Category: reading

Last Week’s Links

What You Need to Know About Regrets

“How looking backward shows us the path forward.”

“So how do we reconcile with regrets as we age? For older adults, it can be bittersweet to compare what is to what could have been, as our chances for a do-over dwindle,” writes Tove Strandmark. Drawing from the book The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward by Daniel H. Pink, she offers some advice and examples.

How some Seattle-area seniors are getting an outdoor escape

Here’s an article about “Cycling Without Age, a global organization trying to enrich the lives of older people by visiting extended living facilities and offering rides piloted by volunteers.” The volunteers use specialized electric bicycles called trishaws.

Old age isn’t a modern phenomenon – many people lived long enough to grow old in the olden days, too

I see a lot of articles explaining that the number of older adults is increasing as advances in fields like medicine and nutrition allow people to live longer. But Sharon DeWitte, professor of anthropology at the University of South Carolina, reminds us that in earlier times people also lived long enough to grow old. She’s a bioarchaeologist, someone who studies human skeletons excavated from archaeological sites to see what life in the past was like. “There’s physical evidence that plenty of people in the past lived long lives – just as long as some people do today,” she writes.

Good Company: Depictions of Older Women in Literature

Jane Campbell has some reading recommendations:

For some time, I have been relishing literature that offers wonderfully varying depictions of old women. They are good company. These are pieces that expose the cruelty inflicted on older women and that impress me with their capacity to pursue the essence of the complex creature that still exists inside the worn-out body. Inside them all is the fight for their independence.

The Real-Life Women’s Baseball League Behind ‘A League of Their Own’

I’ve mentioned before that I like baseball. I eagerly watched the 1992 movie A League of Their Own. Now Amazon has produced a TV series with the same title. In this article Ellen Gutoskey fills in some history of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which lasted from 1943 until 1954.

You Can Expect to Be Happy in Your 50s and 60s

Psychology Today takes a look at the happiness curve, which suggests that humans overall get happier after midlife:  “The argument, which comes from huge data sets, suggests two ways to think about your own history. Don’t blame yourself so much for the bad time—and be optimistic that things will improve.”

How My Mother’s Dementia Has Made Us So Much Closer

“The most common personality change for people with dementia is apathy or sadness,” according to geriatric psychiatrist Gary Kennedy, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Bronx-based Montefiore Medical Center and the Albert Einstein School of Medicine. Though he added that physicians and psychiatrists wouldn’t hear about those patients who become sweeter and more loving because that’s not a problem.

Here Elena Bowes tells one of those stories that we don’t hear about often. Bowes describes how her 88-year-old mother has become “softer, kinder, more loving”—although, Bowes admits, she still occasionally catches a glimpse of her old mother, who was often critical and judgmental.

Medical Mutual Aid Before Roe v. Wade

Linda Thurston tells the story of how and a group of friends at Boston University created a handbook called Birth Control, Abortion and V.D., A Guide for the B.U. Student. There were two editions of the handbook published, the first in April 1969 and the second in January 1970.

I attended Boston University from 1966 to 1970. Although I don’t specifically remember this pamphlet, I do remember what it was like in Massachusetts at the time: “you could only get a legal abortion in the US if you got two doctors to testify that having a baby would kill you.” Massachusetts was particularly strict, with public enforcement of antique laws still on the books that prohibited showing and describing of birth control devices in public. 

© 2022 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

Psychologists say a good life doesn’t have to be happy, or even meaningful

A recent article published in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Review suggests that living a good life needn’t focus on purpose or happiness. According to the two authors of the article, a good life can be one that’s “psychologically rich,” a phrase that they define as one characterized by “interesting experiences in which novelty and/or complexity are accompanied by profound changes in perspective.” Further, “an experience doesn’t have to be fun in order to qualify as psychologically enriching. It might even be a hardship.”

The Heartbreak Key

Here’s a fascinating article on how we interpret or feel music—and why popular musicians tend to avoid the key of D minor.

