A few years ago at a college reunion, I listened transfixed as the silver-haired philanthropist David Rubenstein urged us “to accelerate” as we entered the last chapters of our lives. Pick up the pace? So many of my contemporaries were stopping — if not stooping — to smell the roses. With his admonition in mind,…
“I need you to do everything for him,” the young man told me through an Arabic interpreter. We were at an impasse. We had many tools available to treat our patient’s pain and ease his suffering. But the young man wanted something more — a cure for his father, my patient. I backed away from…
In the mid-20th century, cabaret clubs in the city made glamorous interiors, virtuosic singers, and beloved standards available to anybody with pocket money. Before they were stars, performers like Barbra Streisand and Harry Belafonte played rooms of just a few dozen tables. Cover charges were infrequent, so middle-class couples could make up much of the…
In 1920, the town council of Chamonix, then a quiet French community of 3,000 people, decided to change the municipality’s name to Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, thus forging an official link to the mountain, the highest in Western Europe, with a summit that soars 12,000 feet above the town center. The council’s goal was to prevent their Swiss…
Image Women with cardiac emergencies are less likely than men to receive proper treatment when the ambulance arrives, a new study reports. The analysis, in Women’s Health Issues, used four years of data from a federal government database to compile information on out-of-hospital emergencies involving people 40 and older with chest pain or cardiac arrest.…
Before last summer, every top N.B.A. draft pick of this decade had signed a sneaker endorsement contract with Nike or Adidas. DeAndre Ayton, this year’s No. 1 pick, did not. “We were dealing with Nike people, Under Armour and all the other shoe companies,” he said soon afterward. “We just thought Puma was the right…
Monique Pillard, a booking agent who helped steer the careers of supermodels like Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and Christie Brinkley, died on Dec. 3 at her apartment in the Gramercy Park neighborhood of Manhattan. She was 81. Her death was announced by Christine K. Schott, a friend and former business colleague, who said…
Peter Boizot, who founded the international restaurant chain PizzaExpress, beginning in Britain, where he helped shape the country’s casual dining scene, died on Dec. 5 in Peterborough, England. He was 89. His death was confirmed by his sister and only immediate survivor, Clementine Allen. There were few indications in Mr. Boizot’s youth that he would…
Many people living with HIV choose to explore non-conventional therapies to ease the symptoms of HIV and side effects of the medications. Some alternative treatments can complement a person’s standard medical care, but others are not safe. Many people living with HIV use alternative therapies. According to one source, over 70 percent of people with…
Image Christmas may be the peak time for heart attacks — at least in Sweden. Swedish researchers studied 283,014 heart attacks between 1998 and 2013 that were documented in a registry that included the date and time when symptoms started. They found that compared with days in the two weeks before and after Christmas, the…