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Seasonal Infective Disorder; Confessions of an Eternal Optimist

A Scene on the Ice, Hendrick Avercamp (1585 – 1634), oil on panel, circa 1610-1620. 1958: bequeathed to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, by Daniël George van Beuningen (1877-1955), Vierhouten. Source: Erwin Jurschitza, The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH.

by Julia Sneden

I have a friend who has recently begun treatment for a condition called “Seasonal Affective Disorder,” sometimes referred to as SAD. She describes it as starting in late autumn with a feeling of fatigue and generalized depression, increasing in depth and continuing into January and February, lifting only with the advent of spring. Apparently she has suffered from it for many years, but only recently discovered that it is an actual disorder, identifiable and treatable.

“So you don’t enjoy Thanksgiving or Christmas?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said, “they happen, but I really couldn’t even enjoy visits from my grandchildren, because they would exhaust me. For weeks both before and after the holidays I was no good to anyone, least of all to myself. Until March, I was just blah, and certainly no fun to live with.”

I didn’t ask what’s in the pills the doctor has prescribed for her, but whatever their makeup, they seem to help, because she is positively a whirlwind of energy these days. Or maybe it is just that a few over-achieving bulbs have poked up some green shoots through the snow and mulch just outside her front door, a sure sign that Spring is on its way even though we are only at the last days of January. Of course, on second thought, those shoots may have emerged at the same time last year, but she was just too blah to notice them.

I happen to love the changing seasons, just for themselves, each one arriving in prescribed order, year after year, and delivering us to the season that follows just when we have begun to be bored with the current one. We mark seasons not only by the length of light versus dark before and after the solstices or equinoxes, but also by the need to rearrange the clothes in our closet(s) from cold weather to less cold weather, and then to warmer, and on to really hot weather, etc..

Of course we also mark the turn of seasons by events that recur yearly, like Christmas and Chanukah and Easter and Halloween and Thanksgiving and Fourth of July, or even just the Day that the Swimming Pool Opens for the Summer. The changes of light and dark belong to nature, over which we have no say, but the events belong to people.

Now that I think about it, it doesn’t take much to infect me with enthusiasm for either kind of seasonal change. I love the natural changes in the growing dark of autumn, or the early brightness of summer, but also the event-driven changes like my grandchildren’s delighted anticipation of that final day of the school year.

As an old teacher, I pause to think of the grandchildren’s teachers, whose “final day” will actually come a few days later, after the students have departed and the classroom is tidied up, and all the lists of old textbooks and supplies are turned in, along with repair lists to give to the maintenance workers, and wish lists of what new items would be wonderful to have in the classroom come Fall.

I remember from my own days as a teacher that an empty classroom is both dreary and delicious, once the children are gone. You miss the kids, but you also anticipate the joy of the first morning of your summer break, when at last you can wake up without the alarm beeping away in your ear, and you can linger over a cup of coffee and read the pristine newspaper before husband or children get their hands on it … if, that is, you don’t have an early summer class in which you will be the student, as you struggle to fulfill the required number of “continuing education” hours required by your State Board of Instruction. I don’t deny the need for teachers to keep up with the latest educational theories and advances, but let me tell you that anyone who thinks school teachers have too much vacation needs to consider how little of it is actually spent vacantly. No wonder I used to greet the end of August with relief, despite the return of the 6:30 setting on my alarm clock.

February 1, 2014
Matisse and the Artist Book

Henri Matisse, frontispiece in the book Pasiphaé: Chant de Minos (Les Crétois) by H. de Montherlant (Paris: Martin Fabiana, 1944). Linocut on Japan paper. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Reva and David Logan Collection of Illustrated Books. Art © Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Through October 12, 2014

Henri Matisse was 60 years old when he began to create original illustrations for livres d’artiste (artists’ books). By the time of his death, 25 years later, he had produced designs for 14 fully illustrated books, several of which are considered 20th-century masterpieces of the genre. View seven of these rare books, including Poésies (1932) and Pasiphaé (1944), in conjunction with the special exhibition Matisse from SFMOMA at the Legion of Honor*.

