There are few things that are as ingrained into the American psyche as the Super Bowl. Every year—even months ahead of time—we know that we will: dress up and give out candy for Halloween, exchange gifts for Christmas, and get together with friends for pizza and wings for the Super Bowl. It practically is a religious holiday among die-hard fans, and even those who hate the sport still attend parties and watch “just to see the commercials.”

How big of an event is it? It is estimated that over 173 million people will tune in to the game Sunday evening—over half of the population of the United States. Consumer spending is expected to surpass $11 billion, as many as 1 in 10 workers will miss work the Monday after, and Americans will have eaten over 1.25 billion chicken wings after all is said and done.

And that’s nationwide. The impact the event has on its host city is virtually unfathomable. “There will be over 100,000 people in Indianapolis for the Super Bowl this year,” says Susan Williams, president of Indiana Sports Corporation, a non-profit lobbying group that was instrumental in bringing the event to Indianapolis. “We have been planning for this for three years. It is a huge civic engagement.”

And it is not just the sheer number of people that the city is preparing for. The cultural importance that our country places on this game, combined with the reality of living in the internet age, have indeed meant that Indianapolis has undergone a massive undertaking.

First of all, the enormity of this event means that keeping the venue safe from threats both domestic and abroad is something that the city has taken very seriously. “Fifty percent of the planning so far has been spent on safety and security,” explains Williams. “There are people here from Homeland Security, the FBI, the Secret Service—every possible public safety entity. This ranks right below a presidential visit in terms of security.”

The widespread media coverage of the Super Bowl has also presented unique challenges. There will be 5,000 credentialed media in the city, all of whom will require internet access, access to technology, and hospitality. However, Williams is full of hometown pride and believes Indy is up to the challenge: “An entire floor of the JW Marriott has been transformed into a media center,” she says. “Every single member of the media will have access to equipment, and there will be very high-level volunteers who will act as concierge to ensure that their every need is attended to. That’s why they like coming here: we’ve hosted several Final Fours and the 500 every year, and Indy knows how to deal with it.”

In addition to the special media and security preparations, the city has had to prepare with the physical realities of hosting so many people. Every downtown hotel is sold out; train tracks have been shut down; the downtown post office has been temporarily decommissioned and mail rerouted. It is estimated that visitors will spend between $100-200 million dollars in Indianapolis over the Super Bowl weekend, which is welcome news to local vendors, but presents a logistical nightmare to planners.

This is the reality of the Super Bowl in this modern age. The more cynical among us might say that such importance being placed on a simple sports game shows that our country’s priorities aren’t quite in order, and they might have a valid point.

However, according to Williams, the event will provide a lasting positive impact in Indianapolis outside of the realm of sports. “This has really brought out the best of Indianapolis,” she says. “It’s brought the community together in an incredible way.”

Over 8,000 volunteers will participate in the events surrounding the Super Bowl, which Williams believes will strengthen the community. The city will also benefit from several more physical and concrete improvements:

• Over 200 near-Eastside homes were rehabbed in preparation for the event.
• Volunteers surpassed their goal of planting 2012 trees around the community to commemorate the event.
• 46 murals have been painted around the city by both local and national artists.
• Arsenal Technical High School (an inner-city public school) will get keep the turf field and fitness center created for the New York Giants to  practice in.
• Arts and music should flourish on newly-redesigned Georgia Street downtown.

So, even after this year’s celebration wraps up on Sunday—and we look ahead to the next American holiday—Super Bowl XLVI will leave its mark on Indianapolis and the country as a whole.

A graduate of California Culinary Academy (CCA) in San Francisco, Cheryl has worked in top restaurants in France and San Francisco. She now has an urban farm in Napa, California.

The holidays are long gone, and the time of reckoning has come.

A month ago, we switched from party-goer to gym-goer, from festive cheer to mid-winter resolve. But by now, you may be having a post-holiday showdown with the bathroom scale, and the results are disappointing. Or you’re feeling sluggish and lackluster after weeks of snowed-in cabin fever without exercise.

Still, don’t let a slow starting pace discourage you. The key to getting back on track is to adopt the right frame of mind. Instead of berating yourself for slacking off, use a strategy called “framing” to isolate and contain the unhealthy indulgences that might have occurred. Just as a physical frame surrounds a picture, behavioral framing surrounds a splurge with a solid boundary of good habits. By reinforcing your exercise program and healthy eating plan before and after an indulgence, you give yourself permission to savor special treats, secure in the knowledge that the next day you’ll be right back on track. After all, a single day—or even several—won’t ruin your healthy lifestyle; it’s the long-term pattern that counts.

Now that we have a small dent in the New Year, don’t let a day or week of splurging turn into a month; the longer you go, the more slippery the slope and the tougher it is to get back on track.

Top Tips for Getting Back on Track:

Keep drinking.

Swap out festive libations for water! Try to drink 8 to 12 glasses each day—more if you’re working out. A recent study published in the journal Obesity found that drinking two cups of water prior to meals helps drop more pounds than without hydration. Water makes you feel full, and provides your body with the hydration it needs for optimum function. If you dislike the lack of flavor, add herbs like mint or basil or slices of citrus fruits or cucumber to a pitcher of water.

Swap cans and boxes for fresh food.

Stay away from processed foods in cans and boxes and start buying more fresh foods. You don’t have to be a fancy cook—buy a simple cookbook, and you may surprise yourself at the chef you find within and, in the long run, you’ll save money too.

Swap food rewards for non-food rewards.

It’s so easy to reach for a donut or candy at work when we’re having a stressful day. And after a rough day so many of us drown our worries in a cocktail (or two) or a rich comforting dinner to soothe ourselves into feeling better (temporarily!). Pay attention to emotional eating which causes us to make poor choices and even to eat when we’re not hungry. If an emotional trigger of stress or loneliness sabotages your best intentions, increase your awareness and substitute a hot bath, a book, or a walk for a bag of chips or bowl of ice cream.

Get moving. Exercise will give you more energy.

Get moving.

There’s nothing like an intense workout to combat winter blues. Although it may seem counterintuitive, exercise actually gives you more energy —and if you add weight training to your routine, you’ll build muscle mass and boost your metabolism, helping drop pounds even faster. If you haven’t added a workout into your weight loss plan, you may find that your stamina and strength have diminished a bit, but don’t let that hamper your restart effort. Keep moving on a regular basis, and you’ll soon find your fit self.

Swap fear for confidence.

As Eleanor Roosevelt once said: “Do something each day that scares you.” Take a swim class. Dust off your bicycle. Join a hiking club. Experiment til you find an activity you really enjoy. If you actually look forward to your workouts, you’ve made huge progress!

Eat often.

Include a good source of lean protein with your breakfast to feel full longer, and then eat five to six small meals a day. In a meal-skipping study at the National Institute on Aging, people who skipped meals during the day and had all of their calories at one nightly meal exhibited unhealthy changes in their metabolism, similar to unhealthy blood sugar levels observed in diabetics. And, of course, skipping meals or snacks increases your chances of coming to the table famished at the next meal and over-eating or making less healthy food choices.

Get plenty of sleep.

It’s easier to overeat when you’re tired, and fatigue can make it hard to stick to your work out plans. Caffeine, sugar and simple carbs are the worst choices for a pick-me-up, but they’re what we frequently turn to when sleep-deprived. Aim to get eight hours of sleep per night, and/or try taking short naps during the day. As extra insurance, pitch the junk food and have healthy snacks in the house at all times. That way, if a fatigue-induced craving does hit, the only choice you can make will be a good one.

 
Cheryl Forberg RD is a New York Times bestselling author and a James Beard award-winning chef. Cheryl co-wrote the eating plan for NBC’s “The Biggest Loser” and was the show’s nutritionist for twelve seasons. Her latest book is Flavor First, and she writes a blog of cooking and nutrition tips. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook for more tips and recipes. And continue to read the Saturday Evening Post website for more regular nutrition tips and features from Cheryl.
 
 
 
 

Although American stocks of materiel were sufficient for tackling Libya, they are far from inexhaustible. In fact, the U.S. military remains critically short of these same types of weapons. Early in the Iraq war, for instance, stocks of precision bombs were so reduced that the Pentagon ordered Boeing to ramp up emergency production. Boeing’s attempts to supply the military’s needs were thwarted by a Swiss company, Micro Crystal, which—angered by the U.S. decision to invade Iraq—ceased delivery of a key part, according to defense officials. Because no firm in the U.S. made the part, finding an American company capable of starting a new production line took the Pentagon seven months. If the most powerful military in the world could run short of a key weapon system against a third-rate military power like Iraq, what would happen if we faced a more powerful opponent such as China?

In the last century, American industrial might twice rescued the democratic world: first from German militarism and then from Axis totalitarianism. After World War I, one of Germany’s top military commanders claimed that his country was not beaten by the Allied military but by “pitiless American industry” that was able to mass produce war materiel on a previously unimaginable scale. Two decades later that same “pitiless industry” became President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Arsenal of Democracy,” which buried the Axis powers under an avalanche of war materiel belched out of Pittsburgh’s furnaces and Detroit’s assembly lines. Sadly, those days are relegated to the past. As American heavy industry has moved off shore, so has much of the nation’s ability to mobilize the kinds of forces that met the crises of the last century.

Despite rumors to the contrary, however, America still possesses a formidable industrial base. Unfortunately, it is no longer unrivaled by other growing powers. Every passing year sees China further solidifying its position as the world’s production base. According to the Pentagon’s 2011 annual report to Congress on Chinese military developments this “sustained economic development … coupled with an expanding science and technology base, has facilitated a comprehensive and ongoing military modernization program.”

Knowing this, one cannot help but wonder if the U.S. industrial base is still capable of winning the production war in a major conflict. Meanwhile, there is another looming threat that is only beginning to be understood—the globalization of supply chains. In today’s globalized economy a weapon may consist of parts from a dozen or more countries that come together at a single assembly point. At least 50 percent of all of content in any item bought by the Department of Defense must, by law, come off American production lines, and some weapons are 100 percent made in the USA. Still, in certain cases, parts are made in America, shipped to China for assembly, and then shipped back to the U.S. for sale. This presents America’s high technology military with a major problem.

Illustration by Jonathan Bartlett

Then, there is the potential for sabotage anywhere along the supply chain. For instance, many of the microchips purchased for the Pentagon come from China, where they theoretically could be tampered with by Chinese intelligence. And, in fact, in 2010 alone the U.S. Navy purchased more than 59,000 computer chips from China that were discovered to be counterfeit. These chips were destined for use in our most sensitive weapons systems—from missiles to transponders, as reported in Wired magazine. Any or all of these chips could have included malware that would allow the Chinese military to turn off or otherwise wreck whatever systems the chips were inserted within. After counterfeit chips were discovered, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity initiated the Trusted Integrated Circuit Program both to help prevent foreign adversaries from tampering with U.S. chips and to check foreign-sourced chips for flaws after delivery.

But the problems don’t end there. The Pentagon is expecting huge budget cuts as a result of our current wars ending and the nation’s dire economic position.

For this reason, America’s defense industry is scrambling to reduce capacity.

Northrop Grumman, a global aerospace and defense technology company, recently announced plans to close troubled shipyards and leave the shipbuilding industry. This means that one of the country’s five remaining naval shipyards—Avondale—could close for lack of work with a loss of 5,000 jobs.

With those jobs goes decades of shipbuilding experience that will be near impossible to replicate if it is needed in an emergency.

Today U.S. shipyards produce less than one percent of all commercial vessels while Asia builds 95 percent. Without the naval shipyards America would effectively be exiting the shipbuilding business entirely, a sad end for an industry that in World War II produced ships six times faster than Hitler’s submarine wolfpacks could sink them.

In the meantime, China has the capacity to build almost 60 million tons of ships per year and is looking to increase that capacity, according to the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore.

In the end, if America loses a future war because of production shortfalls that leave our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines bereft of what they require to fight and win, it won’t be because we lack the capacity. America’s ability to win the wars of tomorrow rests on implementing the economic policies necessary to rebuild our industrial base and ensure the availability of funds required to meet an unforeseen crisis.

Jim Lacey, Ph.D., is the professor of strategic studies at the Marine Corps War College. The opinions presented here are entirely his own and do not represent those of the Department of Defense or any of its members.

Cheryl leads the way on a hike with contestants from "The Biggest Loser'"

Looking back, it’s easy to say we were pioneers in weight loss reality television—there are so many similar shows now. Though I’m happy our work inspired and continues to inspire so many, it’s bittersweet, because the obesity statistics are not going down.
 
Like the rest of “The Biggest Loser” medical expert team, my role was off camera but vital to the show’s success. Most of the air time was dedicated to the trainers, work outs, challenges, the occasional guest chef appearance (such as Curtis Stone) and, of course, the stories of contestants themselves.
 
What people didn’t see on camera was that I met with every one of the prospective cast members who flew to LA to vie for a coveted spot on the show. Each season, I met with approximately 75 finalists (who were culled from much larger pool of thousands) for a comprehensive nutrition consultation, which was one component of an entire week of medical and psychological testing before the final cast selections were made.
 
Once the cast was identified (anywhere from 12 to 50 people depending on the season), I shared a personally tailored calorie budget with each of them and instructed them on the eating plan for the show, which I co-wrote. I also taught them about shopping, measuring and weighing food, portion sizes, cooking tips and maintaining a daily food journal. From there, I tracked their food intake to ensure they were getting enough calories, protein, calcium, fiber and all of the other nutrients that comprise “The Biggest Loser” eating plan. And, over the course of 12 seasons, I shared my cell phone number with 250+ cast members and availed myself 24/7 if they had any food/shopping/nutrition/cooking questions, or if they just wanted to chat. 
 
I never had any regrets about that. In fact, former contestants still call me to check in and I love hearing from them. Though it was incredibly rewarding to watch their knowledge grow (while their waistlines shrank!), my biggest regret was that I was only able to reach a small fraction of the overweight Americans who really need my help. And those who need me most can’t afford to hire me on their own.
 

Cheryl with "Biggest Loser" Season 9 contestant Stephanie Anderson.

