@newyorker u okay though?
Ok but can someone check on The New Yorker and make sure like...everything’s okay? ‘Cause this is the third piece they’ve run in the last 6 months about dementia and its relationship with identity (this last one, “Family Medicine” is a personal essay from the March 11 issue, and it’s so much like this piece from March 4, “A Neurologist’s Notebook”, that we had to double-check to make sure it wasn’t the same!). While we’re all for more msm coverage on the complicated dynamics of aging and dying in a youth-obsessed culture, three articles on this one specific theme seem a little odd, no??
Nonetheless, the first of this “series” is the longest and also the best, and you should definitely read it if you only have time for one link: this reported piece from last October, The Comforting Fictions of Dementia Care. This one covers all the big existential themes that the recent pieces do and more, and it poses super interesting questions about the nature of one’s reality (to be read in a Westworldy Dolores voice — because really, it gets very Westworldy) that we could all stand to consider on the reg, apparently.