classics – Retreading for Retirement

9 websites that will bring you back to the old internet

“The internet has been around for long enough — and shifted so drastically in that time — that it’s really easy to get nostalgic for past versions of online life.”

Costa Ricans Live Longer Than Us. What’s the Secret?

“In the United States and elsewhere, public health and medical care are largely separate enterprises. Costa Rica shows the benefits of integrating the two—it spends less than we do on health care and gets better results.”

Raw Granny Power: 100-Year-Old Woman Is the World’s Oldest Female Powerlifter

A portrait of “Edith Murway-Traina, who is heaving around major poundage at the age of 100—making her a Guinness World Record holder for being the oldest known competitive female powerlifter in the world.”

In ‘Rumors,’ Lizzo and Cardi B pull from the ancient Greeks, putting a new twist on an old tradition

Grace B. McGowan, a PhD Candidate in American Studies at Boston University, celebrates the return of Black women to “the classical tradition, a style rooted in the aesthetics of ancient Greece and Rome.” McGowan writes that artists like Lizzo and Cardi B are “adding their own twist” to this tradition.

Being chased, losing your teeth or falling down? What science says about recurring dreams

I periodically dream about losing my teeth, forgetting to go to class for an entire semester, or being unprepared for an exam. Here a professor of psychiatry and a doctoral candidate in neuroscience from the University of Montreal discuss recurrent dream motifs and their possible meanings.

Baby Boomer Bloggers: Are you out there?

Jane Trombley, a Baby Boomer herself, laments, “I don’t see enough of my peers initiating the conversation. And that’s a drag. Millennials and everyone else need to hear much of what Boomers have to say.”

She ends with a challenge: “Over to you, Boomers.”

So, whadda ya say?

‘No one wanted to read’ his book on pandemic psychology – then Covid hit

In October 2019, a month or so before Covid-19 began to spread from the industrial Chinese city of Wuhan, Steven Taylor, an Australian psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, published what would turn out to be a remarkably prophetic book, The Psychology of Pandemics.

The Guardian reports on Taylor’s psychological approach to understanding pandemics in general and, specifically, the current state of world affairs surrounding COVID-19.

The Best Part of Being 60-Something

Lorraine Duffy Merkl basks in the freedom that being in her 60s offers: “We can finally let go of the please-like-me baggage and secrets that have been weighing us down, as well as the insecurities based on what others think of us, and realize what really matters is being ourselves and letting the chips fall.”

Susan Cole, Advocate for Traumatized Children, Dies at 72

Attorney Susan Cole recognized the toll that trauma can take on children:

She began a decades-long examination of the links between education and childhood trauma, using her accumulating experience to identify “broader systemic failures that could not be addressed on a case-by-case basis,” as her husband, David Eisen, put it.
Constant stress and fear were more than just a distraction for students; their effect, she learned, was neurological, activating the fight-or-flight survival instinct permanently.

The 66 Most ’60s Things About 1966

“The year 1966 found America at a crossroads, as the nation faced war abroad and turmoil at home.”

To refresh your memory about this pivotal year in American history, here’s a “look at the music, movies, TV shows, headline-grabbing news stories and pop culture events of 1966.”

TV Viewing Habits in Midlife Could Exacerbate Cognitive Decline

This is probably not the news most of us want to hear after 15 months of sitting on the couch watching TV: “new research shows that middle-aged to older adults reporting high levels of television-viewing experience greater cognitive decline.”

Here are suggestions for changing TV-viewing habits into something that will stimulate the brain:

When looking for something to scratch the TV itch, opt for documentaries on subjects you’re interested in, YouTube videos that teach you something new or game shows that test your knowledge. These provide more stimulation than, say, a reality show or action movie.

The Classicist Who Killed Homer

Most of us learned a long time ago that the Iliad and the Odyssey were originally oral epic poems composed by a blind poet named Homer. Here Adam Kirsch tells the fascinating story of how, in the early 1930s, “a young Harvard professor named Milman Parry published two papers, in the journal Harvard Studies in Classical Philology” that proved that the Homeric epics “were products of an oral tradition, performed by generations of anonymous Greek bards who gradually shaped them into the epics we know today.”

Part of Parry’s research included traveling to remote areas in Yugoslavia to record “local singers, whose improvised songs offered clues about how the Homeric epics might have been performed millennia earlier.”

‘We’re Going to Publish’

“An Oral History of the Pentagon Papers”

“This article is part of a special report on the 50th anniversary of the Pentagon Papers.”

Many People Have a Vivid ‘Mind’s Eye,’ While Others Have None at All

My husband says that he doesn’t have a mind’s eye, that he cannot picture things in his head.

Here’s a story of scientists studying both ends of the spectrum of the ability to conjure up pictures of objects or people in their imagination. The lack of this ability is called aphantasia, and the condition of experiencing extraordinarily strong mental imagery is called hyperphantasia.

“This is not a disorder as far as I can see,” said Dr. Zeman, a cognitive scientist at the University of Exeter in Britain. “It’s an intriguing variation in human experience.”

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