Why More Education Leads To Fewer Signs of Dementia In The Elderly
July 27, 2010
After more than a decade of puzzling over why people who continue their educations longer have a lower risk of developing dementia, researchers have come up with an answer.
Do the brains of the more educated resist disease better?
Nope. The answer is that people with more education cope better with changes in the brain associated with dementia, say researchers in England and Finland.
Researchers, by examining the brains of 872 people who took part in three large aging studies, had concluded previously that each additional year of education results in an 11% decrease in the risk of developing dementia.
But they had, until now, been unable to say definitively whether or not education—which is linked to higher socioeconomic status and healthier lifestyles—protects the brain against dementia.
The new study, led by Professor Carol Brayne, an epidemiologist and public health physician at the University of Cambridge, shows people with different levels of education, in fact, have similar brain pathology. That is, disease that causes dementia was as prevalent the brains of people who had extensive educations as those who did not. The difference, say the researchers, is that those with more education are better able to compensate for the effects of dementia.
Other researchers have long suspected that the ability of well-educated people to cope with damage to their brains, known as cognitive reserve, explained why, at a certain point, the better educated appeared to decline more rapidly if dementia appeared. They theorized that the disease process was probably already more advanced by the time the brains of those with more education could no longer cope.
“Previous research has shown that there is not a one-to-one relationship between being diagnosed with dementia during life and changes seen in the brain at death,” said co-author Dr Hannah Keage of the University of Cambridge. “One person may show lots of pathology in their brain while another shows very little, yet both may have had dementia. Our study shows education in early life appears to enable some people to cope with a lot of changes in their brain before showing dementia symptoms.”
This study, which uses data from the EClipSE collaboration—which combines three European population-based longitudinal studies—was able to pinpoint the relationship between education and dementia.
The study strengthens the case for investment in early education, says Brayne. “This is hugely relevant to policy decisions about the importance of resource allocation between health and education.”
The results of the study are published in the journal Brain. This post was adapted from material on Science Daily and my prior interviews with neuroscients. Further details of EClipSE are available at
Rx For Learning And The Brain: Music; The Duke of Uke Demonstrates & Nina Kraus Explains
July 23, 2010
Nothing attests to the hunger for music more than the ubiquitous sight of thin white wires draped like jewelry from ears and plugged into devices, playing who knows what: Bach? Beyonce? Bieber?
Noticing the other day how many riders on the subway were wired up, I mused that it was no wonder Dr. Rudolfo Llinás, a giant of modern neuroscience, speaks of the the life of cells in the brain as looking “like a Riverdance perfomance,” with “some cells tapping in harmony and some … silent, creating myriads of patterns that represent the properties of the external world. Cells with the same rhythm form circuits to bind information in time.”
Nor does it surprise that an explosion of studies in recent years has suggested that music on the brain is a good thing, good for learning and longevity. Consider this disparate group of musicians and their current ages: BB King, 84; Earl Scrugg, 86, Ravi Shankar, 90, ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards, 95; and Pinetop Perkins, 96; or the world’s oldest performing musician, Bill Tapia, the Duke of the Uke, 102, who appeared recently at the New York Uke Festival.
Now a data-driven review has pulled together studies linking musical training to learning, from skills ranging from language to memory. And scientists who published their work this week in Nature Reviews Neuroscience say that collectively the research has significant implications for education.
Playing an instrument, the researchers say, primes the brain to choose what is relevant in a complex process that may involve reading or remembering a score, timing issues and coordination with other musicians.
“The brain is unable to process all of the available sensory information from second to second, and thus must selectively enhance what is relevant,” Nina Kraus, lead author of the Nature perspective, the Hugh Knowles Professor of Communication Sciences and Neurobiology and director of Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory.
“A musician’s brain selectively enhances information-bearing elements in sound,” Kraus said. “In a beautiful interrelationship between sensory and cognitive processes, the nervous system makes associations between complex sounds and what they mean.” The efficient sound-to-meaning connections are important not only for music but for other aspects of communication, she said.
Musicians are more successful than non-musicians in learning to incorporate sound patterns for a new language into words, according to literature gathered in the Nature review. Children who are musically trained show stronger neural activation to pitch changes in speech and have a better vocabulary and reading ability than children who did not receive music training.
And musicians trained to hear sounds embedded in a rich network of melodies and harmonies are primed to understand speech in a noisy background. They exhibit both enhanced cognitive and sensory abilities that give them a distinct advantage for processing speech in challenging listening environments compared with non-musicians.
Children with learning disorders are particularly vulnerable to the deleterious effects of background noise, according to the article. “Music training seems to strengthen the same neural processes that often are deficient in individuals with developmental dyslexia or who have difficulty hearing speech in noise.”
