Quotes Out Of Context
In February 2009, a Village Voice music blogger accused the newspaper of using “chintzy, ad-hominem allegations” in an article on British Tamil music artist M.I.A. concerning her activism against the Sinhala-Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka. M.I.A. criticized the paper in January 2010 after a travel piece rated post-conflict Sri Lanka the “#1 place to go in 2010”. In June 2010, The New York Times Magazine published a correction on its cover article of M.I.A., acknowledging that the interview conducted by current W editor and then-Times Magazine contributor Lynn Hirschberg contained a recontextualization of two quotes. In response to the piece, M.I.A. broadcast Hirschberg’s phone number and secret audio recordings from the interview via her Twitter and website.
Unmet Needs Continue To Pile Up
Unmet needs, a term gerontologists use, refers to care or help you require but dont get. If, when youre elderly or disabled, you arent able to shop or cook, you lack the strength to go outside, you cant keep track of your bank account or your medications and no one assists you with those functions you have unmet needs.
Older people who move into assisted living and other forms of supportive housing are primarily seeking ways to reduce unmet needs. Occasionally, someone moves because he feels lonely or she is trying not to burden her children. But usually, people stay in their homes as long as they can until unmet needs pile up.
What I have frequently wondered and Im sure lots of you have, too is how often those supposed solutions actually provide enough services to merit their very high price tags. When someone is spending $3,500 a month for assisted living the national median, according to Genworths annual survey are there fewer activities the resident cant manage? Does he or she have fewer unmet needs?
A national study just published in The Journals of Gerontology sheds some light on this, so lets take a look.
The study uses data from the 2011 National Health and Aging Trends Study and pays particular attention to more than 4,000 Medicare beneficiaries over 65 who reported having difficulty with daily activities or received help with them, but did not live in nursing homes.
Dreaming Of The Departed
I ran into my father at a deli the other day. An undramatic encounter: I was waiting at the counter for a takeout order when I spotted him sitting at a corner table, yakking with friends from his senior residence, their walkers and canes carefully folded or propped against the wall.
I was happy to see him, and we had a hug and a few words. I kibitzed with his buddies for a moment, too. Then we said goodbye and I went on my way without thinking much about it because, after all, we would go out for lunch together on Saturday the way we usually did.
Dad looked fine, except perhaps for a less-than-flattering white sweater he didnt, in reality, own. In my dream thats what this was I didnt know that he had died.
He has been gone for nearly two years now, so I was glad to have this fleeting visit. I once dreamed of my late mother, too: a hippie version of Ruth Span, standing on a hilltop in a gauzy flowered dress and long, windblown curls. My sister has also occasionally dreamed about our parents.
Seeing Dad left me wondering how often deceased family members enter their survivors dreams and what we know about what if anything that means. So I called Alessandra Strada, a clinical psychologist and director of integrative medicine and bereavement services at MJHS Hospice and Palliative Care in New York. She has listened to patients talk about their dreams for 20 years.
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Aggressive Neighbors In The Nursing Home
It will not surprise people who spend time in nursing homes who live or work there, who volunteer or visit family members that residents can lash out at each other.
Resident A is sitting in a wheelchair in a common area, yelling out, said Karl Pillemer, a Cornell University gerontologist and researcher, recounting an actual, and typical, example from his latest study. Resident B goes over and says, Be quiet, stop yelling. Resident A hits Resident B on the hand. The nursing aide separates them, then sees someone else wandering and has to leave. When she does, Resident B kicks Resident A, and the cycle continues.
It happens. Nursing facilities house people who are disinhibited, who have dementia, who share close quarters with strangers, who may suffer pain or lose their ability to communicate in more acceptable ways.
On occasion, some will hit, kick, grab, bite and shove. Or threaten, bully and fling insults, including racial slurs. Or say and do things that are sexually inappropriate.
What may surprise people and it certainly stunned Dr. Pillemer and his fellow researchers is how often such incidents occur. Their five-year study, presented at the Gerontological Society of Americas annual meeting in Washington earlier this month, found that 19.8 percent of nursing home residents had been involved in what the researchers call resident-to-resident elder mistreatment verbal, physical or sexual in the previous month.
Clinical Trials Neglect The Elderly
The randomized clinical trial, long the gold standard of medical research, supposedly provides the most reliable data regarding which drugs, devices and procedures prove effective on real patients and which dont. But when the people enrolled in the trial are quite different from those who will actually use the drug or device or undergo the procedure, the data are far less reliable.
Yet it happens, startlingly often, with old people. Theyre not well presented in clinical trials, a fact that undermines their doctors best efforts at providing treatment.