German composer Christian Schubart “was a forefather of musical category creation: In his 1784 essay “A History of Key Characteristics in the 18th and Early 19th Centuries,” he balanced a study of the harpsichord with insights from literature and psychology to match all 24 major and minor musical keys to different auditory personalities.” 

11 Romances Featuring Older Couples

BookBub has some recommendations of books in the category it calls “seasoned romance.” I admit I haven’t read any of these books, but if you’re looking for a book featuring older adults finding love, there may be something here for you.

Here’s Where Our Minds Sharpen in Old Age

We usually think of aging as a time of declining memory, producing those “senior moments” that seem to befall all of us, at least occasionally. This article reports on new research published in Nature Human Behavior suggesting “that many things improve with age, including some cognitive aspects that had previously been thought to get worse.”

Jane Fonda’s blog is one of the internet’s greatest treasures

“We are barely worthy of such incredible content.”

Nicole Gallucci writes that Jane Fonda began blogging in 2009 and continues today, at age 83.

Since celebrities often avoid publicly wading into politics and sharing opinions on real societal issues, it’s refreshing to see Fonda use her blog to inform readers about pressing social and environmental justice problems. And while she nails serious, impactful content, she also strikes a remarkable balance by peppering in light and playful posts.

Social media’s 70-and-up ‘grandfluencers’ are debunking aging myths

Apparently Jane Fonda isn’t the only older social media star. Lianne Italie’s article in the Los Angeles Times reports on the “growing number of “grandfluencers,” folks 70 and older who have amassed substantial followings on social media with the help of decades-younger fans.”

© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

As Lou Gehrig Day nears, here’s what he meant to the fight vs. ALS, and what baseball means to those with it

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the disease that killed baseball player Lou Gehrig (and is therefore alternatively called Lou Gehrig disease), is a “progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord and is 100% fatal.” Next Wednesday Major League Baseball will celebrate the first of what will become an annual event, Lou Gehrig Day.

ALS advocates hope that this event will increase awareness of the disease, for which there have been very few treatment breakthroughs since Gehrig’s 1939 diagnosis:

As Phil Green, a former University of Washington football player who has lived with ALS since 2018, said in an interview this week, “If Lou Gehrig were diagnosed today, he would have pretty much the identical prognosis that he did 80 years ago. Just think about that. We put men on the moon and rovers on Mars, yet this disease still seems to baffle some of the smartest scientists in the world.”

How to Understand the 1960s in 11 Books

“If you remember the 60s, the saying goes, you weren’t there. And for many of us who lived those turbulent, exciting and wildly different times it’s true,” writes Mike Bond, who graduated from college in 1965. “I was one of the founders of the Resistance [to the Vietnam war], and risked ten years in jail for it, was on the run for several years ducking the dutiful FBI guys who would clump up the stairs to whatever apartment I was crashing in, while its rightful tenant would answer the door and say I wasn’t there.”

Here Bond lists 11 books that had a great influence on his thinking in the ’60s.

Banning My Book Won’t Protect Your Child

When I was in my early 20s, I was in an abusive relationship with another woman. Soon after it ended, I did what I always did when I was heartbroken: I looked for art that spoke to my experience. I was surprised to find shockingly few memoirs of domestic violence or verbal, psychological and emotional abuse in queer relationships. So I wrote into that silence: a memoir, “In the Dream House,” which describes that relationship and my struggle to leave it.

Carmen Maria Machado reacts to the recent attempt by a parent in Leander, Texas, to remove her book and several others from a list of recommended reading in the local high school.

25 Great Writers and Thinkers Weigh In on Books That Matter

“To celebrate the Book Review’s 125th anniversary, we’re dipping into the archives to revisit our most thrilling, memorable and thought-provoking coverage.”

Current writers for The New York Times look back on some of the “robust literary coverage” of the newspaper’s Book Review, including articles by authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, Tennessee Williams, Patricia Highsmith, Eudora Welty, and Langston Hughes.

