Author: Andrew Sullivan

Richard Gunderman emphasizes that “a dementia diagnosis is not the medical equivalent of falling off a cliff”:

To provide the best possible care for dementia patients, we n eed to get past some important misconceptions about the disease. One is that Alzheimer’s, which accounts for about 80 percent of dementias, is strictly a disorder of memory. In fact, it usually involves many mental processes, including the abilities to focus attention, organize thoughts, and make sound judgments. Another is the notion that Alzheimer’s is strictly a disease of cognition. In reality, it can affect emotions and personality, as well. But perhaps the biggest misconceptions [occupational therapist] Theresa [Klein] encounters regards a dementia diagnosis as the end.

Naturally, being diagnosed with dementia represents an important change in life, but it is certainly not a death sentence. Some patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease will live another 15 and even 20 more years, though others will progress more quickly. Nor does it represent the end of all that is good in life. Theresa and her colleagues have learned a crucial lesson that needs to be disseminated to caregivers everywhere: “We should dwell less on lamenting what dementia patients are incapable of and focus more on bringing out and celebrating what they are capable of doing.”

(Video: “My Little Friends” documents a program designed in a facility in Mt. Kisco, New York that connects elders with dementia and young children)

A clever plot device used in this popular short about an emotional breakup:

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ALL’S FAIR… from ulteriorproductions.com on Vimeo.

Brian Doherty discusses how citations for petty crimes, like Los Angeles’ renewed push to strictly enforce jaywalking laws, disproportionally target the poor:

[A]n earlier wave of jaywalking enforcement in Los Angeles began back in 2006, under the aegis of the “Safe Cities Initiative.”L.A. police had already been issuing over a thousand tickets per month for jaywalking in the name of homeless management. A 2007 study from UCLA law professor emeritus Gary Blasi, “Policing Our Way Out of Homelessness? The First Year of the Safer Cities Initiative on Skid Row,” found such jaywalking or other petty citations given at rates 48 to 69 times those in the rest of the city. It noted that “of the 1,000 people per month who receive citations and are unable to pay the fines, most will face subsequent arrest and jail, even though the original offense may have been littering or a pedestrian signal.”

Balko focuses on how cities use these petty citations to make money at the expense of their residents’ wellbeing:

I’ve written quite a bit about how cities have come to use traffic cameras not to maximize public safety, but to bolster city revenues. It’s gotten to the point where several cities have been caught shortening yellow lights to hand out more tickets, a practice that makes intersections significantly more dangerous. … Arguments against policies like primary seatbelt laws, jaywalking enforcement, traffic cameras, “distracted drivers” laws, and arbitrary speed enforcement are often met with derision. But these laws inevitably become more about revenue generation than public safety, and when local and state governments start to see motorists and pedestrians as piggy banks, you get policies like those above. For a good percentage of the population these fines can be devastating, and for them, there’s nothing petty about the aggressive enforcement of petty crimes.

Bennett Muraskin studies their origins:

In attempting to build modern nation-states, the authorities insisted that Jews take last names so that they could be taxed, drafted and educated (in that order of importance). For centuries, Jewish communal leaders were responsible for collecting taxes from the Jewish population on behalf of the government, and in some cases were responsible for filling draft quotas. Education was traditionally an internal Jewish affair.

Until this period, Jewish names generally changed with every generation. For example, if Moses son of Mendel (Moyshe ben Mendel) married Sarah daughter of Rebecca (Sora bas Rifke), had a boy and named it Samuel (Shmuel), the child would be called Shmuel ben Moyshe. If they had a girl and named her Feygele, she would be called Feygele bas Sora.

Jews distrusted the authorities and resisted the new requirement. Although they were forced to take last names, at first they were used only for official purposes. Among themselves, they kept their traditional names. Over time, Jews accepted the new last names, which were essential as Jews sought to advance within the broader society and as the shtetles were transformed or Jews left them for big cities.

Some of the names were derived from personal traits:

Alter/Alterman — old; Dreyfus—three legged, perhaps referring to someone who walked with a cane;

Erlich — honest; Frum — devout ; Gottleib — God lover, perhaps referring to someone very devout; Geller/Gelber — yellow, perhaps referring to someone with blond hair; Gross/Grossman — big; Gruber — coarse or vulgar; Feifer/Pfeifer — whistler; Fried/Friedman—happy; Hoch/Hochman/Langer/Langerman — tall; Klein/Kleinman — small; Koenig — king, perhaps someone who was chosen as a “Purim King,” in reality a poor wretch; Krauss — curly, as in curly hair; Kurtz/Kurtzman — short; Reich/Reichman — rich; Reisser — giant; Roth/Rothman — red head; Roth/Rothbard — red beard; Shein/Schoen/Schoenman — pretty, handsome; Schwartz/Shwartzman/Charney — black hair or dark complexion; Scharf/Scharfman — sharp, i.e  intelligent; Stark — strong, from the Yiddish shtark ; Springer — lively person, from the Yiddish springen for jump.

A few Jewish dudes got especially creative:

Update from a reader:

Interestingly, the word feygele (or feygela) is used in modern Yiddish to refer to a gay man. Most often, the word is spoken with some affection and is not typically used as a slur. Little did I realize that it was also a woman’s name.

Another:

Just a warning – you are likely to get a zillion emails about how sloppy and inaccurate the scholarship is in that piece on “Jewish surnames.” A good many of the names are misspelled (reversals of ei and ie being the most common error, but by no means the only one), and many of the derivations are patently wrong. I saw it in Slate and wrote it off as typical Slate shallow unresearched crap. Note that the original article is followed by a list of corrections as long as your arm (inexcusably not included in the Slate pickup).

Thanks for including.

Whitney Mallett delves into a thriving subculture:

It’s a three-hour drive from Mindy’s home to [Kern Valley State Prison in Delano, California] when there’s no traffic. When I talked to her on the phone, she’d already been in the car for four hours. She makes this trek every Saturday; once a month she gets a hotel room in Delano and visits Cody on both Saturday and Sunday. Her relationship is documented on her Instagram account, where she posts pre-visit selfies and screenshots of her recent call history after phone calls with Cody, shares letter-writing campaigns in support of allowing lifers conjugal and family visits, and regrams the prison photobooth pictures you can print with tokens during visiting hours—often hashtagged #highschoolsweathearts or #kvsp, for Kern Valley State Prison.

When Instagram is used this way, it’s more than mere vanity for women like Mindy and Alex. Hashtags like #prisonwife, #visitday, and #freemybaby help women connect and share stories and experiences. Mindy told me Instagram is somewhere she can find support without judgment, adding that in the rest of the world “there are too many negative comments and ideas about why I’m with a prisoner.”

Caption for the instagram seen above:

#visit #mylove #111613 #weremean #wife #prisonwife #cdcrblues #element #wearemadeforeachother #fukwhatuthink