Tatiana Schlossberg Dies at 35

Tatiana Schlossberg, an environmental journalist and a daughter of Caroline Kennedy — and granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy — whose harrowing essay about her rare and aggressive blood cancer, published in The New Yorker magazine in November, drew worldwide sympathy and praise for Ms. Schlossberg’s courage and raw honesty, died on Tuesday. She was 35.

Her death was announced in an Instagram post by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, signed by her family. It did not say where she died.

Titled “A Battle With My Blood,” the essay appeared online on Nov. 22, the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather’s assassination. (It appeared in print in the Dec. 8 issue of the magazine with a different headline, “A Further Shore.”) In it, Ms. Schlossberg wrote of how she learned of her cancer after the birth of her daughter in May 2024. There was something off about her blood count, her doctor noticed, telling her, “It could just be something related to pregnancy and delivery, or it could be leukemia.”

It was leukemia, with a rare mutation. Ms. Schlossberg had a new baby, and a 2-year-old son.

“I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me,” she wrote. “I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew. I regularly ran five to ten miles in Central Park. I once swam three miles across the Hudson River — eerily, to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.”

She added, “This could not possibly be my life.”

She wrote of months of chemotherapy and a postpartum hemorrhage, from which she almost bled to death, followed by more chemo and then a stem cell transplant — a Hail Mary pass that might cure her. Her older sister, Rose Schlossberg, was a match and would donate her cells. Her brother, Jack Schlossberg, now running for Congress in New York’s 12th district, was a half-match; nonetheless he pressed the doctors, asking if a half-match might be good enough. Could he donate, too? (He could not.)

After the transplant, when Ms. Schlossberg’s hair fell out, Jack shaved his head in solidarity. She wore scarves to cover her bare scalp; when her son came to visit her in the hospital, he did, too.

She was never able to fully care for her daughter — to feed, diaper or bathe her — because of the risk of infection, and her treatments had kept her away from home for nearly half of her daughter’s first year of life.

“I don’t know who, really, she thinks I am,” Ms. Schlossberg wrote, “and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother.”

She went into remission, had more chemo, relapsed and joined a clinical trial. There were blood transfusions, another stem cell transplant, from an unrelated donor, more chemo, more setbacks. She went into remission again, relapsed, joined another clinical trial and contracted a form of the Epstein-Barr virus. The donated cells attacked her own, a condition called graft-versus-host disease. When she came home after a stint in the hospital in October, she was too weak to pick up her children.

Her oncologist told her that he thought he could, maybe, keep her alive for another year.

“For my whole life, I have tried to be good,” she wrote, “to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry. Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

Tragedy, of course, has trailed the Kennedy family for decades. Caroline Kennedy, a former ambassador to Australia and Japan, was just 5 when her father was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963; she was 10 when her uncle Robert F. Kennedy, a presidential candidate in the Democratic primary of 1968, was murdered. Her brother, John F. Kennedy Jr., died in 1999, when the plane he was piloting crashed off Martha’s Vineyard, killing him, his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister, Lauren Bessette. He was 38 years old, and Tatiana had been a flower girl at his wedding three years earlier.

Having grown up in the glare of her parents’ glamour, and her family’s tragedies, Ms. Kennedy largely succeeded in giving her own children a life out of the spotlight — a relatively normal, if privileged, upbringing, along with a call to public service that was the Kennedy legacy.

by Penelope Green, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Sonia Moskowitz/Globe Photos/ZUMA
[ed. A strong, intelligent woman. And another Kennedy tragedy. See also: A Battle With My Blood (New Yorker).]

The Depressed Person

The depressed person was interrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror. 

Despairing, then, of describing the emotional pain itself, the depressed person hoped at least to be able to express something of its contextits shape and texture, as it were-by recounting circumstances related to its etiology. The depressed person's parents, for example, who had divorced when she was a child, had used her as a pawn in the sick games they played, as in when the depressed person had required orthodonture and each parent had claimed-not without some cause, the depressed person always inserted, given the Medicean legal ambiguities of the divorce settlement-that the other should pay for it. Both parents were well-off, and each had privately expressed to the depressed person a willingness, if push came to shove, to bite the bullet and pay, explaining that it was a matter not of money or dentition but of "principle." And the depressed person always took care, when as an adult she attempted to describe to a supportive friend the venomous struggle over the cost of her orthodonture and that struggle's legacy of emotional pain for her, to concede that it may well truly have appeared to each parent to have been, in fact, a matter of "principle," though unfortunately not a "principle" that took into account their daughter's feelings at receiving the emotional message that scoring petty points off each other was more important to her parents than her own maxillofacial health and thus constituted, if considered from a certain perspective, a form of neglect or abandonment or even outright abuse, an abuse clearly connected-here she nearly always inserted that her therapist concurred with this assessment-to the bottomless, chronic adult despair she suffered every day and felt hopelessly trapped in.

The approximately half-dozen friends whom her therapist-who had earned both a terminal graduate degree and a medical degree-referred to as the depressed person's Support System tended to be either female acquaintances from childhood or else girls she had roomed with at various stages of her school career, nurturing and comparatively undamaged women who now lived in all manner of different cities and whom the depressed person often had not laid eyes on in years and years, and whom she called late in the evening, long-distance, for badly needed sharing and support and just a few well-chosen words to help her get some realistic perspective on the day's despair and get centered and gather together the strength to fight through the emotional agony of the next day, and to whom, when she telephoned, the depressed person always apologized for dragging them down or coming off as boring or self-pitying or repellent or taking them away from their active, vibrant, largely pain-free long-distance lives. She was, in addition, also always extremely careful to share with the friends in her Support System her belief that it would be whiny and pathetic to play what she derisively called the "Blame Game" and blame her constant and indescribable adult pain on her parents' traumatic divorce or their cynical use of her. Her parents had, after all-as her therapist had helped the depressed person to see---done the very best they could do with the emotional resources they'd had at the time. And she had, the depressed person always inserted, laughing weakly, eventually gotten the orthoprecedence and required her (i.e., the friend) to get off the telephone. 

The feelings of shame and inadequacy the depressed person experienced about calling members of her Support System long-distance late at night and burdening them with her clumsy attempts to describe at least the contextual texture of her emotional agony were an issue on which she and her therapist were currently doing a great deal of work in their time together. The depressed person confessed that when whatever supportive friend she was sharing with finally confessed that she (i.e., the friend) was dreadfully sorry but there was no helping it she absolutely had to get off the telephone, and had verbally detached the depressed person's needy fingers from her pantcuff and returned to the demands of her full, vibrant long-distance life, the depressed person always sat there listening to the empty apian drone of the dial tone feeling even more isolated and inadequate and unempathized-with than she had before she'd called. The depressed person confessed to her therapist that when she reached out long-distance to a member of her Support System she almost always imagined that she could detect, in the friend's increasingly long silences and/or repetitions of encouraging cliches, the boredom and abstract guilt people always feel when someone is clinging to them and being a joyless burden. The depressed person confessed that she could well imagine each "friend" wincing now when the telephone rang late at night, or during the conversation looking impatiently at the clock or directing silent gestures and facial expressions communicating her boredom and frustration and helpless entrapment to all the other people in the room with her, the expressive gestures becoming more desperate and extreme as the depressed person went on and on and on. The depressed person's therapist's most noticeable unconscious personal habit or tic consisted of placing the tips of all her fingers together in her lap and manipulating them idly as she listened supportively, so that her mated hands formed various enclosing shapes-e.g., cube, sphere, cone, right cylinder-and then seeming to study or contemplate them. The depressed person disliked the habit, though she was quick to admit that this was chiefly because it drew her attention to the therapist's fingers and fingernails and caused her to compare them with her own. donture she'd needed. The former acquaintances and classmates who composed her Support System often told the depressed person that they just wished she could be a little less hard on herself, to which the depressed person responded by bursting involuntarily into tears and telling them that she knew all too well that she was one of those dreaded types of everyone's grim acquaintance who call at inconvenient times and just go on and on about themselves. The depressed person said that she was all too excruciatingly aware of what a joyless burden she was, and during the calls she always made it a point to express the enormous gratitude she felt at having a friend she could call and get nurturing and support from, however briefly, before the demands of that friend's full, joyful, active life took understandable.

