Shorts:
“There is an immense bounty of bunk about the wisdom of age available to all of us who require it from time to time, but, as the pitiless Mark Twain put it in his autobiography, “It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all have to do it.”
—David Remnick, The New Yorker
“Preserving democracy has emerged as one of the clearest dividing lines between younger and older voters.
When asked by Quinnipiac to identify "the most urgent issue facing the country today," 10% of registered voters aged 18-34 said democracy.
For those 65 and up, that number rose to 35 percent—higher than any other single issue including the economy and immigration.”
A number of encouraging disability-related trends occurred for the 70 and older population from 2011 to 2020:
• A greater percentage of older adults is successfully accommodating self-care and mobility limitations with assistive devices;
• Assistance with self-care and mobility activities declined whereas difficulty with these activities has held steady and levels of unmet needs related to these activities have declined;
• The percentages with low physical capacity, poor vision, and poor hearing have decreased and the percentage living with dementia (through 2019) has declined; and
• The percentage living in residential care settings and nursing home settings has declined and use of hospice care at the end of life has increased (through 2019). Women and non-Hispanic White persons experienced gains in nearly all of these outcomes.
“It was the last day I would see or speak to West. He seemed more frail, but no less feisty or intimidating than the first time I met him. I joked about the quote he’d given a day earlier, about the idea that he was, in his time, a “wolf” on the court, in contrast to the mere “dogs” that today’s players sometimes describe themselves as. ‘It’s not funny,’ West scolded me. ‘I wasn’t kidding.’
“Toward the end of his conversation with the students, West came back to the thought.
‘People laugh at what I said. It is the truth,’ he said. ‘Have you ever heard a wolf [howl]? How haunting is that sound? Haunting, right? … It’s what you think about going to those games. I was going to kill that dog. I was going to make him respect me as a player, but also know that there’s no way that I was going to give in. … I have been a wolf all my life. And I’ve had to be, to in my own way, survive.’”