Ian Randall in Newsweek:
Nearly half of all Americans struggle to afford access to quality health care and prescription medications. This is the warning of the latest report from the Healthcare Affordability Index, which tracks how many in the U.S. have been forced to avoid medical care or haven’t been able to fill their prescriptions in the last three months—and how many would struggle to pay for care if it was needed. Affordability has fallen six points since 2022, down to a record low of 55 percent since the index was launched back in 2021. According to the researchers, this descent mainly affects two age groups: those aged 50–64 (down eight points to 55 percent over the same period) and those 65 and older (down eight points to 71 percent).
However, the age group most struggling to afford health care is adults under 50—with 53 percent unable to cover their bills, down five points from 2022. The Healthcare Affordability Index is produced by West Health—a group of nonprofit organizations—and polling firm Gallup. “After an uptick in 2022, health care affordability in America is headed in the wrong direction,” said West Health president Timothy Lash in a statement. “The good news is that health care provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act—including empowering Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices, which has not yet taken effect—may help slow these negative trends and provide more stability.”
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In the age of technology everywhere, we are all too familiar with the inconvenience of a dead battery. But for those relying on a wearable health care device to monitor glucose, reduce tremors, or even track heart function, taking time to recharge can pose a big risk.
Elaine Scarry lives in a pale pink house near the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A tall hedge runs along the front, rising to the second story and nearly engulfing the white picket gate through which one passes into Scarry’s garden. Flowers thrive in dense beds overlooked by crabapple trees and yews. Toward the back of the house, a curved wall of windows divides the garden from the garden room. Scarry’s longtime partner, the writer and scholar Philip Fisher, keeps a house nearby and they split their time between the two. Fisher does the cooking, and they eat dinner at his place. When it’s nice out they like to go for a drive.
The genome sequence reveals the order in which the chemical building blocks (of which there are four distinct types) that make up our DNA are arranged along the molecule’s double-helical strands. Our genomes each have around 
“This virus in its current state does not look like it has the characteristics of causing a pandemic. But with influenza viruses, that equation could entirely change with a single mutation,” says Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Most economic debates are about income, not wealth. When we talk about income taxes, or welfare benefits, or labor’s share of national income, we’re talking about the amount of goods and services that get created every year, and how those goods and services get allocated among the various people in a society. But in the 2010s, we saw a lot of debate about wealth instead — wealth taxes, wealth inequality, and so on.
KARL KRAUS WROTE THAT EVERYTHING FITS WITH EVERYTHING ELSE. Maybe. Maybe everything in an artist’s corpus, no matter how incongruous, reflects, repeats, rhymes. Yet this is not the case for Percival Everett. No thematic or formal schema is suitable. He climbs the stairs sideways. His patently ridiculous conceits seem like challenges to his own mischievousness, bids to marry his uniquely sweeping curiosities to a bardic impulse. Charmingly, he’d never admit as much. “I know nothing,” he said in a recent New Yorker profile. “I’m just a dumb old cowboy.” Sure. It remains a considerable feat for Everett to have remained eccentric in the increasingly rational and prefabricated business of literature. He has his prevailing modes—racial satires, Westerns, crime procedurals, retellings of ancient myths, despondent autobiographical metafiction—but all of them are in flux, appearing in different admixtures. It’s hard to imagine another author pulling off, or even attempting, Glyph (1999),a novel about a toddler with a farcically high IQ; in Everett’s hands, the gambit is hilarious, bone-dry, and tragic. Erasure (2001), a canny parody of writers and racial fetishization, is even more affecting as a portrait of senescence. I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), a hysterical abuse of Ted Turner, the media, and various social structures, is also a repudiation of Everett’s previous work. (About Erasure, the author-character, Percival Everett, remarks, “I didn’t like writing it, and I didn’t like it when I was done with it.”) To apply superficial categories is to miss the point; Everett understands that each person is witness to a series of absurd debacles, and his fiction poses the question: What, if anything, is there to be made of our continued looking?
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Getting too little sleep later in life is associated with an increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease. But paradoxically, so is getting too much sleep. While scientists are confident that a connection between sleep and dementia exists, the nature of that connection is complicated. It could be that poor sleep triggers changes in the brain that cause dementia. Or people’s sleep might be disrupted because of an underlying health issue that also affects brain health. And changes in sleep patterns can be an early sign of dementia itself. Here’s how experts think about these various connections and how to gauge your risk based on your own sleep habits.
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This is the third of a trio of reviews in which I take a brief detour into ants and collective behaviour more generally. I previously reviewed 
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Ashura is marked on the 10th day of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, by all Muslims. It marks the day Nuh (Noah) left the Ark and the day Musa (Moses) was saved from the Pharaoh of Egypt by God. The Prophet Muhammad used to fast on Ashura in Mecca, where it became a common tradition for the early Muslims. Ashura this year will be marked in most places on August 29. But for the Shia, it is also a major religious event to commemorate the martyrdom of Husayn Ibn Ali al-Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who died at the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD.