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Bruce Grierson revisits a surprising study from 1981 that suggests as much:

The men in the experimental group were told not merely to reminisce about this earlier era [1959], but to inhabit it – to “make a psychological attempt to be the person they were 22 years ago,” [psychologist Ellen Langer] told me. “We have good reason to believe that if you are successful at this,” Langer told the men, “you will feel as you did in 1959.” From the time they walked through the doors, they were treated as if they were younger. The men were told that they would have to take their belongings upstairs themselves, even if they had to do it one shirt at a time.

Each day, as they discussed sports (Johnny Unitas and Wilt Chamberlain) or “current” events (the first U.S. satellite launch) or dissected the movie they just watched (Anatomy of a Murder, with Jimmy Stewart), they spoke about these late-’50s artifacts and events in the present tense – one of Langer’s chief priming strategies. Nothing – no mirrors, no modern-day clothing, no photos except portraits of their much younger selves — spoiled the illusion that they had shaken off 22 years. At the end of their stay, the men were tested again. … They were suppler, showed greater manual dexterity and sat taller – just as Langer had guessed. Perhaps most improbable, their sight improved. Independent judges said they looked younger. The experimental subjects, Langer told me, had “put their mind in an earlier time,” and their bodies went along for the ride.

Cari Romm relays a similar finding from a more recent study:

In a study recently published in the journal Psychological Science, [Becca] Levy and researchers from Yale and the University of California Berkeley set out to learn the answer by studying 100 volunteers between the ages of 61 and 99 (the average age was 81). One group of participants was asked to write a story about “a senior citizen who is mentally and physically healthy,” while another group completed a subliminal-messaging computer task where positive aging-related words – “spry” or “wise,” for example – flashed across the screen too quickly for them to detect on a conscious level. As a control, others were asked to complete neutral versions of the same activities, either writing a story on a topic unrelated to aging or watching a screen with flashes of nonsense strings of letters.

The volunteers completed their respective tasks once a week for five weeks. At the beginning of the experiment and once weekly for three weeks after it ended, they also took three different tests: one that measured their attitudes towards old age in general; one that measured their perceptions of themselves as people of advanced age; and one that tested their gait, strength, and balance, or what the researchers called “physical functioning.”

It’s well worth reading a story in the Guardian/Observer today about the famous and horrifying murder of Matthew Shepard. The Guardian is a left-leaning paper, but it is not American and therefore has some interest in the actual truth of the affair, as opposed to the propaganda. And it largely echoes the superb reporting of Steve Jimenez, whose book, The Book of Matt, proved to anyone not blinded by agit-prop that this awful crime was committed not be “redneck” strangers, but by a couple of Shepard’s acquaintances, one of whom had been his lover, who were eager to get access to crystal meth they believed Shepard had access to. (For the full Dish coverage of the book see here.)

The author, Julie Bindel, does some reporting of her own. She quotes, for example, the cop who nabbed one of the killers:

“I believe to this day that McKinney and Henderson were trying to find Matthew’s house so they could steal his drugs. It was fairly well known in the Laramie community that McKinney wouldn’t be one that was striking out of a sense of homophobia. Some of the officers I worked with had caught him in a sexual act with another man, so it didn’t fit – none of that made any sense.”

Then this:

Ted Henson is a former lover and long-term friend of Matthew’s. The pair originally met when Matt was growing up in Saudi Arabia. Henson told me he believes that The Book of Matt is “nothing more than the truth” and that he was “never certain” that the murder was an anti-gay hate crime. “I don’t know why there is so much hostility towards Steve,” he told me. “Matt would not have wanted to be seen as a martyr, but would have wanted the truth to come out.”

What’s truly remarkable about this book is not that, like many before it, it exposes the truth behind a useful myth. It is the reaction of the gay establishment to these difficult truths. The Book Of Matt insists on the horrifying nature of the crime; it had no pre-existing agenda; it’s written by an award-winning reporter who is also a gay man. (The Wyoming Historical Society also gave it an award.) What it does is expose a real problem in the gay male world – especially at the time of the murder: the nexus of sex and meth that destroyed and still destroys so many lives.

So what does the Matthew Shepard Foundation say in response to the book?