This is ultimately one of the reasons I decided to move on. Although I’m extremely proud of what I accomplished with individual contestants in 12 seasons, I felt that there could be a way to reach and help many more people. I also realized my focus was on only one segment of the weight loss spectrum—from the morbidly obese starting point to the point of maintenance (or almost there). At the end of each season I had to stop there and circle back to start over again with a new season, never having enough time to dedicate myself fully to those who had achieved the lofty goal of reaching their maintenance weight, and helping them to stay there.
 
This year, I look forward with excitement to reaching a larger audience, on-camera and off, in person and remotely and in print, with you, at the Saturday Evening Post. I look forward to sharing my nutrition and culinary expertise with you. Whether you have questions about weight loss, weight maintenance, or healthy (but scrumptious!) eating and recipes—I look forward to answering them all and to sharing my stories with you about the urban farm I’m building in Napa, California.
 
Thanks for reading, and I look forward to knowing you better.

Join us again in two weeks for nutrition advice from Cheryl.

 
Cheryl Forberg RD is a New York Times bestselling author and a James Beard award-winning chef. Cheryl co-wrote the eating plan for NBC’s “The Biggest Loser” and was the show’s nutritionist for twelve seasons. Her latest book is Flavor First, and she writes a blog of cooking and nutrition tips. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook for more tips and recipes. And continue to read the Saturday Evening Post website for more regular nutrition tips and features from Cheryl.
 
 
 
 

Those two achievements belong to none other than Betty White, whose 1995 book was appropriately called Here We Go Again. “The original idea,” Betty wrote, “was to visit the earliest days of television while I could still remember them.” White assumed, understandably, that her career was pretty much behind her—she was, after all, in her seventies.

In 2010, in an updated forward to the ’95 book, she wrote, “Who could have dreamed at the time, that, fifteen years later, I would still be hanging in there, busier than ever before?” Now at age 90, her star burns more brightly than ever before, as she appears in the hit TV show “Hot In Cleveland” and has been nominated for a Screen Actors Guild award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series. ( She was nominated for the same award for the first time in 2011, at the young age of 89—and won.)

Indeed, 2010 was a crazy year for Betty, and it began with a sassy Snickers commercial, then morphed into a Facebook campaign to make Betty the oldest guest host on “Saturday Night Live” and “somewhere in here I agree to do a guest stint on a pilot for a new series” with the stipulation that “it would be only a one-shot deal.” It starred Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Leeves and Wendy Malick. An instant hit, there was an order for ten episodes. In spite of the agreement that she wouldn’t be involved, Betty ended up doing all ten, and then the series got picked up for twenty more episodes. “I have no business working this much at this age,” she said.

In the madcap year of 2010 she even showed up in the sitcom, “The Middle,” starring Patricia Heaton. She played a spiteful librarian who enjoyed making life hell for second-graders.

The Betty White Show, 1954

Born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1922, Betty was barely out of high school when she received her first big break—singing for an experimental LA television station. By 1953, she was starring in a series called “Life With Elizabeth” and she made regular appearances in the ’60s and ’70s on “Password,” hosted by her husband, Allen Ludden.

Her most famous roles were as the devious Sue Ann Nivens on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (1970–1977) and the hilariously ditzy Rose on “The Golden Girls” (1985-1992). But her list of credits even includes: “Mama’s Family,” “The Bold and the Beautiful,” and “Ugly Betty.”

Nabbing the popular actress isn’t enough; for some reason writers love putting her in unlikely situations—like throwing her in the slammer. They love having her say things you don’t expect to hear from a nice little old lady. The results are delightful.

Betty White and Mary Tyler Moore in a scene from "Hot in Cleveland." Photo Courtesy TV Land.

“I’m in freaking jail here!” she yelled last year on “Hot in Cleveland.” Betty plays the widow of a Mafioso who absconds, faking his death, leaving her to take the heat for sitting on stolen loot. Oh, actually, she doesn’t technically play a widow—although “dead,” he showed up this season—played by Don Rickles, no less. In jail for a couple of hours, she starts singing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” until her unseen cellmate tells her to knock it off. When the camera does show the snarling woman sharing the space, it’s none other than Mary Tyler Moore.

Leave it to Ms. White to make being a “senior citizen” fashionable. No doubt partly in deference to her age group, “Hot” has boasted a “Who’s Who” of guest stars, and many of them, like the beloved Moore, are older. What a treat to see Carl Reiner, Tim Conway, Orson Bean, Buck Henry, Hal Linden (“Barney Miller”) and John Mahoney (“Frasier”).

Betty White is not just about comedic timing. She’s just as famous for her passion for animals. She communes with elephants, giraffes and chimps, too, as trustee for the Los Angeles Zoo. She has tirelessly worked to raise funds for improvements to various areas of the Zoo, such as “the Red Ape Rainforest for our orangutans, followed by a great new home for our gorillas,” as she explains in her 2011 book, Betty & Friends—My Life at the Zoo.

It seems appropriate that Betty White, at the age of 90 has landed on the network “TVLand.” In spite of a wonderful film career, from “Time to Kill” in 1945 to “The Proposal” in 2009, the land of TV is where this always-delightful pioneer belongs.

It was a film that debuted with no expectations whatsoever. Months later, when Dr. No opened in the U.S., The New York Times called it “lively” and “amusing,” a “spoof of science fiction and sex.” Translation: a cute, entertaining trifle.

Yet, lo and behold, Dr. No grossed nearly $60 million worldwide—fantastic box office for that time—and spawned a film franchise that has produced 22 feature films (the 23rd, Skyfall, is due out in October) with global earnings of more than $5 billion.

In an era when big budget extravaganzas such as Lawrence of Arabia and The Longest Day attracted the largest audiences, Dr. No’s success seemed to come out of nowhere. Yet the reasons why it succeeded were easily discernable. “The formula was simple,” says film critic and author Irv Slifkin of moviefanfare.com. “A good-looking guy who was lethal yet likable, gorgeous women, nasty villains, nifty gadgets, nice locations, and cool music—all presented in first class fashion with a dollop of violence and sex and, in some cases, politics.”

“Bond tapped into a full range of male fantasies and desires that were simultaneously being exploited by popular media and international advertising at the height of post-war consumerism,” adds Christoph Lindner, editor of The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader. “There is a great study of the interrelations—both commercial and artistic—between Bond and Playboy magazine in the early 1960s, showing that both developments shared many values and perspectives, not just on sex and women, but also on conspicuous consumption and the fetishism of technology.”

In other words, gorgeous women and cool gadgets—not to mention Cold War paranoia and wackadoodle plot lines far removed from the dour and more realistic spy flicks of the era—were some of the keys to the films’ success. And if you were female, well, you might not have liked the casual sexism of the Bond series, but there was always Sean Connery, about as studly as they come, to satisfy your fantasies. As Slifkin puts it: “The women came for James, and the men came for everything else.”

Sean Connery graces the cover of The Saturday Evening Post.

And they kept coming back for more. When Sean Connery bowed out of the series, they came for George Lazenby, and then Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and now Daniel Craig. The villains changed, the women came and went, the plots sometimes became utterly ridiculous—like in 1979’s Moonraker, which involved a master race, a plot to exterminate all human life, and a battle on a space station—but none of that seemed to matter. Bond was part of the culture. Which meant it became hard to find people who didn’t know who Q, M, and Miss Moneypenny were; who weren’t familiar with Odd Job and Jaws; and who didn’t know that Bond liked his martinis “shaken, not stirred.”

In fact, this familiarity worked in the series’ favor. One of the reasons 007 managed to survive from the Cold War era into the post-9/11 world is that the more things changed, the more Bond tended to stay the same. According to Glenn Yeffeth, editor of James Bond in the 21st Century, Bond is “good at what he does, and he is an openly heterosexual male, unashamed of his own manhood. Those characteristics seem to be as relevant as they ever were. If you look at Jack Bauer in the TV show “24,” I think what people like about that character are the same characteristics.”

There’s also Bond’s relationship with his bosses, which remains highly volatile. 007 is an insider who acts like an outsider, and that tension has been constant throughout the series. “At one level he represents a fantasy of government control in a geopolitical world that has lost its grip on western security,” says Lindner, “but at another level he also represents a fantasy of escape from the excessive authority and surveillance of government. This tension between control and escape is an important part of Bond’s success over the decades.”

And then there’s the most obvious way in which the series stays current—when it comes to enemies, Bond is always after the villain du jour. “The films have always reflected the times in which they were made,” says Yefeth. “In the ’60s, it was Cold War espionage and the beginnings of the sexual revolution. In the ’70s and ’80s, they became more comedic and fantastical in the era of overindulgence. But the fundamental principles of Bond haven’t changed. He is intent on trying to preserve world order. For each era, Bond has found his way.”

Which means that in the latest reboot of the series, Daniel Craig’s 007 has been fighting a gaggle of very contemporary bad seeds who finance international terrorism (Casino Royale) or are out to control an entire nation’s water supply (Quantum of Solace).

And there is one more significant way in which Bond has kept up with the times. Even though he’s as tough as ever, he has become more emotionally open. “Fleming’s original Bond from the novels was a deeply flawed and emotionally damaged character,” says Lindner. “Over the years, the films gradually turned Bond into a teflon spy. But now, in the post-9/11 era—and thanks in part to other spy franchises like the Jason Bourne trilogy—Bond has rediscovered his emotions and his imperfections.”

So what’s not to like? He’s macho. He’s emotional. He’s even become, if the most recent films are any indication, almost—but not quite—monogamous. And in a world that seems even more chaotic and dangerous than the one in which he first appeared, we all know that when evil rears its ugly head, there’s one secret agent we can always count on.

Bond. James Bond.

Best of Bond

There have been 22 Bond films so far. In chronological order, here are my picks for the five best. —L.B.

From Russia With Love (1963)

Daniela Bianchi and Sean Connery. © Bettmann/CORBIS

Why It’s Great: A Cold War spy caper with superbad villains intent on world domination. Bonus: A top-notch supporting cast including Robert Shaw and Lotte Lenya.
Main Villain: Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the consummately evil head of SPECTRE shown only from the neck down as he strokes his white cat. Equally freaky and fearsome—Rosa Klebb (Lenya), the killer with poison-tipped blades concealed in the toes of her shoes.
Bond Babe: Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi), Russian agent turned Bond ally.
Cool Gadget: A special briefcase including a rifle and ammunition plus 50 gold sovereigns, a knife, and a tear gas cartridge disguised as talcum powder.
Memorable Dialogue: Tatiana, trying on dresses – “I will wear this one in Picadilly.” Bond – “You won’t. They’ve just passed some new laws there. ”

Goldfinger (1964)

Shirley Eaton and Sean Connery. © Sunset Boulevard/Corbis

Why It’s Great: A daring robbery plan, nasty supervillain, and that smiling henchman Oddjob (Harold Sakata). Mix that with a female flying corps, one of the best Bond title songs (sung by Shirley Bassey), and a terrific final action sequence and you get perhaps the greatest Bond ever.
Main Villain: Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe), master criminal who wants to rob Fort Knox.
Bond Babe: Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman), Bond enemy turned ally.
Cool Gadget: Awesome Aston Martin with passenger ejection seat, forward machine guns, hubcaps doubling as tire slashers, and other goodies.
Memorable Dialogue: Stewardess – “Can I do anything for you?” Bond – “Just a drink. A martini, shaken, not stirred.”

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)

Diana Rigg and George Lazenby. MGM.

Why It’s Great: George Lazenby is no Sean Connery, but he’s okay as Bond, and the film is tight, smart, and extremely well directed with killer action sequences. Bonus: We find 007 in love.
Main Villain: Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Telly Savalas), doing some strange allergy research involving beautiful women.
Bond Babe: Teresa di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg), who marries Bond, but is murdered on their wedding day.
Cool Gadget: Radioactive lint, which acts as a homing device.
Memorable Dialogue: Draco (Gabriele Ferzetti) – “My apologies for the way you were brought here. I wasn’t sure you’d accept a ‘formal’ invitation.” Bond – “There’s always something formal about the point of a pistol.”

Licence To Kill (1989)

Timothy Dalton and Carey Lowell. Columbia Pictures.

Why It’s Great: Criminally underrated at the time, this is an exciting action film with Timothy Dalton as a nasty, driven Bond out to stop a drug lord and avenge a near-fatal attack on his friend Felix Leiter (David Hedison).
Main Villain: Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi), South American drug kingpin based on Pablo Escobar.
Bond Babe: Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell), CIA informant posing as a drug courier who falls for Bond.
Cool Gadget: A camera that can be converted into a rifle and programmed so only one person can fire it.
Memorable Dialogue: Bond, when asked to cut a wedding cake – “I’ll do anything for a woman with a knife.”

Casino Royale (2006)

Why It’s Great: Grade A reboot of the series featuring a macho but sensitive Daniel Craig as 007 and smashing action sequences.

Eva Green and Daniel Craig. PhotoFest.

Main Villain: Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), a banker for terrorist organizations.
Bond Babe: Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), double agent supposedly monitoring Bond’s expenses but also working for a terrorist organization. She soon falls for our hero.
Cool Gadgets: Film is low on futuristic gadgetry because it is about the start of Bond’s career as a “00.” Still, his Aston Martin has a glove compartment with antidotes to various poisons and a portable defibrillator. Most laughable is his Sony Ericsson cellphone with (get this!) GPS and a 3.2 megapixel digital camera!
Memorable Dialogue: Lynd – “It doesn’t bother you? Killing all those people?” Bond – “Well, I wouldn’t be very good at my job if it did.”

What’s your favorite Bond movie? Vote in our poll and share your thoughts!

As Hope entered her 50s, though, something clicked in her, and she felt somehow replenished.

“When I was young,” she says, speaking by phone from her office at a small college in upstate New York, “I used to drive like an old lady. I drive faster now. I don’t worry so much about what other people think. I speak my mind. I don’t know if it was anything in particular. It was just a gradual awakening after I turned 50.”

She compares her age to her favorite season, autumn. “It’s when the trees are full of color and have their most extreme beauty, just before winter,” she says. “That’s the same season for being in your 50s.”

