Welp, the end of another week is upon us. Is the weekend a punishment or a reward, or neither? What distinguishes our days, if we can’t even go to the goddamn library? (Oh my God I miss the library.) (I don’t want the library to reopen until it can do so in a way that’s safe for library workers; I just miss it.) I have a plan to mark the passage of time by making a new batch of frozen breakfast burritos. This seems fine, but do you remember the time Before when a person could go out to a…
Leave a CommentTag: Atul Gawande
This has been the persistent pattern of how modern society has dealt with old age. The systems we’ve devised were almost always designed to solve some other problem. As one scholar put it, describing the history of nursing homes from the perspective of the elderly “is like describing the opening of the American West from the perspective of the mules; they were certainly there, and epochal events were certainly critical to the mules, but hardly anyone was paying very much attention to them at the time.” The excerpt I read from Being Mortal in the New Yorker dealt with the astonishing rarity…
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