I asked for a reaction regarding the book, but was sent a pre-prepared statement by executive director Jason Marsden, who was a friend of Matthew’s. “We do not respond to innuendo, rumor or conspiracy theories,” reads the statement first issued when The Book of Matt was published. “Instead we remain committed to honoring Matthew’s memory and refuse to be intimidated by those who seek to tarnish it.”

They won’t even address the book. Recently, an editorial in the Casper Star Tribune, without addressing any of the factual claims in the book, continued to smear Jimenez, equating the book’s thesis to conspiracy theories about the moon-landing and describing the paperback edition as “poison made portable.” The New York Times, for its part, refused to review it. Those who made a small fundraising fortune off the myth – like the Human Rights Campaign (natch) – will never acknowledge the truth. But the book is its own best defense. The paperback has a new Afterword by Jimemez. You can buy it here – and I highly recommend that you do.

In an interview about his new book, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, the surgeon and writer Atul Gawande runs down the literary influences that inform his approach to medicine:

What books most influenced your decision to become a doctor, and your approach to medicine? Who are your favorite physician-writers?

I have so many: Anton Chekhov, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Keats, Walker Percy. Mikhail Bulgakov was famous for “The Master and Margarita,” but his “Country Doctor’s Notebook” is fascinating, too. So is William Carlos Williams’s “Doctor Stories.” When I was in medical school, a trio of doctors who’d come out with nonfiction books around that time awoke me to the concrete, practical idea that one could be both a physician and attempt to write seriously: Oliver Sacks, Sherwin Nuland and Abraham Verghese. I reread Lewis Thomas constantly. Richard Selzer’s essays on his life as a surgeon — for instance, “Mortal Lessons,” “Confessions of a Knife” and “Letters to a Young Doctor” — can seem overwritten, but they have stayed with me for years now. These writers all transcend the term “physician-writers.” They’re just writers, telling us about the experience of being human.

What book would you most recommend to an aspiring doctor today?

Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” It’s the best portrayal of sickness and suffering I have ever read — minutely observed, difficult and still true a century and a quarter later.

Great writing on illness and mortality extends vastly beyond works by doctors, and I can’t let the opportunity go without mentioning at least a few more of my non-doctor favorites: There’s Anatole Broyard’s amazing memoir of his own dying, “Intoxicated by My Illness,” Anne Fadiman’s “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” and Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking.” Oh, and Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar,” Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and William Styron’s “Darkness Visible.” And I can’t leave out Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” or Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill.” These all deserve readers of any kind. But about one in five of us work in health care in some way, and we have a particular responsibility to understand what people experience when their body or mind fails them. Our textbooks and manuals aren’t enough for that task.

Gavin Francis notes how Gawande’s personal story informs his perspective on end of life care:

Towards the end of the book, he tells the story of his own father’s decline and death from a tumour of the spine. His experience as a surgeon melts away and he finds himself navigating infirmity and dependency as a son, rather than as a clinician. It’s the worried son, not the Boston surgeon, who reflects on the qualities he values in the doctors treating his father: not bullish arrogance, but acknowledgement of uncertainties and a willingness to accept risks. He finds doctors communicate most effectively when they jettison the position of detached, clinical observers and talk in terms of how they feel: “I am worried about your tumour because … ” Often the bravest and most humane decision, he realises, is to do nothing at all.

When time becomes short, Gawande has the presence of mind to ask his father: “How much are you willing to go through just to have a chance of living longer?” The answer helps guide his father to a relatively peaceful death in the arms of his family, as opposed to a technologised end on an intensive care unit. The message resounding through Being Mortal is that our lives have narrative – we all want to be the authors of our own stories, and in stories endings matter. Doctors and other clinicians have to get better at helping people with their endings, otherwise more and more of us will end our lives babbling behind shining doors.

Recent Dish on end-of-life concerns here, here, and here.

Art Rosman re-reads Walker Percy’s mock-self-help book, Lost in the Cosmos, noting that Percy “does not think that depression is merely a problem to be medicated away, but rather a rational response to the state of our world”:

Let’s start with how Percy takes a quick stock of modern life by answering the question why so many people are depressed:

Because modern life is enough to depress anybody? Any person, man, woman, or child, who is not depressed by the nuclear arms race, by the modern city, by family life in the exurb, suburb, apartment, villa, and later in a retirement home, is himself deranged.