Matisse was stimulated and challenged by book illustration and design, often taking months to prepare pictorial concepts. In his 1946 essay “How I Did My Books,” he wrote, “I draw no distinction between the construction of a book and the construction of a painting and always move from the simple to the complex, but I am always ready to reconceive in simplicity.” In the same essay he declared that the first principle of good book design was a rapport with the nature of the book. For Matisse this meant carefully balancing text and illustration. He handled this masterfully in Pasiphaé with delicate linocuts, and in Poésies with etchings composed of modified arabesques that draw attention to the illustration as much as to the inviting text.

Matisse from SFMOMA

Matisse’s expressive canvases were first introduced to San Francisco shortly after the 1906 earthquake, shocking the arts community with their startling colors and brushwork. Since then, the Bay Area has maintained a fervent connection to the artist’s work, resulting in SFMOMA’s rich collection, which showcases pieces from Matisse’s early career, and continues through the 1930s.

Left: Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954). Young Woman in Pink (La Jeune Femme en Rose), 1923. Oil on canvas.

Right: Study for “Young Woman in Pink”, ca. 1923. Charcoal with stumping and erasure on cream wove paper. Both artworks are memorial gifts from Dr. T. Edward and Tullah Hanley, Bradford, Pennsylvania

Matisse from SFMOMA includes important examples from the artist’s Fauve period, along with other significant paintings, drawings, and bronzes. Iconic works such as Sketch from “The Joy of Life” (1905‒1906), The Girl with Green Eyes (1908), and portraits of the artist’s early patrons Michael and Sarah Stein (1916) are featured along with major sculptural studies that include Madeleine, I (1901), The Serf (1900–1903), and Large Head: Henriette II (1927). Also on view are pre-Fauve still lifes and landscapes, as well as The Conversation (1938), a later decorative interior.

Selections from the Fine Arts Museums’ collection include the vibrant and patterned Young Woman in Pink (1923) and an early nude painted in the academic manner Faith, the Model (ca. 1901), the latter of which was formerly owned by the Steins and displayed in their Paris apartment, as were many of the works in SFMOMA’s holdings.

*The Legion of Honor was inspired by the French pavilion at San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915, which was a replica of the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur in Paris. The museum opened in 1924 in the Beaux Arts–style building designed by George Applegarth, on a bluff overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. Its holdings span 4,000 years and include European painting, sculpture, and decorative arts; ancient art from the Mediterranean basin; and the largest collection of works on paper in the American West.

January 30, 2014
Forget About Forgetting: Older Brains Slower Due to Greater Experience, Rather than Cognitive Decline

“The subject of a gestalt demonstration knows that his perception has shifted because he can make it shift back and forth repeatedly while he holds the same book or piece of paper in his hands. Aware that nothing in his environment has changed, he directs his attention increasingly not to the figure (duck or rabbit) but to the lines of the paper he is looking at. Ultimately he may even learn to see those lines without seeing either of the figures, and he may then say (what he could not legitimately have said earlier) that it is these lines that he really sees but that he sees them alternately as a duck and as a rabbit. … As in all similar psychological experiments, the effectiveness of the demonstration depends upon its being analyzable in this way. Unless there were an external standard with respect to which a switch of vision could be demonstrated, no conclusion about alternate perceptual possibilities could be drawn.”

— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3rd edn., p. 114). Wikimedia Commons

What happens to our cognitive abilities as we age? If your think the answer involves a steady deterioration of brain function, research reported this week in Topics in Cognitive Science may cause you to think again. The work, spearheaded by Dr. Michael Ramscar of the University of Tuebingen, Germany takes a critical look at the measures that are usually thought to show that our cognitive abilities decline across adulthood: Instead of finding evidence of decline, the team discovered instead that most standard cognitive measures, which date back to the early 20th Century, are flawed, confusing increased knowledge for declining capacity.

