When today’s boomers, not to mention today’s pre-boomers (the new-chic word for geezer) were young, stress had not been invented. Oh, moms got frazzled with everything, dads (and occasionally moms too) came home bushed after a long hard day at the office, office buddies groused about too much work for [...]

Retirement village? Assisted living? Co-housing? Age-restricted or aging-in-place communities? Inter-generational cooperative? This space has explored many of the growing varieties of housing choices for boomers and elders when the time comes to downsize, rightsize, clear out or economize. Here's a new one that's making the news: think global. Even with (and [...]

Staying fit in summertime -- you know, those steamy days when lying on a raft in the middle of the lake seems a proper choice for the strenuous life -- isn't always easy. But as it turns out, new studies indicate it's both doable and critical. Plus, it can keep [...]

Public health in the U.S.? "It would be difficult to spend this much money and do worse," says Thomas R. Frieden, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is the 'prevention' issue on which we get an F: tobacco, obesity, teen pregnancy and motor vehicle accidents, all [...]

This fall, California will consider repealing marijuana prohibition by way of a voter-sponsored ballot initiative called Proposition 19. If passed, it would stand as a direct affront to federal law, representing the most significant change in a state's drug policy since cannabis was first outlawed in 1937. Though marijuana legalization is [...]

Was this mastectomy necessary? It's a question few breast cancer survivors want to ask, and one that few are likely to answer absolutely. But after years of aggressive emphasis on early diagnosis and treatment, some previous imperatives are being called into question. Noting that breast biopsy has long been considered [...]

As far as I can tell, Katy Perry's 'California Gurls' is the jam of the summer. I want to be clear that I'm not saying it captures the cultural zeitgeist of 2010 or anything -- it's just the song that America has collectively decided to bore into our collective skulls for [...]

When 7-year-old Kyron Horman went missing from his Portland, Ore. school early last month, news outlets ranging from blogs to newspapers to TV stations raced to cover the story. His name quickly climbed up most-searched term lists and People magazine has been relentless in its documentation of each break in the [...]

Read the headlines on San Francisco's Housing Authority, and you may feel like you've stumbled upon a history book about Chicago's public housing. Gross mismanagement. Rents not collected. Multi-million dollar deficit. Poor upkeep. Serious lawsuits because of negligence. A real mess. Now, San Francisco is looking to remedy two of those problems [...]

A glimmer of good news from the endless bad-news war in Afghanistan: the people doing the fighting are in touch with someone who was winning, a long time before they started fighting.

In the frantic last hours of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s command in Afghanistan, when the world [...]