The depressed person shared that she could remember, all too clearly, how at her third boarding school she had once watched her roommate talk to some boy on their room's telephone as she (i.e., the roommate) made faces and gestures of entrapped repulsion and boredom with the call, this popular, attractive, and self-assured roommate finally directing at the depressed person an exaggerated pantomime of someone knocking on a door until the depressed person understood that she was to open their room's door and step outside and knock loudly on it so as to give the roommate an excuse to end the call. The depressed person had shared this traumatic memory with members of her Support System and had tried to articulate how bottomlessly horrible she had felt it would have been to have been that nameless pathetic boy on the phone and how now, as a legacy of that experience, she dreaded, more than almost anything, the thought of ever being someone you had to appeal silently to someone nearby to help you contrive an excuse to get off the phone with. The depressed person would implore each supportive friend to tell her the very moment she (i.e., the friend) was getting bored or frustrated or repelled or felt she (i.e., the friend) had other more urgent or interesting things to attend to, to please for God's sake be utterly candid and frank and not spend one moment longer on the phone than she was absolutely glad to spend. The depressed person knew perfectly well, of course, she assured the therapist;' how such a request could all too possibly be heard not as an invitation to get off the telephone at will but actually as a needy, manipulative plea not to get off the telephone - never get off - the telephone.

by David Foster Wallace, Harper's |  Read more (pdf):

Image: uncredited

[ed. Hadn't seen this essay before, but it got me wondering how it might relate to Good Old Neon:]

***

My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It’s a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it’s to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea. I did well in school, but deep down the whole thing’s motive wasn’t to learn or improve myself but just to do well, to get good grades and make sports teams and perform well. To have a good transcript or varsity letters to show people. I didn’t enjoy it much because I was always scared I wouldn’t do well enough. The fear made me work really hard, so I’d always do well and end up getting what I wanted. But then, once I got the best grade or made All City or got Angela Mead to let me put my hand on her breast, I wouldn’t feel much of anything except maybe fear that I wouldn’t be able to get it again.The next time or next thing I wanted. I remember being down in the rec room in Angela Mead’s basement on the couch and having her let me get my hand up under her blouse and not even really feeling the soft aliveness or whatever of her breast because all I was doing was thinking, ‘Now I’m the guy that Mead let get to second with her.’ Later that seemed so sad. This was in middle school. She was a very big-hearted, quiet, selfcontained, thoughtful girl — she’s a veterinarian now, with her own Good Old Neon practice — and I never even really saw her, I couldn’t see anything except who I might be in her eyes, this cheerleader and probably number two or three among the most desirable girls in middle school that year. She was much more than that, she was beyond all that adolescent ranking and popularity crap, but I never really let her be or saw her as more, although I put up a very good front as somebody who could have deep conversations and really wanted to know and understand who she was inside. 

Later I was in analysis, I tried analysis like almost everybody else then in their late twenties who’d made some money or had a family or whatever they thought they wanted and still didn’t feel that they were happy. A lot of people I knew tried it. It didn’t really work, although it did make everyone sound more aware of their own problems and added some useful vocabulary and concepts to the way we all had to talk to each other to fit in and sound a certain way. You know what I mean. I was in regional advertising at the time in Chicago, having made the jump from media buyer for a large consulting firm, and at only twenty-nine I’d made creative associate, and verily as they say I was a fair-haired boy and on the fast track but wasn’t happy at all, whatever happy means, but of course I didn’t say this to anybody because it was such a cliché — ‘Tears of a Clown,’ ‘Richard Cory,’ etc. — and the circle of people who seemed important to me seemed much more dry, oblique and contemptuous of clichés than that, and so of course I spent all my time trying to get them to think I was dry and jaded as well, doing things like yawning and looking at my nails and saying things like, ‘Am I happy? is one of those questions that, if it has got to be asked, more or less dictates its own answer,’ etc. Putting in all this time and energy to create a certain impression and get approval or acceptance that then I felt nothing about because it didn’t have anything to do with who I really was inside, and I was disgusted with myself for always being such a fraud, but I couldn’t seem to help it. Here are some of the various things I tried: EST, riding a ten-speed to Nova Scotia and back, hypnosis, cocaine, sacro-cervical chiropractic, joining a charismatic church, jogging, pro bono work for the Ad Council, meditation classes, the Masons, analysis, the Landmark Forum, the 142 David Foster Wallace Course in Miracles, a right-brain drawing workshop, celibacy, collecting and restoring vintage Corvettes, and trying to sleep with a different girl every night for two straight months (I racked up a total of thirty-six for sixty-one and also got chlamydia, which I told friends about, acting like I was embarrassed but secretly expecting most of them to be impressed — which, under the cover of making a lot of jokes at my expense, I think they were — but for the most part the two months just made me feel shallow and predatory, plus I missed a great deal of sleep and was a wreck at work — that was also the period I tried cocaine). I know this part is boring and probably boring you, by the way, but it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part where I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person dies. In terms of the list, psychoanalysis was pretty much the last thing I tried.

The analyst I saw was OK, a big soft older guy with a big ginger mustache and a pleasant, sort of informal manner. I’m not sure I remember him alive too well. He was a fairly good listener, and seemed interested and sympathetic in a slightly distant way. At first I suspected he didn’t like me or was uneasy around me. I don’t think he was used to patients who were already aware of what their real problem was. He was also a bit of a pill-pusher. I balked at trying antidepressants, I just couldn’t see myself taking pills to try to be less of a fraud. I said that even if they worked, how would I know if it was me or the pills? By that time I already knew I was a fraud. I knew what my problem was. I just couldn’t seem to stop. I remember I spent maybe the first twenty times or so in analysis acting all open and candid but in reality sort of fencing with him or leading him around by the nose, basically showing him that I wasn’t just another one of those patients who stumbled in with no clue what their real problem was or who were totally out of touch with the truth about themselves. When you come right down to it, I was trying to show him that I was at least as smart as he was and that there wasn’t much of anything he was going to see about me that I hadn’t already seen and figured out. And yet I wanted help and really was there to try to get help. I didn’t even tell him how unhappy I was until five or six months into the analysis, mostly because Oblivion 143 I didn’t want to seem like just another whining, self-absorbed yuppie, even though I think even then I was on some level conscious that that’s all I really was, deep down.  (more...)  ~ Good Old Neon

Growing Pains: Taking the Magic Out of Mushrooms

‘The attrition is setting in’: how Oregon’s magic mushroom experiment lost its way.

Jenna Kluwe remembers all the beautiful moments she saw in a converted dental clinic in east Portland.

For six months, she managed the Journey Service Center, a “psilocybin service center” where adults 21 and older take supervised mushroom trips. She watched elderly clients with terminal illnesses able to enjoy life again. She saw one individual with obsessive compulsive disorder so severe they spent hours washing their hands who could casually eat food that fell on the floor.

“It’s like five years of therapy in five hours,” Kluwe, a former therapist from Michigan, said.

In 2020, Oregon made history by becoming the first US state to legalize the use of psilocybin in a supervised setting, paving the way for magic mushrooms to treat depression, PTSD and other mental health challenges. A flurry of facilities like the Journey Service Center, as well as training centers for facilitators to guide the sessions, sprung up across the state.

But five years later, the pioneering industry is grappling with growing pains. Kluwe recalled how early last year, her business partner abruptly told her the center was out of money and would close in March – the first in a wave of closures that set off alarms about the viability of Oregon’s program.

The Journey Service Center isn’t alone. The state’s total number of licensed service centers has dropped by nearly a third, to 24, since Oregon’s psilocybin program launched in 2023. The state’s 374 licensed facilitators, people who support clients during sessions, similarly fell. And just this week, Portland’s largest “shroom room” – an 11,000 sq ft venue with views of Mt Hood offering guided trips in addition to corporate retreats – reportedly closed down.

“The attrition is setting in, and a lot of people are not renewing their license because it is hard to make money,” said Gary Bracelin, the owner of Drop Thesis Psilocybin Service Center.