In taking care of older patients, were often guessing the best therapy on insufficient data, said a frustrated Dr. Ken Covinsky, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco. For any given treatment, the risks and benefits may be very different for older patients, but we have no evidence to use.
Why not? In last months Journal of General Internal Medicine, a University of Michigan team pointed to some systemic problems. Analyzing more than 100 studies published during 2007 in prestigious medical journals, the researchers found that more than 20 percent excluded participants above a particular age. That actually represented considerable progress a previous study of trials published from 1994 to 2006 found that 39 percent had excluded people over age 65.
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An Easier Death And Less Costly Too
Saving money isnt really the point of hospice care. Helping dying patients have the best possible remaining life, followed by a good death, is really the purpose.
But whether hospice care saves money has prompted debate for years. Most hospice patients die at home, which is what the great majority of Americans say they prefer, or in nursing homes. Wouldnt that save money compared with the cycle of 911 calls and hospitalizations that characterize so many American deaths?
Studies of this question have been small and have reported contradictory results. There hasnt been a lot of consensus, said Dr. Ziad Obermeyer, an emergency physician and health policy specialist at Harvard Medical School. There are people in the policy establishment who are still skeptical about whether the costs are lower.
He hopes the large study he and his colleagues at Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston published recently in JAMA will finally put that concern to rest. It matched two groups, each containing more than 18,000 older Americans with metastatic cancer, comparing patients who enrolled in hospice with those who had the same poor prognosis but didnt use hospice. The researchers tracked participants in both groups until their deaths.
The hospice patients had far fewer hospitalizations and less than half as many intensive care unit stays, their Medicare records showed. They endured half as many invasive procedures. They were five times less likely to die in a hospital or nursing home.
Going Public With Cancer
Cancer is not something that makes you want to share. It’s something that makes you want to hide, said Suleika Jaouad. Ms. Jaouad offers a glimpse of her new life as an advocate for young adults with cancer as well as the friendships she has made as a result of going public with her illness.
Video by Shayla Harris/The New York Times
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About: The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership. Founded in 1851, the Times has since won 130 Pulitzer Prizes , and has long been regarded within the industry as a national “newspaper of record”. It is ranked 18th in the world by circulation and 3rd in the U.S. The Times stayed with the broadsheet full-page set-up and an eight-column format for several years after most papers switched to six, and was one of the last newspapers to adopt color photography, especially on the front page.
Duke University Lacrosse Case
The newspaper was criticized for largely reporting the prosecutors’ version of events in the 2006 Duke lacrosse case. Suzanne Smalley of Newsweek criticized the newspaper for its “credulous” coverage of the charges of rape against Duke University lacrosse players. Stuart Taylor, Jr. and KC Johnson, in their book Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, write: “at the head of the guilt-presuming pack, The New York Times vied in a race to the journalistic bottom with trash-TV talk shows.”
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How Old Is This Old House
Property records dont go back far enough to date some houses. But experts can pinpoint a houses age by studying tree-ring patterns in the houses timber.
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The first time a real estate agent took Ian Stewart to see the old saltbox farmhouse on a rocky hillside in Ghent, N.Y., he knew he wanted to buy it.
It got its hooks into me. I loved it. It had a warmth to it, Mr. Stewart said.
One question continued to nag at him long after the sale went through, however: Exactly how old was the house?
The agent told him the building went back to 1900, but Mr. Stewart, a historic preservationist with a longtime interest in the Dutch architecture of the Hudson Valley You can call me a giant history nerd knew it was considerably older. It might even date to the late-18th century, he believed.
To find out, he hired William Flynt, of Dummerston, Vt., a historical consultant who practices dendrochronology, a method of dating houses by studying tree-ring patterns in the timber used to build them.
The results would not quite turn out as Mr. Stewart had hoped.
Dendrochronology has been a critical tool in climate research for more than a century, allowing scientists to study long-term changes in weather by measuring the size of tree rings. At Columbia Universitys Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, dendrochronology has been used to study the impact of climate change on tropical trees in the Andes and evergreens in the Alaska tundra, among other things.
At 100 Still Running For Her Life
100 and She Just Won’t Stop
She is a national champion, a former activist and a centenarian. And she runs.
On a cloudless Sunday afternoon in April, a 100-year-old woman named Ida Keeling laced up her mustard yellow sneakers and took to the track at the Fieldston School in the Bronx. Her arrival was met without fanfare. In fact, no one in the stands seemed to notice her at all.
It is possible the spectators were distracted by the girls soccer game taking place on the field. Or perhaps they were simply unaware that Ms. Keeling is a reigning national champion.