Their review, Northwestern researchers conclude, argues for serious investing of resources in music training in schools accompanied with rigorous examinations of the effects of such instruction on listening, learning, memory, attention and literacy skills.
(Part of this post was adapted from materials provided by by Northwestern University.)
Book Making: Deirdre Capone’s ‘Uncle Al’ And Family Feuds
July 20, 2010
Gangster Al Capone’s relatives, real and sham, have recently been trying to take his notorious name to the bank. Family feuds have, as a result, been brewing.
A memoir, ‘Uncle Al Capone,’ written by Deirdre Marie Capone, the great niece of the Chicago mobster once known as Public Enemy #1, is at the center of the controversy, according to a bylined story by David Kesmodel in today’s Wall Street Journal.
But money is not her goal, says the 70-year-old Florida grandmother.
After decades of research and at the insistence of her children, she hopes to renovate the family name by telling what it was really like growing up Capone. “Just because you have Capone blood does not mean that you are monster. It really makes me angry,” she said.
Al Capone, she says, was really just a “big kid” who enjoyed rolling on the carpet with her, soothed her when she fell from an apple tree, and taught her to swim in the pool of his house in Miami. It was there that Al Capone lived from the time of his release from prison in 1939—after serving eight years of his sentence for a conviction on charges of tax evasion—until his death from syphilis on Jan. 25, 1947, the date of Deirdre’s seventh birthday. Though government prosecutors believed Al Capone was responsible for as many as 500 murders, they never succeeded in forging a case against him on those charges.
But the Capone name became synonymous with rampant brutality thanks to the ceaseless mythologizing of the press, says Dierdre Marie Capone. As a result, her father, Ralph, a graduate of Notre Dame and Loyola University Law School, committed suicide in 1950, at age 33. Otherwise, she says, he might have redeemed the family name the way that John F. Kennedy did the Kennedy name. “He was a brilliant man,” she said. “I want to give my father’s short life back to him.”
For years, she used her father’s middle name, Gabriel, to hide her true identity. She learned early that her real last name was a blight. Not long after Al Capone’s death, parents at the Catholic school she attended in Chicago discovered that she was a Capone from press reports of her first communion. From then on, they forbid their children to ever play with her.
In our interview, she declined to disclose her married name, where she lives, or the names of any current or former jobs or employers. She claimed to have worked as a “business executive” and said she had sat at tables with senators and governors. “There are still a lot of people out there who would like to be the one to shoot the last Capone,” she said to explain her reticence. “I try to keep my adult life out of it.”
Still, she was interviewed on NBC’s Today Show two years ago:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
While the Wall Street Journal story said she plans to publish her book this fall, she currently has no book contract. Even if her book gets published, she won’t make buyers out of some Capones.
“I wouldn’t read it if somebody bought it for me,” Theresa Capone, Al Capone’s granddaughter, told Kesmodel. She said she was furious about revelations in the recently published book, “Get Capone,” by Jonathan Eig, a former Wall Street Journal reporter. The book cites a claim by Deirdre Marie Capone that Theresa’s father, Albert “Sonny” Capone, was not the son of Al Capone’s wife, Mae, but of a young woman who died in childbirth. “It is totally and completely false.”
Meanwhile, Chris Knight Capone, the 38-year-old author of a self-published and ghost written book, Son of Scarface, has also angered the Capone clan by filing a lawsuit in Chicago to have the gangster’s remains exhumed to prove that his father, Bill Knight, was Al Capone’s son. After years of research, in 2008, Chris Knight changed his last name to Capone.
And then there’s Dominic Capone III. His relation to Al Capone is also questioned. Nonetheless, he’s been capitalizing on it with his “Capone Family Secret” tomato sauce, which he sells at 188 grocery stores in the Chicago area, and via PayPal. It pulled in about $300,000 last year, he recently told Lou Carloza of AOL’s Wallet Pop. “We’ve been doing really good—in fact, a lot better than we thought we’d do.”
Dominic, an actor who starred as Al Capone in the TV documentary “The Real Untouchables,” claims the sauce’s recipe was handed down to him by his grandfather Ralph. However, Deirdre Marie discounts his claim of being related to the gangster. Asked what the real relation was, he said, “I can’t really say. It’s a little scandalous, what’s going on in the Capone family.”
George Steinbrenner and Robert Butler’s Different Legacies
July 13, 2010
Maybe deaths do arrive in bunches. It’s hard to resist taking note of the death of Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, at age 80, on Tuesday. But I’d much rather use the bulk of this blog to pay tribute to Dr. Robert Butler, whose intensely-researched, muscular positivity about aging transformed the field of geriatrics. He coined the phrase “ageism,” drew attention to discrimination against the elderly, and effectively challenged the once widely-held notion that senility was inevitable. I was away when he died of leukemia, at 83, on July 6. I was sorry to miss the opportunity to post something then.