We could add any number of deranged situations to the list: the growing income inequality gap, any number of looming ecological disasters, terrorism, the disappearance of the extended family, Ebola, AIDS, the fertility crash, and so on.

Rosman goes on to cite a brilliant passage from Percy’s book that elaborates on this notion:

Now, call into question the unspoken assumption: something is wrong with you. Like Copernicus and Einstein, turn the universe upside down and begin with a new assumption. Assume that you are quite right.

You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth—and who are luckily exempt from depression—would fail to be depressed if it lived the life you lead. You live in a deranged age—more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Begin with the reverse hypothesis, like Copernicus and Einstein. You are depressed because you should be. You are entitled to your depression. In fact, you’d be deranged if you were not depressed. Consider the only adults who are never depressed: chuckleheads, California surfers, and fundamentalist Christians who believe they have had a personal encounter with Jesus and are saved for once and all. Would you trade your depression to become any of these?

We recently looked back at why Sartre turned down the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature. Now, Stuart Jeffries elaborates on the philosopher’s refusal and considers why “so much of his lifelong intellectual struggle and his work still seems pertinent” today:

When we read the “Bad Faith” section of Being and Nothingness, it is hard not to be struck by the image of the waiter who is too ingratiating and mannered in his gestures, and how that image pertains to the dismal drama of inauthentic self-performance that we find in our culture today. When we watch his play Huis Clos, we might well think of how disastrous our relations with other people are, since we now require them, more than anything else, to confirm our self-images, while they, no less vexingly, chiefly need us to confirm theirs. When we read his claim that humans can, through imagination and action, change our destiny, we feel something of the burden of responsibility of choice that makes us moral beings. …

In his short story “Intimacy,” we confront a character who, like all of us on occasion, is afraid of the burden of freedom and does everything possible to make others take her decisions for her. When we read his distinctions between being-in-itself (être-en-soi), being-for-itself (être-pour-soi), and being-for-others (être-pour-autrui), we are encouraged to think about the tragicomic nature of what it is to be human – a longing for full control over one’s destiny and for absolute identity, and at the same time, a realization of the futility of that wish.

The existential plight of humanity, our absurd lot, our moral and political responsibilities that Sartre so brilliantly identified have not gone away; rather, we have chosen the easy path of ignoring them. That is not a surprise: for Sartre, such refusal to accept what it is to be human was overwhelmingly, paradoxically, what humans do.

(Photo of painted portrait of Sartre by thierry ehrmann)

Reviewing Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, Rowan Williams claims it “is, at one important level, a novel about the inadequacy of goodness”:

The world of Gilead is full of virtue and kindness; but it survives by denying something. When Lila, newly baptized, hears Ames and Boughton having a mild theological dispute about the fate of un­believers, she suddenly grasps that all the people who have kept her alive up to this point are “outsiders” to faith and grace, strangers to the kindly old pastors; and she is filled with revulsion at her own “insider” status. She goes to the river and rubs water over her body to “cleanse” herself from baptism, from the pollution of her betrayal of Doll and her graceless friends and traveling companions.

What Lila discovers and slowly formulates for herself is what finally emerges in the last pages of the book, where, almost for the first time, a strong, lyrical passion infuses her reflections: if there is heaven, it has to be filled with those who are there because others could not bear to be without them, whatever they have done or been. There cannot be anyone who is not needed somewhere, in some way. The longing for safe goodness is trumped by the hunger of and for solidarity.

And this is what the merely good do not know. The Lilas of the world are those who challenge the ways in which the good refuse to know what they do not know. This is why Lila in the earlier, but chronologically later, novels can function as a point of (near-silent) reference by which the rhetoric of others is to be judged; why she is an absolving as well as a disturbing presence, aware of the irony of being who she is where she is, but neither rebelling nor colluding, simply stating by her presence that things might be different.

