Join us at Town Hall Seattle on February 25, 2024, from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m., for an afternoon with local journalist and activist Ron Chew to celebrate the audiobook launch of his memoir, My Unforgotten Seattle.
Ron will share excerpts from his book while giving us a glimpse into the vibrant, living history of Seattle and its long-established Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.
During our time together, Chew will share clips from his audiobook along with cherished images of family members and key moments in his life and the history of Seattle.
A professional ice hockey team in Pennsylvania broke a franchise record last week, not for goals scored, but for the number of teddy bears tossed onto the ice by fans to help local kids.
The plush pandemonium broke out in the second period as the Hershey Bears scored a goal to trigger the annual Teddy Bear Toss that collects toys for charity—while the announcer screamed, “Let the sweet cuddly mayhem commence!”
The exuberant downpour of plushies began 4 minutes into the second period at the Giant Center last week, with 74,599 stuffed toys raining down.
“You see it on video, but when you’re actually part of it, it was amazing. Just an incredible sight,” said Bears coach Todd Nelson.
“First, you’re celebrating the goal, and then you start getting pelted with bears,” said new Hershey player Chase Priskie, experiencing the event for the first time. “It’s just a phenomenal atmosphere when tens of thousands of bears start raining down on you.”
The event surpassed the club’s previous record of 67,309 teddies collected last year for donation to more than 35 local charities as part of the club’s Hershey Bears Cares program.
The Sweigart Family Foundation also donated $55,000 to Children’s Miracle Network in Hershey to recognize the efforts of local fans this year.
Based in the town of Hershey, The Bears would go on to a 3-2 overtime victory over the Lehigh Valley Phantoms—after a 40 minute delay to cart off all the toys—improving their AHL-best record to 29-7-0- this season.
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Americans who test positive for the coronavirus no longer need to routinely stay home from work and school for five days under new guidanceplannedby the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The agency is loosening its covid isolation recommendations for the first time since 2021 to align it with guidance on how to avoid transmitting flu and RSV, according to four agency officials and an expert familiar with the discussions.
CDC officials acknowledgedin internal discussions and in a briefing last weekwith state health officialshow much the covid-19 landscape has changed since the virus emerged four years ago,killing nearly 1.2 million people in the United States and shuttering businesses and schools. The new reality — with most people having developed a level of immunity to the virus because of prior infection or vaccination — warrants a shift to a more practical approach, experts and health officials say.
“Public health has to be realistic,” said Michael T.Osterholm, an infectious-disease expert at the University of Minnesota. “In making recommendations to the public today, we have to try to get the most out of what people are willing to do. … You can be absolutely right in the science and yet accomplish nothing because no one will listen to you.”
The CDC plans to recommend that people who test positive for the coronavirus use clinical symptoms to determine when to end isolation. Under the new approach, people would no longer need to stay home if they have been fever-free for at least 24 hours without the aid of medication and their symptoms are mild and improving, according to three agency officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal discussions.
The federal recommendations follow similar moves by Oregon and California. The White House has yet to sign off on the guidance that the agency is expected to release in April for public feedback, officials said. One agency official said the timing could “move around a bit” until the guidance is finalized.
Work on revisingisolation guidance has been underway since last August, but was paused in the fall as covid cases rose. CDC director Mandy Cohen sent staff a memo in January that listed “Pan-resp guidance-April” as a bullet point for the agency’s 2024 priorities.
Officials said they recognized the need to give the public more practical guidelines for covid-19, acknowledging that few people are following isolation guidance that hasn’t been updated since December 2021.Back then, health officials cut the recommended isolation period for people with asymptomatic coronavirus from 10 days to five because they worried essential services would be hobbled as the highly transmissible omicron variant sent infections surging. The decision was hailed by business groups and slammed by some union leaders and health experts. (Continued)
Dr. Ranganath is a professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California, Davis, and the author of the forthcoming book “Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Potential to Hold on to What Matters.”
Special Counsel Robert K. Hur’s report, in which he declined to prosecute President Biden for his handling of classified documents, also included a much-debated assessment of Mr. Biden’s cognitive abilities.
“Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
As an expert on memory, I can assure you that everyone forgets. In fact, most of the details of our lives — the people we meet, the things we do and the places we go — will inevitably be reduced to memories that capture only a small fraction of those experiences.
