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Mattresses have a 900% markup; $3000 retail, $300 to make.
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Tag: things
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Austin Pets Alive! | Search Laboratory Selects APA! As Their Charity…
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Austin Pets Alive! is honored and grateful to be considered one of Austin’s favorite
nonprofits and beyond that, to receive outreach from companies in Austin who want to
turn their love and appreciation of APA!’s work into a service-oriented gift. Search
Laboratory is just such a company.In early 2023, the company reached out to our Marketing team sharing that APA! was
voted as Search Laboratory’s “charity of the year,” meaning our organization would
become their “pet” nonprofit to support in whatever way made the most sense to us. As
a nonprofit, that’s thrilling! We take pride in holding a high score on Charity Navigator,
with a portion of that score coming from how much of our dollars raised goes directly
back into our programming (74% — above industry standard!) The way our teams utilize
volunteer support and generosity of companies like Search Laboratories is a big part of
ensuring every dollar is spent responsibly.To kick things off on the right “paw”, Search Laboratory pledged $10,000 worth of their
time and talents to help APA! with our digital marketing goals. They’ve worked closely
with our team members to share industry best practices for social media advertising,
website, content, and online PR, providing both knowledge and donating hours to create
content. Our teams have also worked together to streamline processes allowing us to
track results showcasing how our marketing efforts are directly connected to incoming
donations!Search Laboratory is a certified B-Corporation which means they’re serious about social
responsibility and taking care of the environment. From employee happiness to giving
back to the community, they believe in doing things right and we’ve witnessed that and
benefited from it, first-hand! This company is part of a community of businesses that
care about making a positive impact, and being a B Corp means they can stand behind
a brand that their team, clients, and partners can be proud of.At APA!, we often say that we do a lot with a little and in this case, that means that our
little marketing team has been able to fly higher in the past year because of a lot of
support from our friends at Search Laboratory![ad_2]
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Favorite Things From 2023, and a 2024 Look Ahead
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Juliet and Amanda return for their ACTUAL last episode of 2023! The two discuss their favorite things and moments from 2023, including the Beckham docuseries and WAG culture (1:55); “the summer of women,” giving shout-outs to Greta Gerwig, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and more women later on (4:45); Lauren Sánchez’s Vogue profile; and Jeff Bezos’s future clock (8:37). Plus, a GILDED AGE SPOILER at 9:34! Then, the women discuss what they are looking forward to in 2024, including a plethora of books (14:57); a few movies, including Challengers and Civil War (21:46); the 2024 Summer Olympics and, more importantly, the celebrities that will be there (23:33); and more!
Hosts: Juliet Litman and Amanda Dobbins
Producer: Jade WhaleySubscribe: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / Stitcher
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Juliet Litman
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Things We Missed in 2023
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Steve and Jomi are joined by Daniel Chin to look back at the year in fandom culture and highlight some of their favorite shows and movies that they weren’t able to cover. Suzume, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur are some of the many shows and movies covered in this episode. Later, producer Kerm chimes in with his favorite comic books in the world of X-Men in 2023.
Hosts: Jomi Adeniran and Steve Ahlman
Guest: Daniel Chin
Producer: Jonathan KermahSubscribe: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
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Jomi Adeniran
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Fans were as influential in 2023 as the things they loved
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Fandom might be something people participate in during their spare time, maybe in the privacy of online communities or convention halls, but it undoubtedly has an impact on the wider world. In the past few years, the types of strategies deployed by politicians and those leading social movements have increasingly started to look like those used in fandom. This is particularly true of tactics pioneered within the digital and physical fan spaces in order to increase visibility and impact. All the while, fandom itself is continuing to change and evolve.
Powered by passion, fans make things happen. Sometimes those accomplishments are only important within each individual fandom — producing a zine, making a character or celebrity trend, starting a new meme. But other times they reach further than expected, outside fan spaces, and make things really move.
Taking a look at the accomplishments of fandom communities this year is a good way to get a bird’s-eye view of what exactly fandom is, at a time when more people engage in fandom than ever. In 2023, fans showed up and made their voices heard. They launched projects, saved shows, supported strikes, and even rescued historical figures from obscurity. Here are just a few of fandom’s most impressive accomplishments from this year.
