Words are tricky critters. They constantly skitter away. When I’m banging on a keyboard or babbling into a microphone, I’ll sometimes stop short and realize that the phrase on the tip of my fingers or my tongue has vanished and isn’t coming back, no matter how furiously I will it to.
I used to chalk this up to my brain’s deficiencies. Now I half-panic that it’s brain disease.
“Uh-oh,” I say to friends. “Early onset.” That’s a new shorthand that we bandy back and forth, because we’re getting older (I’m 61), because consciousness of age-related dementia has reached some frightful peak and because we’re battling minor anxiety with major hyperbole, premature fears with dark humor.
We’re not outliers. All around me I hear and see mentions of cognitive health, which, like early onset, is a term that wasn’t nearly as prevalent a decade ago. I trip across more and more articles about brain optimization. I encounter more and more ads for elixirs that promise to perpetuate my acuity and protect my precious thoughts. I’ve never been so conscious of my consciousness. I’ve never been so mindful of my mind.
In The Washington Post a little over two weeks ago, Ariana Eunjung Cha wrote that Americans on the whole “spend billions of dollars each year chasing the idea of a sharper mind” and that “one in five adults over age 50 use vitamins or supplements specifically to try to boost brain functions like memory, attention or focus.” Daily Brain Boost, Brain Drive, brain guard+, Focus Factor and BrainMD are the catchy names of just some of the products and product lines marketed at people who are more eager for reassurances than alert to the dearth of compelling proof that such pills and potions work.
Last month, my Times colleague Dana G. Smith examined six common medications that may lower the risk of dementia and, in a separate report just five days later, four drugs that may increase it. According to The Times’s Most Emailed list, both articles were widely shared, suggesting readers’ deep investment in them.
Along with popular brain journalism there are plentiful brain books, written by members of a growing pantheon of brain whisperers who promise that the right diet, exercise and engagement can safeguard our smarts. In “Keep Sharp,” Dr. Sanjay Gupta assembles tools for a task detailed in the subtitle: “Build a Better Brain at Any Age.” “The Ageless Brain” presents a best-brain protocol by Dr. Dale E. Bredesen, and it inspired a recipe collection, “The Ageless Brain Cookbook for Seniors,” by Hadwin Macy.
Dr. David Perlmutter has stretched his prescriptions for brain health into more than a half dozen volumes, including “Grain Brain” (about the danger of too many carbohydrates), “Brain Maker” (about the benefits of gut microbes), “Brain Defenders” (about the importance of the immune system) and “Brain Wash” (about detoxing the brain). To feed your thoughts, heed his thoughts.
Or just play with puzzles, as a rapidly expanding number of my friends, relatives and other acquaintances do. A widespread belief that brain games are game changers has “launched multiple brain training websites and apps, and most likely contributed to the sale of countless Sudoku, crossword and logic puzzle books over the past two decades,” Smith and Katie Mogg wrote in The Times in late 2024. I like to think that my habit of starting every day with a sequence of challenges in The Times — Wordle, Connections, Strands, the Mini, the Midi and Spelling Bee — amounts to mental calisthenics, and that when I bop over to The New Yorker to play Shuffalo, I’m doing yet more cognitive cardio. It’s not loafing; it’s working out. It’s not procrastination; it’s brainmaxxing.
An irrational rationalization? Not given the statistics and the stakes. We live longer than we once did, which puts more of us in the path of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. According to a report published in the journal Alzheimer’s and Dementia last month, about 7.4 million Americans live with Alzheimer’s, which isn’t the only kind of dementia, and more than 12 million relatives and other unpaid people help care for them.
I’m hard pressed to think of anybody my age — or, for that matter, decades younger — who hasn’t watched a loved one grow increasingly confused, distraught and in sore need of steady guidance; who hasn’t witnessed the erosion of memories and erasure of independence; who hasn’t noticed how incremental and initially subtle those processes can be.
And who hasn’t wondered about their own risk factors. When people I know announce that they’ve cut down on alcohol consumption, they almost always mention a desire to do right by their brains. In a 2024 survey of roughly 1,700 Americans ages 45 or older, about 83 percent said that they worried at least somewhat about developing Alzheimer’s.