Dr. Robert Butler in Central Park in 2006. Photo by Robert Caplin for The New York Times
It, of course, makes no sense to measure one life against another.
Steinbrenner, who had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for several years, spent a lot of money, fired a lot of managers, insulted a lot of people, and, to the joy of Yankees fans and the jealousy of others, celebrated a lot of World Series victories. Seven, to be exact. He returned the pinstriped franchise to its status as the greatest sports team in history and, in various ways, earned the sobriquet “The Boss.”
Oft repeated in news reports today, he parleyed an $8.7 million investment (including a meager personal contribution of about $170,000) into an entity worth $1.6 billion. The chorus of commentators dutifully recited Steinbrenner’s self-proclaimed love of winning and hatred of losing.
(I switched my allegiance from the Los Angeles Dodgers, when Rupert Murdoch bought them, to the Yankees. At least, I rationalized, Steinbrenner wasn’t despoiling journalism. Besides my sons were New York City boys coming of age to baseball. They shared Steinbrenner’s enthusiasm for winning. And, honestly, I joined and benefited from the pleasures of cheering along with them.)
But as legacies go, for all the ballyhoo about the Yankee dynasty created under Steinbrenner, I’ll go with Butler’s.
He not only put the field of geriatrics on the map, he was responsible for a radical sea change in our society’s attitude toward the elderly and aging, a change of fundamental importance in the civil rights of every American. It stands right beside the civil rights victories that have been won for blacks and women.
In the 1975 book that earned Butler his Pulitzer, “Why Survive? Being Old in America,” he wrote, “Human beings need the freedom to live with change, to invent and reinvent themselves a number of times through their lives.” He had no patience with romanticizing aging or with the elderly content to live out their lives amusing themselves.
In an interview with Josh Tapper, a fellow of News21, a national initiative to promote innovation in journalism, three days before Butler’s death, he said, pointedly: “I think a lot of older people are sitting on their asses, playing golf, and not making a contribution to society.”
Butler was still putting in 60-hour work weeks as the founder and C.E.O. of the International Longevity Center in New York.
He couldn’t sit still for the course of the interview, jumping up to grab me a soda (he was sipping from a can of Coke) or a New York Times clipping on elder abuse, Tapper wrote.
“I’m very lucky,” he said. “I’ve got good health.”
At the end of their talk, Butler surprised his interviewer by asking how long he wanted to live. “As long as I enjoy life,” Tapper told him. He immediately regretted his vague answer.
Perhaps Butler knew he didn’t have long to live, Tapper speculated.
“I think you’ve said it right,” Butler assured the younger man. “You want to live as long as you enjoy life. That’s the real truth.”
Mixed Messages as W. S. Merwin Is Named Poet Laureate at 82
July 3, 2010
News stories reporting this week that W. S. Merwin had been named the 17th poet laureate of the United States were quick to note that the 82-year-old poet leads a relatively reclusive life on a former pineapple plantation in Hawaii. (I always thought poets were supposed to lead relatively reclusive lives. Isn’t that how poetry gets written?)
These stories seemed to ask, albeit gingerly, whether Merwin would be vigorous, public, or peripatetic enough to promote poetry in our celebrity and internet-dominated age. After all, Merwin (Heavens!) even eschews the computer for his writing of poetry.
I found myself wondering about the subtle ways of ageism.
Were Merwin younger, wouldn’t reporters have been curious if the poet, who has written deeply for years about the environment, saw irony in being named poet laureate as the worst environmental accident in history, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, was still unfolding? I wondered, too, at the curiosity that one of America’s most mindful poets would assume office at the very moment there is a debate roiling over whether life on the web is harming our ability to concentrate and think profoundly.
Forty years ago, Merwin, the Princeton-educated son of a Presbyterian minister who won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1971, was well-known as a powerful voice in protests against the Vietnam War. Last year, he won his second Pulitzer for his most recent collection, The Shadow of Sirius, in which he writes about memory and mortality.
The Christian Science Monitor’s Elizabeth Lund reported that there were those who were disappointed that a poet more like “Robert Pinsky, the most effective laureate to date,” had not been selected. She commented that Pinsky had, as laureate, exhibited the “zeal of an activist and the charisma of a celebrity. The George Clooney of the poetry world, if you will.”
New York Times reporter Patricia Cohen, noted that Merwin “retains traces of the extravagant handsomeness of his youth,” and reported that after he had learned of the announcement of his appointment, he told her by telephone he wasn’t looking forward to having his life disrupted, though he does “relish” taking a more public part in the conversation about poetry. “I do like a very quiet life,” he said. “I can’t keep popping back and forth between here and Washington.”
It should be said that in their stories both reporters ultimately embraced Merwin’s masterful, elliptical, and frequently mysterious poems. Rooted in mindful attentiveness to the everyday, his poems often have a quicksilver quality to them.
