Recent freelance work
Countering the Growing ‘National Scandal’ of Elder Homelessness
At age 82, Roberta Rabinovitz realized she had no place to go. A widow, she had lost both her daughters to cancer, after living with one and then the other, nursing them until their deaths. While recovering from lung cancer, Rabinovitz ended up at her grandson’s home, where she slept on the couch and struggled to navigate the steep staircase to the shower. That wasn’t sustainable, and Rabinovitz joined the growing population of older Americans unsure of where to lay their heads at night.
As his 28-year-old daughter suffers from long COVID, a doctor clings to hope.
For Samantha Crausman, each day begins with a tiny reservoir of energy. Every activity — eating, listening, even thinking — drains that pool, forcing her to calculate how to expend it. She follows a rigid routine and rarely leaves her bedroom, trapped in an existence that seems to shrink with each passing year, her young life stalled. As the world has moved on from the pandemic, some 20 million Americans — most of them women — continue to suffer from a variety of COVID-19 symptoms.
She grew up unvaccinated. Now she’s a leading voice for science
At the age of 23, Elisabeth Marnik approached her doctor with an unusual request: Vaccinate me. Against everything. She had never received a single vaccine. But now, angry and defiant, she was turning away from the beliefs of her childhood, instilled by a mother who distrusted science. Years later, after she became a mother herself, Marnik came to have sympathy for her mother’s choices. Today, she is striving to counteract the kind of misinformation that ensnared her family.
‘You want to put me back on the street?’
One resident 5 Franklin Street, a boxy gray building with a flat top and a long wheelchair ramp, has lost his legs and his hands. Two were paralyzed in motor vehicle accidents. Several live with profound mental illness. All 14 residents of this home in Northampton have complex medical challenges, and all had been homeless for years, living in shelters or on the street. Now, this program and dozens of others around the state may have to shrink or close because of a looming federal policy change.
New Alzheimer’s treatments and studies are fueling a sense of hope
Every few weeks, a 65-year-old man named Rick drives from his home in New Hampshire to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, to have a clear liquid infused into his bloodstream. He’s not sick, and this procedure is not treatment. It’s an experiment, one of many fueling a new sense of momentum among Alzheimer’s researchers. They're asking a fundamental question: Can the disease be stopped, or delayed, before it has noticeable effects?
New approaches to finding cancer early raise hopes — and questions
The goal is to take the same energy and skill that has been deployed to develop treatments for cancer, and put it to work at finding cancer early enough to stop it in its tracks. But that path is fraught with challenges. Screening has to find the right cancer at the right moment. If a cancer is so indolent it was never going to harm the patient, detecting it only sows fear. When screening finds a cancer so aggressive it can't be stopped, the test can have limited value.