How Doctors Tell Stories: Writing Through the Practice of Medicine

Writer Leslie Jamison interviews Suzanne Koven, author of Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life, a collection of essays. Jamison begins the interview with this question:

I love the ways these essays hold so many aspects of your identity: doctor, daughter, mother, wife, patient, and colleague. We see you as a little girl going to the office of your doctor-father, wanting  “to witness at close range the freedom of men,” and we see you as a panicked mother, riding in an ambulance with your young son after seizures. How did you approach writing about times when various parts of your identity converged or collided?

And Koven replies that writing the book helped her discover that the “various parts of me turned out to be more aligned than I understood.”

‘Take it easy, nothing matters in the end’: William Shatner at 90, on love, loss and Leonard Nimoy

Hadley Freeman describes recently interviewing William Shatner over Zoom: “He certainly sounds like Shatner. But Shatner turned 90 in March, and the man in front of me doesn’t look more than 60, as he bounces about in his seat, twisting to show me the view around him, with the agility of a man two decades younger.”

He’ll always be Captain James T. Kirk to me.

Bob Dylan at 80: in praise of a mighty and unbowed singer-songwriter

“Prolific, resilient and endlessly creative … as Dylan celebrates his 80th birthday, Edward Docx assesses his artistic contribution to the human story”

And look who’s 10 years younger than Shatner and also still going strong.

© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links . . . And Some Questions for You

Losing a long-term spouse can be deadly, studies show

The recent death of Prince Phillip has raised concern about Queen Elizabeth:

Known as stress-induced cardiomyopathy, “broken heart” syndrome is a documented medical condition.

Another possible complication for people facing bereavement is the widowhood effect: 

The risk of an elderly man or woman dying from any cause increases between 30% and 90% in the first three months after a spouse’s death, then drops to about 15% in the months that follow. The widowhood effect has been documented in all ages and races around the world.

This article from CNN provides advice for people facing bereavement.

He’s a cop. He’s 91. And he has no plans to retire

Here’s another article from CNN. This one profiles L.C. “Buckshot” Smith of Camden, Arkansas. Now 91, Smith has worked in law enforcement for more than 56 years. 

He tried retiring once but “quickly realized he missed the work.”

What happens to our cognition in the darkest depths of winter?

You’ve probably heard of season affective disorder (SAD), a form of depression caused by the reduction of sunlight during the short days of winter. Here Tim Brennan, professor of psychology at the University of Oslo in Norway, discusses both his own and other scientists’ research into the question of what he calls human seasonality, or “the psychological effects of extreme swings in the physical environment.”

“A particular challenge when studying human seasonality is that the widespread belief about mental sluggishness in winter tends unjustifiably to seep into the science,” Brennan writes. However, his research lead him to the conclusion that “there really isn’t evidence of much difference between summer and winter in our thinking, memory and attention.”

Our book critic pays homage to Beverly Cleary, whose characters played a key role in so many of our childhoods

Moira Macdonald, arts critic for the Seattle Times, celebrates the life of children’s author Beverly Cleary, who died recently at the age of 104. “For so many of us, Ramona and Beezus and Henry Huggins and Ellen Tebbits and Otis Spofford were friends, keeping us company during the strange journey of growing up.”

For some Seattle-area residents with COVID vaccines, ‘re-entry anxiety’ is real

Since my husband and I have been “fully vaccinated” for some weeks now, I’ve been watching with interest how people like us are approaching the return to social interaction. In fact, I find the term “fully vaccinated” in itself interesting, since the reality used to be that you were either vaccinated or you weren’t.

Although this article focuses on people in the Seattle area, my guess is that the individuals described here are pretty representative of people of the same demographic everywhere. And I especially resonate with the experience of one woman in the article, who discovered “Reentry anxiety is a real thing.”

How About You?

If you’ve been vaccinated and are returning to society, I’d be interested in hearing what your experience has been. 

  • Are you starting to get back into activities that were suspended during the pandemic? 
  • Do you have concerns about how safe such a return to society is right now?

© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

Can Classics Survive?

I did my B.A. and my M.A. in classics, although I never taught classics at any level and eventually turned to English and, later, psychology. After four years of Latin in high school, I decided to study what I most loved in college, and that was Latin. But I never wanted to teach at any level below college, which is why I changed fields.