The Tuebingen study uses the same Big Data techniques that have been quietly revolutionizing our on-line experience to build computer models that simulate human performance in cognitive testing. Computers were trained as though they were humans, reading a certain amount each day, and learning new things along the way. When the researchers let a computer “read” only so much, its performance on cognitive tests resembled that of a young adult. But if the same computer was exposed to the experiences we might encounter over a lifetime — with reading simulated over decades — its performance now looked like that of an older adult. Often it was slower, but not because its processing capacity had declined. Rather, just as it takes longer to find a missing sock as a drawer gets bigger, increased “experience” had caused the computer’s database to grow, giving it more data to process — and that processing takes time.

What does this finding mean for our understanding of our ageing minds, for example older adults’ increased difficulties with word recall? These are traditionally thought to reveal how our memory for words deteriorates with age, but Big Data adds a twist to this idea. Technology now allows researchers to make quantitative estimates of the number of words an adult can be expected to learn across a lifetime, enabling the Tuebingen team to separate the challenge that increasing knowledge poses to memory from the actual performance of memory itself. “Imagine someone who knows two people’s birthdays and can recall them almost perfectly. Would you really want to say that person has a better memory than a person who knows the birthdays of 2000 people, but can ‘only’ match the right person to the right birthday nine times out of ten?” asks Ramscar.

Computationally, at least, the team show how the answer to this philosophical conundrum is, “no.” When Ramscar and colleagues trained their computer models on huge linguistic datasets, they found that standardized vocabulary tests, which are used to take account of the growth of knowledge in studies of ageing, massively underestimate the size of adult vocabularies. It takes computers longer to search databases of words as their sizes grow, an unsurprising fact that may have important implication for our understanding of age-related slowdowns and decline. Because the Tuebingen team discovered that to get their computers to replicate human performance in word recognition tests across adulthood, they had to keep their capacities the same. “Forget about forgetting” explained Tuebingen researcher Peter Hendrix, “if I wanted to get the computer to look like an older adult, I had to keep all the words it learned in memory and let them compete for attention.”

The research shows that studies of the problems older people have with recalling names suffer from a similar blind spot: These days people name their children in very different ways to their grandparents. This cultural shift toward greater name diversity has led to a massive proliferation in the number of names we give to our children, meaning the number of different names anyone learns over their lifetime has increased dramatically. The work shows how this makes locating a name in memory far harder than it has ever been before. Even for computers.

Ramscar and colleagues’ work provides more than an explanation of why, in the light of all the extra information they have to process, we might expect older brains to seem slower and more forgetful than younger brains. Their work also shows how changes in test performance that have been taken as evidence for declining cognitive abilities in fact demonstrates older adults’ greater mastery of the knowledge they have acquired.

Take “paired-associate learning,” a commonly used cognitive test that involves learning to connect words like “up” to “down” or “necktie” to “cracker” in memory. Using Big Data sets to quantify how often different words appear together in English, the Tuebingen team show that younger adults do better when asked to learn to pair “up” with “down” than “necktie” and “cracker” because “up” and “down” appear in close proximity to one another more frequently. However, whereas older adults also understand which words don’t usually go together, young adults notice this less. When the researchers examined performance on this test across a range of word pairs that go together more and less in English, they found older adult’s scores to be far more closely attuned to the actual information in hundreds of millions of words of English than their younger counterparts.

As Prof. Harald Baayen, who heads the Alexander von Humboldt Quantitative Linguistics research group where the work was carried out puts it, “If you think linguistic skill involves something like being able to choose one word given another, younger adults seem to do better in this task. But, of course, proper understanding of language involves more than this. You have also to not put plausible but wrong pairs of words together. The fact that older adults find nonsense pairs — but not connected pairs — harder to learn than young adults simply demonstrates older adults’ much better understanding of language. They have to make more of an effort to learn unrelated word pairs because, unlike the youngsters, they know a lot about which words don’t belong together.”

Our planet is now home to more elderly people than at any time in human history, but beliefs about their declining cognitive abilities often mean that older adults are seen as a burden on society. Yet, as the Tuebingen researchers note, it is impossible to tell if the mind’s information processing capacities do in fact decline with age if you don’t measure the information the mind processes, or how it changes over time. In every one of the cognitive tests in which the team measured this information, no evidence of any change in our minds’ processing capacities was found. The researchers simply found that the tests required older adults to make more effort as they sorted through the larger stores of knowledge they had acquired from experience.