Anne Helen Petersen, who was raised Protestant, calls the novelist’s writing “the closest thing I have to return to those rhythms of early belief, the best at translating their palpability and comfort and challenge”:

There’s been a lot of writing about Robinson in the weeks leading up to the release of Lila, the third in what could be called her “Iowa trilogy,” which traces life in the small town of Gilead from the perspective of a dying Congregationalist pastor (Gilead), his Presbyterian best friend (Home), and his young wife (Lila). They’re deceptively simple novels, offering voice to a small cast of characters in a tiny town, as they wrestle, without pomposity, with what can only be described as the most important questions of life. What does it mean to be good? To forgive? To die? And what might a life of striving toward those answers look like?

If that sounds like a slog through the worst of self-help or the most impenetrable of philosophy, that’s because there’s no suitable language for a text that manages to simultaneously function as a novel and a piece of profound meditation. The trilogy has been called one of the “unlikeliest” in American literary history, but it’s also one of the most indescribable: an unapologetically religious, profoundly lyrical text that is the opposite of “preachy.” Still, the way I’ve always gushed about the books has been a variation on “she makes me miss church.” Church, but not religion. My pastors, not men issuing commandments on how I should live my life. The rhythms and imagination of theology, not the constraints thereof.

Previous Dish on Robinson’s latest novel here and here.

Reihan Salam takes the conversation to what might be its logical conclusion:

[P]erhaps Silicon Valley is simply seeing the future before the rest of us do. Many talented female employees are balancing a desire to climb the corporate ladder with an unwillingness to foreclose the possibility of having children. The executives who’ve embraced the idea of paying for egg-freezing coverage are doing their best to meet the needs of these workers. That said, the fact that a growing number of working women are interested in the procedure is in itself an acknowledgment that it is difficult to combine child-rearing with the all-consuming, more-than-full-time professional work that we find in the uppermost echelons of the American economy. …

[I]f we want to achieve gender equality by changing attitudes, it can’t just be male attitudes that change. Men will have to become more interested in spending time with their children, but women will also have to become less interested. If the miracle of childbirth is a central component of what bonds women to their offspring, and pregnancy envy is a force that drives men to accumulate wealth, outsourcing pregnancy might be the best solution.

In August, Zoltan Istvan, author of The Transhumanist Wager, touted the potential benefits of artificial wombs for women, from the most obvious (“females would no longer have to solely bear responsibility for childbirth”) to the less obvious (“ectogenesis could unchain women from the home”). Even some of the criticisms of ectogenesis—that it will reduce the intimacy between mother and child—could be a good thing if your concern is that when it comes to raising children, the attitudes of women and men are too different.

Annalee Newitz is totally on board:

An artificial womb – now there is a technology that could transform everything. No more paying for those frozen eggs or expensive fertility treatments. No more potentially fatal pregnancies and births. No more women terrified that their “biological clocks” are ticking; no more of the pain and discomfort of pregnancy. Women and men would be liberated from having to use (and often abuse) women’s bodies to make cute little humans.

If you look back at the twentieth century, it’s undeniable that one of the most important technologies to emerge – one that changed social relationships, families, and our understanding of biology – was the birth control pill. As Jonathan Eig argues in a fascinating new book on the topic, the Pill was the culmination of decades of research. It was a major scientific breakthrough. And it transformed the lives of everyone, male and female alike. Women could enjoy sex the way men always had, without fear that one moment of pleasure would have life-altering consequences.

If the Pill brought us into the future, imagine where an artificial womb would take us.

Meanwhile, back to the in-tray, a reader disputes the argument that young adults are better suited for parenthood:

I’m a 46-year-old father of a three-year-old and a nine-month-old. My partner is 48. We met in our early 40s, and we tried to start a family when we knew it was right, but we couldn’t conceive the usual way or through in-vitro fertilization. We eventually had a donor egg and have since given birth to two beautiful boys.

I do have less energy then I did at 25 or 35, which makes it more difficult to chase the kids around or stay up nights bottle-feeding (or, in my partner’s case, breastfeeding). However, I believe I’m a much better father now then I would have been at an earlier point in my life. Having been able to experience life has made me much more patient, content, and laid-back.

I grew up in a dysfunctional home with alcoholic parents, and by doing some work on myself, I’m now able to spot my demons and manage them much better than when I could in my youthful, high-energy days. Plus, my salary is triple what it was in my 20s, and I’ve been able to establish myself in a job that allows me flexibility to deal with the surprises that my two little devils are waiting to unleash. We’ve both upped our life insurance, and we realize that no early retirement is in our future. We are very happy with this lot in life.

