Search Results for: How We Age

Using this helpful book, learn how the secret to happiness and longevity can be found through mentoring the next generation.

In How to Live Forever, Encore.org founder and CEO Marc Freedman tells the story of his thirty-year quest to answer some of contemporary life's most urgent questions: With so many living so much longer, what is the meaning of the increasing years beyond 50? How can a society with more older people than younger ones thrive? How do we find happiness when we know life is long and time is short?

In a poignant book that defies categorization, Freedman finds insights by exploring purpose and generativity, digging into the drive for longevity and the perils of age segregation, and talking to social innovators across the globe bringing the generations together for mutual benefit. He finds wisdom in stories from young and old, featuring ordinary people and icons like jazz great Clark Terry and basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

But the answers also come from stories of Freedman's own mentors—a sawmill worker turned surrogate grandparent, a university administrator who served as Einstein's driver, a cabinet secretary who won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the gym teacher who was Freedman's father.

How to Live Forever is a deeply personal call to find fulfillment and happiness in our longer lives by connecting with the next generation and forging a legacy of love that lives beyond us.

Blending personal anecdotes with hard science, an accomplished physician, researcher, and science communicator gives you the tools to avoid medical misinformation and take control of your health​: "A brilliant step toward patients and physicians alike reclaiming a sense of confidence in a system that often feels overwhelming and mismanaged" (Gabby Bernstein, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Universe Has Your Back).
 
We live in an age of medical miracles. Never in the history of humankind has so much talent and energy been harnessed to cure disease. So why does it feel like it’s getting harder to live our healthiest lives? Why does it seem like “experts” can’t agree on anything, and why do our interactions with medical professionals feel less personal, less honest, and less impactful than ever?

Through stories from his own practice and historical case studies, Dr. F. Perry Wilson, a physician and researcher from the Yale School of Medicine, explains how and why the doctor-patient relationship has eroded in recent years and illuminates how profit-driven companies—from big Pharma to healthcare corporations—have corrupted what should have been medicine’s golden age. By clarifying the realities of the medical field today, Dr. Wilson gives readers the tools they need to make informed decisions, from evaluating the validity of medical information online to helping caregivers advocate for their loved ones, in the doctor’s office and with the insurance company.

Dr. Wilson wants readers to understand medicine and medical science the way he does: as an imperfect and often frustrating field, but still the best option for getting well. To restore trust between patients, doctors, medicine, and science, we need to be honest, we need to know how to spot misinformation, and we need to avoid letting skepticism ferment into cynicism. For it is only by redefining what “good medicine” is—science that is well-researched, rational, safe, effective, and delivered with compassion, empathy, and trust—that the doctor-patient relationship can be truly healed. 

The definitive history of the idea of equality—and why we’re so ambivalent about it 

Equality is in crisis. Our world is filled with soaring inequalities, spanning wealth, race, identity, and nationality. Yet how can we strive for equality if we don’t understand it? As much as we have struggled for equality, we have always been profoundly skeptical about it. How much do we want, and for whom?  

Darrin M. McMahon’s Equality is the definitive intellectual history, tracing equality’s global origins and spread from the dawn of humanity through the Enlightenment to today. Equality has been reimagined continually, in the great world religions and the politics of the ancient world, by revolutionaries and socialists, Nazis and fascists, and postwar reformers and activists. 

A magisterial exploration of why equality matters and why we continue to reimagine it, Equality offers all the tools to rethink equality anew for our own age. 

“Easy to read and comprehensive. This book offers real practical guidance.”
—Matthew Walker, PhD, bestselling author of Why We Sleep

A MindBodyGreen Health & Well-Being Book for Your 2021 Reading List

Anyone having trouble sleeping has heard all the old “sleep hygiene” rules: Don’t drink caffeine after 2:00 p.m., use the bedroom only for sleeping, put down your screens an hour before going to bed. But as the millions suffering from poor sleep can attest, just following these overly simplistic, one-size-fits-all directives doesn’t work. How to Sleep is here to rewrite the rules and help you get to sleep—and stay asleep—each and every night.