“It’s a joy to be part of everything that’s living, and to be able to give something back sometimes,” Merwin, who moved to Hawaii in the 1970s, told NPR’s Melissa Block. His move to Hawaii was inspired by his interest in Zen Buddhism and the notion of living a wholistic life. He has said that he plans to use his new post to draw attention to the poetry of indigenous cultures and the power of translation, something at which he has also given great service in his career as a poet.
What’s important about naming Merwin poet laureate is the degree to which his mind, not the lineaments of his face, has retained and deepened a life and a body of work made of the mix of devotion to craft, consciousness, and imagination. Perhaps his tenure will be quieter and more contemplative than Pinsky’s was, but it will be the manifestation of his way of being in the world, not solely a function of age. And it seems that we could, at this moment, profit considerably from his mindful example.
Here’s “Separation,” a beautiful 3-line poem he wrote early in his career and which Block asked a surprised Merwin to read on air.
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
—
And here’s one I like a great deal:
“I Live Up Here”
I live up here
And a little bit to the left
And I go down only
For the accidents and then
Never a moment too soon
Just the same it’s a life it’s plenty
The stairs the petals she loves me
Every time
Nothing has changed
Oh down there down there
Every time
The glass knights lie by their gloves of blood
In the pans of the scales the helmets
Brim over with water
It’s perfectly fair
The pavements are dealt out the dice
Every moment arrive somewhere
You can hear the hearses getting lost in lungs
Their bells stalling
And then silence comes with the plate and I
Give what I can
Feeling It’s worth it
For I see
What my votes the mice are accomplishing
And I know I’m free
This is how I live
Up here and simply
Others do otherwise
Maybe
——
And here’s Merwin talking to NPR’s Terry Gross in 2008 on memory, mortality, and the writing process.
Cell Rest and Teen Exercise Are Keys To Later Brain Health
July 1, 2010
It can’t be said too often: to protect your brain, exercise! Now, two new studies are adding more emphasis to physical activity— and greater understanding to the interplay between exercise, aging and the exquisite balance that preserves the brain’s reservoir of stem cells for later life.
One study focused on the cellular mechanism that keeps neural stem cell division in check. The other correlated the lack of teenage exercise with cognitive impairment in later life.
In the first, scientists at the Salk Institute of Biological Research in La Jolla, California, underscored how physical activity balances neural stem cell quiescence— stem cells are at rest— and keep them from their dormancy from becoming dominant in later life while it helps stimulate the growth of new neurons in the hippocampus, the brain’s hub of memory.
Image: Courtesy of Dr. Helena Mira, Carlos III Health Institute, Madrid
The other study, of 9,344 women from Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, compared at activity levels at teenage, age 30, age 50, and late life with cognitive decline. Reported June 30 in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, it held alarming implications in an era of declining physical activity for youths.
“Our study shows that women who are regularly physically active at any age have lower risk of cognitive impairment than those who are inactive,” said lead researcher Laura Middletton, Ph. D., of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto. “But … being physically active at teenage is most important in preventing cognitive impairment.”
Researchers, led by Laura Middleton, Ph. D., of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, found that being physically active at any stage of life lowers the risk of cognitive impairment in old age. But “being physically active at teenage is most important in preventing cognitive impairment,” said lead researcher Laura Middleton, Ph. D., of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Canada.
The researchers also determined that women who were physically inactive at teenage but became physically active at age 30 and age 50 had significantly reduced odds of cognitive impairment relative to those who remained physically inactive. In contrast, being physically active at age 30 and age 50 was not significantly associated with rates of cognitive impairment in those women who were already physically active at teenage.
“To minimize the risk of dementia, physical activity should be encouraged from early life,” Middleton said, adding, “Not to be without hope, people who were inactive at teenage can reduce their risk of cognitive impairment by becoming active in later life.”
The mechanisms by which cognition benefits from physical activity across the life course are believed multi-factorial. Much evidence already suggests that physical activity positively effects brain plasticity and cognition and that physical activity reduces the rates and severity of vascular risk factors, such as hypertension, obesity, and type II diabetes associated with increased risk of cognitive impairment.
“Low physical activity levels in today’s youth may mean increased dementia rates in the future. Dementia prevention programs and other health promotion programs encouraging physical activity should target people starting at very young ages, not just in mid- and late life,” said Middleton.
Some of the cognitive issues of aging may be the result of an unchallenged process by which stem cells in the brain remain dormant until called upon to produce more neurons, ensuring a pool of neurons that lasts a lifetime.
In research published in the July 1 issue of Cell Stem Cell, researchers identified the importance of bone morphogenetic factor protein (BMP) in preventing the rampant proliferation and depletion of neural stem cells.