I tell you this to explain why these two recent articles drew my attention.

He Wants to Save Classics from Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?

“Dan-el Padilla Peralta thinks classicists should knock ancient Greece and Rome off their pedestal — even if that means destroying their discipline.”

As much as I love Latin literature, I’m not surprised to learn that the study of classics, like the study of the humanities in general, has declined in favor of majors that offer better job opportunities after graduation. But I did not know this:

Long revered as the foundation of “Western civilization,” the field was trying to shed its self-imposed reputation as an elitist subject overwhelmingly taught and studied by white men. Recently the effort had gained a new sense of urgency: Classics had been embraced by the far right, whose members held up the ancient Greeks and Romans as the originators of so-called white culture. Marchers in Charlottesville, Va., carried flags bearing a symbol of the Roman state; online reactionaries adopted classical pseudonyms; the white-supremacist website Stormfront displayed an image of the Parthenon alongside the tagline “Every month is white history month.”

This article focuses on Dan-el Padilla Peralta, “a leading historian of Rome who teaches at Princeton and was born in the Dominican Republic,” who believes “that classics has been instrumental to the invention of ‘whiteness’ and its continued domination.”

If Classics Doesn’t Change, Let It Burn

“The field as is doesn’t deserve to persist. But scholars are hard at work improving it.

This article by Johanna Hanink, associate professor of classics at Brown University, emerged as a result of the New York Times profile above. She writes, “The field of classics should evolve to keep up with the world outside the library doors . . . Today, as the United States comes to grips with its own painful history and diminished status in a globalized world, our approach to antiquity should radically shift once again.” She feels “invigorated, and not threatened, at the prospect of change for my discipline.”

Can Historians Be Traumatized by History?

There’s been a lot written about how experiencing violence and atrocities first-hand can lead to PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Here James Robins go one step further, to ask people if people, such as therapists or historians conducting research, can “be traumatized by something experienced only secondhand.”

Daily tai chi, exercise help older adults with insomnia, study finds

UPI reports on research recently published by JAMA Network Open about older adults with insomnia: “Adults in their 60s and 70s diagnosed with insomnia who practiced tai chi daily woke up, on average, two fewer times during the night than those who didn’t use the ancient Chinese approach, the data showed.”

Why we’re obsessed with music from our youth

Here’s some interesting research about the “reminiscence bump”: “people tend to disproportionately recall memories from when they were 10 to 30 years old.” The research findings suggest that “we aren’t primarily so interested in the music of our youth because we think it’s better than music from other eras, but because it is closely linked to our personal memories.”

The Library of Possible Futures

“Since the release of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock 50 years ago, the allure of speculative nonfiction has remained the same: We all want to know what’s coming next.”

Samantha Culp looks at speculative nonfiction about the future, which she defines as “the constantly evolving genre we might call ‘pop futurism.’” She explains the telltale signs of a pop futurist book: “it sketches out possible tomorrows, highlights emergent trends to watch, and promises ways for even nonspecialists to apply these insights to their own life and work.” 

The seminal work of this genre, she writes, is Future Shock, Alvin Toffler’s book that recently marked its 50th anniversary. Here she looks at subsequent examples of this type of book and concludes that “we need an entirely new way of talking about the future if we are to shape it into something equitable and sustainable for all.”

© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

A Massive Earthquake Is Coming to Cascadia—And It Can’t Be Stopped

By almost any measure Cascadia—a term born of the 1970s environmental movement to describe the Pacific Northwest’s geography and cultural identity—is a strange and beautiful place.

But just offshore from the postcard-worthy landscapes is a seismic threat as catastrophic as any on earth.

Yes, there’s a lot of talk around here about “the big one.” This article focuses on four people who are working to understand the CSZ (Cascadia Subduction Zone) and inform the population about what to expect.

50 States, 50 Scares

What’s the scariest novel set in your state? 