Two years ago, Hope got engaged. But she doesn’t attribute happiness to late love. Rather, she attributes late love to happiness. In a sense, time wedged an opening—like a stream of water cracking open a big boulder—that made it possible for someone to come into her life.

Hope’s growing happiness may be more the rule than an exception, with a number of recent reports suggesting that just when people start needing glasses to read a restaurant menu, life begins to come into clearer focus.

Most recently there was the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a survey of 1.2 million Americans between 18 and 85, as well as a separate Gallup poll of 340,000. Both surveys produced similar findings—that people’s sense of well-being follows a U-shaped trend, starting high in youth, dipping in one’s 30s and 40s, hitting a low point at 50, then beginning to gather momentum.

“We don’t know why well-being seems to rise with age,” says Nikki Duggan, Healthways’ director of operations and analytics. “Though one trend we see is that over time people feel more respected.”

Other factors, say experts, may be that over time people become more realistic about their expectations, more accepting about what they have or haven’t achieved, and more resilient when things don’t pan out. For many, there’s a growing appreciation of life that may be missing in the years of striving and stress typical of one’s 30s and 40s.

The topic of happiness has blossomed into an industry—from the positive psychology movement to new ways of approaching mental health treatment to happiness skill-building to a book-publishing niche that has almost become its own genre. There are international conferences that look at what happiness means to business and to national and global economics; the south Asian kingdom of Bhutan has a Gross National Happiness Index; Britain recently started a project to measure the national GWB, or general well-being, and this year, Australia hosted the 5th annual World Happiness Forum.

Happiness is particularly relevant in the U.S., which was, after all, the first country to make the happiness of its citizens part of its core mission, starting with the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson substituted what must have seemed an ethereal notion, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” for a more common phrase of the time, “life, liberty and property.” The ideal of happiness was truly radical at a time when humans were generally presumed to be subjects whose sole purpose was to serve the state and its rulers.

The topic is no less important now than it was then, but the recent efforts to compare the relative happiness of the different ages is more relevant than ever: It is projected that life expectancy in the U.S. will rise to 79.5 years by 2020. According to the 2010 census, 40.3 million Americans, 13 percent of the population, are 65 or older. That number is expected to reach 72 million by 2030 and more than double to 89 million, 20 percent of the population, by 2050.

To be sure, happiness is an elusive topic, a vague term for something we seek without necessarily having a definite idea of what it is we’re after.

llustrations by Koren Shadmi.

“There’s a lot of confusion between happiness and pleasure,” says Matthieu Ricard, author of Why Meditate? Working With Thoughts and Emotions and the French translator for the Dalai Lama. “Happiness is about well-being, a sense of fulfillment. That’s different from how happiness is promoted—it’s all about do this or use that and you’ll find happiness. That is more of a recipe for exhaustion than flourishing. It has to be more a way of being than a momentary pleasant stage. In that sense, pleasure can contribute to happiness, but it can also undermine it, if, for example, it becomes a destructive obsession.”

Many experts prefer the term “well-being” because it describes an overall condition rather than a fleeting feeling of pleasure. Martin Seligman, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist whom many regard as the father of positive psychology, called his latest book Flourish, and introduced an acronym, PERMA, to describe the elements of well-being: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.

The recent studies suggest that as people age they get better at all of the above. Reported in a series of graphs, Gallup-Healthways’ survey showed that as the years go by Americans are more satisfied and feel more respected at work. They smoke less and eat a healthier diet. Older Americans worry less and are less sad and depressed than people in other age groups, and that trend rises into their 60s despite less robust physical health.

“As you age, you realize that you can be happy in the present,” says Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage. “You don’t have to wait until you achieve something more. It’s something you cultivate in the present by connecting to social support networks and paying attention to what’s happening in your life right now.”

Another factor may be the ability to bounce back from adversity or just to keep things in perspective.

“My sense is that unless people change their attitudes and behavior, they remain with the optimal levels of happiness they have,” Achor says. “But what they do gain over time is resilience. They can experience stress and failure and find they’re able to overcome.”

The flip side of the age issue is that unhappiness—a deep, fundamental sense that life has gone off the rails—is occurring at younger ages, with depression occurring earlier than in the past. The mean onset of depression diagnoses in the 1970s was 29. In 2006, it was 14.5. Achor blames technology for this phenomenon. He describes what has happened to modern citizens as a “connection paradox” caused by the urgency to be always linked up and wired in. You can’t be happy if you’re compulsively trying to connect because of a feeling—or fear—of being disconnected or disengaged.

“People are doing too many things,” Achor says. “They’re stressed, running after everything possible. Their brains, even in down moments, are not down. They’re connected to virtual worlds and multitasking. But what we know from research is that the more personal projects a person has on their plate, the more their brain’s resources are spread out, and they don’t get to enjoy them. The more multi-tasking we do, the less happy we are.”

Focus and self-discipline improve with age, and there may be some advantage for people who didn’t grow up mesmerized and conditioned by omnipresent flashing screens, say the experts.

Age, especially for people who have enjoyed a moderate level of success, may also ease the disappointment of youthful high hopes of fame and fortune.

For Roger Stewart, now retired, contentment came from accepting that what he had achieved in his career—a highly rewarding post as an executive editor at a big-city newspaper—was more than adequate professionally, even though he’d started in journalism with the goal of becoming well-known on a national scale.

“When I was in my 30s, I remember listening to an older man I looked up to who was a professor of philosophy, saying, ‘Hey, there are certain stars in the world of philosophy, and I know now I’m never going to be one of them, but I’m comfortable with who I am,’” Roger recalls. “I remember feeling shocked by that. How could he accept being anything but number one? Today, I get it. Making it to the so-called ‘top of your profession’ is not the key to happiness.”

“As you get older, your outlook certainly does change,” says Hope Ferguson, the communications specialist. A number of factors come into play, and one of the biggest is the inescapable experience of living through enough triumphs and setbacks to put things in perspective. “You see the passage of time. You’ve lost people. You see that life has an end, and that makes you want to seize the moment.”

None other than Aristotle asserted that happiness is the goal of goals. But, in researching The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study, Howard S. Friedman, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, came to the conclusion that perhaps happiness ought not to be a goal at all.

Friedman wasn’t even looking at happiness per se. Rather he was analyzing factors that influence longevity. What he found was that “certain behaviors that resulted in happiness also added to people’s longevity.”

In other words, there’s a correlation between happiness and health, and therefore lifespan. But what’s unique about Friedman’s discovery is that “happiness was really just a byproduct of certain habits” rather than an end in itself. For this reason, Friedman doesn’t believe in the happiness skill-building exercises advocated by many positive psychologists because those habits are not sustainable over time and, more important, because they are less vital than the basic healthy habits that we all know are good for us.

“The pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of doing meaningful things,” Friedman says. “Happy people have certain behaviors. They’re active, they’re socially engaged, they have good relationships and are involved in their communities. They’re absorbed by their work and careers. If they want to do something, they don’t worry that it’s going to take too much effort or be too stressful. They’re persistent. They’re not impulsive. They don’t drink too much. They’re not attracted by destructive relationships. They’re not vain or self-centered. What we found is that happiness is what you get when you live a thriving life.”

Out of Friedman’s research comes a word of warning to those who are happy now, and a word of encouragement to those who are still reaching for it: People who have good habits can lose them and people who don’t can get them.

Even though happiness may naturally rise in one’s 50s—a reward for a life well lived—each of us has to keep earning that reward at every age.

And be sure to check out our feature by Lewis Beale, “Bond. James Bond.”

Dancing is also just plain fun. “It’s the most joyful way for me to get my exercise, get my heart rate up, and get the endorphins I crave,” says actress Jennifer Grey, who has done as much for dancing as it has done for her. As costar of the 1987 hit film Dirty Dancing, she motivated millions to head for the ballroom. Last year she had a similar impact when she earned top honors on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars (DWTS) and proved, at age 50, that it’s never too late to strap on 4-inch heels and out-perform competitors 20 years her junior.

“Dancing takes me out of my busy monkey mind and dumps me in a physical space where I can be free from thinking,” says the actress. “It’s the best way for me to feel connected and alive. I take one dance class every week, but it’s not enough. I want to be able to do it every day.”

Although ballroom dancing has never lacked for fans, its soaring popularity has certainly been boosted by shows like DWTS and its FOX counterpart, So You Think You Can Dance. Statistics confirm that Americans are giving ballroom dancing another whirl.

“People are definitely getting off their sofas and starting to dance again,” emphasizes Carrie Ann Inaba, one of DWTS’s three professional judges. “During our first season on television people would come up to me on the street and say, ‘I watch the show every week.’ By the time the second season rolled around they were saying, ‘I’m talking my husband into getting into a dance class.’ Now they’re telling me, ‘We’re taking lessons and having a ball!’”

The least likely folks are taking up dance these days. Donna Thomas, 65, was raised in a conservative church and graduated from a college that frowned on anything that resembled what it categorized as “rhythmic activity.” Yet two years after becoming a widow, Donna summoned her courage, walked into a studio near her Springboro, Ohio, home, and announced, “I want to dance.”

It changed her life. “I needed to be with people,” she recalls. “I figured I had a choice: either withdraw and stay in my shell or step out and try something new.” The “something new” included mastering the waltz, samba, cha-cha-cha, and jive. Her timing—on the dance floor and off—was perfect. At home, she was learning to operate solo and make all the decisions that she and her husband used to make jointly. In the studio, she felt the pressure ease and the responsibility shift as she became part of a team again. “I didn’t have to be in charge,” she says. “All I had to do was follow my partner’s cues and react to the music. That lifted my spirits.”

People are also dancing in the least likely places. One of the most colorful offshoots of the trend is the “flash mob,” best described as a spontaneous outbreak of dancing in very public settings such as shopping malls, school cafeterias, hotel lobbies, food courts, and train stations.

J.R. Martinez and Karina Smirnoff were crowned "Dancing with the Stars" champions on November 22, 2011. Photo courtesy of ABC/ADAM TAYLOR)

Participants, alerted to a planned flash mob through social media, congregate and wait for their cue. “People are just milling around when all of a sudden one or two start dancing,” explains Angela Prince, a spokesperson for USA Dance. Others join in and before long—in a flash, you might say—everyone’s toes are tapping, hips are swiveling, and bodies are gyrating. It’s as if one were in the center of a Broadway musical. “I remember being on a Caribbean cruise when a couple of passengers started a flash mob while we were eating dinner,” recalls Prince. “Everyone, including waiters and crew, caught the spirit and formed a conga line of about 300 people that snaked its way around the entire dining room.”

Although Prince agrees that shows such as DWTS have encouraged the ballroom craze, she credits other factors as well. “Dancing seems to experience a bump in popularity after events that change our lives,” she says, using the years following World War I and II, Vietnam, and 9/11 as examples. “Music is great therapy, and dancing gives people the opportunity to come together.”

Technology also may have a hand in the revival. Mary Murphy, a studio owner and frequent choreographer and judge on So You Think You Can Dance, says dancing provides a degree of human contact that is sorely missing since people have come to rely on the Internet as their primary mode of interaction. She works with elementary and middle school students to introduce them to what she calls the language of dance. “Some of the kids come kicking and screaming into the classes, but teachers tell me that they see positive changes within a few weeks.”

The idea of a young couple joining hands as the boy guides his partner and the girl follows his lead, is certainly part of the appeal. Dancing allows young people to communicate without the pressure of finding the right words. “Kids who have behavior problems naturally calm down and find new ways to express themselves,” says Murphy.

When it comes to the therapeutic benefits of dancing, Murphy can speak from first-hand experience. She underwent treatment for thyroid cancer a year ago and faced the possibility of losing her ability to talk. Today she is cancer-free and as exuberant as ever. She used dancing to help prepare for surgery, and she integrated it into her recuperation regimen. “Getting that diagnosis and hearing the word cancer was the one time in my life I just wanted to shut down and have a major pity party, which I did for a couple of days,” she admits. “Then I decided I absolutely had to keep my body moving. So I added a lot of activities to my pre-surgery program to increase my lung capacity. I did yoga, pilates, and dance exercises every day. I wanted to be in the healthiest condition possible.”

Her plan worked. She sailed through the operation and the recovery that followed. The reason? “I absolutely believe it was because of dance.”

Fans of the two hit TV dance shows can attest to similar dramatic effects that dancing has had on several of the competitors. “Kirstie Alley immediately comes to mind,” says Inaba. Dubbed “the incredible shrinking Kirstie” because of the weight she lost during Season 10 of DWTS, Alley decided to wear the same costume on the show’s finale as she wore for the initial competitive round. This proved to be a challenge for the wardrobe staff because the dress had to be downsized by 38 inches. The combination of a healthy diet and rigorous dancing had caused her to lose almost 100 pounds.

“A lot of times our self esteem is determined by the shape we’re in and how good we feel about ourselves,” says Inaba. “Dancing brings you back to a place where you feel physically confident about your body because you’re strong again. Your core muscles are working; you’re in shape; and you’re in tune with your body. I watched Kirstie rediscover her confidence last season.”

Dancing also can replenish a zest for life. Donna Thomas, the conservative-turned-dance-enthusiast, certainly discovered this when she was still newly widowed and stepped out of her comfort zone to sign up for ballroom lessons back in Ohio. Over a period of time, she became so engaged in dancing that she was a regular at Friday night dance parties, and her skill level rose to the point where her instructors encouraged her to enter competitions. Although she no longer competes, she still has the sassy black dress and high heels that she wore when performing, and somewhere there’s a scrapbook of photos, certificates, and ribbons. Her favorite memory, though, doesn’t involve winning prizes or gaining recognition. It’s more personal. “I remember the night I invited my kids to attend a dance with me,” she recalls, with a laugh. “You should have seen their faces! They were just so surprised at how good I was!”

Into this sanctum stepped Laura Berton-Botfeld with her therapy dog—a 70-lb blond poodle named Apollo. The father of one of the patients spotted them and came quickly to her side. “Over here,” he said, tugging on her arm. Laura and Apollo moved to the bed of his 10-year-old daughter, whom we’ll call Sophia to protect her privacy. The delicate, wan figure under the sheets had bacterial meningitis—an inflammation of the brain that can be fatal. By the time Laura and Apollo arrived, the girl had been in a coma for seven days, and things were not looking good. Doctors had told the parents to prepare for the worst.