It is normal to be more forgetful as you get older. Broadly speaking, memory functions begin to decline in our 30s and continue to fade into old age. However, age in and of itself doesn’t indicate the presence of memory deficits that would affect an individual’s ability to perform in a demanding leadership role. And an apparent memory lapse may or may not be consequential depending on the reasons it occurred.
There is forgetting and there is Forgetting. If you’re over the age of 40, you’ve most likely experienced the frustration of trying to grasp hold of that slippery word hovering on the tip of your tongue. Colloquially, this might be described as ‘forgetting,’ but most memory scientists would call this “retrieval failure,” meaning that the memory is there, but we just can’t pull it up when we need it. On the other hand, Forgetting (with a capital F) is when a memory is seemingly lost or gone altogether. Inattentively conflating the names of the leaders of two countries would fall in the first category, whereas being unable to remember that you had ever met the president of Egypt would fall into the latter.
Over the course of typical aging, we see changes in the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, a brain area that plays a starring role in many of our day-to-day memory successes and failures. These changes mean that, as we get older, we tend to be more distractible and often struggle to pull up the word or name we’re looking for. Remembering events takes longer and it requires more effort, and we can’t catch errors as quickly as we used to. This translates to a lot more forgetting, and a little more Forgetting.
Many of the special counsel’s observations about Mr. Biden’s memory seem to fall in the category of forgetting, meaning that they are more indicative of a problem with finding the right information from memory than actual Forgetting. Calling up the date that an event occurred, like the last year of Mr. Biden’s vice presidency or the year of his son’s death, is a complex measure of memory. Remembering that an event took place is different than being able to put a date on when it happened, the latter of which is more challenging with increased age. The president very likely has many memories of both periods of his life, even though he could not immediately pull up the date in the stressful (and more immediately pressing) context of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Other “memory” issues highlighted in the media are not so much cases of forgetting as they are of difficulties in the articulation of facts and knowledge. For instance, in July 2023, Mr. Biden mistakenly stated in a speech that “we have over 100 people dead,” when he should have said, “over one million.” He has struggled with a stutter since childhood, and research suggests that managing a stutter demands prefrontal resources that would normally enable people to find the right word or at least quickly correct errors after the fact.
Americans are understandably concerned about the advanced age of the two top contenders in the coming presidential election (Mr. Biden is 81 and Donald Trump is 77), although some of these concerns are rooted in cultural stereotypes and fears around aging. The fact is that there is a huge degree of variability in cognitive aging. Age is, on average, associated with decreased memory, but studies that follow up the same person over several years have shown that, although some older adults show precipitous declines over time, other “super-agers” remain as sharp as ever.
Mr. Biden is the same age as Harrison Ford, Paul McCartney and Martin Scorsese. He’s also a bit younger than Jane Fonda (86) and a lot younger than Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett (93). All these individuals are considered to be at the top of their professions, and yet I would not be surprised if they are more forgetful and absent-minded than when they were younger. In other words, an individual’s age does not say anything definitive about their cognitive status or where it will head in the near future.
I can’t speak to the cognitive status of any of the presidential candidates, but I can say that, rather than focusing on candidates’ ages per se, we should consider whether they have the capabilities to do the job. Public perception of a person’s cognitive state is often determined by superficial factors, such as physical presence, confidence, and verbal fluency, but these aren’t necessarily relevant to one’s capacity to make consequential decisions about the fate of this country. Memory is surely relevant, but other characteristics, such as knowledge of the relevant facts and emotion regulation — both of which are relatively preserved and might even improve with age — are likely to be of equal or greater importance.
Ultimately, we are due for a national conversation about what we should expect in terms of the cognitive and emotional health of our leaders.
And that should be informed by science, not politics.
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When most people see downtown Vancouver, BC, they think it is a big city because of the number of high-rise buildings. Actually, its metro population is less than Portland’s, and most of those buildings are condo towers. In contrast, most of Seattle’ high-rises are offices.
You could argue that Vancouver and Seattle have different approaches to planning, but what’s really at work is the different business interests in each city, and how those drive public investment. Seattle could have beautiful walkable waterfront neighborhoods on the north and south doorsteps to downtown, but century-old industrial interests are keeping underused land from conversion to residential. It will probably take job loss to the suburbs to open those possibilities.
Vancouver, Where Homebuilding is a Major Industry
Leave it to the Canadians, who rely on exports to Pacific Rim countries to drive much of their economy, to make homebuilding on their own shores a major industry with high-wage jobs in high-rise construction. That began happening in the mid 1980s when Hong Kong residents fearful of the 1997 turnover began flocking here. That turnover is now 28 years behind us, but today the mainland Chinese come as well, drawn by the possibility of getting their kids into good schools.