For us here in Washington, it’s The Good House by Tananarive Due, a haunted-house tale about “racism, greed, separation and communication breakdowns,” according to this article.

Sick of COVID-19? Here’s why you might have pandemic fatigue

When COVID-19 first hit the U.S., most people were eager to follow the recommended safety guidelines. Fear sparked the hoarding of toilet paper and hand sanitizer. But now that fear has abated, and we’re hearing a lot about pandemic fatigue.

Public health researcher Jay Maddock, professor of public health at Texas A & M University, explains the psychological reasons for pandemic fatigue and offers some tips on protecting both mental and physical health. 

You’re not nuts. This really is a crazy time. Here are a dozen ways to cope

And here’s some more help, from CNN’s Sandee LaMotte, on coping with the current pandemic, which shows no signs of going away any time soon.

Quarantine book club: Reading for mental health in a plague year

Jeannine Hall Gailey, who previously served as the second poet laureate of Redmond, Washington, describes how reading has been a lifeline in helping her cope with the COVID-19 pandemic.

So, can reading really address the state of anger, despair, and confusion so many of us are in? I can only say that books (along with gardening, cats, chocolate, and phone calls with friends) definitely helped me hold on to not only sanity and hope, but also serve as a reminder of why we continue to act to address injustice instead of just saying “that’s the way it’s always been.” Reading also provided a useful context to talk with family and friends who were also experiencing anxiety about politics, race, class, and fear of illness and death. Discussing books — even on social media — seems safer and more enjoyable than merely doomscrolling or rehashing whatever the day’s traumatic news cycle had revealed.

© 2020 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

How Solitude Can Help You Regulate Your Mood

Whether we think we needed it or not, the arrival of COVID-19 has given us plenty of time to contemplate the meaning of solitude. Writing for NPR (National Public Radion in the U.S.), Colin Dwyer looks at the findings of recent research on the topic of solitude. 

Dwyer offers four findings from this research:

  1. Solitude is in the mind of the beholder.
  2. We may crave time alone the way we crave time with others.
  3. Don’t expect an epiphany.
  4. Solitude can be a communal exercise.

You Don’t Have to Be Young to Be a Badass Detective

Author Jane Badrock has noticed a fictional marketing niche that she aims to fill: older adult detectives, particular female ones.

“Think of the opportunities! Imagine, even the real-life unsolved crimes that may have happened because nobody suspected the little old lady.”

Brain scientists haven’t been able to find major differences between women’s and men’s brains, despite over a century of searching

brain

I couldn’t resist including this article. The search to explain gender differences by tying them to differences in the anatomy and/or function of various parts of the brain began at the dawn of the discipline of psychology. Here Ari Berkowitz, Presidential Professor of Biology and Director of the Cellular & Behavioral Neurobiology Graduate Program at the University of Oklahoma, concludes:

So it’s not realistic to assume any human brain sex differences are innate. They may also result from learning. People live in a fundamentally gendered culture, in which parenting, education, expectations and opportunities differ based on sex, from birth through adulthood, which inevitably changes the brain.

In other words, gender differences are not biological—that is, inborn—traits but rather social constructs, normative behaviors defined and passed down by societies to tell people how they should live, think, and feel.

The 40 Must-Read Books for Baby Boomers

Lorraine Berry makes “An earnest attempt at an essential library.”

She writes, “I aimed to include those novels rooted in a writer’s emotional honesty in telling true stories about the human condition. Light on classics, the list is weighted toward books published in the past 119 years.”

She adds that we should hurry up and look at the list—before she tweaks it yet again.

How about you? What books would you add or delete from Berry’s list? Remember, you must limit the list to 40 books.

Lifelike robotic pets are helping isolated seniors avoid loneliness

This CNN article looks at test programs that have provided robotic pets to older adults to help ease the loneliness exacerbated by the isolating restrictions of COVID-19. These programs have been conducted in Alabama, Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania.

So far the results look promising, but, at least in Alabama, evaluation of the program will continue over the next year.

© 2020 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

It’s nearly impossible to avoid COVID-19 new entirely, and I apologize for that.