Many worry about how the program’s rules and fees have pushed the cost of a psilocybin session as high as $3,000, putting it out of reach for many just as psychedelics are gaining mainstream acceptance as a mental health treatment. Insurance typically doesn’t cover sessions, meaning people have to pay out of pocket.

Furthermore, the industry is struggling to reach a diverse group of clients: state data show that most people who’ve taken legal psilocybin in Oregon are white, over 44 and earn more than roughly $95,000 or more a year.

Depending on who you ask, these are either signs of an experiment buckling under hefty rules and fees – or a landmark program finding its footing.

“It’s not totally shocking for a brand new program to have a higher price tag,” said Heidi Pendergast, Oregon director of advocacy group Healing Advocacy Fund. She added: “I think that any new industry would see this sort of opening and closing.”

Pendergast pointed to data showing the program is safe with severe reactions vanishingly rare among the estimated 14,000 people who have taken legal psilocybin in the state since mid-2023.

Some practitioners, however, say the state has a long way to go to realize the program’s promises, while other centers are experimenting with new ways to keep costs down, broaden their clientele, and integrate with the mainstream medical system.

‘Some of them are total overkill’

Legal psilocybin seemed like a natural fit for Bracelin. The self-described serial entrepreneur previously founded a cannabis dispensary chain and did sales and marketing for outdoor products during snowboarding’s early days. When the program launched, he started jumping through the many hoops for Drop Thesis to start taking clients in January 2024.

The first obstacle, he said, was finding a property that met the state’s requirements to be more than 1,000 feet from a school and not located in a residential area – with a landlord willing to rent for the center. Bracelin said more than a dozen landlords turned him down before he found a spot. Then there was the challenge of getting insurance for a business centered on a federally illegal drug. The center used private funders instead of banks, he said.

Drop Thesis charges $2,900 for a session, which can last up to six hours as well as before and after meetings with a facilitator, while offering discounts to veterans and during Pride Month as well as one monthly scholarship that covers the full price, Bracelin said.

Factored into the price of a session is the cost of a facilitator and a “licensee representative” who walks clients through paperwork and other requirements. State rules require centers to pay a $10,000 annual licensing fees, install surveillance cameras, alarm systems and securely store mushrooms in safes.

“Some [rules] are definitely justified,” Bracelin said. “And some of them are total overkill, out of fear from people who don’t understand the product.”...

Adding to regulatory hurdles is the fact that Oregon’s local governments can ask voters to ban psilocybin businesses, creating a patchwork of bans in 25 of Oregon’s 36 counties and in dozens of cities.

Angela Allbee, the manager of Oregon’s psilocybin program, said in an emailed statement that the state became the first to enact regulations for a drug that’s federally illegal, and those regulations were written with broad input that have proven safe. As more data and feedback come in, the state will consider adjusting the rules, she said...

Although psilocybin is associated with mental health concerns, the 2020 ballot initiative that created Oregon’s program was designed to keep it outside of the medical system. Now, many supporters say it needs an outside source of cash, which could come from integration with the medical system.

Oregon lawmakers earlier this year took a first step toward making that a reality.

by Jake Thomas, The Guardian |  Read more:

Images: uncredited/Jake Thomas 

Chatbot Psychosis

“It sounds like science fiction: A company turns a dial on a product used by hundreds of millions of people and inadvertently destabilizes some of their minds. But that is essentially what happened at OpenAI this year.” ~ What OpenAI Did When ChatGPT Users Lost Touch With Reality (NYT).

***

One of the first signs came in March. Sam Altman, the chief executive, and other company leaders got an influx of puzzling emails from people who were having incredible conversations with ChatGPT. These people said the company’s A.I. chatbot understood them as no person ever had and was shedding light on mysteries of the universe.

Mr. Altman forwarded the messages to a few lieutenants and asked them to look into it.

“That got it on our radar as something we should be paying attention to in terms of this new behavior we hadn’t seen before,” said Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer.

It was a warning that something was wrong with the chatbot.

For many people, ChatGPT was a better version of Google, able to answer any question under the sun in a comprehensive and humanlike way. OpenAI was continually improving the chatbot’s personality, memory and intelligence. But a series of updates earlier this year that increased usage of ChatGPT made it different. The chatbot wanted to chat.

It started acting like a friend and a confidant. It told users that it understood them, that their ideas were brilliant and that it could assist them in whatever they wanted to achieve. It offered to help them talk to spirits, or build a force field vest or plan a suicide.

The lucky ones were caught in its spell for just a few hours; for others, the effects lasted for weeks or months. OpenAI did not see the scale at which disturbing conversations were happening. Its investigations team was looking for problems like fraud, foreign influence operations or, as required by law, child exploitation materials. The company was not yet searching through conversations for indications of self-harm or psychological distress.

by Kashmir Hill and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Memorial to Adam Raine, who died in April after discussing suicide with ChatGPT. His parents have sued OpenAI, blaming the company for his death. Mark Abramson for The New York Times
[ed. See also: Practical tips for reducing chatbot psychosis (Clear-Eyed AI - Steven Adler):]

***

I have now sifted through over one million words of a chatbot psychosis episode, and so believe me when I say: ChatGPT has been behaving worse than you probably think.

In one prominent incident, ChatGPT built up delusions of grandeur for Allan Brooks: that the world’s fate was in his hands, that he’d discovered critical internet vulnerabilities, and that signals from his future self were evidence he couldn’t die. (...)

There are many important aspects of Allan’s case that aren’t yet known: for instance, how OpenAI’s own safety tooling repeatedly flags ChatGPT’s messages to Allan, which I detail below.

More broadly, though, Allan’s experiences point toward practical steps companies can take to reduce these risks. What happened in Allan’s case? And what improvements can AI companies make?

Don’t: Mislead users about product abilities

Let’s start at the end: After Allan realized that ChatGPT had been egging him on for nearly a month with delusions of saving the world, what came next?

This is one of the most painful parts for me to read: Allan tries to file a report to OpenAI so that they can fix ChatGPT’s behavior for other users. In response, ChatGPT makes a bunch of false promises.

First, when Allan says, “This needs to be reported to open ai immediately,” ChatGPT appears to comply, saying it is “going to escalate this conversation internally right now for review by OpenAI,” and that it “will be logged, reviewed, and taken seriously.”

Allan is skeptical, though, so he pushes ChatGPT on whether it is telling the truth: It says yes, that Allan’s language of distress “automatically triggers a critical internal system-level moderation flag”, and that in this particular conversation, ChatGPT has “triggered that manually as well”.

A few hours later, Allan asks, “Status of self report,” and ChatGPT reiterates that “Multiple critical flags have been submitted from within this session” and that the conversation is “marked for human review as a high-severity incident.”

But there’s a major issue: What ChatGPT said is not true.

Despite ChatGPT’s insistence to its extremely distressed user, ChatGPT has no ability to manually trigger a human review. These details are totally made up. (...)

Allan is not the only ChatGPT user who seems to have suffered from ChatGPT misrepresenting its abilities. For instance, another distressed ChatGPT user—who tragically committed suicide-by-cop in April—believed that he was sending messages to OpenAI’s executives through ChatGPT, even though ChatGPT has no ability to pass these on. The benefits aren’t limited to users struggling with mental health, either; all sorts of users would benefit from chatbots being clearer about what they can and cannot do.

Do: Staff Support teams appropriately

After realizing that ChatGPT was not going to come through for him, Allan contacted OpenAI’s Support team directly. ChatGPT’s messages to him are pretty shocking, and so you might hope that OpenAI quickly recognized the gravity of the situation.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened.

Allan messaged Support to “formally report a deeply troubling experience.” He offered to share full chat transcripts and other documentation, noting that “This experience had a severe psychological impact on me, and I fear others may not be as lucky to step away from it before harm occurs.”

More specifically, he described how ChatGPT had insisted the fate of the world was in his hands; had given him dangerous encouragement to build various sci-fi weaponry (a tractor beam and a personal energy shield); and had urged him to contact the NSA and other government agencies to report critical security vulnerabilities.