Using prior observation that quiescent neural stem cells express the BMP receptor 1A as a starting point, co-first author Helena Mira, formerly a post-doc in senior author Fred H. Gage’s Laboratory for Genetics at the Salk Institute and now an assistant professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Development at the Carlos III Health Institute in Madrid, and her collaborators investigated the role of BMP signaling in regulating the proliferation of stem cells located in the hippocampus, one of two brain regions harboring neural stem cells.
They found that BMP signaling, which is triggered by the interaction of BMPs with their receptors, is inactive in most proliferating cells, whereas it is active in non-dividing cells, including quiescent stem cells and differentiated neurons. Unlike stem cells, mature neurons express BMP receptor 1B, which will be the focus of future studies.
Experiments with cultured neural stem cells confirmed that it was indeed BMP that kept them quiet. BMP’s anti-proliferative effect was blocked when BMP was replaced with a protein known as Noggin, which binds and inactivates members of the BMP family.
The researchers observed the same effect when they delivered Noggin directly into the brains of adult mice. Here, too, Noggin successfully interfered with BMP signaling and raised quiescent stem cells out of their slumber. After one week, those neural stem cells had started dividing and their offspring were well on their way to becoming neurons.
When neural stem cells were forced to proliferate over prolonged periods of time, however, the pool of active neural stem cells was depleted, suggesting to Gage and his team that quiescence functions as a protective mechanism that counteracts stem cell exhaustion.
“It tells you how finely this process is regulated,” says Mira. “BMP ensures a sufficiently big population of quiescent stem cells that can feed into the system when called upon.”
Gage, the Vi and John Adler Chair for Research on Age-Related Neurodegenerative Diseases, will next investigate whether BMP is the linchpin that links exercise, aging and neurogenesis. “As we age, the number of new neurons declines but physical exercise brings that number back up,” he said. “Our findings raise the possibility that the BMP signal becomes dominant over time, forcing neural stem cells deeper into quiescence and thus making it harder to generate new brain cells.”
This post was based on reports at the Salk Insitute website, at http://www.salk.edu/news/pressrelease_details.php?press_id=428
Francisco Varallo, Last Livng Player in the 1930 World Cup
June 24, 2010
I’ve been bogged down with research for a new book for the last couple of weeks and regret letting time slip between posts. Of course, I still found time to watch World Cup soccer and relish yesterday’s sensational climax, with Landon Donovan’s 91st minute strike. As has been much noted, the last time the U.S. made the leap out of group play was 80 years ago at the 1930 World Cup.
In February “Little Canon” Francisco Varallo, the last living member of the second place team from Argentina, was honored by Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) at celebration of his 100th birthday.
He was also the youngest player in that first World Cup, played in Montevideo, Uruguay. Argentina lost the final game 4-2 to the hometown team.
Here’s a more recent photo.
“It was like a dream come true,” Varallo told FIFA’s World magazine for it’s March issue. “I was just a boy and I was in awe of players like Luis Monti, Manuel Ferreira, Guillermo Stabil. In those days the coaches barely spoke, and it was the most experienced players who decided on the starting 11. On the day of my debut against France, I asked the captain, Ferreira, how I should play, and he replied: “Play the way you know how, do what you want.”
Varallo injured his knee during a match against Chile and had to sit out the semi-final match in which Argentina defeated the U.S. team. “I was in pain and I shouldn’t have played in the final,” but he was determined to play for his country. “I played my heart out in the second half and I could feel it in my knee. We were down to ten men, and as the match went on, another was injured, and another. There were no substitutions then: we were left with eight players on the field. But they beat us fairly and squarely, what can you do?”
Training was much different in the 1930s. They practiced only three days a week, sometimes less often. The only nutritional advice Varallo’s coach offered was not to eat salami sandwiches. “I always ate very well, a variety of things. I had a typically Argentinian diet, with a lot of meat. And before a match I would ask for seconds. Roberto Cherro used to ask me, ‘Panchito, how come you eat more than the rest of us?’ And I would explain ]If I don’t, I won’t score any goals.’ He didn’t smoke or drink alcohol or carbonated beverages.“It must have been a good diet because I’ve still got my own teeth,” he said. “Some of that is down to genetics, of course, but I was never fat and I maintained my muscles. I also never had a medical check-up during my career. The advances that have been made in that area are fantastic. I never fully recovered from the injury I sustained at the World Cup in Uruguay. Nowadays, players recover in no time from operations – it’s extraordinary, they walk out of surgery!”
After the historic final match, played at the Estadio Centenario, Varallo went on to glory with Boca Juniors, where he scored 181 goals in 210 matches – a record that remained unshattered until 2008.
“I find it incredible that young people know who I am,” he mused. ” When I was in France, people from Germany, Poland, England, Switzerland ... they all wanted to meet me, with a lot of passion and respect. They still send me letters to my house. And some even send presents. They are unforgettable gestures that make me very happy. And it’s all thanks to football! Here in La Plata, everybody knows me: old folks, young people, children…they all say hello to me. I was named an ‘illustrious citizen’. Now that I’m old, more tributes are being paid to me than before. It seems I’m still important!”