Fans on strike
When the Writers Guild of America announced that its members would be going on strike in May of this year, fans took the news in stride. Of course, it was disappointing to hear that production on many fan-favorite shows, like Stranger Things, would be pausing thanks to the strike action. But it was more important that fans supported the actions of the WGA, and later SAG-AFTRA, which were necessary for writers and actors to earn protections and fair wages in their industry.
Though some troll posts led people to believe that fans were against the strike, that couldn’t have been more untrue. It was precisely the opposite: Fans worked hard to spread information about how best to support the striking writers and actors. Independent, fan-run blogs like sagwgastrikeupdates and fans4wga consistently communicated the latest news on the strikes and answered questions about how best to avoid crossing the picket line with fan activity.
And while some fans were sad that shows that came out during the strike, like fan favorites Good Omens and Our Flag Means Death, never got traditional actor- and writer-centric press tours that fans could obsess over alongside the new episodes, fans put their feelings aside in support of fairness. OFMD fans showed up in person to picket lines and were rewarded, when the strike ended, with a deluge of behind-the-scenes content that stars like Vico Ortiz and Leslie Jones shared on TikTok.
A plaque for Hester Leggatt
West End comedy musical Operation Mincemeat has fostered a fandom of Mincefluencers ever since its off-West End days at Riverside Studios. It’s an oddball show, which, much like the Broadway hit Six, was written and developed by a company of Fringe Festival stalwarts. And like Six it was also inspired by real history. Like the Colin Firth film of the same name (which it otherwise shares no connection with) Operation Mincemeat was inspired by real events during World War II, when a group of MI5 operatives successfully diverted the Nazis by planting false information on a corpse.
The musical’s main characters are based on real historical figures, including Hester Leggatt, a secretary at MI5. She contributed to the wartime operation by helping create the false identity of the corpse, writing love letters to “Bill Martin” that were planted on the body. In the musical this work is immortalized in the tearjerker song “Dear Bill.” In the song “Useful,” Hester thinks that instead of a statue she might like to be recognized by “just a small plaque / Something tasteful and small.”
Something special is happening, folks!!!
On Monday 11th Dec, a plaque in Hester Leggatt’s honour will be unveiled following the dedicated research of some incredible fans!
You’ll be able to view the plaque unveiling from the entrance to the theatre. pic.twitter.com/6SPWsWoRLb
— Operation Mincemeat (@mincemeatlive) November 24, 2023
Unlike the male protagonists of the story, about whom biographical details abound, little was known about the real Hester Leggatt — just enough to create her character in the musical. But fans went much, much further, digging up biographical records at the National Archives and London’s Imperial War Museum in order to illuminate details of Leggatt’s life. Fans found census records, exam results, and handwriting samples that matched the real letter to “Bill.”
Finally, their research culminated in a letter from MI5 confirming Legatt’s employment, which had been classified information up until then. A plaque honoring Leggatt is set to be unveiled outside the Fortune Theater, where Operation Mincemeat is playing, on Dec. 11. Hester Leggatt is finally getting the recognition she long deserved, thanks to fans’ hard work uncovering her story.
Save the sapphic show
Fan campaigns aren’t new, but their persistence year after year is a demonstration not only of fans’ ability to self-organize and persevere, but the continued divergence of studios, networks, and streaming platform priorities from the desires of passionate fan communities. In 2023, the shows that fans rallied behind included animated show Star Trek: Prodigy and the CW’s Supernatural prequel The Winchesters. But the most notable fan campaigns have been behind the canceled shows A League of Their Own and Warrior Nun.
Passionate fans hungry for queer representation have helped rescue shows like Sense8; fans have also banded together to campaign for The 100 to change certain plotlines. A League of Their Own was renewed only to be un-renewed by Amazon in August of this year, and fans immediately started organizing, seeing that it was worth the effort to push back against this cavalier treatment. Fan campaigners behind accounts like @ALOTOHomeRun have kept the show trending, hoping for a second season that will continue to explore the queer and Black characters that made the show a powerful adaptation of the original 1992 film. They have kept the show trending on X (formerly Twitter), and in return the showrunners have promised that they’re still trying to find a way forward for the show.
Fans’ impressive show of support for Warrior Nun began late last year, when Netflix confirmed the beloved drama about an ass-kicking nun (played by Alba Baptista) would not return for a third season. After creating a Discord server called Sapphics in Pain, the fans began to organize — and didn’t stop. Well into 2023, they were spending hours of volunteer labor on professional-level analytics research papers and strategic analysis, aiming to prove conclusively to network stakeholders that their beloved show was well worth picking up for a new season. Their hard work was rewarded when executive producer Dean English announced the series would return as a trilogy of feature films — though, because of the lack of involvement of the original series’ writers, it’s a cautious victory for the hardworking fans.