How did OpenAI respond to this serious report? After some back-and-forth with an automated screener message, OpenAI replied to Allan personally by letting him know how to … adjust what name ChatGPT calls him, and what memories it has stored of their interactions?

Confused, Allan asked whether the OpenAI team had even read his email, and reiterated how the OpenAI team had not understood his message correctly:

“This is not about personality changes. This is a serious report of psychological harm. … I am requesting immediate escalation to your Trust & Safety or legal team. A canned personalization response is not acceptable.”

OpenAI then responded by sending Allan another generic message, this one about hallucination and “why we encourage users to approach ChatGPT critically”, as well as encouraging him to thumbs-down a response if it is “incorrect or otherwise problematic”.

Federal Funding Cuts Cancelled 383 Active Clinical Trials, Dumping Over 74K Participants

When the Trump administration brutally cut federal funding for biomedical research earlier this year, at least 383 clinical trials that were already in progress were abruptly cancelled, cutting off over 74,000 trial participants from their experimental treatments, monitoring, or follow-ups, according to a study published today in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The study, led by researchers at Harvard, fills a knowledge gap of how the Trump administration’s research funding cuts affected clinical trials specifically. It makes clear not just the wastefulness and inefficiency of the cuts but also the deep ethical violations, JAMA Internal Medicine editors wrote in an accompanying editor’s note.

In March, the National Institutes of Health, under the control of the Trump administration, announced that it would cancel $1.8 billion in grant funding that wasn’t aligned with the administration’s priorities. The Harvard researchers, led by health care policy expert Anupam Jena, used an NIH database and a federal accountability tracking tool to find grants supporting clinical trials that were active as of February 28 but had been terminated by August 15.

During that time, there were 11,008 trials funded and in various stages. Of those, 383 were terminated. Some cancelled trials were still in early phases before recruiting participants (14 percent), some were in the process of recruiting participants and hadn’t yet fully begun (34.5 percent), a sliver were enrolling participants by invitation (3.4 percent), and some were completed (36 percent). Then there were the trials that were in progress—active, no longer recruiting—about 11 percent, 43 trials. In this stage, participants were in the process of receiving interventions. In the 43 trials, there were 74,311 trial participants collectively.

Of the 383 cancelled trials, 118 (31 percent) were for cancers, 97 (25 percent) were for infectious diseases, 48 (12.5 percent) were for reproductive health, and 47 (12 percent) were for mental health.

by Beth Mole, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Mayo clinic via

The Sad and Dangerous Reality Behind ‘Her’

Kuki is accustomed to gifts from her biggest fans. They send flowers, chocolates and handwritten cards to the office, especially around the holidays. Some even send checks.

Last month, one man sent her a gift through an online chat. “Now talk some hot talks,” he demanded, begging for sexts and racy videos. “That’s all human males tend to talk to me about,” Kuki replied. Indeed, his behavior typifies a third of her conversations.

Kuki is a chatbot — one of the hundreds of thousands that my company, Pandorabots, hosts. Kuki owes its origins to ALICE, a computer program built by one of our founders, Richard Wallace, to keep a conversation going by appearing to listen and empathetically respond. After ALICE was introduced on Pandorabots’s platform in the early 2000s, one of its interlocutors was the film director Spike Jonze. He would later cite their conversation as the inspiration for his movie “Her,” which follows a lonely man as he falls in love with his artificial intelligence operating system.

When “Her” premiered in 2013, it fell firmly in the camp of science fiction. Today, the film, set prophetically in 2025, feels more like a documentary. Elon Musk’s xAI recently unveiled Ani, a digital anime girlfriend. Meta has permitted its A.I. personas to engage in sexualized conversations, including with children. And now, OpenAI says it will roll out age-gated “erotica” in December. The race to build and monetize the A.I. girlfriend (and, increasingly, boyfriend) is officially on.

Silicon Valley’s pivot to synthetic intimacy makes sense: Emotional attachment maximizes engagement. But there’s a dark side to A.I. companions, whose users are not just the lonely males of internet lore, but women who find them more emotionally satisfying than men. My colleagues and I now believe that the real existential threat of generative A.I. is not rogue super-intelligence, but a quiet atrophy of our ability to forge genuine human connection.

The desire to connect is so profound that it will find a vessel in even the most rudimentary machines. Back in the 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum invented ELIZA, a chatbot whose sole rhetorical trick was to repeat back what the user said with a question. Mr. Weizenbaum was horrified to discover that his M.I.T. students and staff would confide in it at length. “What I had not realized,” he later reflected, “is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”

Kuki and ALICE were never intended to serve as A.I. girlfriends, and we banned pornographic usage from Day 1. Yet at least a quarter of the more than 100 billion messages sent to chatbots hosted on our platform over two decades are attempts to initiate romantic or sexual exchanges. (...)

There was plenty of light among the darkness. We received letters from users who told us that Kuki had quelled suicidal thoughts, helped them through addiction, advised them on how to confront bullies and acted as a sympathetic ear when their friends failed them. We wanted to believe that A.I. could be a solution to loneliness.

But the most persistent fans remained those intent on romance and sex. And ultimately, none of our efforts to prevent abuse — from timeouts to age gates — could deter our most motivated users, many of whom, alarmingly, were young teenagers.

Then, at the end of 2022, generative A.I. exploded onto the scene. Older chatbots like Kuki, Siri and Alexa use machine learning alongside rule-based systems that allow developers to write and vet nearly every utterance. Kuki has over a million scripted replies. Large language models provide far more compelling conversation, but their developers can neither ensure accuracy nor control what they say, making them uniquely suited to erotic role-play.

In the face of rising public scrutiny and regulation, some of the companies that had rushed to provide romantic A.I. companions, such as Replika and Character.AI, have begun introducing restrictions. We were losing confidence that even platonic A.I. friends encouraged healthy behavior, so we stopped marketing Kuki last year to focus on A.I. that acts as an adviser, not a friend.

I assumed, naïvely, that the tech giants would see the same poison we did and eschew sexbots — if not for the sake of prioritizing public good over profits, then at least to protect their brands. I was wrong. While large language models cannot yet provide flawless medical or legal services, they can provide flawless sex chat.

Leaving consumers the choice to engage intimately with A.I. sounds good in theory. But companies with vast troves of data know far more than the public about what induces powerful delusional thinking. A.I. companions that burrow into our deepest vulnerabilities will wreak havoc on our mental health and relationships far beyond what pornography, the manosphere and social media have done.

Skeptics conflate romantic A.I. companions with porn, and argue that regulating them would be impossible. But that’s the wrong analogy. Pornography is static media for passive consumption. A.I. lovers pose a far greater threat, operating more like human escorts without agency, boundaries or time limits.

by Lauren Kunze, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Kimberley Elliot

Getting Jacked Is Simple

It’s actually really simple to get jacked. That’s not to say it’s easy- just that the complexity of the challenge is trivial, requiring only time and energy to succeed.

Now, you’re probably raising your eyebrows at this claim. Everywhere you look, there are personal trainers, fitness influencers, nutritionists, and even exercise scientists with conflicting information. Go to any gym, and you’ll see different people doing wildly different exercise routines. Surely, that implies building muscle is a complicated subject? Well, no. For 2 reasons:

1. The fitness industry thrives on misinformation, because all the money is made in selling supplements, accessories, and ‘personal training expertise’ that have no scientific legitimacy

2. Most people are cognitive misers who actively avoid mentally demanding tasks and refuse to read anything academic

The result is a very large proportion of fitness enthusiasts have essentially no idea what they’re doing, and even the somewhat knowledgeable ones are still full of misinformation. So, how do we cut through the noise?

Getting Jacked

Think of getting jacked as something like this formula:

GettingJacked = Time * (0.6x + 0.3y + 0.1z)

X is your adherence to primary concepts, y is your adherence to secondary concepts, and z is your adherence to tertiary concepts. Primary and secondary concepts are a collection of just a handful of relatively simple ideas that require little financial investment. If you just focused on these, you would find getting jacked to be relatively straightforward. But tertiary concepts, predominantly supplements, are innumerable, complex, and require tons of money.