Phillies Venerable Jamie Moyer, 47, Quiets Yankee Bats, Salves Childrens’ Hearts
June 16, 2010
Let us praise, let us celebrate the enduring arm—and giving heart— of the Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Jamie Moyer.
On Wednesday night, at the venerable athletic age of 47, he became the oldest pitcher ever to beat the New York Yankees.
In a convincing two-hit performance at Yankee Stadium days after one of the worst starts of his career, the venerable, left-hander earned his 265th victory in his 680th regular season appearance after facing his 16,977th batter. His pitch speed was often a mere 77 miles an hour, but his location was precise and his craft cunning as he went seven innings in the 6-3 victory. The gray stubble on his chin had a mythological sparkle to it.
His win came on the 24th anniversary of his debut on June 16, 1986 at Wrigley Field, when he defeated the Philllies and Hall of Famer Steve Carlton. He has since earned one World Series ring, with the 2008 Phillies, and twice placed among the top five candidates for the Cy Young Award, the highest achievement for a pitcher in Major League Baseball.
Now, I confess it. I’m a Yankee fan. But I’m even a greater fan of endurance, passion, and guts. And beyond demonstrating those qualities, Moyer is also a man of considerable caring.
With the help of his wife, Karen, The Moyer Foundation has created 225 different programs that help children in distress. The foundation has also created and funds Camp Erin, the largest network of bereavement camps in the country for children and teens who are grieving a significant loss. “It’s a privilege and an honor to be a professional athlete,” Moyer, who has earned tens of millions of dollars throwing a baseball, said the other day. “But I’m also privileged and honored to be able to give something back.”
Tao Porchon-Lynch Turns Age On Its Head With Yoga And Dance
June 7, 2010
Ninety-one year-old yogi and competitive ballroom dancer Tao Porchon-Lynch isn’t balancing herself in front of her classes like a human teeter-totter these days. But that’s only because she recently broke her wrist and isn’t quite ready to put full weight on it, she explained during an early morning class in Hartsdale, New York.
Following her in Down Dog, Half Moon, and Warrior Pose, a gawking visitor half her age was quickly disabused of any doubts. Porchon-Lynch, who was raised in French Pondicherry, India, pretzeled a leg behind her neck and demonstrated how far she’s come since she had a hip replacement in 2003 and despite a surgical pin that was implanted in one leg in the late 1980s. She credits the spinal twists of yoga practice, which she does in the morning with her students and at night before bed, with staying lithe.
CNN video:
Tao Porchon-Lynch
At the time of her injury, skeptical doctors warned, ” ‘You won’t be able to do this, you won’t be able to do that.’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to know what I won’t be able to do. I won’t improve that way,’ ” she recalled. A few weeks later, Porchon-Lynch sent a photograph to her physician of herself practicing mayurasana, or peacock pose, balancing her body on her hands, with her nose pointing to the ground and her straight legs arrowing up.
“Just like nature does, you can renew every part of your body,” she tells her students now as she exhorts them in a whispery voice to use their fingers and particularly their “lazy little toes.”
Porchon-Lynch began practicing yoga during her childhood in India, but she didn’t teach her first yoga class until she was in her 40s, and then informally. She didn’t land her first paying gig as a yoga instructor until she was 50, when Jack LaLanne spotted her giving classes at a health club he was buying and offered her $15 a week.
By then, she had already lived a storied life. During World War II, she worked in the Resistance in France with an aunt before escaping to England. She danced London’s nightclubs and acted in shows, cast for parts by Noel Coward, who, she remmebered, taught her English with such phrases as, “I presume that your presumptions are precisely incorrect and your sarcastic insinuations too obnoxious to be appreciated.” A glamorous beauty, she modeled haute couture in post-war Paris, modeled hair permanents for Lever Brothers in the United States, appeared in several Hollywood movies, wrote screenplays and, in the 1960s and 1970s, documentaries in India. She was also hired by UniTel to help establish TV stations in India in the 1960s.
Yoga has not only helped her maintain her flexibility of body and mind, it’s kept her wardrobe costs down. While she may no longer have a 17-inch waist, thanks to her unwavering practice of yoga and her minimalistic vegetarian diet, she can still wear the size 2 dresses of her Parisian youth. “I don’t eat much and I don’t get tired,” she said.
After her Indian mother died in child birth, her French father gave her to his brother and sister-in-law to raise in India. She studied yoga with Indra Devi in Pondicherry and, in Pune, was one of the first women to study under B.K.S. Iyengar, credited with popularizing yoga in the West. Since founding the Westchester Yoga Institute in 1982, she has trained and certified hundreds of instructors. She also maintains a demanding schedule of teaching yoga classes at the Fred Astaire Studio in Hartsdale and the JCC in Scarsdale, NY, giving workshops at such yoga centers as the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, MA, and the Satchidananda Ashram-Yogaville in Buckingham, Va., and leading trips to India and Sri Lanka.