Sophia’s dad propped his daughter up with pillows. Her unseeing eyes were wide open, a beautiful blue, framed by lank blond hair.

Normally, with a patient’s permission, Laura has Apollo jump up on a chair beside the bed then onto the bed itself. He’s trained to sit with his broad back to patients so they can stroke him and nestle their fingers in his fur. In this case, because Sophia was not conscious, Laura urged Apollo only to sit on the chair, a position that left him practically nose to nose with the patient. “It was the weirdest thing,” says Laura. “Sophia’s eyes seemed to just lock onto Apollo’s, and the dog’s gaze was so intense I thought he was going to kiss her—something therapy dogs are trained not to do.”

Eventually, Laura moved Apollo to the foot of the bed where he continued to watch the patient intently with his intelligent, poodle eyes for a good 20 minutes. But Sophia was unresponsive, and eventually Laura and Apollo moved on to other patients. A few hours later as she sat in a parking lot waiting to pick her daughter up from school, Laura’s phone rang. It was Jack Barron, director of UCLA’s People Animal Connection (PAC), the volunteer organization responsible for Laura, Apollo, and 49 other therapy-dog teams at UCLA.

“He said, ‘Sophia just woke up,’” recalls Laura. “‘And her first words were, “Where’s Apollo?” How fast can you get back here?’”

In hospitals across the country, stories like Laura’s are common. “I see miracles here every day,” says Barron as he talks about the PAC program in the medical center’s cafeteria. “People who just wake up. People who start eating. People who finally take their meds. People who are paralyzed and then suddenly move a couple of fingers to wave at a dog.”

But if the healing associated with these dog visits is stunning, so are the sheer numbers of dogs and their humans now certified to provide Animal Assisted Therapy (AAT), the technical term that refers to using trained dogs intentionally as a therapeutic healing tool. The Delta Society, a non-profit organization that evaluates and certifies teams across the U.S., has gone from 700 AAT teams to a staggering 10,000 plus in less than 20 years while Therapy Dogs International, a non-profit that also credentials dogs, reports that it has fielded 20,000 teams in the U.S. and Canada.

Although dogs have been used for therapeutic purposes around the globe for years, today, particularly in the U.S., their use is driven by mounting evidence that dogs truly can heal. One look at a therapy dog strolling into a hospital room and a patient’s blood pressure drops, heart rate slows, and the corrosive hormones generated by stress that damage arteries and play a part in so many diseases and disorders plummet.

In a study at the University of Southern Maine researchers found that therapy dog visits calmed the agitation of patients with severe dementia. At UCLA another group of researchers found that therapy dog visits had a significant effect on heart patients. The study looked at 76 patients with heart failure and their responses to a 12-minute visit from either a therapy dog or a volunteer, then used blood tests to compare the patients’ responses to other patients who had no visit of any kind. The results were unequivocal: There were essentially no changes in those who did not receive a visit. Visits from volunteers lowered anxiety levels around 10 percent, and didn’t do much else. But visits from therapy dogs reduced pressure in the heart and lungs by 10 percent, reduced stress hormones by 17 percent, and lowered anxiety levels by a startling 24 percent. A similar study at Massachusetts General Hospital supported those results and extended them. In this report, visits from therapy dogs markedly reduced patients’ pain levels as well.

“Blood levels of endorphins generated by the body increase dramatically after dog visits,” says University of Pittsburgh neurologist and pain specialist Dawn Marcus, M.D., author of The Power of Wagging Tails. “That’s why pain levels go down. Endorphins block stress chemicals—the body’s natural narcotic.”

Nor are the physiological effects of a therapy dog visit fleeting. Other studies have found that the benefits last a full 45 minutes. “It’s not just that the dog walks in and does its stuff,” says Marcus. “Even very brief encounters produce a helpful effect. There’s a profound, biological change. And the change is associated with better health. So when you see changes in someone who connects with a therapy dog, something’s really behind it. We’re not just crazy dog nuts. Real science proves the dogs make a difference.”

To get a sense of just how therapy dogs work their magic, this reporter pays a visit to the UCLA medical center early one morning where I meet Charley, a personable, 79-pound “goldendoodle” (golden retriever/poodle mix) therapy dog and his handler, Ellen Morrow.

It takes me about two seconds to fall in love with them both. Charley has long, straight, creamy-beige fur that falls in shaggy lines from the top of his huge head to the bottom of his equally huge feet—and a sparkle in his eyes that suggests he’s up for anything. At the other end of his leash—complete with ID badge and carrying a navy cloth bag stuffed with everything from treats and collapsible water bowls to doggie-wipes, balls, biobags, hand sanitizer, and a brush—his teammate Ellen is a tiny powerhouse of positive energy with hair about the same color and cut as Charley’s.

The three of us take the elevator up to the 4th floor to visit the adolescent psych unit. There, on an outdoor triangular roof patio sheltered on two sides by the medical center and on a third by 20-foot, clear, shatter-proof panels, a dozen kids between 14 and 18 are gathered in the sun. Some lounge in twos and threes on benches, others pace back and forth, and a few simply wander around. One kid stands alone up against a wall, looking down at his feet, shifting his weight back and forth from one foot to the other. Tall and thin, with creamy café-au-lait skin and beautiful dark curls, he is completely withdrawn, isolated as if alone on a desert island.

Except for this one young man, the kids light up when they see Charley. Ellen calls out, “Do you want to see Charley do some tricks?” and the patients gather around the two, petting the dog, shaking his paw, answering Ellen’s questions about their own pets, and asking questions about Charley. Eventually they perch on benches while Ellen folds her legs under her and sits on the ground, nose to nose with Charley.

She puts Charley through his paces—speaking in his regular voice, his quiet hospital voice, his big voice, and finding a circular cut-out on the ground as kids shift it around. But his big crowd-pleaser is the way he shakes hands, literally curling his paw around the kids’ hands and squeezing. “It’s like he’s holding your hand,” chuckles Ellen. “It’s a very personal connection. They just light up!”

The kids bond instantly with the dog. As Ellen draws kids, dogs, even staff into the interaction, each begins to open to the other: kids to dog, then to Ellen, then to staff. The process is beautiful to watch.

But the quiet young man by the wall never looks up.

Then something happens. Ellen asks Charley to give her a high-five, and the dog joyfully leaps straight up into the air, smacking both of Ellen’s raised hands with his shaggy front paws.

The kids squeal with delight, and suddenly the silent young man is paying attention. His eyes come into focus and he stops rocking back and forth. A few minutes later he rigidly stretches out a hand in Charley’s direction. Ellen, seeing the invitation, moves the dog closer. For the next 10 minutes, the young man is anchored to reality by a shaggy dog.

In the psychiatric world, breakthroughs are often made from far less.

“I love these dogs,” says unit nurse Coleen Moran. “They know when someone needs love. And that’s better than any medicine.”

Charley, Ellen, and I walk down another corridor toward the neuro trauma unit where Charley and Ellen are scheduled to visit Lois Kearney who recently had a stroke. When we arrive on the otherwise sunny unit, Lois’ room is pitch dark except for the red, white, and green lights of monitors measuring every sign of life.

Ellen checks with a nurse to see what’s going on. The nurse enters the room and quietly asks Lois if she’d like to see Charley. “Oh yes,” a faint voice murmurs from the bed.

“Come on in,” the nurse calls as she opens blackout drapes and flips on some lights.

Lois is sitting propped up on a high bed, wires taped to her head and neck, a tube taped to her nose, an oxygen mask dangling to her shoulder, IVs and other tubes running every which way to more computers, monitors, and wires than I’ve ever seen in my life. Her eyes are dull, her face pale, and she is clearly a very sick woman.

Ellen quickly surveys the situation, approaches the high-tech bed with Charley, and asks if Lois would like Charley to lie on the bed with her. The woman nods, a small smile taking shape as she looks at Charley. She watches as Ellen carefully spreads a fresh sheet over the bed where Charley will lie. Her soft “Oh!”s of amazement and delight as Ellen helps Charley onto the bed are a gift to Charley, Ellen, and the smiling staff clustered around the door, peeking in from the hall.

It’s nothing short of a love fest. As Charley lies next to Lois, she gently strokes his head and begins to tell Ellen about a dog she had for 12 years. Ellen listens, Charley connects, and Lois talks, her voice gaining strength and energy with every word.

“He’s such a love,” she says in wonder.

From floor to floor, room to room, patient to patient, the story’s the same. Charley comes in, he and the patient connect, and someone’s healing process gets a boost.

But exactly how and when did this human-dog connection happen?

Part of the answer may be rooted deep in our shared past. One theory holds that when people stopped hunting and began forming villages, early dogs—descended from wolves—started hanging around the edges. “The dogs were attracted to the trash people threw around,” says Alan Beck, D.Sc., director of the Center for the Human-Animal Bond at Purdue University. “Dogs were useful. They ate the trash, alerted residents when predators were around, helped with hunting, and provided companionship. And people found the puppies fascinating so they kept them around.”

As time passed, the connection between dog and human evolved with each growing more tightly attuned to the other’s needs. The bond between therapy dogs and the humans they visit may be the next step on that evolutionary journey, says Beck. But, in effect, the dogs are only doing what they’ve been programmed to do for centuries: help us out.

Although the theory behind the dog-human bond is plausible, there’s a real, measurable explanation for the healing that occurs, says Rebecca Johnson, Ph.D., director of the Research Center for Human-Animal Interaction at the University of Missouri, Delta Society board member, and president of the International Association of Human Animal Interaction Organizations. She points to studies defining the neurochemical changes in our brains triggered by the dog-human connection. “The vagus nerve that runs from brain to gut is stimulated when you see, hear, touch, and smell the dog,” she explains. “That triggers the relaxation response.”

The result: the amount of the stress hormone cortisol drops and oxytocin and prolactin—two feel-good hormones—increase. “When that happens,” says Johnson, “the body can switch over from a deterioration state”—a state of illness—“to a growth state” in which healthy new cells emerge that can promote healing.

“It’s the magic of animal-assisted activity,” she adds. “Actually, it’s not magic at all. It’s medicine. Good medicine.”

But not the old retired; the new retired.

Ed and Jeanie no longer toil at their professional jobs, but they’re working almost as hard on their passion—farming 85 acres in suburban Indianapolis. They mostly sell cut flowers at their roadside stand. Jeanie is famous throughout the region for her fresh-from-the-garden bouquets in canning jars with ribbon accents. “If our health holds out, we will do this as long as we can,” Ed says with a laugh. “You’ll know when Jeannie and I are truly retired. It’s when we sell the farm—or when we’ve truly bought the farm.”

Sally Haver, 71, lives in New York City and can’t imagine giving up her job as a senior vice president at career services firm The Ayers Group. She finds her work engaging and demanding (in a good way), and, just as important, she feels valued. “I can’t think of anything more interesting to do than what I’m currently doing,” she says. “I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I retired. Among my peers, a lot of people might not be working a 60-hour week, but they’re definitely working because it’s a lot more interesting than not.”

These folks are among the legions of Americans 65 and older who are eschewing the rocking chair and the golf course for a chance to continue working. Some, like Sally, remain on their lifelong career paths while others, like Ed and Jeannie, are diverging to entrepreneurial ventures, consulting, or part-time work.

But working they are.

The portion of Americans aged 65 and older in the work force has increased markedly in recent years. In 2010, an average of 17.4 percent of them were in the labor force, up from 10.8 percent in 1985, according to an analysis by AARP using U.S. government figures. And during the recession of recent years, the number of older folks in the work force swelled by 1 million workers. Specific reasons for remaining on the job are as diverse as older workers themselves. The recession has certainly shrunk many retirement nesteggs, requiring folks to work longer—or making them nervous enough that they think they should. But it’s not only about being too short on cash to retire.

“A lot of people are shifting to something that is a real passion as opposed to working to get money,” said Lita Epstein, author of Working After Retirement for Dummies. “People find it hard to sit around and play mahjong or golf all day.” Additional reasons to stay on the job include:

Ed and Jeanie Fischer and their thriving flower farm and roadside stand.

The nature of work. The decline in manufacturing and the rise of service industries means most work in America today is physically easier than it was a generation ago. Working in an office cubicle with a computer, a desk, and a phone is a far cry from laboring in a garment factory or steel mill.

Telecommuting. In a development that would have seemed futuristic even 15 years ago, many older folks are staying in touch with the office via Internet connection and a phone, allowing them to continue full or part time in a field where they are highly skilled—without the drudgery of commuting to an office.

The need to stay engaged. For many professionals, retiring is an abrupt break in much more than just a paycheck. The day-to-day of office life is a defining part of who they are and how they fit into society at large. In fact, walking away from an energizing, fulfilling occupation may be so demoralizing that it can lead to a decline in health. The recent book The Longevity Project documents a 90-year study of 1,528 Americans and found that those who lived active, involved lives and continued to work lived the longest. “Everybody has the ideas—don’t stress, don’t worry, don’t work so hard, retire and go play golf,” writes Howard Friedman, a psychology professor at University of California-Riverside and co-author of the book. “We did not find these patterns to exist in people who thrived.”

Demographers and retirement experts see the phenomenon of working well beyond traditional retirement age as a permanent shift. “I think we’re in a new normal,” says Dallas L. Salisbury, president and CEO of the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI). “There is a wake-up taking place.”

That shift is dramatic. In 1991, half of workers planned to retire by age 65. Today, it’s just 23 percent, according to the EBRI 2011 Retirement Confidence Survey—at 21 years, the longest-running annual retirement survey. Its results jibe with those from the Pew Research Center, which further found that 16 percent of Americans ages 50 to 64 say that they never expect to stop working. Case in point: Writer Joan Rattner Heilman of Mamaroneck, New York, is well into what might be called her retirement years but has decided to keep angling for writing assignments. “I seem to need some structure in my life,” Joan says. “I’m not good at hanging out all day.”