And another questions the efficacy of egg-freezing:

The real issue with the procedure is that the odds of producing a live baby on any one IVF cycle are no better than 50%, without using frozen eggs.  The typical egg retrieval is 5 to 12 eggs, which are used for one cycle, with the take-home-baby rate dropping as the number of eggs retrieved drops.  There’s an upward limit on how many eggs can be retrieved, because too much stimulation causes Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome.   If the number of eggs retrieved is on the low side (closer to 5 than 12), the woman would need to do more than one retrieval to reach a 50% chance of taking home a baby when she chooses to use her eggs.

A woman who does two retrievals, each of which retrieves over 10 eggs, can do two IVF cycles, giving her something around a 60% to 70% chance of taking home a baby, still not great odds, if her other choice was to have children at a younger age.  Each retrieval is a month of daily hormone injections, medical monitoring, and an outpatient procedure, none of it without risks (see Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome).

Even The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists doesn’t recommend egg freezing as a way to delay fertility.  Yet the idea is being pushed and discussed in the media, rarely with much skepticism.

This is how the free market American medical system works.  A new technology gets pushed, usually by the people who stand to benefit, such as fertility clinics eager to expand their client base beyond infertile couples.  The media picks it up, often without questioning or investigating the science or the numbers, despite the fact that they are out there and easily Googled.  There’s no systematic process of questioning the hypothesis pushed.

Well there is at the Dish, at least – your emails. Another reader takes a new approach:

I only have a moment, as I’m one of those older parents (53) with a 12 year old who I need to get to bed, but I have one word that I’d like to put out there in response to the “need” to freeze eggs so that it’s possible to become a parent later in life: ADOPTION!

How about if more companies offered adoption benefits. That way, employees of all ages and fertility “abilities” could become parents if and when they wanted to, AND more children in desperate need of homes would have the opportunity to find their forever families. In the frantic quest to have their “own” child, so many people are missing out on the amazing blessing of adoption, which can be a win-win-win – for a child, the parent(s) and society.

Having had children by birth in my 20s, and another by adoption in my 40s, I can personally attest that energy levels decrease; but, having come to parenthood both by birth and adoption, I can also attest that each of my children is 100% “mine” and that the joys and challenges and miracles of parenthood are gifts beyond compare at any age.

I wonder if all of the companies that offer egg-freezing benefits also offer comprehensive adoption benefits.  If they don’t, they certainly should!

Follow the whole discussion thread here.

In his new volume of prose reflections, The Labyrinth: God, Darwin, and the Meaning of Life, the poet and atheist Philip Appleman comes to terms with life’s meaning in a world where God is “an unnecessary hypothesis.” Daniel Thomas Moran praises Appleman’s book, summarizing its message as “we must care for one another, for this planet we exist on only briefly, and for all the living things that share it with us”:

We who call ourselves humanist or agnostic or atheist don’t have the available remedy of luxuriating in the pat explanations of ancient texts or the bumptious pronouncements of holy men. To a greater degree than those who get answers from priests, preachers, imams, or rabbis, we nonbelievers must invest more of ourselves in the great wrestling with our nature, and surely, our fate as mortal beings. How many times have all of us been asked by people of faith how it is that our lives can have meaning in the absence of a belief in a god and an afterlife? Unlike the blindly faithful, we refuse to find our meaning in the worship of death and in the chimera of an eternal life.

Appleman sums it up with grace and directness as only a poet can:

Once definitely done with our adolescent longing for the Absolute, we would find this world valuable after all, and poignantly valuable precisely because it is not eternal. Doomed to extinction, our loves, our work, our friendships, our tastes are all painfully precious. We look about us, on the streets and in the subways, and discover that we are beautiful because we are mortal, priceless because we are so rare in the universe and so fleeting. Whatever we are, whatever we make of ourselves: that is all we will ever have—and that, in its profound simplicity, is the meaning of life.

The Labyrinth is perhaps the book we have been waiting for, the one Philip Appleman has been waiting a lifetime to write. It is a comfort. Let it also be a companion.