Vancouver had high-rise development before the 1980s near Stanley Park, but it was the reuse of the Canadian Pacific rail yards as the Expo 86 site and then as a new waterfront neighborhood that took that high-rise residential development to scale. And it was a Hong Kong developer, Li Kai-shing, one of the biggest businessmen in that city, who bought the Expo 86 site and brought master-planning and large-scale development to Vancouver. Yes, some of the seawall walks were left over from Expo 86, but as part of the approvals process, Li Kai-Shing also added large waterfront parks, a marina, and a new community center in an old round house, all publicly accessible. Those amenities made downtown a more interesting place to live, and they also sold condos.
With that template established, Marathon, the development subsidiary of the other railroad in town, Canadian National, began turning its railyards on the north waterfront at Coal Harbor into a second walkable waterfront community, also with a marina, seawall walks, parks, and a second community center. In preparation for the 2010 Winter Olympics, the city acquired old warehouses and factories on the southeast shores of False Creek (about a mile east of Granville Island) and turned this into the Olympic Village, which was turned into permanent housing after the games were over. Just south of downtown in the Kitsilano neighborhood, two First Nations groups have approval to build a total of 19,000 housing units on two sites each near the water.
All in all, there are now about 80,000 housing units in and around downtown Vancouver, compared to about 45,000 units in areas of Seattle south of Mercer, west of I-5. and north of the football stadium. Seattle would have about three times as many units as it does now if it had the same ratio of downtown to metro housing as Vancouver.
Seattle, Where Commerce Speaks Loudest (Continued)
The US Department of Defense will install rooftop solar on the Pentagon as part of the Biden administration’s plan to “reestablish the federal government as a sustainability leader.”
In addition to rooftop solar panels, the Pentagon will also install a heat-recovery heat pump system and solar thermal panels to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
The solar panels and heat pump system will power over 95% of space heating and hot water heating, currently powered by natural gas and oil. The Pentagon, which has over 6.6 million square feet (610,000 square meters) of floor area and houses 26,000 employees, is aiming to achieve net zero.
The Pentagon program has a potential savings of over 7 million kWh of electricity and 128,157 MMBtu of natural gas per year, leading to an estimated annual total energy cost reduction of $1.36 million.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said, “By rethinking how we generate, distribute, and use energy, DoD is making our installations more resilient, better securing our critical infrastructure, and saving money — a win for warfighters and taxpayers alike.”
The Pentagon is one of 31 federal facilities that will receive $104 million in grants for energy conservation and clean energy projects from the US Department of Energy’s Assisting Federal Facilities with Energy Conservation Technologies (AFFECT) program. The grants are the first of three disbursements from $250 million in funding earmarked for the program in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Other projects include the application of photovoltaic film on south-facing windows at the Department of Transportation and the upgrade of more than 86,000 square feet of windows from the original 1960s single‐pane to double‐pane, low‐e secondary windows added to the interior of the DOE’s Forrestal Building. The Commerce and Transportation buildings will also see upgrades.
President Jimmy Carter installed solar water panels on the roof of the White House when he was president. When Ronald Reagan became president, he had them removed. Let’s hope this isn’t repeated if there is a change in administration
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Remember to turn in your steps and/or minutes to keep us going on the Skyline trek. Below is one resident who’s enjoying the incredible sights after trekking (by train) from Cusco to Machu Picchu! (Note: please send me a picture to post if you’re traveled in the Andes!)
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Ice bed: A polar bear naps on an ice bed carved into a small iceberg in the far north, off Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. Winner of the People’s Choice Award. Nima Sarikhani/Wildlife Photographer of the Year.
British amateur photographer Nima Sarikhani called it an honor to win the award for the dreamy scene “Ice Bed,” captured off Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, saying that the image “stirred strong emotions,” such as hope, in those who saw it.
“Whilst climate change is the biggest challenge we face, I hope that this photograph also inspires hope; there is still time to fix the mess we have caused,” Sarikhani added in a press release.
Organizers said more than 75,000 people voted in the competition — a record number.
“Ice Bed” was chosen from a shortlist of 25 images, which was previously narrowed down from around 50,000 entries. The Wildlife Photographer of the Year is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, London.
Douglas Gurr, director of the Natural History Museum, described the winning shot as “poignant” and “breathtaking.”