And then there’s competitive dancing. “I dance as much as I can afford to,” said Tao Porchon-Lynch, who will demonstrate the Argentine Tango and other dances with a 22-year-old dance partner on June 12 in Tarrytown, NY, at the Fred Astaire Dance Studios regional New Comers competition. “I’d rather dance than eat. Dancing with someone who likes to dance can make you feel at one. It turns on the energy and lights up your body.”
Author Harry Bernstein Celebrates 100th Birthday and Closes In On Fourth Book
June 1, 2010
Literary late-bloomer Harry Bernstein celebrated his 100th birthday on Sunday with a bash in Brooklyn Heights, announcing to a gathering of awed friends and relatives that, recuperated from a rough patch of health, he was on the verge of completing the fourth volume of his family saga.
“It’ll take me about two more months to finish,” a robust Harry told me while waiting to greet a roomful of family and friends at the Park Plaza Restaurant.
His acclaimed first memoir, The Invisible Wall, was published in 2007 and compared for the strength of its prose about his difficult early life in the poor milltown of Stockport, England with the works of D.H. Lawrence and Frank McCourt. It was followed in succeeding years with two more volumes about his life in America.
Harry’s first short story was published in 1928, the year Mickey Mouse debuted in movie theaters and Herbert Hoover was elected presidents. He was soon heralded as one of America’s most promising young writers, but instead would face the rejection of more than 40 novels over seven decades before the publication of his first memoir following the death of his wife, Ruby.
When I first interviewed Harry, in 2007, for What Should I Do With The Rest Of My Life, he explained his sober response to the accolades he received, “Remember, there were circumstances of writing that book I would rather never have happened. It would have made all the difference for Ruby to be here.” I doubt that I had ever heard anyone speak, at any age, of love with such transcendent, transporting, and true emotion.
I noted as much when I was asked to say a few words on Sunday. I also read personal messages of admiration and birthday wishes written to Harry from all of the other subjects of my book, including a note from inventor Myrna Hoffman, who wrote, “I’m happy to be ‘between the covers’ with you, Harry!”
While recuperating in Brooklyn and unable to sit at his typewriter for the last several months, Harry has been dictating a fourth volume of his family’s story, this one focused on his radical sister, Rose, a seamstress.
Dana Dakin Wins Prestigious Award For WomensTrust’s Micropath to Major Results
May 26, 2010
“You know, there’s just so much, sometimes you just have to turn away and pretend it’s not happening,” a usually thoughtful friend recently told me in response to some bad news from Africa.
Dana Dakin, a retired financial marketing consultant, proved otherwise seven years ago when, to mark her 60th birthday, she set off from her home in Wilmot Flat, N.H., for Pokuase, Ghana.
With $5,000 from the sale of a used Volvo, she founded WomensTrust, a microlending project that now has more than 1,000 women are now clients. Moreover, after Dakin recognized that people needed more than just access to loans to lift themselves from poverty, WomensTrust— in collaboration with women in Pokuase and volunteers from New England—added critical education and healthcare programs that are changing lives and earning the non-profit widespread recognition as an emerging model for microfinance in Africa.
Recently, the Women’s Bond Club of New York, one of the nation’s oldest professional organizations for women in finance, awarded Dana the prestigious Isabel Benham Award and $25,000, on behalf of her organization, in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the lives of women.
“Our clients take the resources we provide and, against daunting odds, created a path of their own: safety for their families and opportunity to advance economically and socially,” she said. You can read about Dana in my book’s chapter “One Woman, Two Villages.” Here’s a short film about WomensTrust:
Gratitude: Patti Smith, Budget Threat To NYPL, And Moral Motivation
May 20, 2010
With Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget threatening to devastate the New York Public Library with an historic $37 million cut, it may seem a curious choice to harness rocker Patti Smith, the library, and idea of moral motivation with the word “gratitude.” So, stick with me.
A couple of weeks ago, writing in the Huffington Post, library President Paul LeClerc outlined ample reasons to dread the proposed cuts:
At the moment that they are most needed, the free services offered by The New York Public Library in 90 libraries across the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island - including job search assistance - are imperiled. Additionally, if Bloomberg’s cut is adopted next month, more than 25% of all library jobs in New York would be eliminated, six million fewer items would be circulated, and ten libraries would be closed. Perhaps most devastating, computer access critical to the city’s youth and poor, would be reduced by an estimated two million sessions. Anyone who has read Marilyn Johnson’s fascinating new work, This Book Is Overdue will appreciate how much more is at stake.
