And sometimes it’s the embodiment of the cages of wealth and privilege we build around ourselves.
aging
Posted inEditor's Pick
Let’s Go to Jerusalem for Soup Again
Taffy Brodesser-Akner travels to Israel to reexamine the soup of her youth and the gap between memory, desire, and (ugh) reality.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The $5,000 Decision to Get Rid of My Past
After a series of painful losses, Ben Kuchera learns that when your games become your ghosts, it’s time to clean house.
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Pet Tortoise Who Will Outlive Us All
“It’s humbling to care for an animal that reminds you, each day, of your own imminent death.”
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
François Truffaut on an Aging Joan Crawford
As she neared fifty, determined to keep going, she became almost grotesque, answering her own needs and the wiles of directors eager to exploit her. In Nicholas Ray’s odd, beautiful, impassioned Western “Johnny Guitar” (1954), she’s Vienna, a tough businesswoman who runs a saloon and constantly faces down groups of armed men. Vienna is both an […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Awful Emotional and Financial Toll of Dementia
Lost too often in the discussion about a cure has been a much more basic, more immediate, and in many ways more important question: How can we better care for those who suffer from the disease? Dementia comes with staggering economic consequences, but it’s not the drugs or medical interventions that have the biggest price […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
On Aging and the Memories We Look Back On
What I’ve come to count on is the white-coated attendant of memory, silently here again to deliver dabs from the laboratory dish of me. In the days before Carol died, twenty months ago, she lay semiconscious in bed at home, alternating periods of faint or imperceptible breathing with deep, shuddering catch-up breaths. Then, in a […]
Posted inUncategorized
Researchers are studying the residents of the island of Ikaria to figure out why so many of them live well into their 90s and beyond: Following the report by Pes and Poulain, Dr. Christina Chrysohoou, a cardiologist at the University of Athens School of Medicine, teamed up with half a dozen scientists to organize the […]
Posted inUncategorized
A reflection on a mother’s life, and how advancements in medicine have extended our life expectancy, and have made it more difficult for us to die: ME: ‘Maybe you could outline the steps you think we might take.’ DOCTOR: ‘Wait and see.’ NEUROLOGIST: ‘Monitor.’ DOCTOR: ‘Change the drugs we’re using.’ MY SISTER: ‘Can we at […]