I hope you are all staying inside as much as possible, remaining safe and healthy, and WASHING YOUR HANDS.

My husband got all dolled up this morning for a run to the grocery store:

My husband masked up for a trip to the grocery store

Why Life During a Pandemic Feels So Surreal

“You’ve heard your friends and family say it: just surreal. We in the media call it surreal all the time. Because it is surreal, “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream,” so says Merriam-Webster.

It’s good to have our feelings validated in these unusual—well, yes, surreal—times. Even though “study of the surreal isn’t exactly an official field in psychology,” here are some psychological explorations into what we’re all feeling right now and why. 

Here’s a good take-away from the article: “Psychologists say that to combat our aimlessness, we need continuity, and luckily that’s one of the few things you can easily create for yourself right now.”

20 Surprising Facts About King Tutankhamun

Unless you’re an Egyptologist, you can probably, like me, learn something new about a subject other than COVID-19 from this article.

How Epidemics of the Past Changed the Way Americans Lived

“Past public health crises inspired innovations in infrastructure, education, fundraising and civic debate.”

I’m finding it hard right now to find the silver lining in the current pandemic cloud, but here’s some encouraging discussion from Smithsonian Magazine:

the effects of epidemics extend beyond the moments in which they occur. Disease can permanently alter society, and often for the best by creating better practices and habits. Crisis sparks action and response. Many infrastructure improvements and healthy behaviors we consider normal today are the result of past health campaigns that responded to devastating outbreaks.

The Best Books for Distancing Yourself From Reality Right Now

“If you’re looking for an escape from your Coronavirus quarantine pick up one of these and transport yourself to rural Maine or to Mars.”

Esquire offers some reading suggestions to help pass the time in isolation: “From speculative and historical fiction to soulful works of nonfiction, these transporting books are the best medicine for strange times.”

How to Digitize Your Most Important Documents

“If you have some spare time at home and want a productive project, consider creating a digital archive of your personal papers.”

Or, if you’d prefer a more hands-on activity than reading, New York Times tech writer  J. D. Biersdorfer tells you how to scan personal papers to create a digital archive: “ even if you don’t have a document scanner, you can create your personal archive with a smartphone, a few apps and a bit of time.”

Stop Trying to Be Productive

Now that we’re all living even more online than before, our world is saturated with articles (like the ones included here) about how to spend fruitfully all this enormous amount of time now on our hands. “This urge to overachieve, even in times of global crisis, is reflective of America’s always-on work culture,” writes Taylor Lorenz.

But it’s important to remember that the current situation is not normal. It’s OK to feel overwhelmed and perhaps even a little disconnected. If some of the recommended activities can help you stay occupied and get through this, fine. But if the seemingly endless urge to be productive just makes you feel even worse, that’s OK, too. 

For the first couple of weeks of self-isolation, I, an introvert who likes nothing more than curling up with a good book, couldn’t read a novel or write anything more than the occasional Facebook post. For the past two weeks I have been able to read novels, but I’m still having trouble concentrating long enough to write anything of substance, such as book reviews. 

Everyone will react to this surreal (there’s that word again) time differently. What’s important is to find something that works to soothe you. During times of stress such as these, different people find solace in very different activities: cleaning, cooking, baking, rearranging the furniture, reading, writing, gardening, meditating.

You don’t have to be productive in terms of making finished projects you can check off on a list. All you have to do is get through this. Whatever works for you is what you should do.

As long as you remember to also wash your hands.

Stay safe, stay healthy, and, if you’re so inclined, let us know in the comments how you’re coping.

© 2020 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

The Real History Behind The Sound of Music

My husband’s and my first date was a trip to the movie theater to see The Sound of Music, released in 1965. (Yes, we were high school sweethearts.) Here’s the story behind that movie, which, according to the article, “became one of America’s highest-grossing films of all time” and is “probably the main reason that generations of non-musicians can effortlessly spout off the notes of the tonal scale.” 

Anyone even half as nostalgic as I am about this movie will enjoy this article.