That’s not to say Joan is a workaholic. She plays tennis, volunteers, and tends to her garden during warm-weather months. But her “Puritan work ethic” tells her she needs to accomplish something before she can play. So Heilman continues to write. “I have the kind of job that has no age limit,” she says. “You can write until your brain goes.”

Joan also concedes that the money does matter to her. Being paid for her labor signifies her continuing usefulness to society. “I like to have something I’m paid for. It reinforces my identity as being a writer,” she says.

None of this is to discount the very real importance of needing money to pay for healthcare—not to mention food and shelter. In the simplest of terms, it costs more today to grow old than it ever did in the past, if only because we can expect to live so much longer. The average life expectancy in 1930 was about 60 years. Today it is 78 years. “There’s a growing recognition that ‘I may live a long time,’” says Salisbury. “People are starting to realize, ‘I shouldn’t be planning for average life expectancy; I should plan on living to 100.’”

As for that planning thing, for many it hasn’t been going so well. Certainly boomers, the first of whom began turning 65 this year, have been notorious for building up debt and failing to save. But not all of their retirement problems are of their own making. The percentage of Americans with defined pensions has fallen substantially in recent decades. And many 401(k) plans and IRAs have taken a beating in the recent recession.

Compounding things, many Americans got spooked at the peak of the recent recession and pulled their money out at the bottom of the market—the exact wrong time, Epstein says. Even those with solid savings who’d prudently placed their money in fixed-income products years earlier are looking at returns that are a mere trickle compared to even 10 years ago. A further problem is that homes today—for many, the bedrock of savings—are worth significantly less.

What it all adds up to is worry. Concern about the ability to afford a comfortable retirement is at a record high, according to the EBRI study. A full 27 percent of workers today say they are not at all confident about having enough money to retire. That’s up dramatically from just a year ago, when 22 percent lacked that confidence. “I need to be sure there’s enough money in the coffers to take care of anything that needs to be taken care of,” says Sally Haver. She’s speaking not just of her own future needs but also those of her disabled son.

Retirement was once part and parcel of the American Dream. Along with some notion of prosperity–of living better than our parents did–the Dream came with an implied life plan. You work hard while you’re young, maybe buy a house and raise a family, and then rest easy after the rings on the old tree trunk number 62 or 65. That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. In fact, for many, the notion of continuing to work past retirement age has clearly gone from a negative to a positive. “If working is not odious—if you don’t wake up every day and feel like you’re on the torture rack—you should just keep doing it,” says Sally.

You can learn more at The Biologos Foundation: http://biologos.org/blog/an-afternoon-with-john-polkinghorne

It was the end of the academic year, and he had invited some colleagues to his office for a meeting. At the conclusion, they gathered their papers, ready to leave. “Before you go,” Polkinghorne said, “I have something to tell you.”

The audience settled back into their chairs. “I am leaving the university to enter the Anglican priesthood. I will be enrolling in seminary next year.” Stunned silence filled  the room for several seconds until one of his colleagues, an atheist, finally uttered what was probably on everyone’s mind: “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

A few others were supportive of his personal choice, but there was a muttered consensus that this beacon of the scientific world had just committed intellectual suicide.

Can religion and science co-exist? Many would say no. Science, after all, deals with what can be measured, tested, and verified. Religion deals with things that can, by definition, only be taken on faith. Today, John Polkinghorne inhabits both worlds, but he understands why this is confusing to some.

“When you say that you’re a scientist and a Christian, people sometimes give you a funny look, as if you’d said, ‘I’m a vegetarian butcher.’ Many people out there think science and religion are actually at war with each other, but I believe that science and religion are friends, not foes.”

Science and religion are not mutually exclusive, Polkinghorne argues. In fact, both are necessary to our understanding of the world. “Science asks how things happen. But there are questions of meaning and value and purpose which science does not address. Religion asks why. And it is my belief that we can and should ask both questions about the same event.”

As a for-instance, Polkinghorne points to the homey phenomenon of a tea kettle boiling merrily on the stove.

“Science tells us that burning gas heats the water and makes the kettle boil,” he says.

But science doesn’t explain the “why” question. “The kettle is boiling because I want to make a cup of tea; would you like some?

“I don’t have to choose between the answers to those questions,” declares Polkinghorne. “In fact, in order to understand the mysterious event of the boiling kettle, I need both those kinds of answers to tell me what’s going on. So I need the insights of science and the insights of religion if I’m to understand the rich and many-layered world in which we live.”

Seeing the world from both the perspective of science and the perspective of religion is something Polkinghorne describes as seeing the world with “two eyes instead of one.” He explains: “Seeing the world with two eyes—having binocular vision—enables me to understand more than I could with either eye on its own.”

Polkinghorne was just 47 when he left Cambridge to become a priest in the Anglican Church. The year was 1979. The reason he left his physics post was multi-faceted. He had been part of a neighborhood Bible study and wanted to participate more in the sacraments at his church. Plus, he was ready to move on. “I had done my bit for physics,” he asserts, “and, unlike some other things in life, one doesn’t necessarily get better at physics the older one gets.”

The debate about God’s existence is “the single most important question we face about the nature of reality,” says Polkinghorne.(Photo courtesy Dean Nelson)

After being ordained, he first served in the village of Blean, just up the hill from Canterbury Cathedral. At first parishioners were leery that this towering intellect would be difficult to understand. But Polkinghorne soon won them over with clarity and reason (that metaphor about the boiling teapot is recalled by one church member), and so his presence was welcomed into the community. In 1986, he returned to Cambridge, first as a chaplain to one of the colleges and eventually as president of Queens’ College,  a position he held until he retired in 1996.

Over the years he has preached his unique “binocular vision” theory to explain how a person committed to scientific inquiry could also be committed to the teachings of the Bible. He’s written many books on the harmony of religion and science, served on boards concerned with ethical standards for medical research, and received numerous honors. For his contributions, Polkinghorne was knighted by The Queen. (As a priest, however, he cannot be addressed as “Sir Polkinghorne.”) He’s also a highly regarded public speaker, putting into words a philosophy that is so moderate and reasonable that it was bound to make enemies on both ends of the religious spectrum.

Religious fundamentalists—those who believe in a six-day creation, a literal Adam and Eve, and an earth that is 6,000 years old—tend to repudiate Polkinghorne’s acceptance of evolution, the Big Bang, and a universe that is billions of years old. Bill Hoesch, curator of the Creation and Earth History Museum in Santee, California, derides Polkinghorne’s beliefs as “idol worship.”

Hoesch doesn’t see how scientific theory can enter the picture when the subject is the miracle of creation. “Is [Polkinghorne] just wrong? Yeah. He’s been deluded,” says Hoesch. (Polkinghorne actually toured Hoesch’s museum last November. While there, he stopped at a poster that claimed there was no suggestion of death in the Bible until the sin of Adam and Eve. “It may not be in the Bible, but the evidence is everywhere else,” Polkinghorne said, shaking his head.)

On the other extreme, atheists don’t exactly cotton to his ideas either. “In the very difficult context of theoretical mathematical physics, John made a real contribution,” allows Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from the University of Texas who is also Polkinghorne’s friend and debating partner. “As for his religious interests, I’m sure he means well, but I don’t find his search for common ground a good thing. There is a relationship between science and faith, I suppose, but science tends  to weaken faith.

“I don’t want to see John go away,” Weinberg adds, laughing. “Just his beliefs.”

Religion doesn’t have all the answers, Polkinghorne agrees. He points out that magical Biblical explanations for lightning and plague were long ago debunked by science—and that the problems were solved with lightning rods and rat poison. “That’s one of the ways science has been helpful to religion,” notes Polkinghorne. “Religious explanations make mistakes, and science helps us see that some things are a natural phenomenon. That’s helpful to religion. Truth is very beneficial to both sides and helps both see more clearly. It helps and corrects some mistakes. But that doesn’t mean all religious belief is a mistake.”

And therein lies the key to Polkinghorne’s uniqueness: He addresses challenges—even rude ones—from both sides with such grace that it’s nearly impossible to be angry with the man, whatever your point of view. “There is no one else in the world like him,” said Darrel Falk, biologist, president of the BioLogos Foundation, and author of the book Coming to Peace with Science. “He is the best representative of the dialogue between faith and science because he has struggled with—and achieved so much in—both fields. He’s the most respected voice out there.”

As to the question of which has the clearer view of reality—faith or science?—Polkinghorne answers that it’s a false question. “You have to be two-eyed about it. If we had only one eye, then we could say it’s religion, because it relates to the deepest value of being human. Science doesn’t plumb the depths that religion does. Atheists aren’t stupid—they just explain less.”

Polkinghorne thinks atheists fail to consider the possibility that there might be more to life than what we can see and test and verify—that life might have transcendent and ultimate meaning. In addition, Polkinghorne argues, atheists have faiths of their own—beliefs that aren’t visible, testable, or verifiable any more than religion is, yet they inform one’s point of view in a manner similar to religious faith.

Ultimately, people of faith should not be afraid of science because both pursue truth. “Because people of faith worship the God of Truth, they should welcome truth from whatever source it comes,” Polkinghorne says. “Not all truth comes from science, but some does. It grieves me when I see Christian people turning their backs on science in a willful way, not taking seriously the insights it has to offer. All truth interacts with each other, and all truth is helpful.”

Likewise, people of science do not need to be afraid of faith. “Science doesn’t tell you everything. Those who think it does take a very diminished and arid form or view of life.”

For Polkinghorne, science made his faith stronger, and that faith made him a better scientist. Both approaches fulfill one of his favorite verses in scripture, I Thessalonians 5:21, which the esteemed physicist paraphrases: Test everything. Hold fast to what is true.

In the 1880s, the continental United States wasn’t even united. California, Oregon, and Nevada were states, but separated from their eastern counterparts by nine territories that would ultimately become 10 states. There were not yet cars, but the Industrial Revolution was well under way. The country had more than 160,000 miles of railroad tracks by 1890. That’s almost four times the length of today’s Interstate highway system. But if you wanted to travel where you wanted and when you wanted, you were relegated to the horse. Or the mule.

Conventional 19th century wisdom held that a man on horseback could cover about 20 miles a day without harming his mount. If you lived in rural America, you were unlikely to see much of the country that lay beyond your horse’s range in your lifetime. And such things as emergency medical service, Domino’s Pizza delivery, the Roto-Rooter Man, and the Avon Lady were not even dreams. Had they been, they still would have had to wait for the automobile. The automobile proved to be nothing less than the device that freed every American from the tyranny of geography and the loneliness of isolation.

How It All Started

The average American, if he thinks about early automotive history at all, knows that Henry Ford invented the Model T, that there was a song involving Lucille and an Oldsmobile, that tires lasted about two hours, and that you risked being considered daft if you drove a “horseless carriage.” After all, why would anyone want to swap placid old Dobbin, whose only wish was for some oats and hay a couple of times a day, for a smoke-belching, unreliable creation that not only frightened birds and little children, but also ceased working at frequent intervals? Anyone who aspired to be an early adopter of the thing was at best a person of questionable judgment and at worst deranged.

If you insist on seeing a birth certificate for the automobile, look not to American ingenuity, but the European kind. We start with German patent DRP No. 37435 issued on January 29, 1886, to Karl Benz. The generally accepted birth year, however, is 1885, the year Benz actually built his first gasoline-powered three-wheeler. All of which means that this is either the 125th or 126th anniversary of the car.

To show you that there’s nothing altogether new under the sun, what became known as the Benz Patent Motorwagen had rack-and-pinion steering and a glove compartment. But no cup holders.

Adding some lipstick with a little help from the car.

We are lucky that Benz got as far as he did. His first manufacturing business failed; his second was an unwelcome association between him, a photographer, and a cheese merchant. He and his business partner Gottlieb Daimler remained in the automobile business, however, and in 1926 merged to form what became Daimler-Benz and later Daimler. More than 100,000 patents ultimately contributed to the creation of what we know as the automobile, and among the important automotive pioneers in America were the Duryea brothers. From 1893 to 1896, Charles and Frank Duryea of Chicopee, Massachusetts, built America’s first standardized and series-produced automobile, 13 of them. Alas, the brothers moved the company to Peoria, Illinois, squabbled, and ultimately went their separate ways. Frank remained in Massachusetts and, with the Stevens Arms and Tool Company, built a car called the Stevens-Duryea until 1927.

In 1900, in Europe, Ferdinand Porsche, in addition to insisting that his name be pronounced POR-shuh and not Porsche, produced a remarkable automobile. It was battery powered with four electric motors, one at each wheel. Shortly afterward, he patented the Mixte, or Mixture, which had a gasoline engine driving through a dynamo to power electric motors at the wheels. Sound familiar? It should, because it was essentially a hybrid. And it happened 111 years ago.

In Michigan, which would become the seat of the American car industry, Ransom E. Olds expanded on the Duryea brothers’ feeble run at mass production. He, not Henry Ford, established the first true assembly line and used it to build a tiller-steered car known as the “curved dash” Oldsmobile. By 1902 he was pumping 2,500 cars out the door, and this rose to 5,000 Oldsmobiles by 1904. To put these sales in perspective, Benz sold 572 vehicles in 1899.

This set the stage for Henry Ford, his refined and expanded assembly line, and the Model T. Henry Ford’s first automobile was not the Model T, but the Quadricycle, an open, gasoline-fueled, four-wheel, tiller-steered contraption with a seating capacity of two. On June 4, 1896, when he was ready to test his creation, built in a shed behind his home on Bagley Avenue in Detroit, Ford had to remove a wall because the Quadricycle would not fit through the shed’s door.

That was the bad news. The good news was that the Quadricycle worked and led to the formation of the Henry Ford Company and later the Ford Motor Company.
In 1908 Henry Ford brought out the Model T, the car that would put America on wheels. It cost $850 and sold 10,000 units its first year. Four years later, Ford reduced the price to $575. By 1916 some 55 percent of the world’s automobiles were Model Ts, a record that was never equaled. By the time Model T production ceased in 1927, more than 15 million of the cars had been sold. An astonishing number of Model Ts are still with us, and there would be more had World War II scrap drives not consumed thousands of them.

