generics reached 95% in 2012.”

Photo: Erin DeMay/Flickr

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A new survey by the Better Sleep Council found that disagreements about bedroom temperature topped tossing and turning and even snoring for the reasons couples gave for not getting a good night’s sleep.

In the survey, taken last year, a majority of American adults (85 percent) said they had problems sleeping at night, with 43 percent bothered by the temperature of the room. A spouse or partner who tosses and turns disrupted the sleep of 40 percent of respondents, while snoring was cited by 32 percent.

Women, in particular, said problems with their sleep environment — too hot, too cold, too noisy — kept them awake at night.

So what’s the answer (other than separate bedrooms, which, by the way, is the solution of almost one in 10)? Maybe it’s a colder bed.

The sleep industry is promoting a number of new products designed to help us sleep by keeping us cool, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Among the choices: the ChiliPad temperature-controlled mattress pad from Brookstone; a water-cooled Chillow pillow pad to help keep a cool head; a new Sleep Number mattress topper with a dual-temperature layer; and mattress maker Kingsdown’s Blu-Tek line of mattresses (with shivery names like Winter, Arctic and Glacier), which features a layer of cooling gel.

Many of these also allow couples to adjust the bed to each of their personal temperature preferences — such as the wife (ahem) who wants a colder room with a heavier blanket, and the husband who wants a warmer room and a lighter blanket.

Plus, the Better Sleep Council offers these other tips to improve your sleep, including getting a larger mattress. Evidently couples who have been sleeping on a double, or full-size, mattress may think they have sufficient room, the council notes, but each person really has only as much sleeping space (widthwise, we assume) as a baby’s crib provides.

And should you think sleep quality isn’t all that important, check out this new sleep research report from the National Institutes of Health on how better sleep translates into better brain health for older adults.

Photo: creative commons/NIH.gov

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