When she runs, Ms. Keeling occupies a lane all her own. She has held several track-and-field records since she began racing in her late 60s, and she still has the fastest time for American women ages 95 to 99 in the 60-meter dash: 29.86 seconds. In the week to come, she plans to compete in a 100-meter event at the Penn Relays in Philadelphia, where she hopes to establish a new standard for women over 100 years old.
You see so many older people just sitting around well, thats not me, said Ms. Keeling, who is barely 4-foot-6 and weighs 83 pounds. Time marches on, but I keep going.
Ms. Keeling was not always such an accomplished runner. As a child growing up in Harlem, she preferred riding bikes or jumping rope. With Title IX half a century away, there were few opportunities for girls, let alone black girls, to play organized sports. When she did run, it was always to race, never to exercise.
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New York Times V Sullivan
The paper’s involvement in a 1964 libel case helped bring one of the key United States Supreme Court decisions supporting freedom of the press, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. In it, the United States Supreme Court established the “actual malice” standard for press reports about public officials or public figures to be considered defamatory or libelous. The malice standard requires the plaintiff in a defamation or libel case to prove the publisher of the statement knew the statement was false or acted in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity. Because of the high burden of proof on the plaintiff, and difficulty proving malicious intent, such cases by public figures rarely succeed.
Cells Can Clean Themselves Up They Can Get Rid Of Old Proteins They Can Rejuvenate If You Turn On The Youthful Genes Through This Reset Process
More recently, however, researchers have tested particularly innovative techniques for reversing and postponing some aspects of aging, with tentative but promising results. James Kirkland, an expert on aging at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has demonstrated with colleagues that certain drug cocktails purge old mice of senescent cells, granting them more than a month of additional healthy living. Their research has already inspired numerous human clinical trials.
At the same time, at the University of California, Berkeley, the married bioengineers Irina and Michael Conboy are investigating ways to filter or dilute aged blood in rodents to remove molecules that inhibit healing, which in turn stimulates cellular regeneration and the production of revitalizing compounds.
Known for his boyish features and sanguine predictions, Sinclair, 51, and several of his family members follow versions of his life-prolonging regimen, which has, over the years, included regular exercise, sauna steams and ice baths, a two-meal-a-day mostly vegetarian diet, the diabetes drug metformin and several vitamins and supplements, like the once-hyped but ultimately disappointing red-wine miracle molecule resveratrol. Sinclair has also founded at least 12 biotech companies and serves on the boards of several more, one of which is already pursuing human clinical trials of a gene therapy based on his recent Nature study.
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How The Lady Became Less Gray
Between the 1960s and the 1980s, Louis Silverstein, a bold art director for The Times, introduced new graphic design elements that continue to shape the appearance of the paper today.
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By Will Dudding
Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.
If you were to pick up a copy of The New York Times in 1960, you would have mostly seen dense pillars of words. Sentences would have been packed tightly, like commuters on a busy subway car.
The Times was, as its nickname suggests, the Gray Lady.
But over the next two decades, that began to change. A bold art director, Louis Silverstein, emphasized graphic design elements that have since become standard industry practice. More white space appeared and the photos got bigger.
Working during a period of cultural, technological and economic shifts, he transformed The Times into a paper that took design as seriously as it did text in its journalism, and he helped to establish the role of the art director as a key player in the newsroom. By 1984, the paper was respected for its design by industry experts.
It was trying to change from the old gray lady to a more vibrant newspaper, said Steven Heller, a former art director for The Times who teaches design at the School of Visual Arts.
From a design angle, the main consideration was making the paper more accessible, Mr. Heller said.
Carlos Slim Loan And Investment
On January 20, 2009, The New York Times reported that its parent company, The New York Times Company, had reached an agreement to borrow $250 million from Carlos Slim, a Mexican billionaire “to help the newspaper company finance its businesses”. The New York Times Company later repaid that loan ahead of schedule. Since then, Slim has bought large quantities of the company’s Class A shares, which are available for purchase by the public and offer less control over the company than Class B shares, which are privately held. Slim’s investments in the company included large purchases of Class A shares in 2011, when he increased his stake in the company to 8.1% of Class A shares, and again in 2015, when he exercised stock optionsacquired as part of a repayment plan on the 2009 loanto purchase 15.9 million Class A shares, making him the largest shareholder. As of March 7, 2016, Slim owned 17.4% of the company’s Class A shares, according to annual filings submitted by the company. While Slim is the largest shareholder in the company, his investment only allows him to vote for Class A directors, a third of the company’s board. Slim continues to influence the paper’s direction.
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