Tips for choosing an Airbnb on your next vacation — from a Seattle couple who has stayed in 270 of them
Michael and Debbie Campbell, a retired Seattle couple who call themselves the Senior Nomads, have stayed in more than 270 Airbnbs in 85 countries over the last eight years. Here are their tips for choosing a vacation rental that will meet your needs.
The Strange Language of Diane Williams
“After 30 years of work, some writers grow lazy; Williams has grown more potent, like the venom of certain snakes.”
The 34 short stories of How High?—That High, Williams’s 10th work of fiction, reveal an artist who, at 75, shows no hint of being tamed. But a common subject for Williams—pleasure—may be more complicated now than it was in her earlier books.
Author Hilma Wolitzer lost her husband to COVID-19. So at 91, she wrote a story about it
Meredith Maran interviews Hilma Wolitzer on the publication of Wolitzer’s story collection Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket. Most of the pieces in the collection were first published in magazines in the 1960s and 1970s—all except the last, a reflection on the death from COVID-19 of Morton Wolitzer, her husband of 68 years.
This is the writing of a self-proclaimed late bloomer, bursting with half a life’s worth of observations. “I was raised by my housewife mother to be a housewife,” says Wolitzer now. “I went along with the plan. My writing was a surreptitious ‘hobby,’ something I did in rare moments alone. I took that time-worn advice: ‘Write what you know.’ So my early fiction takes place in the familiar terrain of supermarkets, playgrounds, bedrooms and kitchens.”
The 7 Worst Habits for Your Brain
“Bad choices and everyday missteps could harm your cognition. Here’s how to combat several of them.”
Recommendations from AARP.
A Warning Ignored
“American society did exactly what the Kerner Commission on the urban riots of the mid-1960s advised against, and fifty years later reaped the consequences it predicted.”
The Kerner Commission, created in the summer of 1967 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, reported on numerous incidents of civil unrest in U.S. cities between 1964 and 1967: “the Kerner Report shows that it is possible to be entirely cognizant of history and repeat it anyway.”
Darwin Was a Slacker and You Should Be Too
In this excerpt from his book Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang argues that we should follow the example of history’s great achievers like Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, and Ingmar Bergman, who spent much of their time “hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking.”
Schadenfreude: A psychologist explains why we love to see others fail
The wonderful German word schadenfreude means “taking pleasure in the misfortune of others.” Probably most of us have experienced this emotion, and then immediately felt guilty about it. But, writes neuroscientist Dean Burnett, “Schadenfreude is the result of several deeply-ingrained processes that the human brain spent millions of years evolving.”
US WW II veteran reunites with Italians he saved as children
Here’s another one of those stories that are just so heartwarming that they have to be shared. Martin Adler, a 97-year-old veteran of World War II, was recently reunited with three children from the Italian village of Monterenzio whom he first met in 1944.
An 1870s marriage certificate was hidden behind a picture at a thrift store. Employees set out to find the couple’s family.
And here’s another story that will warm your heart, even if you not into genealogy.
© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown
Retreading for Retirement 