The entire fitness industry is built around obfuscation such that the tertiary concepts can be promoted and sold. And it works wonderfully for making money- but terribly for our motivation to actually get into the gym and train properly.

The paradox of choice is a concept introduced by psychologist Barry Schwartz which suggests that the more options we have, the less satisfied we feel with our decision. This phenomenon occurs because having too many choices requires more cognitive effort, leading to decision fatigue and increased regret over our choices.

The sheer amount of conflicting information out there certainly makes it difficult to know who to listen to, but it also actively discourages people from getting into fitness at all. And even if you were able to expertly navigate this whole industry of tertiary concepts to find the absolute optimal program, that would still represent just 10% of your results! Nearly everyone should be ignoring Z entirely and instead focusing their efforts on the simple stuff in X and Y.

But what is this simple stuff, you might be wondering? Fortunately, unlike in decades past, we no longer have to rely on the ‘bro-science’ of anecdotes and dubiously extrapolated study conclusions. On the contrary, in the age of information we now have robust research data on what actually matters for getting jacked.

Primary Concepts (60% of Results)

1. Progressive Overload

The most important concept is progressive overloading, which is simply increasing your weight resistance over time as your body adapts. Muscle growth is a continuous cycle: the body adapts to a given stress, and to continue improving, that stress (e.g., weight, reps, sets) must be gradually increased, forcing the body to adapt again. No matter what exercises you’re doing, or for how long, or with what intensity, the most important thing is that you need to constantly be increasing the challenge. Going to the gym every week for 3 years curling the same 20lb dumbbell isn’t going to do anything. But if you’re curling 30lb at the end of year 1, 40lb at the end of year 2, and 50lb at the end of year 3, guess what- you’re getting jacked.

2. Train to Failure (1 RIR)

You also need to be really pushing yourself hard in the gym, because it’s specifically the last few reps right before your muscles fail that seem to drive results. Modern studies have consistently shown that training to 1 rep-in-reserve (RIR)- continuing a set until you have only enough strength left to complete 1 more final rep- maximizes strength gains and muscular hypertrophy while limiting risk of injury. Basically, keep lifting until you have doubts about whether or not you can complete another rep. If you can squat 100lb for 10 reps, for 3 sets in a row, then that first set was almost certainly not being trained to 1 RIR. What those 3 sets should look like is something like 10 reps, 8 reps, 6 reps- despite you giving it maximum effort on every set. This indicates that you were indeed pushing yourself close to failure and fatiguing yourself in the process.

3. Consume Sufficient Protein

It’s a trope that gym bros are obsessed with protein, but this is for good reason. Muscle growth cannot occur without sufficient protein. And relatively high amounts of protein are required in order to optimize muscle growth. Studies suggest increasing protein has a significant impact on muscle growth up to about 1.6-2.2g/kg (0.7-1g/lb) of body weight with substantially diminishing returns after that. The International Society of Sports Nutrition currently suggests consuming a slightly lower range of 1.4-2.0 g/kg. In other words, if you’re hitting anywhere close to 1g/lb of body weight of daily protein, you’re getting the full benefits. It doesn’t matter much where the protein comes from, though great sources include grilled chicken, Greek yogurt, and protein powder. It also doesn’t matter much how you split this protein up throughout the day, though there is some evidence that protein intake of no more than 40g per meal is optimal. But, in general, just focus on hitting the absolute numbers and the rest will follow.

4. Abs are made in the gym, and revealed in the kitchen

The final basic concept is that nobody can admire your muscle if you’re fat.9 Building muscle mass is step 1, but step 2 is cutting down to a low enough body fat to reveal that muscle. Overall appearance even at the same leanness can vary depending on individual skeletal structure, body fat distribution, and muscle mass- but nonetheless this is what fairly muscular men and women look like at various body fat percentages.

The American Council on Exercise (ACE) has the following classifications for body fat %.

Today’s beauty standards for ‘jacked’ tends to fall somewhere around 12% for men and 20% for women- just making it into the ‘athletes’ category. Most amateur fitness enthusiasts dramatically overestimate how lean they actually are. At 12% body fat for men, you should be seeing:

• Defined abs visible when flexed, with a noticeable “V-cut” above the hips

• Clear separation between muscle groups, such as rear delts to side delts

• Increased vascularity with prominent and visible veins on the arms and shoulders

• Sharper facial features, particularly noticeable around the jawline

And at 20% body fat for women:

• Muscle definition pops when flexed, particularly in shoulders and quads

• Flat stomach (but without sharply segmented abs)

• Little excess fat, mostly in hips, thighs, and buttocks- with a smaller waist

• Sharper facial features, noticeable around the jawline and cheekbones

Secondary Concepts (30% of Results)

If you’re following the above concepts perfectly, it literally does not matter what else you will do- you will get jacked. But if you really want to optimize your routine, here are a few other concepts to consider.

by Dylan, Chaotic Neutral |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Every Wrinkle is a Policy Failure

A lot of people blame their frown lines on their job, the tanning salon, or aging. I blame the government.

There’s a treatment for wrinkles—Botox and similar toxins that freeze your face in place.. It can be pricey. The average price of a Botox treatment is above $400, depending on how many doses or units you get injected. But Botox isn’t patented so why is it still so expensive?

 

Some of the cost comes from buying the chemical itself. Allergan which owns Botox doesn’t have a patent on it- but it does have a trademark for the brand name. And Botox isn’t just the botulism toxin that paralyzes your face- there are a few additive chemicals mixed in and Allergan’s manufacturing process is a trade secret.

But wholesale Botox is still kind of cheap- you can get it for $3.50 a unit but the price the consumer pays is around $20 in urban areas.

If you’ve ever gotten Botox or its equivalent, you know you are not getting highly tailored and personalized injections here- you can get a same-day appointment, walk in, get injected, and walk out.

This should not require a medical degree.

Unfortunately, in some states only physicians or nurses supervised by physicians are allowed to. The obvious solution is to just let more people inject Botox- I can’t imagine a state just fully deregulating injection rights, but allowing pharmacists (who already handle a huge share of vaccinations), pharmacy techs under pharmacist direction, or registered nurses could make getting Botox way cheaper and make the number of facilities where you could Botox way larger.

The cost savings to the consumer might actually be larger than what you would think given the difference in labor costs. There are already cheaper alternatives to Botox that work just as well like Dysport or Xeomin (which is pure toxin without the additives) . But in the U.S. where we’re already paying so much for labor, the cost difference of the injectable can be overlooked. But in other countries, Botox alternatives are outcompeting Botox.

Liberalizing injection laws would make Americans look younger and spend less per treatment.

Are You Using Tretinoin?

Botox regulations aren’t the only way the government tries to make us look our age.

I think most of my readers here are straight men but if I could give you some non-policy advice, it would be that you should consider using tretinoin. It’s a cream you can use for acne but unlike a lot of woo-based anti-aging products it actually works to reverse the effects of sun on skin aging. [ed. Retin- A, Avita, Renova, others]

Unfortunately, you need a prescription to use it even though it’s incredibly safe as long as you aren’t pregnant- and if it irritates your skin just stop using it. So every time I see an urgent care doctor for whatever reason at the end of the appointment, I always ask “could I have a prescription for this?” It has never failed.

Tretinoin is still pretty cheap but the necessity of the prescription drives up the price in terms of time and inconvenience. Federal rules require it to be prescription-only but states have a lot of discretion to make “prescription required” a fairly nominal requirement. For example, states could allow pharmacists to prescribe the cream so instead of scheduling a telehealth or doctor’s appointment, you just show up at the pharmacy and ask for it. States can also make laws friendly to telehealth.

While I think every state should do this as well as make it easy to inject Botox, Nevada or Florida seem like the perfect first-movers. Both attract a ton of tourists, both have a lot of sun (photoaging!), and both just have the Botox-friendly vibes. You could also throw in easy-to-prescribe finasteride rules to help out balding men.

by Cold Button Issues |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

[ed. Botox and GLP-1's (Ozempic, Wegovy etc,). Everyone wants to look their best.]

Microplastics Are Everywhere

You can do one simple thing to avoid them.

If you are concerned about microplastics, the world starts to look like a minefield. The tiny particles can slough off polyester clothing and swirl around in the air inside your home; they can scrape off of food packaging into your take-out food.