Locked down elderly in rural French village find some parallels with World War II

Jim Bittermann reports for CNN on how isolation and social distancing are affecting the normally social and affable French. 

“Out here in rural France, the 15-day confinement period is generally scoffed at. The lockdown could go on far longer than most everyone believes. Just like during World War II, there is no real idea about what the world will look like afterward.”

As Life Moves Online, an Older Generation Faces a Digital Divide

I’m assuming that anyone reading this blog (anyone?) does not fall into this group. However, you might be able to help some of your less tech-savvy friends and neighbors: “Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, urged people this month to help the elderly set up technology to talk to medical providers.”

There’s information here on some of the tools helping people stay connected during this time of isolation.

Book sales surge as self-isolating readers stock up on ‘bucket list’ novels

If you’re searching for some “silver lining” news to this pandemic cloud, this might qualify: According to the U.K.’s Guardian, “Book sales have leapt across the country as readers find they have extra time on their hands, with bookshops reporting a significant increase in sales of longer novels and classic fiction.”

Ageist “Triage” Is a Crime Against Humanity

The question of whether older people are expendable apparently became an internet meme after some politician or other commented that we needed to stop isolation and social distancing so that we can get people back to work to rev up the economy, even if doing so meant that some older people (the most at-risk demographic for this virus) might get sick and die. 

Here Margaret Morganroth Gullette takes a philosophical approach to the large ethical question of how older people might fare if medical triage becomes necessary.

My cohort of over-65 people are supposed to be enjoying the new Age of Longevity. But do some younger people still associate us older folks with dying — however unconsciously — so that our premature demise may come to seem — sadly — normal? These questions arise with more gravity because the pandemic Covid-19 may become an atrocity-producing situation for older persons. Will anxiety, which already runs high, come to be focused on the figure of an old person who is seen as expendable? This depends on how panicked different nation-states become, and how discourse about victims is structured by governments and the media.

© 2020 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

On this, the last week’s links before the new year, please indulge my first two choices. When we retired from St. Louis to the Pacific Northwest, I undertook the project of acquainting myself with literature specific to this region. The first two entries here provide suggestions for doing just that.

The 2010s in books: 10 titles from Washington-state authors that defined the decade 

I’ve read three books on this list, have heard of a couple of other writers, and found out there are a lot more Pacific Northwest authors I need to acquaint myself with.

25 Books to Read Before You Die: Pacific Northwest Edition

I landed on this article through a link in the previous one. This list, prepared by the famous bookstore Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon, has a wider focus than the first one and features “what we consider a consummate selection of books written by Pacific Northwest authors.” Boy, do I have a lot of catching up to do! 

The Hidden Upsides of Growing Older

Well, some good news!

We often take for granted the advantages that coincide with years of experience when handling complex information or rebounding from setbacks. We’d like to focus here on the aspects of mental function that stay strong or even become better with age. We refer to these enhanced mental functions as “hidden upsides,” because we often don’t notice the many ways that our years of life have led to improved mental abilities.

This article apparently is a general introduction to an upcoming series from Psychology Today that promises to look at specific upsides and to explore “the types of situations in which the older adult mind surpasses its younger adult counterpart.” I’ll be looking for those future columns.

Baba Ram Dass, spiritual guru and LSD proponent, dies at 88

Many of us of a certain age remember Ram Dass—born Richard Alpert—who in the 1960s experimented with LSD and traveled to India in search of spiritual enlightenment. He “was best known for the 1971 book “Be Here Now,” written after his trip to India.” Later he wrote, “the baby boomers are getting old — and I’m learning how to get old for them. That’s my role.”

What you’re unwrapping when you get a DNA test for Christmas

“To what extent is giving a DNA test also a present for law enforcement?”

Many DNA databases were started to help people interested in genealogy connect with their extended family. DNA kits to help people find relatives are often touted as great gifts. “But is using one of these kits also opening the door to letting the police use your DNA to arrest your cousin?”

This article discusses several DNA testing companies and databases and explains how the results may be used.

© 2019 by Mary Daniels Brown

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