(I’ve excerpted, then edited it down. See the whole piece here.)

In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, almost 70 percent of elderly widows lived with an adult child; by 1990, that proportion had plummeted to 20 percent, according to the Census Bureau.

Economists Robert F. Schoeni of the University of Michigan and Kathleen McGarry, now at Dartmouth College, investigated this phenomenon, using more than a century of Census data showing where elderly widows resided…they pinpointed the year the big change began: 1940. After that, the graph depicting the percentage of widows living with children resembles a ski slope: down, down and down some more, until by 1990 more than 60 percent of widows lived ALONE.

So what happened in 1940? The economists, testing various hypotheses, found a far simpler explanation.

In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. In 1940, the monthly checks began to flow. And even those tiny checks — Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Vt., got the first one, for $22.54 — were enough to allow widows, who had historically high poverty rates, to remain in their homes. As Social Security benefits rose and reached a larger proportion of the elderly, the trend toward remaining at home accelerated.

The single greatest factor driving this immense cultural shift, in other words, was economic. Once elders no longer had to move in with their children to survive, most opted not to.

“When they have more income and they have a choice of how to live, they choose to live alone,” Ms. McGarry said. “They buy their independence.”

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Want to join in and buy a Quran? I did.

Or, at Amazon if you’re so inclined.

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Pain, most of the time, makes sense. It happens for a clear reason: Break a leg and it’s going to hurt.

Even booming migraines and ruptured discs have a kind of logic. That’s “acute pain,” and it warns us something’s wrong. When the broken things abate or mend, the pain quits.

Melanie Thernstrom is concerned with a very different animal: one that lives on long after it has served its purpose and “transforms into the pathology of chronic pain.” That “pathology” bit is important, because this isn’t just pain that lasts longer, it’s the body’s failure to return to normal.

Chronic pain, Thernstrom notes, is like a security alarm that never quits ringing, so itself becomes the problem.

She writes from personal experience, having suffered for years from pain of various intensities and locations, especially of shoulder and neck. Pain that imprisoned her and either baffled doctors or was shrugged off by them.

For the rest of my review in the Seattle Times, click here.

[Full title: "The Pain Chronicles: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing and the Science of Suffering" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 328 pp.]

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If you guessed “a red nose and a lot of apologies”  you have not been listening to TV news.

A respected study has shown that moderate drinking in one’s later years leads to a longer life. The University of Texas at Austin study looked at 1,824 people, age 55 to 65, for twenty years. “Moderate” drinking is defined as one to less-than-three drinks per day.

By the time the study had been “reported” through a full 24-hour news cycle, it had boiled down even more. I watched as the statement  “Three drinks a day can help you live longer” crawled repeatedly across the bottom of the TV screen.

Yes, and lying down on the freeway can help you sleep better.

Even with my shockingly limited science background I was able to trudge through the original report, and see that this was misrepresented from start to finish.

It appears that there is indeed evidence that people who take a drink now and then can be longer-lived than abstainers. The bigger issue, for me, is that definition of “moderate” as one to less than three drinks a day. That’s less alarming than the truncated TV-news summary, but I still wonder. That’s 7 or 14 or almost 21 drinks a week. The only time in my life I thought even 7 drinks a week was moderate was when I was losing count.

The writers of the report and other experts have bent over backwards to stress that these findings are not a reason to let ol’ Johnny Walker nestle in there next to the B Vitamins and wheat germ on the shelf.  But, alas, the sound byte is winning.

It reminds me of Animal Farm, when the Seven Commandments observed by the critters (“Whatever goes on four legs or has wings in a friend” and “No animal shall sleep in a bed…wear clothes…drink alcohol…kill another animal” etc.) gets reduced to “Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better!”

We do love to reduce things to the one-liner that justifies our excesses, don’t we?

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Our machine did indeed turn out to be one of the few with the defect. I’d used the thing almost daily for over a year unknowingly risking my life. I tell you, this housewife thing is like combat.