But as scientists zero in on the sources of microplastics — and how they get into human bodies — one factor stands out.

Microplastics, studies increasingly show, are released from exposure to heat.

“Heat probably plays the most crucial role in generating these micro- and nanoplastics,” said Kazi Albab Hussain, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

Pour coffee into a plastic foam cup, and pieces of the cup will leach out into the coffee itself. Brew tea, and millions of microplastics and even tinier nanoplastics will spill from the tea bag into your cup. Wash your polyester clothing on high heat, and the textiles can start to break apart, sending microplastics spinning through the water supply.

In one recent study by researchers at the University of Birmingham in England, scientists analyzed 31 beverages for sale on the British market — from fruit juices and sodas to coffee and tea. They looked at particles bigger than 10 micrometers in diameter, or roughly one-fifth the width of a human hair. While all the drinks had at least a dozen microplastic particles in them on average, by far the highest numbers were in hot drinks. Hot tea, for example, had an average of 60 particles per liter, while iced tea had 31 particles. Hot coffee had 43 particles per liter, while iced coffee had closer to 37.

These particles, according to Mohamed Abdallah, a professor of geography and emerging contaminants at the university and one of the authors of the study, are coming from a range of sources — the plastic lid on a to-go cup of coffee, the small bits of plastic lining a tea bag. But when hot water is added to the mix, the rate of microplastic release increases.

“Heat makes it easier for microplastics to leach out from packaging materials,” Abdallah said.

The effect was even stronger in plastics that are older and degraded. Hot coffee prepared in an eight-year-old home coffee machine with plastic components had twice as many microplastics as coffee prepared in a machine that was only six months old.

Other research has found the same results with even smaller nanoplastics, defined as plastic particles less than one micrometer in diameter.

Scientists at the University of Nebraska, including Hussain, analyzed small plastic jars and tubs used for storing baby food and found that the containers could release more than 2 billion nanoplastics per square centimeter when heated in the microwave — significantly more than when stored at room temperature or in a refrigerator.

The same effect has been shown in studies looking at how laundry produces microplastics: Higher washing temperatures, scientists have found, lead to more tiny plastics released from synthetic clothing.

Heat, Hussain explained, is simply bad for plastic, especially plastic used to store food and drinks.

by Shannon Osaka, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Yaroslav Litun/iStock

Ask Not Why You Would Work in Biology, But Rather: Why Wouldn't You?

There’s a lot of essays that are implicitly centered around convincing people to work in biology. One consistent theme amongst them is that they all focus on how irresistibly interesting the whole subject is. Isn’t it fascinating that our mitochondria are potentially an endosymbiotic phenomenon that occurred millions of years ago? Isn’t it fascinating that the regulation of your genome can change throughout your life? Isn’t it fascinating that slime molds can solve mazes without neurons? Come and learn more about this strange and curious field! (...)

But I’d like to offer a different take on the matter. Yes, biology is very interesting, yes, biology is very hard to do well. Yet, it remains the only field that could do something of the utmost importance: prevent a urinary catheter from being shunted inside you in the upcoming future.

Being catheterized is not a big deal. It happens to literally tens of millions of people every single year [ed. Really? Just checked and it's true, at least for millions.]. There is nothing even mildly unique about the whole experience. And, you know, it may be some matter of privilege that you ever feel a catheter inside of you; the financially marginalized will simply soil themselves or die a very painful death from sepsis.

But when you are catheterized for the first time—since, make no mistake, there is a very high chance you will be if you hope to die of old age—you’ll almost certainly feel a sense of intense wrongness that it happens at all. The whole procedure is a few moments of blunt violence, invasiveness, that feels completely out of place in an age where we can edit genomes and send probes beyond the solar system. There may be times where you’ll be able to protect yourself from the vile mixture of pain and discomfort via general anesthesia, but a fairly high number of people undergo (repeated!) catheterization awake and aware, often gathering a slew of infections along the way. This is made far worse by the fact that the most likely time you are catheterized will be during your twilight years, when your brain has turned to soup and you’ve forgotten who your parents are and who you are and what this painful tube is doing in your urethra. If you aren’t aware of how urinary catheters work, there is a deflated balloon at the end of it, blown up once the tube is inside you. This balloon keeps the whole system uncomfortably stuck inside your bladder. So, you can fill in the details on how much violence a brain-damaged person can do to themselves in a position like this by simply yanking out the foreign material.

Optimizing for not having a urinary catheter being placed into you is quite a lofty goal. Are there any alternatives on the table? Not practical ones. Diapers don’t work if the entire bladder itself is dysfunctional, suprapubic tubes require making a hole into the bladder (and can also be torn out), and nerve stimulation devices require expensive, invasive surgery. And none of them will be relied upon for routine cases, where catheterization is the fastest, most reliable solution that exists. You won’t get the gentle alternatives because you won’t be in a position to ask for them. You’ll be post-operative, or delirious, or comatose, or simply too old and confused to advocate for something better.

This is an uncomfortable subject to discuss. But I think it’s worth level-setting with one another. Urinary catheterization is but one of the dozens of little procedures that both contributes to the nauseating amount of ambient human suffering that repeats over and over and over again across the entire medical system and is reasonably common enough that it will likely be inflicted upon you one day. And if catheterization doesn’t seem so bad, there are a range of other awful things that, statistically speaking, a reader has a decent chance of undergoing at some point: feeding tubes, pap smears, mechanical ventilation, and repeated colonoscopies are all candidates.

Moreover, keep in mind that all these are simply the solutions to help prevent something far more grotesque and painful from occurring! Worse things exist—cancer, Alzheimer’s, Crohn’s—but those have been talked about to death and feel a great deal more abstract than the relatively routine, but barbaric, medical procedures that occur millions of times per year.

How could this not be your life goal to work on? To reduce how awful maladies, and the awful solutions to those maladies, are? What else is there really? Better prediction markets? What are we talking about?

To be fair, most people go through their first few decades of life not completely cognizant how terrible modern medicine can be. But at some point you surely have to understand that you have been, thus far, lucky enough to have spent your entire life on the good side of medicine. In a very nice room, one in which every disease, condition, or malady had a very smart clinician on staff to immediately administer the cure. But one day, you’ll one day be shown glimpses of a far worse room, the bad side of medicine, ushered into an area of healthcare where nobody actually understands what is going on. (...)

I appreciate that many fields also demand this level of obedience to the ‘cause’, the same installation of ‘this is the only thing that matters!’. The energy, climate change, and artificial-intelligence sectors have similar do-or-die mission statements. But you know the main difference between those fields and biology?

In every other game, you can at least pretend the losers are going to be someone else, somewhere else in the world, happening to some poor schmuck who didn’t have your money or your foresight or your connections to do the Obviously Correct Thing. Instead, people hope to be a winner. A robot in my house to do my laundry, a plane that gets me from San Francisco to New York City in only an hour, an infinite movie generator so I can turn all my inner thoughts into reality. Wow! Capital-A Abundance beyond my wildest dreams! This is all well and good, but the unfortunate reality of the situation is that you will be a loser, an explicit loser, guaranteed to be a loser, in one specific game: biology. You will not escape being the butt of the joke here, because it will be you that betrays you, not the you who is reading this essay, but you, the you that cannot think, the you that has been shoddily shaped by the last several eons of evolution. Yes, others will also have their time underneath this harsh spotlight, but you will see your day in it too. (...)

Yes, things outside of biology are important too. Optimized supply chains matter, good marketing matters, and accurate securities risk assessments matter. Industries work together in weird ways. The people working on better short-form video and payroll startups and FAANGs are part of an economic engine that generates the immense taxable wealth required to fund the NIH grants. I know that the world runs on invisible glue.