The Race Is On

Mankind being what it is, the invention of the car led almost immediately to the invention of competition, especially for the land-speed record (1911 marks the first running of the Indianapolis 500). Early land-speed record cars, like ships, were given names. And the first goal they pursued was a speed in excess of 100 kilometers per hour (62.5 mph). The first man to accomplish this was a Belgian gentleman racer named Camille Jenatzy.

Known as the Red Devil because of his beard and the ferocity of his driving style, Jenatzy drove a battery-powered electric car—La Jamais Contente, French for “The Never Satisfied.” In 1899 he drove it at the astonishing speed of more than 105 kilometers an hour (65 mph). In addition to fast driving, Jenatzy also liked fast living. In December 1913, he hosted a hunting party on his estate and drank just enough at cocktail hour to think it would be amusing to remove a bearskin rug from the parlor and use it to impersonate a bear.

Jenatzy, draped in bearskin, was crouched behind some bushes snuffling and grunting like a bear, when the editor of the Belgian Star shot and killed him. Auto executives have never quite trusted journalists since.

In 1901 the first Grand Prix race, at Pau in France, was won with an average speed of 46 miles per hour. Seventy years later, Peter Gethin won the Italian Grand Prix, averaging over 150 mph. Today, Grand Prix racers routinely top 200 mph.

Meanwhile, in Cleveland, Ohio, automaker Alexander Winton was the first to install steering wheels in cars, all previously steered by tiller-like devices. In 1901, prior to a match race against Henry Ford, Winton gave Ford the design for his steering wheel. Ford beat him. For the next 110 years, racing teams have been reluctant to share with the competition.

Cars continued to improve, but highways remained significant problems. Roads in America’s outback were awful arteries barely suited for a horse and buggy, much less for motoring. In 1912 a visionary entrepreneur, Carl Fisher, set out to change that. Fisher envisioned a cross-country gravel highway to be called the Coast-to-Coast Rock Highway. Local governments would provide labor and equipment, and the business community the materials. Motorists would be able to drive from New York to San Francisco to attend the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition.

For his cross-country road project, Fisher would attract two allies who realized what this could mean to the fledgling auto industry—Frank Seiberling, president of Goodyear, and Henry Joy, the boss at Packard. Joy suggested the project be renamed the Lincoln Highway.

As you might suppose, the project bogged down over the politics of choosing a route, but by the early 1920s, the Lincoln Highway existed and ran, at some point during its history, through 14 states.

Planning for what would become today’s Interstate Highway system began in 1938, but building it did not get under way in earnest until 1956. Today, more than 46,000 miles of interstate connect our cities. By 1972 cars were traveling Los Angeles freeways at an average speed of 60 miles an hour. By 1982, the average had dropped to 17 miles per hour. Today, discouraged experts have given up calculating freeway speeds.

The Evolution of the Modern-Day Auto

Until 1911 all cars powered by internal combustion engines were cranked by hand, an act of necessity that could break an arm. Charles Kettering introduced the electric starter on 1911 Cadillacs; now even small women and little boys could operate an automobile.

The year 1923 saw the first powered windshield washers on many cars; manual wipers were first invented by a woman in 1903. Also in 1923, a radio was offered as an option for the first time. The radio was not invented by a woman, but in 1924 alone, women inventors came up with 173 devices for automobiles.
In 1924 Walter P. Chrysler introduced the first car bearing his name at the New York Auto Show. In 1927 Ford Model A production began, and so did the sales race between Ford and Chevrolet that would last for decades.

The year 1937 saw the formal establishment of what would become Volkswagen. The so-called “People’s Car,” a pet idea of Adolf Hitler, was designed by Ferdinand Porsche and owed a great deal of its configuration to the Czech-built Tatra, a streamlined rear-engine car of the period. The People’s Car became the Kubelwagen, the German Army’s Jeep equivalent during World War II, but returned to civilian use after the war as the Volkswagen Beetle.

Things you couldn't do before cars were invented such as taking the gang for an impromptu clambake.

Buick introduced the first electric turn signals in 1938. Seventy-three years later, a surprising number of drivers have been seen using them. During the World War II years, American production switched to military vehicles and aircraft, and one of history’s most famous vehicles, the Jeep, went on sale to the government. Like the Beetle, it would become vastly popular with consumers after the war.

By the late ’40s, GM had long been operating under the leadership dictates of Alfred P. Sloan, who originated the “move-up” strategy that could take you from a Chevrolet to a Cadillac with stops along the way at Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Buick. Unless you were a doctor, in which case you had to stop at Buick. Sloan also invented the annual model changeover, which cost stockholders and car buyers alike enough money to buy Saudi Arabia.

In 1948 Ford introduced the first F-series pickup. Today, the F-series has been the best-selling vehicle in the United States for 34 consecutive years. You still cannot see over them at a traffic light, a quality they share with the ubiquitous sport utility vehicles (SUVs). The SUV, by the way, is older than you think it is. Most automotive pundits credit Jeep with the first one, the all-metal, two-wheel-drive station wagon that appeared in 1946. If you are of the school that believes a true SUV has four-wheel drive, then the 1947 Jeep station wagon gets the nod. They sold in limited quantities.

The first tailfins, brainchild of GM styling chief Harley Earl, appeared in 1948 and set off a “mine are bigger than yours” styling war between GM and Chrysler that lasted until the early 1960s and lent true meaning to the phrase “wretched excess.”

Rolling into the Future

You know most of what happened after tailfins. Technical advancement after technical advancement came along—arguably culminating in the cup holder. We’ve seen a lot: fuel injection, remote rearview mirrors, electronic engine control, antilock brakes, and so on. A new car now costs the average consumer more than 50 percent of his or her household income (up from 33 percent in 1974), but you can’t have everything.

Cars today are better than anyone ever thought they could be. Diesels don’t rattle or smell anymore. Onboard GPS systems can help you find a hotel or a Starbucks when you’re traveling. Cars are safer and sounder—and they last for years, as do the payments.

Tires, one of the weak points in early automobile travel, now last 50,000 miles with ease. One unsung pioneer in this progress was Benjamin Franklin Goodrich who started the company bearing his name in 1880. B. F. gets credit for the first U.S.-made radial tire, the first “run flat” tire, the first synthetic rubber tire, and the first “space saver” spare. In 1988, B. F. Goodrich, as the firm was by then known, left tire-making to others and is now an aerospace company. The BFG brand is owned by Michelin.

The tailfin’s disappearance in the mid-1960s coincided almost exactly with the appearance of the Ford Mustang. Introduced in 1964 at the New York World’s Fair, the Mustang was the first affordable sporty car available to men with a midlife crisis.

Another affordable car, the Volkswagen Beetle, became a bestseller in the U.S. around this time but was anything but flashy. Almost a half-century later, the Mustang not only survives, but flourishes. The original Beetle is gone, but before it left, it managed to outsell the Model T. More than 21 million customers bought Beetles.
The 1970s saw the OPEC oil embargo, the hated 55-mph national speed limit, and automobiles so uninspired that it’s a wonder the housing industry didn’t quit building garages.

The Japanese auto industry took note, and before you could say “Banzai!” they were a major factor in the U.S. market. By the 1980s, Hondas and Toyotas were regulars on the lists of bestselling cars. A popular perception held that American automakers played golf and office politics while their Japanese counterparts worked at building better cars. That was true except for the golf part; the Japanese are obsessed with the game.

The U.S. industry produced the first minivan in 1983, and not long after, the SUV became the thing for moms and dads to drive because kids didn’t want to be seen in a minivan. The station wagon reappeared in the 1990s, but we now call it a crossover. The hybrid is back, and so is the electric car. Maybe they’ll work this time around.
The love affair between Americans and their cars has lasted for more than a century. Like most affairs of the heart, those years have produced triumph, tragedy, creativity, innovation, and a not insignificant dose of laughter and lunacy.

That is likely to continue. Certainly one hopes that the laughter and lunacy do not disappear entirely.

Ehrich had enormous luck, though. He discovered as a child that he was gifted as an athlete and gymnast. He took up magic, and before he was out of his teens he changed his first name to Harry and then his last name to Houdini—and he became the most famous magician who ever lived.

Ehrich Weisz was just one of 36 million people who poured into the United States in the century between 1820 and 1920. At the beginning of that period, the U.S. had a population of only 10 million. The newcomers dwarfed that number, and America became a land populated largely by recent arrivals and their descendants. Its culture and its character were remade by what those immigrants brought with them and what they created after they were here.

The immigrants came mostly in two great waves, first from northern Europe—places like Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia—and then from southern and eastern Europe—Italy, Russia—but they also came from China and Japan and Mexico and Canada and almost everywhere else on earth. They shaped the nation with their collective independent, pioneering spirit, for it was not easy or inexpensive to abandon all you knew and travel around the globe to a new land, and those who made the journey tended to be stubborn and ambitious. They also shaped the nation with the fortitude they showed after they got here, for almost all of them had to strive long and hard to rise to prosperity, and most of them faced discrimination and disdain from the moment they arrived. As we struggle with the burdens we sometimes feel placed on us by our latest immigrants­—especially illegal ones—it can be heartening to remember what struggles there were before, in a time when there were virtually no limits on who could come to America or what hardships they could be forced to put up with.

Around the same time Ehrich Weisz arrived in the U.S., Luigi Giannini traveled from Italy to try to succeed as a farmer in the lush lands of California, but he wasn’t there long before he was murdered by one of his farmworkers over two dollars in wages. His son, Amadeo, dropped out of school in the eighth grade and went to work for a wholesale produce business. Amadeo proved so good at buying and selling that by 1904 he was able to open a little bank in a former saloon in San Francisco’s Italian neighborhood to serve immigrants who most banks wanted nothing to do with. He called it the Bank of Italy, and under his guidance it opened branches even through the earthquake of 1906 and the Panic of 1907. In the 1920s, he changed its name from the Bank of Italy to the Bank of America. It remains today one of the nation’s great financial institutions.

There are countless stories like those, because to be an immigrant at all you almost had to have unusual resourcefulness, imagination, and drive. The first big group to arrive was the Irish in the late 1840s. More than two million of them—around a quarter of Ireland’s population—sailed to the United States to escape mass starvation caused by the potato disease known as the “blight.” They were so hated by some Americans that they weren’t even considered white—a cartoon in Harper’s Weekly in 1876 showed a black man and a just-as-black Irishman above the caption “The Ignorant Vote.” Yet by the 1880s they were the master politicians of many of the cities in which they dwelled. More than five million Germans came to America during the century of immigration as well; today, Germany remains Americans’ top place of ancestral origin—above England or anywhere else. Germans and Scandinavians tended to move to rural areas in the Midwest, establishing farming communities. By 1890, the United States was a nation of lager beer drinkers and lovers of German food, and there were 800 German-language newspapers across the land. Most large U.S. cities fostered sizable German-speaking communities until the start of World War I, when all things German suddenly came to be considered unpatriotic.

Chinese began arriving on the West Coast in the late 1840s, imported to do grueling labor such as building railroads and mining, work not many whites wanted to do. Often they were the bulk of the population in the mining camps of the West, and in San Francisco in 1870 there were estimated to be two white people and one Chinese person for every job. The Chinese were the victims of especially virulent discrimination, seen as an inferior race that put “real” Americans out of work. In 1882 a law was passed that almost completely stopped them from coming to America. It was the first time there was even a concept that immigration could be illegal. Until then the door had been open to everybody.

The second big wave of immigration began in the 1880s. More than 4 million people left Italy for the United States between 1880 and 1920, and about as many Jews came from eastern Europe, especially Poland and Russia—about a third of all the Jews in those countries. The Jews were driven from their homelands principally by religious persecution, the Italians by unending grinding poverty. At the beginning, both groups stayed mainly in the cities of the eastern seaboard, packed together in crowded, desperately poor neighborhoods. In 1910 there were 500,000 Jews living on the Lower East Side in New York City, which one person called “the filthiest place in the Western Continent.” By 1920 New York was home to 400,000 Italian immigrants.

Jews found that they hadn’t escaped anti-Semitism at all by coming to the New World, although it almost never threatened their lives as it had in the Old. As for Italians, The New York Times once ran an editorial that said, “Our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as they.” As the twentieth century dawned and poor new arrivals from abroad made up more and more of the population of America’s biggest cities, pressure grew to put limits on immigration.

Where were the laws to control the great influx? They barely existed. In 1790, Congress ruled that any “free white persons” who were in the country for two years could become citizens. In 1868, after the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment affirmed that anyone born in the U.S. was a citizen, protecting not only former slaves but every child of an immigrant. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, putting an end to immigration from China. In 1892, the federal government opened Ellis Island in New York Harbor, but it turned away only “idiots, insane persons, paupers,” criminals, and people “suffering from a loathsome or contagious disease.” In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt persuaded Congress to establish a commission to study immigration, and the commission delivered a report that stated that recent arrivals, especially Italians and Jews, were “far less intelligent” than earlier ones with an “absence of family life.” That gravely unfair assessment led to the passage of laws in the 1920s that almost completely stopped immigration. The century of immigration ended. Large numbers of new Americans wouldn’t begin to enter again until President Lyndon Johnson—standing beneath the Statue of Liberty—signed a new law reopening the nation’s doors in 1965.

All through the century of immigration there were fears that the hordes of newcomers from exotic lands would never assimilate into American society. But of course they did—and in so doing they enriched American society immeasurably. To state just the most obvious, imagine Boston without Irish politicians or New Orleans without Cajun (originally French-Canadian) food and music or an entertainment world without Jewish humor or San Francisco without Chinatown. Still far worse, imagine the land without all the people who brought those things. You can’t, because they—and their ideas and hopes and dreams and all of their descendants—became America. America became them. They are no less us than are the original settlers who trekked over the land bridge from Asia to Alaska tens of thousands of years ago, no less us than the first few English who settled a few scattered spots on the coastline or the millions of Africans who were taken across the ocean in chains. It is a cliché, but it is a true one, that America is defined by people who came from elsewhere, what they brought with them, and the new things they created after they got here.