Dr. Rafael Pelayo, an expert sleep clinician and professor at the world-renowned Sleep Medicine Clinic at Stanford University, offers a medically comprehensive and holistic approach to the myriad issues that might be affecting your sleep. He begins by grounding us in the biology of sleep including the extremely reassuring fact that no one actually sleeps through the night—we naturally wake up every ninety minutes. Dr. Pelayo then tackles the major sleep issues one by one, such as snoring and its causes; the difference between transient and chronic insomnia, and how to treat each; strategies to combat jet lag; how lifestyle choices affect your sleep, including exercise (even ten minutes helps), meditation (try it right before bed), and food and drink (alcohol is a double-edged sword—it may help you fall asleep faster, but it often interferes with staying asleep).

There’s advice for the bedroom—on white noise machines, ambient temperature, what to look for in a pillow—and answers to our most pressing questions, from when to see a sleep medicine specialist to how aging affects our sleep. All in all, it’s a sure prescription to help you sleep better, wake up refreshed, and live a healthier life.

The incredible untold origin story of cyberwar and the hackers who unleashed it on the world, tracing their journey from the ashes of the Cold War to the criminal underworld, governments, and even Silicon Valley.

Two years before 9/11, the United States was attacked by an unknown enemy. No advance warning was given, and it didn't target civilians. Instead, tomahawk missiles started missing their targets, US agents were swept up by hostile governments, and America’s enemies seemed to know its every move in advance. A new phase of warfare—cyber war—had arrived. And within two decades it escaped Pandora's Box, plunging us into a state of total war where every day, countless cyber attacks perpetrated by states and mercenaries are reshaping the world.

After receiving an anonymous email with leaked NATO battle plans during the bombardment of Kosovo, journalist Matt Potter embarked on a twenty-year investigation into the origins of cyber war and how it came to dominate the world. He uncovered its beginnings – worthy of a Bond movie – in the last days of the Cold War, as the US and its allies empowered a generation of Eastern European hackers, only to wake up in the late 90s to a new world order. It's a story that winds through Balkan hacking culture, Russia, Silicon Valley, and the Pentagon, introducing us to characters like a celebrity hacker with missing fingers who keeps escaping prison, FBI agents chasing the first generation of cyber mercenaries in the 90s, tech CEOs, and Russian generals obsessed with a Cold War rematch. Never before told, this is the riveting secret history of cyberwar not as governments want it to be – controlled, military-directed, discreet, and sophisticated – but as it really is: anarchic, chaotic, dangerous, and often thrilling.

From fourth grade onward, shy, nervous Bree Housley and fearless, outgoing Shelly were an inseparable, albeit unlikely, pair. Their friendship survived everything from the awkward years of junior high to the transformative upheavals of early adulthood—until, at the young age of 25, Shelly lost her life to complications caused by Preeclampsia.

We Hope You Like This Song is a tribute to the ineffable, incomparable bond that we call friendship, and a celebration of living life to the fullest. Housley recounts how she and her sister found a way to keep Shelly’s memory alive—by spending a year doing crazy things that Shelly would have done, like giving Valentines to strangers, singing at a karaoke bar, and letting her boyfriend pick out her outfits for a week. In the process, she paints a vivid, often hilarious, portrait of her fun-loving, social butterfly best friend and the many adventures they had growing up together in '80s and ’90s small-town America. 

Sweet, poignant, and yet somehow laugh-out-loud funny, We Hope You Like This Song is a touching story of love, loss, and the honoring of a friendship after it’s gone.

The writings of the Greeks and Romans form the bedrock of Western culture. Inventing the molds for histories, tragedies, and philosophies, while pioneering radical new forms of epic and poetry, the Greeks and Romans created the literary world we still inhabit today. Writing with verve and insight, distinguished classicist Richard Jenkyns explores a thousand years of classical civilization, carrying readers from the depths of the Greek dark ages through the glittering heights of Rome’s empire.