But while the prospect of dementia is surely the main driver of Americans’ intensifying attention to the workings and whirring of their brains, I detect an additional dynamic. Cognitive health is the next frontier in self-care. It’s the direction in which people who’ve made progress on other parts of their anatomy turn. It’s the unchecked box on many affluent Americans’ to-do lists.
Thanks to cosmetic dermatology, wrinkled and saggy skin are on the run. Courtesy of Ozempic and its kin, love handles are in retreat. Maybe the brain is the new belly — in need of tending, in line for toning, in want of perfection.
Or not. I’m struck by several paradoxes: For all our fussing over cognition, we seem to get stupider and stupider. We fret about our brains’ juice as we outsource their jobs to artificial intelligence.
I try not to linger too long with any bot. I do the puzzles but not the pills. I drink less than I used to but perhaps more than I should. Is that proper brain fitness? Is my brain in good shape? It’s certainly busy with those questions, and I can’t tell if they’re prompted by changes in the culture around me or in the circuitry inside me. There’s probably some word for that kind of doubt. Damned if I can find it.
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For the Love of Sentences
In The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum fell for the campy Broadway musical “Schmigadoon!”: “I’m an easy lay for a swoony ballad, I love a deep-cut golden age callback, and I’m happiest when grinning lunatics in crinolines start grape-vining around a gazebo.” (Thanks to Tracy Stern of Manhattan for nominating this.)
In The Philadelphia Inquirer, Sam Ruland deemed local roadways unsuited to Waymo self-driving taxis: “This is a city where lane markings are suggestions, every third block is under construction, and potholes have tenure.” (Joel Epstein, Philadelphia, and Dan Tannenbaum, Phoenixville, Pa.)
On the New Zealand website Newsroom, Steve Braunias praised the voice of a radio commentator, Kim Hill, who quit her weekly program: “It was the sound of 4 a.m. and ashtrays and the recycle bin rattling with empty wine bottles.” (Laurie Renwick, Christchurch, New Zealand)
In The Times, Ron Lieber assessed a college’s qualifications of its projections of how much financial aid a student might expect: “So much throat clearing. So many maybes. All these asterisks make the whole endeavor seem asterisky, and it is.” (Kate Schultz, Madison, Wis.)
Also in The Times, Anand Giridharadas reviewed the new book “How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University,” by Theo Baker: “In every age, there is some place that epitomizes how power works. Baker’s Stanford is a strong candidate, and his book follows in the tradition of Michael Lewis’s Wall Street chronicle ‘Liar’s Poker,’ but with more pimples and less eye contact.” (Therese Bissell, Belvedere, Calif.)
In The New York Review of Books, Ben Tarnoff identified a certain “species of capitalist overlord” as “the nerd-bully, whose oddness and rudeness are the necessary effluent of his genius.” (Joellyn Ross, Philadelphia)
In The Atlantic, Drew Goins recalled his experience as a “Jeopardy!” contestant and described “playing with trivia” as “standing on the banks of human knowledge, marveling at the volume rushing past, knowing I will never acquire more than the slightest share of it, yet contenting myself with plucking a remarkable specimen from below the surface.” (Paul Alexander, Oakville, Ontario)
Also in The Atlantic, David A. Graham offered a theory about the president’s recent “fixation on footwear”: “Perhaps Trump cares so much about feet and what goes on them because he knows that, sooner or later, he will place his own in his mouth.” (Caroline Simon, Manhattan, and Jim Carhart, Red Bank, N.J., among others)
And Helen Lewis charted the “unlikely constellation of pastors, posters, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters, and fanboys” who think women shouldn’t have the rights that men do: “Masculinism is both serious and silly, sometimes camp and sometimes chilling, an attention-grabbing performance and a genuine proposition. No wonder it has become the cornerstone of Trumpism.” (Peter Schmolka, Ottawa, Ontario)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
What I’m Watching and Listening To
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“Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” a new Apple TV series about a broke single mother turning to nudity on OnlyFans to pay the bills, concluded its first season on Wednesday night. I had mixed feelings. There’s a glibness to the early episodes, the later ones veer into melodrama and much as I revere Michelle Pfeiffer, she gives a strained, wearying performance as a reluctant grandmother too vain and self-involved for that assignment. But I can’t rave enough about Elle Fanning in the title role. She’s a phenomenal actress who works magic even with small parts, as she demonstrated in “A Complete Unknown” in 2024 and in last year’s “Sentimental Value.” I spent time with her once, but in odd circumstances, which is to say that I was assigned a long magazine profile of her when she was all of 12. (She’s now 28.) Her parents and her publicist understandably put limits on how much I could observe and speak with her, so I compensated with a crazily long list of supplementary interviews, as I saw when I returned to the article recently to refresh my memory. It has cameos by Jodie Foster, John Turturro, Sofia Coppola and seemingly anyone else in the movie business who had ever worked with or thought about Fanning at that point.