It is encouraging to remember as we face the immigration struggles of the present moment that not only have we seen it all before, but that the history of immigration in America is almost all a story of heroic, difficult struggle—and that it is finally a story of triumph.

Despite all the ways that he is like his father, and they are many, Jamie is a very different kind of artist and very much his own man. “I grew up with the legacy thing. My father did, too,” he says. “That could crush you unless you left it outside the door of the studio. In a funny sense, though, my grandfather, who I never knew, had more of an influence on me.”

Newell Convers “N.C.” Wyeth (1882-1945) died in a tragic train-car accident in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, the year before Jamie was born. N.C. Wyeth was a larger-than-life figure, a swashbuckler of a man whose dramatic illustrations fired the imaginations of generations of readers beginning with his first illustration commission—a bucking bronco painted for the cover of the February 21, 1903, issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

By comparison, Jamie’s father, Andrew, was a quiet, reserved, and far more subtle and secretive man. Growing up in Chadds Ford, young Jamie played in his late grandfather’s studio amidst the costumes and props used in his grandfather’s pictures of cowboys and Indians, pirates and warriors. “For a kid, it was just magical. Then I’d go to my father’s studio where he’d be working on a dead bird or dried grass.”

Andrew became one of America’s most popular painters—the austere poet laureate of rural life in coastal Maine and Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley. Like his father and grandfather before him, Jamie paints both these places as well, the personal poles of the Wyeth world. And in each place the family has a museum devoted to its art—the Farnsworth Art Museum’s Wyeth Center in Rockland, Maine, and the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

Where his father was a somber tone poet who sucked all the air and color out of local scenes in Maine and Pennsylvania leaving only the painted bones for eternity, Jamie paints with a lively, bold, colorful playfulness and freedom that recalls the melodrama of his grandfather’s illustrations for children’s classics such as Treasure Island, The Deerslayer, and Kidnapped.

Jamie generally marks his own decision to become an artist at 1958, the year he completed the sixth grade and, at his own request, left formal education behind to study art—first with his aunt, Carolyn Wyeth, and then with his father. Andrew, too, had been homeschooled and mentored by his father.

Young Jamie had already entered American art history, however, as one of his father’s subjects. “Faraway” (1952) depicts six-year-old Jamie sitting in a field in a coonskin cap with a distant look in his eyes (top, right). Jamie, a big Davy Crockett fan at the time, still remembers the hat, the boots he wore, and the long hours spent posing for his father. “I had a lead soldier that I played with every time my father took a break,” he recalls. “I lost it in the grass. I looked everywhere for it, but I couldn’t find it. I had dreams about that soldier.”

N.C. Wyeth was a hugely successful illustrator, but his attempts to paint landscapes were nowhere near as successful as his son Andrew’s. “His non-illustration work was rather self-conscious,” says Jamie of his grandfather. “There was this tremendous pride in his son but also this terrible jealousy.” The professional relationship between Jamie and his own father had elements of friendly rivalry, too, but it was far healthier. “In terms of painting, we were completely honest with one another,” says Jamie. “That I really miss.”

Although Andrew was enormously popular, his very popularity was the kiss of death in the contemporary art world, which—having embraced abstract expressionism in the 1950s—tended to view him as a throwback, a nostalgic realist. “Andrew Wyeth was one of the most misunderstood painters,” says his son. “He was no more a realist than the man in the moon. He painted a very strange, airless world.”

Jamie compares his father’s New England Gothic imagery to the spare poetry of Robert Frost. “At one level, it’s all snowy woods and stone walls,” he says. “At another, it’s terrifying. It exists at both levels.”

Still, Andrew’s paintings tend to exist in that gray area between critical scorn and public adulation. “I was at the Museum of Modern Art recently and there was a crowd around ‘Christina’s World,’” says Jamie of his father’s most famous painting, the iconic image of disabled spinster Christina Olson crawling back across a field to her Maine farmhouse. “The museum hates it. They hang it in a hall. But the guards will tell you the two most asked questions at the museum are ‘Where’s the men’s room?’ and ‘Where is “Christina’s World?”’”

The other charge that the art establishment throws at the Wyeths—all three of them—is that they are illustrators rather than artists. “I’ve always taken it as a supreme compliment,” Jamie said in a 1998 interview. “What’s wrong with illustration? There’s this thing now that illustrations are sort of secondary to art, and I think it’s a bunch of crap.”

Reminded of that defiant statement today, Jamie notes that the beloved painter Norman Rockwell was denigrated in the same manner. “I’ve always found Rockwell amazing,” he says, “but my father loathed him. He was almost threatened by Rockwell. He said he had no imagination—that he did everything from photographs with syrupy emotions.”

Jamie himself has no qualms whatsoever about answering the call to illustrate. One of his most recent projects was to paint pictures for the children’s book Sammy in the Sky, a realistic tale of canine love and loss by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barbara Walsh. And, despite his occasional forays across the border into commercial art, his pure-art credentials remain untarnished. That’s partly because, unlike his father, he makes the effort to know and be known in the rarified art world. “He is far more interested than his father was in seeing what’s out there, and living in New York as he does part of the year is itself a statement about his engagement with the world of contemporary art,” says Michael Komanecky, chief curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum. He also notes that as a young man Jamie spent a lot of time at Andy Warhol’s Factory, arguably the epicenter of 20th century American art.

“With Warhol,” says Jamie, “I was just curious about him as a person. This peculiar little man in a wig just fascinated the heck out of me.”

Victoria Wyeth, daughter of Jamie’s brother Nicholas and Andrew Wyeth’s only grandchild, is the designated family docent, giving lectures on all things Wyeth when not working as a therapist in the Pennsylvania state hospital system. She sees her uncle’s art as much more varied than her grandfather’s. “Jamie is the future of our family,” says Victoria. “And he’s so different. He’s managed to do his own thing in his own style, and he’s painted everything from pigs to presidents.”

“Jamie’s art is more openly expressive and expansive, soliciting a wide range of emotions,” adds Wanda Corn, professor emerita of art history at Stanford University, author of The Art of Andrew Wyeth, and a board member of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. “He can be funny, horrific, ghoulish, and theatrical. His brush is often wild and his color riotous. He enjoys provoking his viewers, making them feel extreme emotion. He is a great animal painter.”

A good-humored menagerie of dogs, geese, gulls, sheep, ravens, chickens, cows, horses, ducks, and especially pigs populate Jamie’s paintings. Enormous, pink, intelligent, clean, and forthright, pigs have become almost a totem animal for Jamie. As he explains in the text to the catalogue to his current exhibition, “Farm Work,” he first took a shine to pigs when a neighbor’s pig, a sow with a crooked snout named Den-Den, got into his studio and ate some of his oil paints. “Months later they were sending her to the butcher,” Jamie recalls. “I thought, I can’t have that. By consuming and surviving twenty-two tubes of my paint, she had endeared herself to me. So I took her to our farm at Point Lookout.” A steady stream of pig paintings ensued.

“The whole family has a wonderful sense of humor,” says Victoria, “and Jamie’s the one who paints with it.”

At almost any given time there is a Wyeth family exhibition somewhere in the world. “The Wyeth Family: Three Generations of American Art; Works from the Bank of America Collection” spent the summer of 2010 at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London and will be featured at the Mona Bismarck Foundation in Paris from November 26, 2011, to March 6, 2012. Jamie’s “Farm Work” exhibition, which features his animal paintings, runs through September 11, 2011, at the Brandywine River Museum. And in 2014, Jamie’s own lifetime of art will be featured in a major retrospective at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston.

“I hate having shows,” Jamie confides. “All the inadequacies in the paintings scream out to me. Painting is so difficult, it reduces the three generations thing to nothing.”

But Jamie will soldier on, bearing the Wyeth family banner high into the 21st century, both because he wants to and because his father expected him to do so. It is his pleasure, his birthright, and his duty.

Andrew’s final words to his son were simple and direct—”Just give them hell.”

N.C. Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth

Jamie Wyeth

As they came through the turn, he saw the accident. A woman had smashed her car into the rocks, the impact tossing her vehicle across two lanes of traffic and onto the median strip. Debris littered the road.

The bus braked hard to a stop and, without thinking, Joplin leaped to the ground and ran to the car. “I thought the driver was a goner,” he recalls. “Her whole face was bloody, she was unconscious, and the roof was caved in. She had her seatbelt on, but the way she hit…” He shakes his head. “The hardest part was the kids had to watch.”

As he paused for a moment to assess the damage, the driver’s compartment began to fill with smoke. Joplin ran back to the bus and grabbed a fire extinguisher. “By the time I got back, the engine compartment was full of flames,” he says. He emptied the extinguisher over the blaze as other motorists pulled the driver from the wreck.

“She was so banged up I questioned the choice to move her,” he says. “But it was the right thing to do because the fire reignited and totally consumed the car’s interior.”

Joplin is more comfortable hiking the Long Trail high in the mountains of Vermont or reading Blueberries for Sal to his kindergartners than he is being called a hero. But, by anyone’s definition, that’s precisely what he is. When another human being needed help, he acted decisively and put himself in harm’s way.

“I’m not a hero,” he protests vehemently. “When I think of a hero, I think of that guy who stepped in front of the shooter in Tucson when Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot in January. Now he’s a hero!”

Joplin is referring to Bill Badger, the 70-something retired army colonel who leaped at the Tucson shooter as he tried to reload, and held onto his gun arm as two others joined him to subdue the man. Six people died that day, including an elderly woman and a young girl, but Badger undoubtedly saved others from violent death.

Watching the replay of cell phone images and news media interviews with Tucson survivors, the question became inescapable: What makes a person risk himself to save others?

“Helping others in a crisis is a gut response,” explains researcher Paul Slovic, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and president of Decision Research, a nonprofit institute that investigates human judgment, decision-making, and risk. “We don’t fully understand what’s going on in the brain, but we’re built in a way to respond quickly to emergencies. And in a crisis, we don’t sit back and weigh the costs and benefits with pencil and paper. We react in an instant.”

Essentially, the human default position is to help others.

Most people we tag with the label “hero” are professionals who have been trained as soldiers, firefighters, police, paramedics, or search and rescue team members to hone that instinctive, heroic response and put their lives on the line—so in the split-second it takes to decide to either run or help, they’ll move forward and do what needs to be done. They’ll take the risk, take the bullet, take the consequences.

But so, it turns out, will ordinary people on their way to work or picking up milk at the corner market. There’s the subway hero in New York City who, after a woman commuter fell from the train platform onto the tracks, jumped onto the tracks himself, pulled her between the rails, and covered her body with his as a train passed over the two of them.

There’s the letter carrier in Lexington, Massachusetts, who saw a house on fire, ran in, and pulled a 96-year-old man to safety. Before it was brought under control, the blaze engulfed the house and burst through the roof.

Then there’s the Mississippi football coach who was out fishing with a buddy when he spotted smoke coming from another craft. Acting swiftly, the coach pulled passengers to safety just before the craft burst into flame.

And there’s the Pennsylvania mom who was picking up some milk from the local stop-and-go when she saw a man grab his former wife and force her into a car. As the man tried to hang on to the woman and get into the car himself, the mom leaped forward, opened the passenger door, yanked the woman out of the car, and pulled her into the store to call police.

“Every one of us is a hero in waiting,” says Scott Allison, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Richmond and co-author of Heroes: What They Do & Why We Need Them. “We’re just waiting for the opportunity to step forward and do something extraordinary.”

Still, why? Why place oneself in harm’s way—often for a complete stranger? After all, it’s not rational, and it’s certainly not prudent. The explanation may have as much to do with human biology as with altruism, says Allison. “There’s research to show that there’s a biological, evolutionary tendency toward these actions. We’re social animals. And we’ve learned, or at least our genes have learned, that survival is fostered by social relationships. We’ve learned that if we’re helpful to others, we’re more likely to survive ourselves.”

Selfless selfishness: That does sound like a bit of a paradox, but it may well be that the engine of self-interest—on a genetic level, at least—is what drives our noblest deeds.

Another surprising fact about heroism is that it need not be associated with danger or classical ideas of bravery at all. Heroism does not require standing in front of a speeding bullet, leaping through fire, or putting one’s life on the line. Indeed, there are many ways to be heroic, and some do so quietly, without any fanfare. Take Mississippi washerwoman Oseola McCarty. Forced to quit school in the sixth grade to care for an elderly home-bound relative, she took in laundry to support herself. Throughout her life, she never owned a car, walked everywhere she needed to go, attended Friendship Baptist Church every Sunday, held her Bible together with tape, and banked just about every dime she ever made. Eventually those dimes added up to $150,000—and Oseola decided to give it all away.

“More than I could ever use,” the tiny, 87-year-old told The New York Times.

The money went into a trust and, upon her death in 1999, some went to her church and family, but most went to the University of Southern Mississippi, a nearby school that did not admit children of Oseola’s race when she was a girl. The money—quickly matched by a business community humbled by the woman’s generosity—was used to provide scholarships for nine African-American children.

Or take two nuns in Indianapolis, Sisters Rita Ann Wade and Barbara McClelland, who had seen the largely middle-class eastside neighborhood nearby slide into poverty. Based at the Holy Cross convent, church, and school, they watched as older residents—and some of the young ones, too—became afraid to venture into the increasingly hostile streets.

Holy Cross became an oasis of safety and succor. It wasn’t unusual for a homeless or hungry soul to come knocking on the convent’s back door in the middle of the night. “Holy Cross had a food pantry, and the door to the parish office was right next to our kitchen door,” explains Sister Barbara. “So when people got hungry or just wanted to talk, they’d come and pound on our door.”

She chuckles. “We had one guy who came every night at 2, 3, or 4 in the morning and woke us up.”

As a result of their nocturnal visitors, the two Sisters jokingly began to refer to their “back door ministry.” But they also recognized the very real need for a place where people in the neighborhood could find food, a place to relax, a place to be heard, a place to be safe—and a couple of loving hearts.