Commenting on these findings in an editorial in the Journal Topics in Cognitive Science, Editors Wayne Gray and Thomas Hills suggest, “It is time we rethink what we mean by the aging mind before our false assumptions result in decisions and policies that marginalize the old or waste precious public resources to remediate problems that do not exist.”

January 28, 2014
Size of Gender Pay Gap Varies By State, Job
By Susan Milligan, Special to Stateline
Female workers don’t need to be told what numerous studies have concluded: Women, on average, are paid less than men, even when they are doing the same job. But where workers live also makes a difference.

Woman working on an airplane motor at North American Aviation in California. Photographed by Alfred T. Palmer in June 1942, Library of Congress

On average, women made an average of 80.9 cents for every dollar a male earned in 2012, according to recent statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But from state to state, the numbers vary dramatically. Female workers in Wyoming, for example, earn just 65.5 percent of what men earn, worst of any state. In the nation’s capital, women fared best and are nearly at parity, making 94.8 cents on the male-earned dollar.

There is no clear regional or political pattern: Arkansas women experience a narrower gender gap (15.9 cents) than women in New York (17.1 cents), for example.

The reason for the differences, experts say, is a complicated and sometimes contradictory set of conditions, ranging from the states’ dominant industries to labor union status and the percentage of workers earning the minimum wage.

And they caution that the gender gap number doesn’t tell the whole story. Women might make less than men in Connecticut, for example, but a female worker there earns a median salary of $868 a week compared to a man’s median earnings of $1,127. In areas where financiers and lawyers are prevalent — like Connecticut — salaries between the genders, while higher, are more disparate.

In states where there are a lot of minimum-wage jobs, men’s and women’s pay are likely to be closer. An Arizona woman might take solace in the fact that she earns about 87 percent of what men in the state earn, but on average, she’s earning just $670 a week.

In straight salary comparisons, women fared best in the District of Columbia, where the median weekly salary in 2012 was $1,072, 94.8 percent of men’s $1,131. At the bottom by salary: Montana, where women earned $566 a week, 77.2 percent of men’s $733.

The national median weekly wage for men was $854 in 2012 compared to $691 for women.

What Can States Do

Equal pay-related legislation was introduced in 11 states in 2013, according a summation prepared by the National Conference of State Legislatures for Stateline. A few examples:
- Vermont recently adopted a sweeping package that requires state contractors to prove they are complying with Vermont’s equal pay law, which says employers must pay equal wages, regardless of sex, for jobs that require “substantially equal, but not identical, skill, effort and responsibility.” The law also bans retaliation against employees who disclose their salaries (specialists say women are more likely to demand and get higher salaries if they know what others are being paid).
- Oregon adopted a law ensuring equal pay for health practitioners.
- Louisiana last summer enacted the Louisiana Equal Pay for Women Act, which protects state employees from gender-based pay discrimination if the worker is doing the same or “substantially similar” work.
- In New York, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo has introduced an ambitious Women’s Equality Act that addresses not just equal pay for the same job, but prohibits employers from denying jobs or promotions to women because they have children. The proposal also would allow women working in places with fewer than four employees (60 percent of New York businesses are this category) to file a sexual harassment claim. Currently, such small businesses are exempt.
- Connecticut recently finished a report on pay equity that encourages employers to publish salary ranges for jobs.
January 28, 2014
A House Foreign Affairs Hearing: “Lessons Learned from Super Bowl Preparations: Preventing International Human Trafficking at Major Sporting Events”

Congress returns from a recess.

Chairman Smith on the hearing: “As sports fans prepare for February’s Super Bowl, the prospect of human trafficking threatens to darken the festivities. Fortunately, we have learned from past sporting events and have new best practices, such as training for the transportation and hospitality industries to help identify and rescue victims being trafficked in plain sight. This hearing will examine how we can transform this Super Bowl — and other major sporting event worldwide — from potential trafficking-fests to trafficking-free zones.”