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Ed note: My friend and publisher Greg Shaw has deep roots in Oklahoma, Washington DC and Seattle. Greg is in the midst of an eclectic career–speech writer, Microsoft Director, Walla Walla Sweets baseball team owner, publisher (Clyde Hill Publishing), former Crosscut CEO and now author of a book of poetry (Rust in August). Here are his reading suggestions.
Better late than never. Here are the books I most enjoyed reading last year.
Reading is a very personal experience. For this reason, you will notice that I’ve included a few stories about why these books resonated with me.
A reviewer compared this novel with To Kill A Mockingbird – a drama built upon legal and social justice. The author of Stealing is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, and her setting is northeastern Oklahoma where I once worked as a journalist, including for the Cherokee Advocate tribal newspaper. This is a sweet and then terrifying story of a young Cherokee girl who ends up in the nightmare that was Indian boarding schools. I can imagine some saying, why read something so depressing? My response: this novel is about the greatness of the human spirit and the beauty that is Cherokee community culture.
In my early twenties I was a speechwriter for the Secretary of the Interior, a cabinet position focused on our public lands and the environment. During that brief time, I read every naturalist and environmental book I could get my hands on. It’s a rich bookshelf. Brinkley, one of the most engaging historians in generations, brings to life the Long Sixties, stretching from the late 1950s into the 1970s. This is the story of activists, including scientists but also artists, pushing America toward environmental reform is as strategic as it is inspirational.
Steven Wright has for a very long time been my favorite comedian. Deadpan and cerebral, he can make you think differently about the world in only a few sentences. Harold is the story of bright boy with a load of insights and a load of laughs. Ideas arrive on the wings of birds, literally. Readers may or may not agree with me, but it reminds me in some ways of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
If you love literature, read this. Genius. Diaz explores truth and deception behind unfathomable wealth and the writing of a bestselling novel from 1937, Bonds. Winner of the Booker Prize for 2022.
If you love literature, read this, too. Verghese is a treasure. Set in Kerala, India, the novel tells the story of three generations in which at least one family member dies of drowning. In this region, water is everywhere. It is a beautifully told story with the medical insight you would expect from this professor of medicine at Stanford University. It’s an Oprah’s Book Club chose this for 2023. Oh, and the audiobook is narrated by the author who has a stunning range of voices and accents! (Continue for more great suggestions)
It’s the most miserable time of the year: tax season.
Americans are about to spend millions of hours and billions of dollars filing their federal income taxes, and they are pretty sure they know who is responsible for their pain: The misanthropes at the Internal Revenue Service.
But we’re here to convince you that the I.R.S. is not the problem.
Yes, it should be easy to file taxes. And yes, it should be free. That’s how it works in the rest of the developed world, and it could very easily work that way here, too. It is absurd that America’s tax system is so antiquated and complicated that most people must pay someone else to help them pay the government.
So what is standing in the way of progress?
Watch.
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Historically, U.S. currency has been the domain of men, but the U.S. Mint is ever so slightly adjusting the gender balance this year with new quarters depicting American women.
It wasn’t until 1979 that the Susan B. Anthony Dollar became the first U.S. circulating coin to feature an American woman, and her successors were at first far and few between. The Sacagawea Golden Dollar Coin was issued in 2000 and Helen Keller appeared on Alabama’s state quarter in 2003. In 2022, though, the Mint got busy. The bureau’s American Women Quarters Program became its first circulating coin program dedicated exclusively to women. The four-year series, which has already featured depictions of Eleanor Roosevelt, Maya Angelou, and Sally Ride, will have introduced 20 new quarters into circulation that show women by the time the program wraps in 2025.
[Image: U.S. Mint]
This year’s designs include depictions of the “Queen of Salsa,” Celia Cruz, and Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, the only woman to receive the Medal of Honor. Cruz, the Cuban-American salsa singer, is shown on her quarter with her signature catchphrase “¡AZÚCAR!,” or Spanish for “sugar!” while Walker, a Civil War-era surgeon, is shown in hers wearing her medal.