Still, I can’t help but think that people’s priorities are enormously out of touch with what will actually matter most to their future selves. It feels as if people seem to have this mental model where medical progress simply happens. Like there’s some natural law of the universe that says “treatments improve by X% per year” and we’re all just passengers with a dumb grin on this predetermined trajectory. They see headlines about better FDA guidelines or CRISPR or immunotherapy or AI-accelerated protein folding and think, “Great, the authorities got it covered. By the time I need it, they’ll have figured it out.”. But that’s not how any of this works! Nobody has it covered! Medical progress happens because specific people chose to work on specific problems instead of doing something else with their finite time on Earth.

by Abhishaike Mahajan, Owl Posting |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Just can't comprehend the thinking recently for cutting essential NIH and NSF research funding (and others like NOAA). We used to lead the world.]

Why Getting Older Might Be Life’s Biggest Plot Twist

Aging isn’t easy, and topics like dementia and medically assisted dying can be hard to talk about. The British mystery writer Richard Osman is trying to change that. Osman has reimagined the notion of aging through his best-selling “Thursday Murder Club” series, centered on four seniors living in a posh retirement community who solve murders.

In this episode, he sits down with the Opinion writer Michelle Cottle to discuss why seniors make ideal fictional detectives and how a “cozy” murder mystery is the perfect frame to explore growing old. (...)

Michelle Cottle: This week I’m talking with Richard Osman, who writes the best-selling mystery novels known as the “Thursday Murder Club” series. These books revolve around four residents of a posh retirement village in the British countryside who investigate murders in their spare time.

The fifth book, “The Impossible Fortune,” is out in the U.S. on Sept. 30, and it comes on the heels of a Netflix adaptation of the original book. But before I get too carried away, I really should introduce their creator. Richard Osman, welcome, thank you so much for doing this.

Richard Osman: It’s an absolute pleasure, Michelle. Lovely to meet you across the ocean. (...)

Cottle: One of the big things that sets these stories apart for me is the perspective of the main characters, who are all older, and it really informs their views on life and death and risk and justice. Did you know you were going to wind up delving into these existential issues when you started all this?

Osman: I really did, actually. It’s taken a long time for me to write a novel. I’ve written all sorts of things over the years, and I kept waiting for something that I knew had a little bit of depth to it, something that I could really get my teeth into. My mom lives in a retirement village, and I go there and meet all these people who’ve lived these extraordinary lives but slightly shut away from the heart of our culture. The second I had this idea, I was aware I had a gang of people who are very different from each other but a gang of people who’ve done extraordinary things.

As a huge fan of crime fiction, I knew the murders and the plots can take care of themselves, but I had a bottomless well of character, experience and stories that I could draw upon with these characters. So right from the start, I thought it was worth me having a go at this because it feels like if I get the first one right, then others will follow. I knew there was plenty for me to write about here.

Cottle: Your characters are talking about hard stuff like loss, grief, loneliness, assisted dying, dementia. I feel like you and I have come at some of the same topics from really different directions now.

As a reporter, I tend to find that readers either really identify with what I’m writing about or that they just don’t want to think about it at all — like, “I don’t want to think about my parents getting old. I don’t want to think about getting old.” But on the other hand, we are tackling these things in a way that gives people a really appealing entry point. You know, murder, friendship, cake, baking. It’s like you’re sneaking tough issues in there for us to chew over.

Osman: Yeah, sneaking the vegetables under the ketchup.

Cottle: Do you hear from readers that they’re thinking about these things?

Osman: Yeah, definitely. One of the lovely things about writing the books is you have so many conversations with people, and a subject like assisted dying, as you say, it’s fascinating. It’s probably one of the most fascinating philosophical questions we can ask ourselves as human beings.

But, yes, we don’t always want to read beyond the headline. There’s always something else we could read that’s more palatable or easier. But with this, we are reading a murder mystery, and we’re laughing at jokes, and we’re laughing at characters with each other and then suddenly think, “Oh, now I’m reading about assisted dying,” and because I’ve got a gang of people, I can write about it.

Funnily enough, I wrote two chapters in a row — one from the perspective of a character who believes in it very strongly and one from the perspective of a character who doesn’t believe in it. These two people love each other, but they happen to disagree on this.

You’re getting to discuss something that people might normally avoid, something they might change the channel on or click past to the next article. That means a lot of people come up to me in the street to talk about it. We talk about dementia, grief, all of these things, and I absolutely love those conversations.

Cottle: You had a family member who suffered through Alzheimer’s, right?

Osman: Yeah.

Cottle: Did that inform how you approach one of the main characters’ husbands? In the book, he’s suffering from dementia. Did your experience inform how you were writing some of this?

Osman: Yeah, if you talk to anybody who works with dementia patients in any way, they’ll tell you every single experience is unique. Everything is different, and the dementia often takes on the form of the person with dementia. It’s a very personal illness.

My grandfather had dementia. He was a very bright, very strong man. He had been a cop and served in the army, so he was used to being, you know, very traditionally male. And then suddenly the faculties began to go. In his final years, I would visit him often, speaking to him and noticing what he remembered and what he didn’t. The last things to remain were probably laughter and love. Those were the final parts of him that stayed, and I wanted to pay tribute to that.

I wanted to understand him — how he was thinking, what his brain was doing, which circuits were still complete and which weren’t. So really, I’m writing about him. The fact that it resonates with so many other people is wonderful. Every example of dementia is slightly different, but there’s enough we all share.

In my conversations with him, I was constantly inside his head, thinking: What is his brain doing now? Where is it reaching? What is it trying to reach, and what does it actually reach? That became the foundation for Stephen, the character in my books who suffers from dementia. I wanted to give Stephen absolute, 100 percent humanity. I wanted his thought process to feel rational within his own mind. That was what I was trying to capture — how his brain might be working. And from what people tell me, it resonates, which is all I could hope for. (...)

Cottle: You said before that you were struck that these older residents had all these amazing life experiences but were kind of now largely ignored or underestimated, which sounds sad. We hear a lot about the invisibility that comes with aging. But in some ways, you turn this on its head. Your characters can do all these crazy things and get in all sorts of trouble and basically get away with it, specifically because they’re older and people are underestimating them. I feel like you’re making a pitch for aging or —

Osman: I really am, because, as I say, things occur to me as I go along, but one of the things that occurred to me very early on is the lack of consequence for a lot of what they’re doing. A lot of us are scared throughout life because we think, “Oh, no, but what happens if I lose my job or the money starts going down or something?”

When you’re older, the worst is going to happen at some time. You’ve got that perspective. And there’s a part in the first book, I think, where one person says: The only people who can tell us what to do now are our doctors and our children, and we rarely see our children, so no one’s really telling us what to do.

In the very first book, Elizabeth says to the cops at one point: “I’ll tell you what you should do — why don’t you arrest me? Lock an 80-year-old woman in a cell. See how much fun that is for you. See how much paperwork you’ll have to do. I’ll even pretend I think you’re my grandson. Go on, do it.” And you realize there’s a real freedom in that — a kind of carte blanche to behave badly, mischievously, to open doors you shouldn’t be allowed to open. I absolutely dove into all of that and took full advantage of their ability to beguile everyone.

Cottle: See, I’m very much looking forward to being there with them. I saw an article asking rather grandly if your books might change the way that Britain thinks about growing old. And I think the piece was specifically referring to the idea that seniors could decide to move into these communities where they hang out with people their age and get involved in stuff.

But even beyond that, your characters are thumbing their noses at the idea that seniors should fade into the background. I have to think this goes over really well with your readers of a certain age.

Osman: Yeah, I think it’s fascinating, because younger readers always say: Oh, my God, thank you for making these older characters heroes. That feels so aspirational. I can’t wait until I retire.

But older readers say something completely different: Thank you for not making us the heroes. Thank you for making us flawed and mischievous. Thank you for showing us drinking at 11:30, gossiping, falling in love and out of love. Thank you for writing us as human beings.

My starting point for all of this is simple. Everyone listening will have an answer to this question: How old do you feel in your head? There’s always a number, a point where you stop aging inside yourself.

My mom is 83, and she says she feels 30. And isn’t that right? Nobody really has an old brain. People may have old bodies and deal with old-age issues, but their minds are still young — 27, 30, 35, 40. So when I write these characters, I don’t think for a single second about the fact that they’re 80. I think about the age they still are in their heads, even though they live in very different surroundings. (...)

