But I'll start with the New York Knicks.  According to the New York Times , the Knicks gave their city something new, IMPOSSIBLE JOY .   It is different because New York’s mass unifying events tend to imply unbearable tragedy: 9/11, Sandy, Covid. Their best player, Jalen Brunson, was small (for basketball), underestimated (by his last team), conditioned (by his father, a former Knick) to know that winning here would mean more than winning anywhere else. This place has cheated bankruptcy, built (and rebuilt) towers, raised Jay-Z and J. Lo and J-Seinfeld. It has been told to drop dead and refused. It has elected a billionaire and a socialist and a Bill de Blasio. It has processed Donald Trump as a 20-something curiosity, a chattering pooh-bah, a steak salesman, a defendant and a president whose attendance in Game 3 had Knicks maniacs of all political persuasions wondering about an executive curse. Then from Sports Illustrated : Some of the greatest athletes in sports history hav...

Harvard researchers published in the  British Medical Journal  a study of which occupations lowered the rate of Alzheimer's deaths. They looked at American Alzheimer's death records of more than 400 occupations, including when they died. The two occupations with the lowest rate of Alzheimer's death were taxi and ambulance drivers. More specifically, these two jobs had death rates 56% lower than the general population at any given age. An earlier British study provided some clues. Since 1865, London taxi drivers had too pass what's known as "the Knowledge," a grueling test of a person's memory of thousands of streets, landmarks and routes within the city. They had to study for years to become qualified. In 2000, London neuroscientists compared MRI brain scans of cabbies and other occupations, and  found that the former had changes in the hippocampus, the brain region dedicated to memory and navigation.   The longer cabbies worked, the larger their hippocamp...

Every so often, medical science announces something astounding.  Here is the latest.  It apparently does not matter if you're fat, skinny or normal,  we all die at the same rate .  While this is a simplification of that article, this general thought is now probably closer to reality than the previous one, which says that being normal was by far the best weight.  Most of my life I've noticed that extremely thin people tended to die early, while those who are far overweight, are more troubled by diabetes, heart problems and a range of other ailments,  so therefore must have a lower longevity.  Was I imagining things?  Not really, for everything I also read said about the same thing. Health publications in the past indicated that  your Body Mass Index ( BMI ) determined your life expectancy .   People live to be 100 and older by preventing chronic diseases. Those overweight have more of these ailments. The best way to avoid gettin...