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A song for the road: Izzamuzzic’s single “Adventure,” which recently turned 10, has long fascinated me because it’s a cover of Coldplay’s “Adventure of a Lifetime” that came out only five and a half months after the original and transformed it so fully and improved on it so significantly. I still play “Adventure” all the time. In its melancholy tone and layered aural effects, it reminds me a bit of Moby’s “Porcelain,” which also manages to be hummable mood music. I guess that’s two songs for the road.
Dictation Gone Wrong, Pt. 2
Transcription software and autocorrect mangle all sorts of references — that’s the premise of this occasional newsletter feature — but they perform particular mischief with location names, as many of the emails I received from readers pointed out.
Several of you drew attention to a channel of water that our technology routinely mislabels in a fashion so fitting that it’s tempting to see the error as intentional commentary: “Strait of Hormuz” becomes “Strait of Hormones.” Works for me. Tidal waves of testosterone have undeniably informed the aggression there.
A few times a year, for lunch, I take a 20-minute drive to an artsy town on a sleepy river. I know this North Carolina refuge as Saxapahaw. But Denise Williamson of Carrboro, N.C., reported that it got a saucier appellation in one of her digital conversations: Sexy HaHa. It was alternately transcribed as “sex at the haw” and “sexy papa” when Kristin Trangsrud of Chapel Hill, N.C., dictated it.
I have to visit more often.
The transcription gods (or are they gremlins?) definitely skew toward the bawdy. Mitchell Baker of Provincetown, Mass., received a text message from a friend who was wishing him a good trip back to the big city in which he grew up. But “have a great time in New York” morphed into “have a great time in Björk,” umlaut and all.
During a recent vacation that Liz Soria of Calgary, Alberta, took in South America, her traveling companion dictated a text to a friend about their adventures in “the wet undies region of Colombia,” where, apparently, there is a dearth of dryers or a plague of incontinence. The West Andes, in contrast, are distinguished by their mountain scenery.
Leigh Hood of Tiverton, R.I., said that she “hurriedly dictated” an email giving her mother someone’s mailing address. Her mother wrote back: “Is there really a place called Phlegm?” Hood was apparently too late to answer that Pelham, N.Y., was her intended reference; her mother “addressed the letter to Phlegm, N.Y., and it actually got there,” Hood reported. Neither snow nor rain nor malapropism will stay our couriers!
Patricia Callaway Daniel of Ponte Vedra, Fla., once asked Siri for directions to Taverna Yamas, a nearby Greek restaurant. Siri replied: “I’m unable to find a bar for llamas.” How unjust: There are a half dozen speakeasies for alpacas within a mile of my house.
Lisa White of Winnetka, Ill., and Rusty Mott of Sheffield, Mass., noted the tendency of “Hanover, N.H.” to become “Hangover, N.H.,” which is perhaps an example of Siri being cheeky. Hangover — sorry, Hanover — is a college town, home to Dartmouth. And 19-year-olds aren’t known for their restraint around intoxicants.
Anne Weiss of Philadelphia wanted her 15-year-old son to enjoy his next stop in Israel. “Have fun in Be’er Sheva!” she told him — or meant to. He received a wish that he “have fun in beer heaven.”
Most people do. It’s the sister city of Hangover.
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