Hearings: Human Trafficking — On Monday, the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations will hold a hearing, “Lessons Learned from Super Bowl Preparations: Preventing International Human Trafficking at Major Sporting Events.”

On Tuesday, the House is scheduled to begin consideration of the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act (H.R. 7).

Family Support — On Wednesday, the House is likely to consider the conference report for H.R. 2642, the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act, more commonly known as the Farm Bill.

What follows is what Congress accomplished the week before it began:

Bill to Restrict Funding for Abortions Cleared by House Committee

On January 15, the House Judiciary Committee approved, 22-12, the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act (H.R. 7). The Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice held a hearing on the bill on January 9 (see The Source, 1/10/14).

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), would prohibit federal funding for health benefit coverage that includes coverage for abortions. Unlike current law, this provision does not make an exception for rape, incest, and to protect the life of the mother. The measure would prohibit the inclusion of abortion in any health care service provided by federal or District of Columbia health care facilities, or by a physician employed by the federal or District of Columbia governments.

The legislation would prohibit DC from using locally raised revenue to fund abortion services for low-income women. In addition, the bill would disqualify individuals from receiving IRS tax deductions for medical expenses spent on abortion services. The definitions of “qualified health plan” and “health insurance coverage” would be modified to exclude any plan that provides abortions.

Child Protection

S. 1936—-Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH)/Judiciary (1/16/14) — A bill to improve the response to missing children and victims of child sex trafficking.

H.R. 3902—-Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA)/Judiciary (1/16/14) — A bill to amend the National Child Protection Act of 1993 to establish a permanent background check system.

H.R. 3905—-Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH)/Judiciary, Education and the Workforce (1/16/14) — A bill to improve the response to missing children and victims of child sex trafficking.

H.R. 3923—-Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA)/Judiciary (1/17/14) — A bill to expand the authority of governmental social service agencies with child protection responsibilities to access the national crime information databases.

Family Support

S. 1922—-Sen. David Vitter (R-LA)/Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry (1/14/14) — A bill to prevent the illegal trafficking of supplemental nutrition assistance program benefits by requiring all program beneficiaries to show valid photo identification when purchasing items with program benefits.

International

S. 1942—-Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA)/Foreign Relations (1/16/14) — A bill to ensure that the United States promotes women’s meaningful inclusion and participation in mediation and negotiation processes undertaken in order to prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflict and implements the United States National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security.

Military

S. 1917—-Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO)/Read the first time (1/14/14) — A bill to provide for additional enhancements

FY2014 Appropriations Summary

On January 15, the House approved, 359-67, an omnibus spending bill (H.R. 3547) that would fund the government through the current fiscal year, which began on October 1, 2013 and ends on September 30, 2014. The Senate approved the measure, 72-26, on January 16; the president signed the bill into law on January 17. The…

Did You Know? The Women’s Caucus was formed on April 19, 1977, when a small group of Congresswomen sat down to talk about spousal abuse.

Courtesy of Women’s Policy, Inc

January 27, 2014
Decisions, Decisions ….

Single cup coffee servers, originally posted to Flickr by Andrés Nieto Porra; Wikimedia Commons

by Rose Madeline Mula

Shopping was much simpler in the old days. When you ran out of toothpaste, for instance, you went to the store and bought a new tube. You just had to decide between the brand that promised to make you wonder where the yellow went, or the one that cleaned your breath while it cleaned your teeth. That was it.

Today it’s not so easy. For starters, you have to choose from a dizzying multitude of brands, each of which offers dozens of formulations. Do you want a gel or a paste? Do you want to diminish sensitivity to heat and cold? Do you want to prevent plaque, remove tarter, whiten your teeth, discourage cavities, or strengthen your gums? (Unfortunately, a choice that includes “all of the above” doesn’t seem to be an option.) Further, would you like your toothpaste (or gel) to contain antioxidants … flouride … mint flavoring…? It’s overwhelming.

Despite all that, a toothpaste choice is one of the easiest conundrums facing us today. Nowhere near the challenge of buying a new pair of sneakers for instance. Yesterday the only problem was finding the extra few bucks to get a new pair of Keds. Today, after taking out a second mortgage to finance new footware, you then must analyze your requirements. A Google search reveals that different activities demand specific shoes. Will you be wearing them while cross training, weight lifting, long-distance running, short-distance sprints, jogging, or aerobics? A flatter heel will enable you to execute deeper squats, a flexible sole is preferable for kick boxing, and flex-grooved bottoms kick your Jazzercise workout up a notch because they help you sidestep seamlessly and move effortlessly in any direction. Also consider soles with shock absorbers and others with zig-zag bottoms that provide a spring-like action. And don’t dismiss the “deconstructured” sneaker which “forces otherwise dormant foot muscles into action.” Just like my old Keds! But at twenty times the price.

So which sneaker should you buy? It’s enough to drive you to drink. But that presents a new problem: What to drink out of:

You can’t just grab an empty jelly jar out of the kitchen cupboard if you want some wine. No, no, no! It’s important to match the glass to your choice of fruit of the vine. The bowl of a glass for red wine, for example, should be fuller and rounder and with a larger opening so you can dip your nose into to detect the aroma. Also, the larger surface area enables the wine to come in contact with more air, which apparently is critical. But it’s even more complicated. The same glass is not appropriate for all red wines. You need special glasses for a Bordeaux and a Burgundy. The former must be taller, with a slightly smaller bowl. This shape allows heavier red wines such as Cabernets and Merlots to travel directly to the back of the mouth to maximize the wine’s flavor; while the Burgundy glass — not as tall but with a slightly larger bowl — directs lighter wines, such as Pinot Noir, to the tip of the tongue to taste its more delicate flavors. Who knew??

January 23, 2014
In California, a Raft of Measures to Improve Conditions and Oversight of Assisted Living

by A.C. Thompson
ProPublica, Jan. 22, 2014,

Still from PBS Frontline documentary, Life and Death in Assisted Living

California lawmakers last week unveiled a dozen legislative proposals aimed at stiffening regulations governing the state’s roughly 7,700 assisted living facilities, residences that offer room and care to tens of thousands of frail or ailing people, most of them seniors.

The wide-ranging array of proposed regulations would mandate annual inspections of the facilities and increase the size of financial penalties that the state can levy for failures in care. The proposals would also step up mandatory training for assisted living employees, require facilities to employ registered nurses in some instances and demand that California post inspection results online for the public to review.

California, which is home to more assisted living facilities than any other state, currently maintains one of the loosest regulatory regimes in the country, with minimal fines (as little as $150 in cases of fatal neglect or abuse) and infrequent inspections (required once every five years). Ranging in scale from a handful of beds to hundreds, assisted living facilities provide housing and day-to-day help to the elderly and disabled, but, unlike nursing homes or physical rehabilitation centers, they do not offer around-the-clock medical care.

The regulatory proposals come as Gov. Jerry Brown seeks $7.5 million to hire dozens of additional inspectors, and state legislators prepare to hold a series of public hearings in February on improving the performance of the assisted living facilities and the officials who oversee them.

At least some of the new initiatives have the support of the California Assisted Living Association, an industry trade group. In a press release, the association said it was backing efforts to increase the frequency of inspections and raise training standards, as well as several other proposals.

The consensus — at least in broad terms — that California’s regulatory system needs an overhaul is “a testament to the level of crisis we’ve reached,” said Tony Chicotel, a staff attorney at California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, one of the advocacy groups pushing the legislative package. “Everyone seems to agree that it’s really bad and we need to do something.”

Several lawmakers described the bungled closure of a troubled Castro Valley facility late last year — a debacle that left an unpaid cook and janitor caring for 19 seniors, many of them seriously ill — as a catalyst for the new initiatives.

“The owners of the facility basically walked away,” said state senate majority leader Ellen Corbett, a Bay Area Democrat who is sponsoring new legislation. “It was so shocking and outrageous that this could happen.”

The state’s shortcomings have also been spotlighted in reports by ProPublica and PBS “Frontline,” as well as the San Diego Union-Tribune.