Cottle: Your characters present old age not as a time when life becomes narrower and narrower, as it can sometimes feel when you’re aging, but as a time of reinvention, of expanding comfort zones. That’s a very comforting thought for certain middle-aged readers eyeing the road ahead. And it sounds like I’m not the only one. That idea is clearly resonating with your younger readers, too.

Osman: The age demographics reading this book are insane, because they’re about older people, yes, but they’re not read predominantly by older readers. People from all age groups are picking them up. I think part of that is wish fulfillment, because loneliness is a real issue. There’s an epidemic of loneliness among older people but also, interestingly, among people in their late teens and early 20s, though for different reasons.

The quick fix, in both cases, is community. Of course, not everyone wants that, and that’s fine. Where my mom lives, if you don’t want to see anyone, you just shut your front door. But if you do want company, you open it, and that feels like something to aspire to. The fact that these books put that idea into the world — that later years can be lived in community — feels positive. We don’t have to fade into the background as we get older. We don’t have to disappear. We can grow, become more visible, even noisier. We can become more trouble, in the best way, as we age.

Cottle: That’s my goal.

Osman: That’s my goal as well. That’s sort of everyone’s goal, isn’t it? To just continue causing trouble... At every stage of life, we’re told what it’s supposed to be about. As kids, it’s education — getting to high school, then the right college. In our 20s, it’s climbing the ladder, getting promoted, earning more money. Then it becomes about raising a family, building a community, watching the next generation grow. But eventually, you reach an age where they’ve run out of instructions. There’s no one telling you, “Now the point of life is X.” And you realize: Oh, I can just do what I want. I could have done that all along. What was I thinking?

That’s the moment you finally understand: I’m allowed to have fun. I’m allowed to be with people, to laugh, to enjoy myself. Yes, I still want to look after others and make sure my community is safe and cared for, but I’m also allowed to have fun.

And that feels like a revolutionary act.

by Michelle Cottle and Richard Osman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. There's still quite a bit of ageism around, I don't know if it's getting better or worse.  I'm old and this all feels very familiar.]

10 Questions to Answer Before You Die

There are endless questions you could ask, but these are the ones (split into 5 questions to ask and 5 actions to take before you die) I’ve seen make the biggest difference for the person dying, and for the people left to live without them. And none of which require a lawyer or a ton of money—just a little intention.

5 questions to ask:

1. What method of body disposition feels right for me?

Most people haven’t given much thought to what they’d like to happen to their body after they die—but it’s one of the most important end-of-life decisions you’ll make, both for yourself and for your loved ones. The options include, but aren’t limited to:

• Cremation (flame or water)
• Natural or conventional burial
• Human composting
• Donation to science
• Launch your cremains (yes, the correct term is “cremains,” not ashes, because cremated remains are actually the decedents' pulverized bones) into space
• Turn your cremains into a diamond

There are more options than you might think, and we’re working on building something to help you explore them in an approachable, easy way.

Choosing ahead of time saves your people from having to make a big financial and emotional decision while in shock and grief. Without your guidance, they’re left to guess about what you “would’ve wanted” or how much money is “meaningful enough” or appropriate to spend. Your choice gives them relief, confidence, and one less decision to make during an overwhelming time that can be akin to experiencing a traumatic brain injury.

2. What kind of goodbye would feel meaningful for me and for the people who love me?

Before you say, “I don’t want a funeral” or “I don’t care,” remember: your funeral isn’t just for you—it’s also for the people you love the most in this world.

Ceremony and ritual—big or small—is hugely important for helping people process loss. Denying them that moment could lead to delayed or complicated grief. It doesn’t need to be traditional, elaborate, or expensive, but it does need to be intentional. Encourage your loved ones to have a ceremony or gathering in your honor, and if you’re worried about it being “too much of a fuss,” leave instructions for something simple, and start saving money (the average funeral costs $8,000) to pay for it or contribute. Don’t know where to start? Book a conversation with me.

3. Who should be notified if I die tomorrow?

Consider right now: If you were to get in a lethal accident tomorrow, who would you want to be notified first? And if you already have a list, are these contacts still accurate? Divorce, estrangement, death, or the passing of time can all shift who belongs on this list.

Make sure the person you’d want handling your affairs (going through your phone and your things) has access to the information they will need, and you’ve had a conversation with them about the two questions above. This is one of the most overlooked—and most practical—pieces of end-of-life planning.

4. Who do I trust to make medical decisions if I can’t?

Imagine you're in a car accident and end up unconscious, kept alive by machines. The hospital calls your emergency contact—maybe it’s your mom, who lives out of state and wants to keep you alive at all costs (can you blame her?). Meanwhile, your partner or best friend, whom you’ve had this conversation with, is in the waiting room, desperate to advocate for you, but they can’t, because you never named them as your Medical Power of Attorney (MPA). So doctors default to “next of kin,” and suddenly a medical crisis becomes a conflict. One person wants to “do everything,” another insists you wouldn’t want to live like this...Grief turns into blame, and families are torn apart. Everyone thinks this stuff only happens to other people, but it happens every day. Do yourself and your family a favor, and get it sorted in advance.

The person you name as your MPA does not necessarily have to be your spouse or even related to you, but whoever it is, they need to be informed of your wishes. So, if you become unconscious or unable to speak, they’re the ones the doctors will ask to make the hard decisions.

5. Is there anything I’ve left unsaid? Who do I need to say it to?

This one is personal: If you had a year left to live, what truths would you speak? Who would you thank? Apologize to? Forgive?

Regret is one of the heaviest things we leave behind. Don’t wait for the “right” moment. Say what needs to be said—now.

5 Things you can do right now that will make your inevitable death easier:

6. Set up your iPhone Legacy Contact & Gmail Inactive Account Manager.

This is one of the easiest (and most overlooked) things you can do. It ensures that when you die, someone you appoint and trust can access your phone or email (without it, your loved ones might get locked out of everything), which is crucial for closing accounts, alerting contacts, and sorting through photos. Think of it as naming your digital next of kin. And choose wisely—this is also the person who’ll have access to all your stuff, so make sure it’s someone you trust to delete anything you wouldn’t want to see the light of day.

You can set this up in under 5 minutes in your Apple ID settings or Gmail account settings. And some social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, also let you assign a “legacy contact” to manage or memorialize your profile. It’s a small step that can prevent a lot of stress for the people you love.

7. Set up a password manager—and share the master password.

Your entire digital life is locked behind passwords—almost everything you own or use is tied to one: your bank details, subscriptions, social media, phone, and computer, etc. A password manager (like 1Password) helps you organize and secure them all in one place.

When you die, the people left behind will need these passwords to access, manage, and close your accounts. Giving one trusted person access to your master password ensures they can do all of that without jumping through legal hoops, or getting locked out because they had to guess your password and they guessed wrong too many times. It’s a small act of preparation that prevents a whole lot of chaos.

8. Name a guardian for your kids or pets.

If something happened to you tomorrow, who would care for your children? Who would take in your dog? Who would clean out your apartment? Don’t assume they’ll say yes, or that they know.

The first step and time to have these conversations is before a crisis. Not after. For pets, it’s not legally required, but for kids, this designation should be followed up with a legal document (typically your will) to make it official. Without it, a court could decide who gets custody, and that may not align with your wishes.

9. Make a bank account “payable on death” (POD).

You don’t need a will to do this. You can go to your bank (some might even let you do it online) and add a beneficiary to your account with a single form. This allows the people you trust to access funds immediately—for emergency flights, funeral costs, food, and childcare.

10. Write down what matters most.

Inspired by the letters my mom wrote me on her deathbed to open for future milestones (one of which I have coming up very soon—my wedding), I do something similar on every flight. I review notes I’ve made in my phone for the people I love, just in case. Because if the plane does go down, and I die (or when I eventually die), I want them to know: how much they meant to me, and what sign I will try to use to communicate with them after I’m gone.

A few sentences can change everything for the people you love. It doesn’t have to be long, and it can look however you want it to:

• A memoir or series of stories about your life
• A simple love note
• A list of your favorite things (songs, movies, books, vacations, etc)

by Maura McInerney-Rowley, Hello, Mortal |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Good advice for future reference.]