The two women approached the problem the way they approached every other challenge: They thought about it, prayed about it, then talked to their spiritual community. The women’s order ultimately voted to have the nuns quit their jobs and begin serving the neighborhood on a full-time basis. Within a year, Sisters Rita Ann and Barbara had rented and renovated a house on the near eastside and named it “Miracle Place” (amiracleplace.org).

Today, 11 years later, the house is a hive of activity—and the Sisters have also cleared away a pocket park across the street where kids can play safely. Those who have watched the community evolve say that the Sisters will never tell you the half of what they do nor take the credit for any of it. Yet one look at the door constantly swinging open for neighborhood children, their brothers, sisters, parents, and old folks shows the Sisters are saving lives as fully as if they were snatching victims from a burning building.

The point being that heroes come in different forms: the action-hero kind like Joplin James, the secret-giver kind like Oseola McCarty, and the quietly devoted kind like Sisters Rita Ann and Barbara.

There’s heroism in such small gestures as writing a check to your favorite charity, coaching a little league team, or offering a kindness to a total stranger. “It’s all these gifts of self that, put together, really make the biggest difference,” says Diane Heavin, co-founder of the Curves fitness centers and a star of the ABC hit television show Secret Millionaire.

In fact, if you really want to change someone’s life, “Think about the last time you put a smile on someone’s face,” says Heavin. “Then go out there and do it again.”

Ellen Michaud is the author of Blessed: Living a Grateful Life. Contact her at theblessedblog.com.

“I have a few questions,” Susana interjected, stopping the pediatrician in her tracks. “What do I do for her?”

“Give her some Tylenol,” she advised. “She’ll be fine.”

“How much Tylenol do I give her?” the new mother asked.

“What is her body weight?” the doctor said, scanning Sofia’s chart.

“I don’t know—no one in 
your office weighed her or took her temperature,” she replied. “Will you please pay more attention to this situation and tell me what’s wrong with my daughter? I need information.”

Because Susana spoke up, her daughter got the attention she needed, and Susana got the information and guidance that she, as a paying customer and concerned mother, had a right to expect from the doctor. But not everyone feels comfortable doing that, even if they should.

Being wise medical consumers means choosing medical partners we can communicate with effectively and trust. When it comes to protecting our health, we have to be sure that we are getting what we pay for. An engaged, concerned, and skilled doctor is the best health care investment we can hope to find.

Illustrated by Pablo Bernasconi

Let’s Talk

Perhaps the most important step to becoming a smart medical consumer is the process of finding and choosing the right GP or family physician. That person will be your closest medical partner and will play an important role in helping you make other decisions about your health care management and practitioners. If 
you are in the market for a new physician, ask your friends and co-workers for recommendations, and go online to find out what doctors within that specialty are located in your area. When you’ve found one you want to “interview,” call the office and schedule an introductory appointment, so you can go 
in, share your medical history, and get a sense of the doctor’s attitudes and approach to medicine. (Tell the scheduling assistant specifically what 
you want to do during the appointment so you have adequate time.)

As with any interview, little things count: The office workers, nurses, and med techs should be friendly and helpful; the office should be clean; the doctor should be open and willing to talk with you about your concerns and interests. Keep it relatively simple, but use your time to determine how well this physician’s working approach suits your own. Does he or she communicate with patients via e-mail when appropriate? Is this doctor comfortable discussing information you’ve gathered? What hospital affiliations does the practice maintain? What regular screening tests does he recommend for someone of your age group? Talk about your major health concerns and listen closely to the answers you receive. If you’re comfortable with the initial meeting, schedule a full physical and use that experience to cement or break the deal with this doc.

Partner with Your Physician

Doctors are not infallible, nor should we expect them to be. Like the rest of us, they occasionally will be distracted and disengaged, and they won’t always seek our active collaboration in the doctor-patient relationship. It is therefore our responsibility to speak up, ask questions, and insist that our voices are heard when we have concerns about our treatment.

We don’t need a degree in medicine to partner with our doctors. We can start with some very simple steps. First, we should realize that our medical history is our business, not just our doctors’ “property.” Most of us know that we should maintain a list of our medications, including dosages and directions for use, along with any alternative health practices and supplements. In addition, many patient advocates advise that we keep track of our medical records, requesting copies from our doctors for our own safekeeping. That way, we know exactly what information is available to new physicians and consulting specialists—and we have the important information we need if we want to do our own research. Further, with copies of our test results in hand, we can be sure that the correct name appears on them and that there wasn’t a mix-up at the lab.

Be Your Own Records Keeper

Illustrated by Pablo Bernasconi

Every time you visit a new doctor, you’re asked to complete a personal health information form that lists family medical history, your history of diseases, illnesses, injuries, hospitalizations, allergies, and so on. You’re also asked to complete a “release of information” form, which enables your previous doctor to release health records to the new doctor’s office. With all this information floating around, you might wonder why anyone would need to keep his or her own personal health record. But, according to the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), everyone should do so. That way, no matter when or where we need health care, the medical provider we consult has access to a full and detailed medical history.

These records can be in written or electronic form, stored in a file folder, on a computer hard drive or disk, on a portable USB removable flash drive, or through an online service. The AHIMA maintains a Web site (My Personal Health Record, myphr.com) that offers full information about the benefits of maintaining a personal health record, along with free downloadable electronic forms for compiling one. The site has a search feature to find forms, tools, and software for storing records. Online services typically have access codes and other measures devised to keep information secure and accessible only by those you’ve authorized. Some online storage services are free, while others charge a monthly fee; check each service carefully when making your choice.

Asking Questions, Getting Answers

At some point, most of us will need a medical advocate—a friend or relative who can accompany us to our appointment or examination to help take notes, ask questions, and listen to information. If 
our doctor wants to send us on our way with a prescription, we first should ask for the drug’s name, its purpose, side effects, potential negative interaction, and so on. Then, when we fill the prescription, we need to check its accuracy before we leave the pharmacy. And we should always feel free to ask “why”: Why do I need this drug, treatment, or surgery? How else could we tackle this problem? What benefits will I get 
from this treatment plan, and what risks am I taking?

Some doctors can be prickly when they sense that their authority is 
being challenged. So how do we help make sure that our physician isn’t misdiagnosing our condition? Jerome Groopman, M.D., recommends that patients or their advocates describe to their doctors exactly what worries them most about their symptoms or condition. And ask early—don’t leave important details until the doctor is leaving the room. Groopman also suggests that patients ask questions 
to make their doctors think more deeply about their diagnosis, such as “What else could this be?”

We shouldn’t hesitate to speak up about sloppy practices, either. We can—and need to—ask whether all medical instruments, including stethoscopes and blood pressure armbands, 
have been sterilized, 
and whether we should be started on antibiotics before surgery, to help ward off post-surgical infections.

Illustrated by Pablo Bernasconi

Patient-Physician Compatibility?

Through the years, my expectations for physicians have changed. If you’re going to need ongoing service, such 
as from a cardiologist, dermatologist, internist, or gynecologist, then compatibility is much more important. On the other hand, if you’re seeing a specialist for a (hopefully) one-time treatment, such as an oncologist or surgeon, personality is not as important. What you really want to know is, “How good is the doctor for this type of treatment?” A good question to ask in the first meeting is, “What is your success rate?”

I firmly believe it’s important for patients to be accountable for their bodies and health. We are in a professional relationship with our physicians. We may form close bonds with the health care teams that tend to us or our loved ones, but we can’t afford to overlook potential warning signs simply because we like and trust them. Mistakes happen all the time. Better that we ask why an order has been changed, why a vital sign has been altered, why a medication has been dropped or started, than to have a simple slip-up go unchecked and develop into a fatal error.

Collecting is a national pastime in America. From postcards to Pez dispensers, it is a hobby that’s fun, enjoyable, and family-friendly. However, the hobby has a dark underside—phonies. The fake collectibles industry is huge—some estimate it generates billions of dollars worldwide each year—and countless people are unwittingly shelling out significant money for stuff that is nearly worthless. Below are some tips that could help collectors avoid fraudulent merchandise.

General tips

1. Use caution when a seller requests privacy. Sometimes, this is for perfectly legitimate reasons. “Sellers will often request privacy when selling higher end stuff,” says Bill Kranz, an appraiser at Antique Helper auction house (antiquehelper.com), “because people are going to want to keep very valuable things safe.” However, when someone is trying to sell counterfeit merchandise, they will often request privacy because they don’t want experts around pointing out their phony product. Whenever dealing with a private seller, Kranz advises that you ask for some form of documentation that you can verify with a secondary source.

2. Ask for a guarantee. In many cases, a seller is unaware that they have a fake or misrepresented item. If you buy it and later find out that it isn’t what you thought, you should be able to return it. Even the most reputable dealers can make a mistake. Dan Ripley, owner of Antique Helper, has a standing policy that if his company mistakenly sells a misrepresented item, they will take it back at any time. “A fake is a fake,” he explains. “They don’t expire.”

3. Cliches can sometimes be, well, cliche. But many are repeated for good reason. “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is,” is golden for collectors. In other words, things that are supposedly valuable should reflect it in the price. There are exceptions—television programs such as American Pickers and Antiques Roadshow highlight items worth much more than the owner thought. But according to Andrea Hastings, also an appraiser with Antique Helper, this is rare. “That doesn’t happen often,” she says. “It’s like hitting the lottery. A person that finds an item like that usually has some idea that it is valuable.” A good rule of thumb is that if someone is knowledgeable about an item, they know better than to grossly undervalue it. If someone found an item in the basement and doesn’t know much about it, it is best for everyone involved if they get an expert opinion. Of course, there are always bargains, but be wary of seemingly outrageously good deals.

4. As with much of life, knowledge is invaluable, and one key reason that people buy false collectibles is a lack of it, according to Hastings. “The best way to know (if something is fake) is to have experience with the real thing,” she explains. “In many cases (where people are scammed), they pick up an item they don’t know about and think ‘Hmmm. This seems like a good deal.’”

The root of this problem is looking at collecting in the wrong way. There are two reasons for collecting: enjoyment and investment. Some make a living via the latter. However, this requires expertise that can only be gained by experience. In many cases it is learned the hard way. “Part of the learning curve is making mistakes,” explains Hastings. “It has happened to everyone on some level.” She and her colleagues recommend that it is best to start by collecting for enjoyment, for multiple reasons. First, value is subjective. There is always worth in something as long as you enjoy it, even if everyone else thinks it’s a bad deal. Second, someone thinking of enjoyment views money spent as permanent, while someone thinking of investment views money spent as temporary. The lure of future returns might induce bad decisions. Another cliche sums up the third and most important reason– “You must learn to walk before you can run.” Collecting for enjoyment teaches you the basics, which you should know before you invest.

Autographs

1. In many cases, supposedly authentic autographs are simply copies of an original. One good way to detect if a signature is a copy is to inspect it with a magnifying glass or run your finger over it (with permission). If it is flat, it may be copied. If it is raised, then it has probably been added mechanically. Pens usually make a detectable imprint. Also, printers leave telltale signs. “A print machine just sees signatures as a function,” explains Kranz. “They do what they are programmed and don’t distinguish between image and signature.” Many modern printers use a dot matrix system, so if the signature is comprised of tiny dots detectable by magnifying glass, it is fake. (Bonus tip: the dot matrix was not around before the 70s, so anything older than that should not have microdots.)

2. Unfortunately, another mechanical signature forger, the “autopen” machine, also makes a detectable imprint. However, they also produce telltale signs. Autopen signatures start and end with a dot detectable by magnifying glass because the machine goes straight up and down when writing and stops and starts abruptly (think sewing machine). People, however, generally use pens at an angle and their writing motion extends beyond where the pen actually touches the page, so the autograph will taper off at the ends. Autopen machines can also vibrate, so be wary of shaky looking signatures. Conversely, perfectly straight lines are not generally created freehand and are also a warning. One final red flag is that if the ink is evenly distributed, the autograph might be mechanical. People naturally put more or less pressure on various parts of their signature.

3. Consider how realistic the autograph is. Autographs from older figures won’t appear on modern things. For example, Teddy Roosevelt would not have signed anything about the 50 states because Hawaii and Alaska did not gain statehood until after his death. Also, celebrities won’t likely sign things unrelated to them. Albert Einstein would probably not have signed a Boston Celtics jersey, and Larry Bird likely would not sign a book on nuclear physics. As with any collectible, don’t be afraid to ask for authentication. It also never hurts to point out things that don’t make sense and ask “Why?”

Antiques

1. Antiques were not originally designed to become antiques; they were made to be used. Therefore, true antiques show signs of wear. A good place to look is where people would come in contact with the item. Handles should show discoloration, smoothness, or other signs of being held; chairs should show signs of being sat in, and so on. Also, genuine antiques will exhibit normal wear and tear, such as chipped paint or minor cracks in the finish.

2. Unfortunately, counterfeiters are aware that antiques should look aged and make things look old. There are several ways to do this, according to Kranz. “There could be chemical discoloration or fading, or marks could be made by hand,” he explains. “In some cases, someone will just bury an ‘antique’ in the backyard for six months.” There are, however, detectable differences with these methods. A good rule of thumb is that “aging should make sense,” says Kranz. If it just doesn’t look natural, be wary. Uniformity is the biggest sign of artificial aging, because things break down a little here and a little there over time, not equally all over. Metal discoloration should vary, and dirt and dust should have accumulated more in certain places. Look at the area of an antique that would have been more exposed. The top of a table or legs of a chair, for example, should look more worn than other parts. Signs of aging should also look worn. For example, wood chipped 50 years ago will look more faded than wood chipped last week. Lastly, if there are two of the same antique, look at both. If they are genuine, they will exhibit differences. Identical or similar signs of aging on both indicates counterfeits.

3. Look at how the antique is made. Older items typically have more attention to detail, so pay attention to the intricacy of the paint, carpentry, etc. Also, keep in mind history. Anything made before the assembly line (pre-1920s) should not show signs of mass production. There should be small imperfections and quirks on an item if it was handmade. Also, Phillips screws, power tools, and circular saws did not become widespread until the 1930s, so they should not be evident in older items.  Finally, look at what is holding it together. If the nails, screws, or staples look shiny and new and the rest looks old, it is probably fake.