San Francisco Sen. Mark Leno, a Democrat, is spearheading a bill that would bring California’s practices in line with those of many other states, giving the Department of Social Services, which oversees assisted living, the power to halt admissions at facilities plagued by serious regulatory violations. If passed, the law “will go after the lifeblood of these facilities and prohibit them from taking any new customers,” Leno said.

January 22, 2014
The Miami Heat Comes to Call; A Fiftieth Birthday

The following blog post was cross-posted from Let’s Move!

Last week, the Miami Heat visited the White House to celebrate their 2013 NBA championship win. Rumor had it, during their visit, they teamed up with the First Lady in support of Let’s Move! to highlight the importance of eating healthy and drinking water to perform like a champion.

Catch all the action in the Public Service Announcement they recorded in the Diplomatic Room. And help spread the word about healthy eating by sharing the video with your friends and networks.

And to top it all off:

President Barack Obama checks in on First Lady Michelle Obama and daughters Sasha and Malia as they prepare burritos while volunteering at the DC Central Kitchen in Washington, DC, on Martin Luther King Day, January 20, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Celebrated this past week was the 50th birthday of Mrs. Obama. The White House released their 15 Favorite FLOTUS Moments for the birthday, including childhood photos and videos from her time at the White House.

SeniorWomen.com’s Editor’s Note: Michelle Obama has brought healthy eating, exercise and support for military families to the forefront during her time in the White House. As a mother with two small children when my husband was in Viet Nam in 1967-68, I encountered little support from the local and federal communities during that time and a national figure’s encouragement and programs would have been an exceptional gift.

January 21, 2014
CultureWatch Reviews: Amsterdam, A History of the World’s Most Liberal City; The Virgin of Bennington; DVD Tips: Foyle’s War & Doc Martin’s Return

Georg Braun; Frans Hogenberg: Civitates Orbis Terrarum, Band 1, 1572 (Ausgabe Beschreibung vnd Contrafactur der vornembster Stät der Welt, Köln, 1582 [VD16-B7188]; Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg

In This Issue

Amsterdam
A History of the World’s Most Liberal City
By Russell Shorto, ©2013
Published by Doubleday, Illustrated,
Hardcover 357 pages including Notes and Acknowledgements

Anyone who has read Shorto’s earlier book, The Island at the Center of the World, which is about Manhattan — and if you have not read it, you might want to consider doing so — will come to Amsterdam expecting history that has been impeccably researched, and told through far more than cold facts. There is most assuredly no shortage of the latter, but Shorto’s gifts include a keen eye for individual little stories that add a delicious depth to his writing, and thus to our understanding of times and events.

The term “liberal” may be off-putting to a prospective reader who equates it only to Amsterdam’s well-known coffee shops that sell marihuana and hashish, and its street-side windows featuring prostitutes who advertise their wares. Shorto ascribes those excesses to the Dutch tradition of gedogen, a term that translates roughly as “illegal but tolerated,” or more accurately, perhaps, “if you don’t like it, look the other way.”

But make no mistake, there is a great deal more to Mr. Shorto’s use of the word “liberalism.” Let him speak for himself:

“What all uses of liberalism go back to is the centrality of the individual. In this sense – the sense I will employ in this book – the word describes a fault line between the modern and the medieval; it represents our break with the Middle Ages and from the philosophy that has knowledge and power centered on received wisdom from the Church and the monarchy.”

From that statement, Shorto does a detailed and commendable job of giving the history of the city itself, and its break with the Church (Catholic). Following the horror of the Inquisition, Amsterdam and indeed all of Holland emerged as an entity known for tolerance of other faiths (including Catholicism), this in an intolerant age.

But four hundred years before that came the 11th and 12th century farmers, who looked at the marshy shores and decided that there must be way to control the water and increase the amount of land on which they could grow their crops. The reclaiming of marshland was a back-breaking, shovel-and-bucket process that resulted in heaped up dikes and channels to drain the water from the peaty soil. But as Shorto notes, when peat is dry, it begins to sink, and eventually it reaches a point once again below water level.

