mattlawyue

At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.

At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler.

Mr. Fairfax was among the last avatars of a centuries-old figure: the lone-wolf explorer, whose exploits are conceived to satisfy few but himself. His was a solitary, contemplative art that has been all but lost amid the contrived derring-do of adventure-based reality television.

The Hotel Workers Union, under the leadership of Peter Ward, has created a network of one-stop clinics where union members can receive any care they need, free of charge. By building a medical community, and providing their own insurance, the union has developed a system so efficient they can offer free coverage at 1/3 the cost of the average HMO.

You may think that sounds crazy. I think it’s crazy we’ve waited so long to try and replicate their success. So this year we’ll bring the Hotel Trades model to a group of New Yorkers that has a hard time affording health care – freelancers.

Independent workers like temps or copy editors now account for 30% of the workforce, and one in four make less than $25,000 a year. Through the leadership of Sara Horowitz, the Freelancers Union has created a growing community of over 93,000 members in the five boroughs. Working with Council Member Maria del Carmen Arroyo, we’re going to help the Freelancers launch a flagship clinic, to provide low cost care to any member who needs it. This kind of creative health care model has the power to connect more New Yorkers to primary care, take some of the burden off of struggling hospitals, and strengthen our non-profit healthcare system.

Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected check in the mail, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homey restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.

Because … what the hell has Kim Kardashian ever done besides the X-rated roll-around and moronic, naval-gazing reality shows? Last week, according to a breathless US Weekly report, Kim was in Dallas with sister Khloe, the wife of Mavericks forward Lamar Odom (a story of vacuity for another time), ‘doing a little retail therapy at a local mall before visiting the Dallas Aquarium,’ where, as Kim writes on her blog, they took photos of all the ‘fab animals.’ The magazine reported, apparently without irony, that Kim had to ‘cut her trip short due to work commitments.’