[Image: U.S. Mint]
Rep. Patsy Takemoto Mink (D-Hawaii), the first woman of color to serve in Congress, was a coauthor of Title IX, and she’s depicted in her quarter design wearing a lei with documents representing her signature legislation in front of the U.S. Capitol. (Continued)
Sloane Crosley with Ben GibbardGrief is for PeopleFri 3/1 at 7:30PM | $5-$25 Sliding Scale | In-Person Sloane Crosley with Ben Gibbard Grief is for People Praised for her humor and sharp wit, essayist and novelist Sloane Crosley delivers her first memoir Grief is for People, exploring how loss can take many forms. Crosley seeks to upend the traditional grief memoir and offer both consolation and challenge to standard conceptions of mourning. Crosley’s talk is for anyone in a current time of sorrow or who has experienced a loss and might welcome a discussion beyond platitudes. Tickets to this event are free for ages 22 and under!Get Tickets
The move to a long-term care facility is often difficult but necessary for frail patients. For their partners, it can mean a new set of challenges.
After moving his partner of 33 years to a nursing home, Joseph Drolet, a retired lawyer in Atlanta, said his fear of what would happen to her if he died or became disabled has abated.
Ed Note: This article reminds me how fortunate we are to have the memory care support at Skyline, and caring for the caregivers. Also it’s fortunate that we have the nearby resources of the Memory Hub and Frye Museum.
Even as the signals of approaching dementia became impossible to ignore, Joseph Drolet dreaded the prospect of moving his partner into a long-term care facility.
Mr. Drolet, 79, and his beloved Rebecca, 71, both retired lawyers and prosecutors in Atlanta, had been a couple for 33 years, though they retained separate homes. In 2019, she began getting lost while driving, mishandling her finances and struggling with the television remote. The diagnosis — Alzheimer’s disease — came in 2021.
Over time, Mr. Drolet moved Rebecca (whose surname he asked to withhold to protect her privacy) into his home. But serving as her round-the-clock caregiver, as she needed help with every daily task, became exhausting and untenable. Rebecca began wandering their neighborhood and “getting dressed in the middle of the night, preparing for trips that weren’t happening,” Mr. Drolet recalled.
Last year, when he determined that Rebecca no longer really knew where she was, he felt it was time to move her to a nearby memory-care residence.
Putting a spouse or partner in a nursing home, for any reason, represents a fraught transition for a couple, one that can mean release from the sometimes crushing burden of caregiving, but can also be accompanied by lingering depression, anxiety and guilt, studies have shown.
“That everything was on my shoulders for the care of a very vulnerable person — that stress left,” Mr. Drolet said. After Rebecca left, “the 24-hour duties could be taken by somebody else.” His constant fear of what would happen to Rebecca if he died or became disabled also abated.
Still, as he visited her daily, Mr. Drolet felt his exhaustion “replaced by feelings of guilt and anxiety.” Was Rebecca being cared for as well as he had cared for her? Though she seemed content, the answer, he said, was no.
After his visits, he said that he would, “go home to the house, where everywhere I look is the reminder of her absence.” He wept during our phone call.
“When one relinquishes the day-to-day responsibility to the staff, that may come as a relief,” said Joseph Gaugler, a gerontologist at the University of Minnesota who has led much of the research on patients’ transition to institutional care. Dr. Gaugler has found that “for caregivers, feelings of depression and burden actually drop quite significantly, across multiplestudies.”
Yet nursing-home placement poses particular challenges for spouses compared with other family caregivers. An early and often-cited 2004 study of long-term care for patients with Alzheimer’s disease found that spouses were more often depressed before placement than other family members and more likely to be depressed and anxious afterward.
“Spouses are deemed to be more responsible than sons or daughters,” said Richard Schulz, a retired social psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh and lead author of the study. “Institutional care, in some circles, is viewed as giving up, relinquishing responsibilities one shouldn’t relinquish.”
Adult children and siblings are less likely to have shared a home with the patient for decades and to experience its emptiness after the person leaves. However attentive the family members may be, if they also have jobs and families of their own, “we don’t expect them to do as much,” Dr. Schulz added. Only spouses took that vow about sickness and health, until parted by death.
Dr. Schulz’s study found that nearly half of spousal caregivers visited institutionalized loved ones at least daily, compared with only about a quarter of caregivers who weren’t spouses.
Family members undertake multiple tasks on those visits. In nursing homes, family caregivers are so apt to assist with personal care like feeding and grooming, as well as with mobility, activities and socialization, that one recent study called them “an invisible work force.”
“Too often, institutionalization is thought of as the end of family caregiving. It’s not,” Dr. Gaugler said. In fact, shouldering the new tasks of overseeing care, advocating on behalf of the resident and monitoring the staff means that “in some ways, there’s a chance of substituting one set of challenges for another.” (continued)
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