One can only imagine the frustrations of those medieval people as they worked out their systems of dikes and pumps in order to achieve a workable balance. It was an on-going battle that continues to this day, waged by trial and error and marked by scientific advances, and in the opinion of Russell Shorto, it is the battle against the water that created an “ethic of cooperation that created a society strong enough for it to impel, curiously, a commitment to value the individual…” So perhaps this is a working hypothesis to keep in mind as we explore the foundations of liberalism: individualism, as a theory and an ideal, is related to extreme conditions and, seemingly paradoxically, to the need to band together.

In recounting the political and economic history of Amsterdam, Shorto does enliven the facts with digressions involving the famous (think Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Anne Frank), but also with stories of people unfamiliar to the reader. It is this quality of research, that employs small observations to flesh out known historic facts, that make Amsterdam such a compelling, lively read: that, and just plain good writing. Not only do we find detailed descriptions of the first Dutch ships to sail to the East: we learn the names of those who sailed them, and whether or not they were able to purchase enough spices to convince their backers to send out more ships, all of which led to the founding of the Dutch East India Company (labeled VOC by the Dutch), and its companion, the Dutch West Indies Company. The leaders who initiated those voyages were instrumental in developing a whole new concept: allowing others to invest in their venture by buying shares in its prospects, which provided capital for its pursuit, and included sharing of the profits. Thus developed the world’s first Stock Market, and the beginning of capitalism.

January 19, 2014
Gridiron Cards at the Met: Grange, Thorpe, Washington, Unitas and Rockne

Goudey Gum Company, Sport Kings, 1933; Red Grange
The Jefferson R. Burdick Collection, Gift of Jefferson R. Burdick
Exhibition location: Robert Wood Johnson Jr. Gallery, Gallery 690

In conjunction with this year’s Super Bowl — the first ever to be played in the New York area — The Metropolitan Museum of Art will display a selection of vintage football cards from its celebrated Jefferson R. Burdick Collection of printed ephemera. Opening January 23, 2014, Gridiron Greats: Vintage Football Cards in the Collection of Jefferson R. Burdick will feature some 150 football cards printed between 1894 and 1959.

The Burdick Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art represents the life work of a man devoted almost entirely to collecting and cataloguing trade cards and other types of paper collectibles.

Goudey Gum Company, Sport Kings, 1933; *Jim Thorpe
The Jefferson R. Burdick Collection, Gift of Jefferson R. Burdick

Amassed by Jefferson R. Burdick (1900-1963) who began collecting Amercian ephemera when he was ten years old, his is the finest collection of American trade cards in the United States. Ephemera in the Burdick Collection ranges from advertisements for meat products, milk and bread, women’s clothing and shoes, stoves, pianos, cigars, candy, to postcards and playing cards, greeting and souvenir cards, to paper dolls.

So absorbed was Burdick by his passion for collecting that he devised a system for categorizing trade cards that was published as The American Card Catalogue in 1939. Subsequent editions appeared every few years until 1960; his system remains in use today.

Highlights include football cards from 1894 by the tobacco company Mayo — the first such cards to be produced. The rare John Dunlop (Harvard) card will be shown, along with other early collegiate standouts.

The exhibition will also feature Hall of Famers such as coach Knute Rockne, Red Grange and his teammate the powerhouse Bronko Nagurski, Jim Thorpe, and Sid Luckman; New York icons such as Frank Gifford, Tom Landry, Charlie Conerly, and Emlen Tunnell; and lesser-known players, coaches, and owners.

Editor’s Note: * Considered the best all-around athlete of modern times, Native American James “Jim” Thorpe won gold medals in both the pentathlon and the decathlon in the 1912 Stockholm Summer Olympics. Scandal struck in late January 1913 when he was stripped of his titles by the Amateur Athletic Union after admitting he had played professional baseball prior to the Games. Within days of the judgement, however, Thorpe had signed on with the New York Giants and went on to play years of professional baseball, football, and basketball. — From the Library of Congress, Topics in Chronicling America

Another highlight will be two cards depicting Kenny Washington. As a student at UCLA, Washington played alongside Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in professional baseball in 1945. The following year, Washington himself became the first African American to sign a contract with a National Football League team after integrated teams were reinstated.

January 16, 2014