My treating older people have been dotted with experiences of ageism which, years later, will recount to me something I regret. So common is ageism, and so natural is it to those of us who have received little training in geriatrics, that functional decline becomes the sine qua non of old age.

Recently, I read about the origin of the term "ageism," coined in 1968 by an American gerontologist Dr. Robert Butler. Known for his decades-long passion to challenge the deep-seated

We tend to look inside of ourselves to explain the norms and outside of ourselves to call something deviant.

The debut novel of Jenny Jackson, Pineapple Street , is a good example of such conflict. Think about the chaos when a middle-class New England girl married into a family of much higher social class. Characters in the novel are our witnesses to opposite values. Millennials, who only bought things from Instagram ads, stand in contrast to Generation X who still sift through catalogs from mailbox. Daughters who prefer texting to

Wealth or health (or lack thereof) is the catalyst for tension in almost everyone – though we can often decide which of them is the priority.

My dad has suffered from a stroke and repeated falls recently. Is that an high stakes situation? Absolutely. After everything that had happened last week, and pondering everything that could happen later, our family found comfort in tackling the mess one by one.

It's like the tangles in our hair. We can't settle unless we start from the bottom and

In September 2015, a drug company's CEO Martin Shkreli ordered a price hike of pyrimethamine from 13.5 to 750 dollars per pill, after his purchasing exclusive rights to distribution.

Pyrimethamine is a medicine to treat life-threatening parasitic infection in disadvantaged AIDS patients. The reason for lofty profits from jacking up the price is nothing other than greed. There were no development costs because this drug has existed for over 60 years. To prohibit manufacturers from "price gouging" on essential

You know the feeling: you have a hard time recalling the name of someone you know – in many case, an old acquaintance.

You appear to have recalled someone's face or voice, but not the name. You have to admit having a lousy retrieval system for name. The older you grow, the worse the system will be.

One way to train myself is reading novels with more characters. I don't know your manageable number of characters without the need of a cast spreadsheet. I recently read

In November 2022, the release of ChatGPT became a viral hit within two months. By then, the milestone of reaching 100 million daily active users (within two months, let me repeat here) was a testament not only to the explosion of artificial intelligence, but also to a new era of technology. This year, a powerful model DeepSeek emerged in China and shunned the world.

Fifty years ago few of us were familiar with VCR, let alone computers. Now that we get problem comprehending

For most people, the words diversity and inclusion are used interchangeably. But hear me out: this is more difficult than what we think to have love or acceptance that transcend every prejudice.

That's the reason many of us will find the book Far from the Tree unsettling. Andrew Solomon, who is gay, wrote seven hundred pages on families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia and transgender children. Despite his proposition that diversity is what unites us all, dwarfs still carry with them the

Japan's connection with cats is always tangible. The legacy of cats goes all the way back to the famous robotic earless blue cat. The Japanese have also created Totoro, Hello Kitty, Guest Cat and the grey kitten from Chi's Sweet Home .

I couldn't help but feel obsessed to fit in one more book, The Cat Who Saved Books , when my wife shoehorned our travel luggage for Hokkaido trip. That's the story of a mysterious talking tabby cat called Tiger.

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