What began as a quaint and unique nod to New England’s seafaring heritage is proliferating in Hallmarkian proportions: the lobster trap Christmas tree. At least 20 of the structures dot the coastline from Connecticut to Maine.

A growing movement seeks to ensure all clinicians are equipped to care for older adults. Learn more about the push for universal #geriatrics training. ja.ma/4aqR5mi

"As physicians, we remain steadfast in a belief that everyone should be afforded the opportunity to die with dignity and recognize any death in prison as a policy failure. We can, and must, imagine a more just future for all patients."

New GERI Brain Health video is out! Dr. @annachodos.bsky.social shares practical ways to acknowledge, support & partner with caregivers—essential allies in dementia care. Watch here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMxX...

Rachel Aviv reviewed four decades’ worth of Oliver Sack’s journals—many of which had never been read before. What she found reveals how the neurologist’s own stories shaped the ones he told about his patients.

Fantastic read— harpers.org/archive/2025...

Neurodivergence and disability politics are, at their best, demands for structural transformation, not simply particularist accommodation. Liberal individualists and reactionaries alike love to—in response—focus on the latter to deflect attention from the former.

Meaning, Medications, and Psychodynamic Psychopharmacology: Discussion with David Mintz Exploring medication effects mediated symbolically www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/meaning-me...

“When you are dying, at least in my limited experience, you start remembering everything.” Tatiana Schlossberg, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy, writes about receiving a terminal diagnosis. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/a-battle-with-my-blood

On repeat this month—

To explain the remarkable persistence of American health capitalism despite the obvious and enormous harm it causes requires a key concept: ideology. drive.google.com/file/d/1CAk9...

Bedside clinical skills have been diminished by an overreliance on technology. A new Review Article presents educational strategies for reinvigorating the bedside encounter and shows how much can be learned from it. Learn more: nej.md/4nUirnP #MedSky #MedEd

Ongoing reading (and it’s excellent, because Larissa MacFarquhar always is)

We must normalize carrying naloxone, make sure it’s available everywhere and at all times—and federally fund it as a public-health essential. https://ow.ly/CBOt50Xl7bk

Protesters gathered on Saturday to rally against President Trump’s actions that they see as authoritarian. nyti.ms/3WcPHva

Beyond thrilled for my friend Alex’s film In Transit premiering at NewFest 2025! Couldn’t be prouder; see you there! newfest.org/events/intra...

Nalbuphine is the Diet Coke of opioids: fresh blog 🥤 Multimodal mechanism of action: partial mu-opioid agonist (like buprenorphine) & kappa-opioid agonist 🥤 Reduced incidence of mu-opioid agonist side-effects (respiratory suppression, emesis, abuse potential) emcrit.org/pulmcrit/nal... #EMIMCC

Tickets secured for October's New Yorker Festival! 🫡

“When a person recovers from an illness, it is usually seen as the end of the story. But becoming sane also causes a kind of narrative collapse, a confrontation with a personal history that is no longer recognizable."

Registered; so looking forward to this, organized by @parapraxismag.bsky.social

Morgan Lieberman's "Hidden Once, Hidden Twice" is a documentary photo and film project bringing visibility to the lives of senior lesbian couples across the U.S.

"The urgent questions before us have much more to do with building the political conditions under which a healthcare revolution is possible than with once again demonstrating truths that have already been so well-established." proteanmag.com/2025/04/15/c...

Go Rams! 🐏! @fordham.edu!

“Homelessness is the product of collaboration between the state and real estate” — @city.bsky.social

Dr. @alexjordanmd.bsky.social presents “Opioid Prescribing and Risk in Older Adults with Serious Illness: A Nationwide Clinician Survey” #AGS25

"I see an artist doing what artists do: opening the wound, peering into it, and extracting what she can." www.latimes.com/lifestyle/im...

"Criminal justice scholars say that when scores based on immutable facts are weighted so heavily in parole decisions, prisoners from impoverished, racially segregated communities are more likely to be hurt."

Grateful for the opportunity to be able to present this work @wcmgeripal.bsky.social!

Honored to have played a role in securing compassionate release for this patient last year through the incredible work of Medical Justice Alliance! For more information on how to get involved: medicaljusticealliance.org

Today we discuss Substance Use Disorder & Serious Illness, including harm reduction, buprenorphine vs methadone, countertransference, clinic setup, & more. Guests Janet Ho, Sach Kale, and Julie Childers. Ep bit.ly/GeriPalEp345 - hosted by Drs. Alex Smith and Eric Widera

Already purchased tickets!

When cities clear homeless encampments, workers often take people’s belongings — including important documents, survival gear and irreplaceable mementos. Over and over, people across the U.S. told ProPublica they were devastated by such losses: https://propub.li/3WScD3g

Gail Butensky’s spontaneous approach to shooting punk and indie-rock musicians match the scrappiness still inherent to the genre, Amanda Petrusich writes—“less ‘Fake it till you make it’ and more ‘Fuck making it.’ ”

"The truth is, nursing homes can meet these standards. The for-profit nursing home industry diverts hundreds of millions in profits to executives and shareholders — money that could be redirected toward hiring more nurses." www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/o...

Now the whole country gets the experience of what it's like when private equity buys the place you work

We are doing a GeriPal podcast on caring for people with serious illness and substance use this Thursday with some amazing palliative care & addiction medicine providers. What burning questions do you have (some of mine are below) #medsky #palliative #hospice

In case you didn't have enough to be mad about this week. (the tl:dr version . . . the glaring inadequacies of the amyloid hypothesis and the sketchy science underlying it) www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/o...

www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/o... I've wanted to be a geriatrician and palliative care physician since my medical school days, and it's still the best decision I've made.

Rachel Aviv writes about what Alice Munro’s partner’s abuse of her daughter did to her family—and her fiction, which “captures what it feels like to live next to pain and shame without ever looking directly at it.”

"Resigned to the Big Tech companies recording our every move, we’ve invited friends, family, and partners to join them in watching us. We’ve begun to celebrate surveillance as a form of intimacy." www.thedriftmag.com/on-the-grid/

“Maybe everyone knows this, anyway, and structural violence—another term for it is “social injustice”—is simply, at this point, the structure of American life, and it is treated as normal, whether we attach that particular name to it or not.” www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

“Squatting, waiting, the primitivism comes over me with the rain. I’m saturated by the absurdity of this twenty-first-century moment.” www.esquire.com/news-politic...

Thanks to Dr. Wrigley-Field for this very thoughtful thread related to our recent paper on benzo discontinuation. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38117495/

I’ve been looking forward to starting this for over a year; slowly integrating more fiction into my life