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Aging photographs and cognitive quilts
I am a Baby Boomer and a child of the ‘60s, and for both those reasons I am keenly aware of my memory, and its failings. I’m not alone in this. For a growing number of adults, questions about cognitive aging are increasingly personal and relevant. We want to know what, specifically, will keep us sharp into old age. Will reading Tolstoy do it? Or playing racquetball? Taking a class in Civil War history, or Portuguese? How about mastering Thai cooking? Or simply surrounding ourselves with good friends and stimulating conversation? Unhappily, there is very little empirical evidence available to help Baby Boomers sort all this out.
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A (new and revised) silver linings playbook
The Serenity Prayer is the cornerstone of many addiction recovery programs, including Alcoholics Anonymous. Borrowed from the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, it is most often recited this way today: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” The prayer captures the paradoxical nature of addiction and recovery. Alcoholics must accept the fact that they are powerless over alcohol and cannot drink, ever. But alcoholics are still agents with plenty of personal power to change their own lives.
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Oh, the humanity. Putting faces on social causes.
Back in the 1940s, the U.S. Forest Service began a public service campaign aimed at preventing forest fires. It featured Smokey Bear, a humanized caricature of a bear wearing blue jeans and a ranger’s hat. In a kind, gravelly voice, Smokey enlisted public support with slogans, his most famous being: “Remember—only you can prevent forest fires.” Smokey’s effort is considered one of the most enduring and effective advertising campaigns of all time. I know the ads worked for me as a boy. I grew up in a heavily wooded area, and became extremely cautious about matches and campfires as a result of Smokey’s message, as did all my friends.
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Spooky Judgments: How Agents Think About Danger
We are watching Big Brother watching us. Whatever one thinks of Edward Snowden, hero or traitor or something in between, his revelations about sweeping NSA surveillance have gotten America’s attention. His whistle blowing has raised important questions about the balance of liberty and safety, and will heighten suspicions and scrutiny of the nation’s intelligence agencies for some time to come. We hire and train intelligence agents to weigh risks and make judgments, and most of us want to believe that these assessments are sound. But how rational are the individual men and women who are making the life-and-death decisions that influence national security?
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Hunger and Hoarding
Suzanne Collins’ futuristic trilogy, The Hunger Games, takes place in Panem, a totalitarian nation of obscene wealth and pervasive poverty. Its twelve districts are all impoverished, but District 12, the coal-mining region formerly called Appalachia, is the poorest of the poor. Citizens struggle to eke out a living in the mines, but hunger is the norm and the unfortunate routinely die of starvation. Panem is the opposite of a welfare state. There is no dole, no safety net—certainly no 47 percent. Indeed, there is no institutional sharing at all.
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Munching Through Life’s Travails
The world is divided into Munchers and Skippers. I’m a Skipper, which means that, when living gets stressful, I stop eating. I don’t snack. I skip meals. Munchers, on the other hand, invented comfort food. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Chunky Monkey or Doritos or cheeseburgers. Calories are taken like a tonic against life’s mishaps. Traditionally, Munchers have been viewed as more pathetic than Skippers—and more of a problem. Feeding on calorie-dense foods shows lack of self-discipline, and leads to unhealthy weight gain. And given our high-stress modern lives, it’s likely that anxious munching is contributing to the nation’s obesity epidemic.