Jenkyns begins with Homer and the birth of epic poetry before exploring the hypnotic poetry of Pindar, Sappho, and others from the Greek dark ages. Later, in Athens’s classical age, Jenkyns shows the radical nature of Sophocles’s choice to portray Ajax as a psychologically wounded warrior, how Aeschylus developed tragedy, and how Herodotus, in “inventing history,” brought to narrative an epic and tragic quality. We meet the strikingly modern figure of Virgil, struggling to mirror epic art in an age of empire, and experience the love poems of Catullus, who imbued verse with obsessive passion as never before. Even St. Paul and other early Christian writers are artfully grounded here in their classical literary context.

A dynamic and comprehensive introduction to Greek and Roman literature, Jenkyns’s Classical Literature is essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the classics — and the extraordinary origins of Western culture.

“There is scarcely anything on which he does not offer an original aperç sometimes illuminating, sometimes simply provocative, but always worth reading… Jenkyns’s view of ancient literature is Olympian.” — G.W. Bowersock, The New York Review of Books

How young is too young to talk with children about sex and reproduction? Are we clear as adults about the meaning of the words “sex” and “sexuality,” or “gender” and “sexual orientation”? Do we know what we want our children to think and value about sexuality, and how to combat unhealthy cultural influences?With a rare directness and clarity about these profoundly important issues, nationally recognized sexuality educator Deborah Roffman challenges and teaches readers to develop a blueprint for opening the lines of communication with children of all ages. Raising sexually healthy children requires that we master what Roffman identifies as five core parenting skills: we must affirm our children’s emerging sexuality; provide accurate sexual information; demonstrate the connection between values and action; set safe and healthy limits; and provide constant and effective anticipatory guidance. Powerfully instructive on how to talk in ways that will be meaningful to kids, Sex and Sensibility will help parents confidently interpret and comfortably respond to virtually any question a child might pose or any situation that arises.

Encourage caring and kindness in the youngest child with the meaningful message of this engaging board book.

How many heartprints will you leave today?
Will you share with a friend?
Will you give hugs away?

In this delightful and warm book, author-illustrator P. K. Hallinan shows how our actions, no matter how small, can make an impression on the hearts of others. These are the “heartprints” we leave behind. The simple, lyrical text and bright illustrations will inspire readers of all ages.

For more than a century we’ve known that much of human evolution occurred in an Ice Age. Starting about 15,000 years ago, temperatures began to rise, the glaciers receded, and sea levels rose. The rise of human civilization and all of recorded history occurred in this warm period, known as the Holocene. Until very recently we had no detailed record of climate changes during the Holocene. Now we do. In this engrossing and captivating look at the human effects of climate variability, Brian Fagan shows how climate functioned as what the historian Paul Kennedy described as one of the “deeper transformations” of history — a more important historical factor than we understand.

The story of an infamous poison that left toxic bodies and decimated wildlife in its wake is also a cautionary tale about how corporations stoke the flames of science denialism for profit.

The chemical compound DDT first earned fame during World War II by wiping out insects that caused disease and boosting Allied forces to victory. Americans granted it a hero’s homecoming, spraying it on everything from crops and livestock to cupboards and curtains. Then, in 1972, it was banned in the US. But decades after that, a cry arose to demand its return. 

This is the sweeping narrative of generations of Americans who struggled to make sense of the notorious chemical’s risks and benefits. Historian Elena Conis follows DDT from postwar farms, factories, and suburban enclaves to the floors of Congress and tony social clubs, where industry barons met with Madison Avenue brain trusts to figure out how to sell the idea that a little poison in our food and bodies was nothing to worry about.

In an age of spreading misinformation on issues including pesticides, vaccines, and climate change, Conis shows that we need new ways of communicating about science—as a constantly evolving discipline, not an immutable collection of facts—before it’s too late.

We all know the history of science that we learned from grade school textbooks: How Galileo used his telescope to show that the earth was not the center of the universe; how Newton divined gravity from the falling apple; how Einstein unlocked the mysteries of time and space with a simple equation. This history is made up of long periods of ignorance and confusion, punctuated once an age by a brilliant thinker who puts it all together. These few tower over the ordinary mass of people, and in the traditional account, it is to them that we owe science in its entirety. This belief is wrong. A People’s History of Science shows how ordinary people participate in creating science and have done so throughout history. It documents how the development of science has affected ordinary people, and how ordinary people perceived that development. It would be wrong to claim that the formulation of quantum theory or the structure of DNA can be credited directly to artisans or peasants, but if modern science is likened to a skyscraper, then those twentieth-century triumphs are the sophisticated filigrees at its pinnacle that are supported by the massive foundation created by the rest of us.