The machine was fixed by a nice man who stuck around to share half my almond-butter sandwich and chat about the risks of wayward appliances and the politics of recalls. We wondered what people get paid when their washer turns on them. We wondered if recalls could be a way to manipulate stock prices. It was the sort of enjoyable conversation that two strangers have when neither one knows anything about the topics discussed. Sort of like a Tea Party gathering, only we weren’t blaming the government for high taxes, cellulite or anything else that has ruined our lives.

I wish the story in yesterday’s New York Times had appeared earlier. It was  headlined “Johnson & Johnson Recalls Hip Implants” and it would have been fascinating to kick around that development with the washer guy. Maybe some other customer will mention it to him.

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Now, of course no one with the common sense God gave a walnut would take this person seriously. He is no more representative of Christians than the Energizer bunny, and considerably less intelligent. And he sure as hell is no “pastor,” never mind what it says under “occupation” on the permit for the pistol strapped to his hip.

The book-cooker in Florida seems like a random kook until you consider that forty-six percent of Republicans polled claim to think President Barak Obama is a secret Muslim. (See Tim Egan’s good essay on that idiocy.)

The whole world is watching, and we’re demonstrating that in a true democracy, you can say or do just about any asinine thing you want without fear of punishment. We’re also proving that we’re every bit as good at producing haters, fear-mongers, liars and fools as the next nation.

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Here’s the story in The New York Times that accompanies it.

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She isn’t going to retire, she says, just extricate herself from situations in which she can be unfairly criticized for using the word,  “nigger” some 11 times in one radio broadcast.

Okay, Miss Klan-mouth, go find that place where you can say whatever you want, whenever you want, without anyone raising an eyebrow. It’s that place where the nice nurses lock you in, take your shoelaces and sedate you.

I guess there are a lot of white people in America who feel that if Chris Rock can say that word every 3 seconds, then we Caucasians should get to use it at least once a year. Or twice, if a black person cuts us off in traffic.

So, conversely, if black people stop saying it, these white people won’t want to either?

Yes, it’s all becoming clearer to me now.

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This morning’s spin through the WSJ site turned up several good finds, including Jonah Lehrer’s piece on how nice guys actually do finish first…and then turn into jerks when they’re the bosses. The next thing I clicked on was a piece by Ray A. Smith about “smart clothes” that change color when the wearer sweats or helps her monitor vital signs and diet.

Lehrer quotes Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California:

When you give people power, they basically start acting like fools. They flirt inappropriately, tease in a hostile fashion, and become totally impulsive.” Mr. Keltner compares the feeling of power to brain damage, noting that people with lots of authority tend to behave like neurological patients with a damaged orbito-frontal lobe, a brain area that’s crucial for empathy and decision-making. Even the most virtuous people can be undone by the corner office.

And Smith tells us that folks at North Carolina State University’s College of Textiles are working hard in the lab to develop sensor-laden fabric that tells the wearer when blood pressure or pulse rates are rising. He also shares the good news that a wicking, waterproof suit may be coming to a haberdashery near you, and even better, a Japanese company is pushing posture-enhancing underpants.

This last bit of news is especially gratifying, since the people who labor in the vineyards of unmentionables have not brought us any real innovative products since the days of edible undies. (Which, being very high in carbs, never had a chance.)

Now, what I want to see is clothing that keeps the nice guy from turning into a fool.

“Idiocy wicking” — yeah, that’s the ticket.

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You just know the first time some bright young banker proposed this in a meeting she was met with an appalled silence. Well, times change and even Big Banks do nice little things for customers every couple of years. This is one.

Reading this I was reminded of calling up a bankcard company some years ago and asking them to lower my credit limit. They had no mechanism, no paper form, no policy. But because it was a credit union and customer-service people were empowered to solve problems, the nice person on the phone figured out a way. It was a key part of getting myself out of some pretty deep debt. (I wrote about it in 1997, here, for the Seattle Times in “Debt Lite: Shedding ugly pounds of plastic.”)

I stopped myself from reading to the end of the NYT story or looking into it more deeply because I didn’t want to get to the part where the inevitable “service charges” get described.

The banking world is like one big fishing trip. We small customers are the fish and yes, now and then they do practice catch-and-release. They’re waiting for us to get big enough to make a decent meal. But, hey, enjoy the swim in the meantime.

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