Why then talk about gratitude?
Well, first, there’s Patti Smith. Searching on the Internet for discussion of the proposed cuts, I came across her appearance at the New York Public Library on April 29. In addition to chatting up Just Kids, her memoir about her remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, the poet and one-time Brentano’s book clerk rose to the defense of the library. But it was her performance of her song “Grateful” that moved me most:
And that got me thinking about what my first heart-thumping, imagination-flaring visit to the New York Public Library and why gratitude might be a better public relations strategy for restoring the cuts than fear.
[Blog Post Continued]
At some point in high school, I was faced with a project I could not adequately research in the library in Long Beach, N.Y., where I lived. I no longer recall what possessed me, but one Saturday morning I boarded an LIRR train and made my first solo trip into Manhattan. I felt bravely cosmopolitan as I walked from Penn Station to great library on 42nd Street. I paid no heed to the giant sculpted lions that guard the library’s impressive front steps. But inside, everything changed. A trembling reverence overtook me when I stepped into the main reading room, as long as a football field, and when I handed a librarian my penciled call card. I waited—with my heart in my throat—for my books to be delivered from the miles of stacks. I spent the day reading—or trying to—at the old-fashioned library table with brass lamps, in the most awesome room in which I had ever set foot.
I was simultaneously transported, distracted, and transformed. I’m not sure if I could have articulated it then, but I felt privileged—lucky to sit in that cathedral of learning. I felt electrified by the energy of minds at work around me. And as I watched men and women of every type and class turn pages and take notes, stare into space and fasten on phrases, I was swept away by the boundless potential of the place, by its mysterious majesty, and by the sense that this was democracy’s paradise. When I eventually left for the train home, I felt an irrevocable pride about what I had learned and where I had learned it.
I still feel grateful for that day, and I carry that gratitude with me every time I enter a library, no matter its size.
And it’s that kind of gratitude—a sense of what we might personally have lost if we hadn’t had the privilege of libraries and access to information that people should be asked to recall as they consider the proposed cuts. Why? Well, one reason is that it has everything to do with the way expressing and feeling gratitude affects moral behavior.
For the last decade or so, scientists have been catching up with philosophers, psychologists, and the religious in concluding that gratitude is a critically potent agent of human health, wholeness, and well-being. Cutting-edge experiments have shown, for instance, that those who kept a gratitude journal for three weeks experienced fewer adverse physical symptoms and felt more positive and optimistic about their lives than those who recorded their daily travails or reported neutrally on the events of their lives. Moreover, those who keep a gratitude list are more likely to make progress toward important personal goals than others, according to Robert A. Emmons, a professor at UC Davis, a leading scholar of the positive psychology movement, and author of Thanks.
It should be enough for us to recognize how damaging the library cuts will be to critical library services and to people whose best hope of escaping poverty is found in libraries, but it turns out that by experiencing gratitude, Emmons says, “a person is motivated to carry out pro-social behavior, energized to sustain moral behaviors, and is inhibited from committing destructive interpersonal behvior.” Gratitude, he concludes, “serves as a moral motive.”
Late Shift: Career Reinventions
May 17, 2010
Rhonda Kave (center, above, with kids Corwin and Allison) did an exemplary truffle-shuffle, according to one of Linley Taber’s three stories on career reinvention in The New York Post (5/17/2010) which prove its never too late to land your dream job.
After a couple of decades running a beauty supply store and then working for a non-profit countering domestic violence while studying sociology, Kave finally made her sweetest move, in 2007, when her grown children moved out and she separated from her husband. Kathy Gurland pursued a series of careers before her younger sister’s cancer made her calling as a cancer treatment conusltant clear to her. And rather than retiring from 35 years of teaching English at John Jay College in New York City, 68-year-old Eric Larson has launched a new career as a renegade publisher of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
Read the full package at: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/jobs/late_shift_zyj40nx1YcrymeoOtjC3zN and a Q&A with me at: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/jobs/new_agers_FXBKbEJTGJIcM4ETKHPc5I
Paulie Gee—nius’s Perfect Pizza
May 13, 2010
A passion for pizza paved the path Paulie Gee took from drudgery as a computer geek to happiness at his new pizzeria in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
I can’t deliver a slice to you, but this terrific video by Liza de Guia, at foodcurated.com, will get you salivated. And like Loretta Thayer, the piemaker I wrote about in What Should You Do With The Rest Of Your Life?, Paulie’s pursuit of perfect pizza has the purity of genius in it. Listen to him. The source of his tomatoes may be a closely-held secret, but he’s giving away the secret of success at any age. He summarizes: “I like to put my love into my pizza.”
It’s Never Too Late to Make Pizza: Paulie Gee’s from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo. ” title=“Paulie Gee—nius’s Pizza”>Paulie Gee—nius’s Pizza