Learn how the perception of truth has been weaponized in modern politics with this "insightful" account of propaganda in Russia and beyond during the age of disinformation (New York Times).

When information is a weapon, every opinion is an act of war.

We live in a world of influence operations run amok, where dark ads, psyops, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, and Trump seek to shape our very reality. In this surreal atmosphere created to disorient us and undermine our sense of truth, we’ve lost not only our grip on peace and democracy — but our very notion of what those words even mean.

Peter Pomerantsev takes us to the front lines of the disinformation age—from Kiev to Manilla–where he meets Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, “behavioral change” salesmen, Jihadi fanboys, Identitarians, truth cops, and many others. Forty years after his Ukranian dissident parents were pursued by the KGB, Pomerantsev finds the Kremlin re-emerging as a great propaganda power. His research takes him back to Russia — but the answers he finds there are not what he expected.

Blending reportage, family history, and intellectual adventure, This Is Not Propaganda explores how we can reimagine our politics and ourselves when reality seems to be coming apart.

Mothers and daughters share a special bond. . . why not further this bond through reading together? Book clubs have been growing in popularity over the past ten years, started by a variety of people with various interests and goals. Mother-daughter book clubs offer a great way for families to grow and share-with each other and with other mother-daughter pairs. 

In Book by Book Cindy Hudson offers all the how-to tips mothers need to start their own successful book clubs. Hudson offers her own firsthand experience as the founder of two long-running successful mother-daughter book clubs. Hudson offers suggestions on books topics, club guidelines, and how to keep the club going as daughters grow older. How big should the club be? Whom should we invite? How often should we meet? How do we make sure we actually read the books? Hudson has all the answers. 

With recommended book lists (divided by four age groups), online resources, and suggested recipes for book-club treats, Book by Book is a great resource for helping moms and daughters form new memories and traditions. 

The politics of grief, in an era marked by loss, shows us how we can find our humanity once more. From one of our most vital and far-seeing social critics.

Our era is one of significant and substantial loss, yet we barely have time to acknowledge it. The losses range from the personal grief of a single COVID death to the planetary disaster wrought by climate change. We are in an age of unraveling hopes and expectations, of dreams curtailed, of aspirations desiccated. What can we do? 

This is capitalism’s death phase. It has become clear that the cost of wealth creation for a few is enormous destruction for others. The marginalized and the vulnerable have been feeling the crisis for a long time, but it is increasingly coming for all of us. At the same time, we are denied the means of mourning the futures that are being so brutally curtailed. 

At such a moment, taking the time to grieve is a radical act. Through in-depth reporting intertwined with memoir, Sarah Jaffe shows how public memorialization has become more than a refusal or a protest: it is a path to imagining a better world. When we are able to mourn the lives, the homes, the worlds we have lost, we are better prepared to fight for a transformed future. 

From a world-renowned leader in neuroscience, a provocative, enthralling journey into the depths of the human mind.

Where do our thoughts come from? How do we make choices and trust our judgments? What is the role of the unconscious? Can we manipulate our dreams? In this mind-bending international bestseller, award-winning neuroscientist Mariano Sigman explores the complex answers to these and many other age-old questions.

Over the course of his 20-year career investigating the inner workings of the human brain, Dr. Sigman has cultivated a remarkable interdisciplinary vision. He draws on research in physics, linguistics, psychology, education, and beyond to explain why people who speak more than one language are less prone to dementia; how infants can recognize by sight objects they’ve previously only touched; how babies, even before they utter their first word, have an innate sense of right and wrong; and how we can “read” the thoughts of vegetative patients by decoding patterns in their brain activity.

Building on the author’s awe-inspiring TED talk, the cutting-edge research presented in The Secret Life of the Mind revolutionizes how we understand the role that neuroscience plays in our lives, unlocking the mysterious cerebral processes that control the ways in which we learn, reason, feel, think, and dream.