Swifties united
Photo: Daniel Knighton/Getty Images
Thanks to the kickoff of the ubiquitous Eras Tour, and the steady (re)releases of Taylor’s Version albums, Swifties consolidated their power and emerged as an unshakeable and unstoppable bloc in 2023. Swifties are behind trends like trading friendship bracelets and wearing glittery boots, but there’s more to it than aesthetics — the huge community of Taylor Swift’s die-hard fans have also used their influence to attempt to create visible change and move the needle on issues that are important to them.
In early November, Swifties in Argentina spoke out against the right-wing political candidate Javier Milei, forming a group called “Swifties Against Freedom Advances” to try and convince other fans not to vote for him. However, in the end it wasn’t enough to move the needle, and he ended up winning.
Other Swifty fan efforts in South America are ongoing. A fan, Ana Clara Benevides Machado, died at one of Swift’s Brazilian shows during an extreme heat wave. Fan outcry after this event was widespread, but American-language media was slow to report on the incident beyond Swift’s initial statement about the tragedy. Fans rose to the occasion in order to translate Brazilian news stories regarding the timeline of events and venue issues, and even raised money for the family of the fan who passed. This culminated in Swift paying for the family to come from their rural home to see her concert, where they posed for a picture with her wearing shirts with Ana’s face on them.
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Allegra Rosenberg
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Getting The Deck of Many Things? These are the card sleeves you need
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The Deck of Many Things is coming to wreak havoc on your next Dungeons & Dragons campaign. This classic magical D&D item, sometimes known as The Deck of Hazards, has been granted physical form by Wizards of the Coast and features a collection of 66 unique, tarot-inspired cards capable of sowing magic and mayhem in your next tabletop session.
The $99.99 bundle currently available to pre-order from Amazon and Wizards of the Coast includes the fabled deck in addition to The Book of Many Things, which features content for players and DMs that’s thematically tied to the deck, and an 80-page hardcover guidebook that explains the effects of each card.
Reserving a copy ahead of the launch date from either Amazon or Wizards of the Coast saves you $10 on the launch price. Additionally, pre-ordering from Wizards of the Coast will get you early access to The Book of Many Things on D&D Beyond starting Oct. 31, as well as a collection of other digital bonuses. Just note that pre-orders from Amazon cost the same as a direct purchase from Wizards of the Coast, but that doesn’t include a digital copy, or any of the featured pre-order bonuses.
While The Deck of Many Things was initially slated to launch on Nov. 14, a series of unfortunate manufacturing defects has suspended the launch until further notice. However, early access to the digital pre-order bonuses available through Wizards of the Coast won’t be impacted. A revised launch date for the physical release hasn’t been announced yet, but we’ll update our pre-order post with new information once it becomes available.
The cards found in The Deck of Many Things use a non-standard size compared to those found in games like the Pokémon TCG or Magic: The Gathering. Thankfully, Ultra Pro makes card sleeves specifically measured for tarot decks, and the company confirmed to Polygon that they’re compatible with the cards found in The Deck of Many Things.
Update (Oct. 27): Following a series of manufacturing defects, the launch date for The Deck of Many Things has been postponed until further notice (originally Nov. 14). The post has been updated to reflect this information.
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Alice Newcome-Beill
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Do Not Underestimate the To-Do List
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Productivity is a sore subject for a lot of people. Philosophically, the concept is a nightmare. Americans invest personal productivity with moral weight, as though human worth can be divined through careful examination of work product, both professional and personal. The more practical questions of productivity are no less freighted with anxiety. Are you doing enough to hold on to your job? To improve your marriage? To raise well-adjusted kids? To maintain your health? What can you change in order to do more?
Anxiety breeds products, and the tech industry’s obsession with personal optimization in particular has yielded a bounty of them in the past decade or two: digital calendars that send you push notifications about your daily schedule. Platforms that reimagine your life as a series of project-management issues. Planners as thick as encyclopedias that encourage you to set daily intentions and monthly priorities. Self-help books that cobble together specious principles of behavioral psychology to teach you the secrets of actually using all of the stuff you’ve bought in order to optimize your waking hours (and maybe your sleeping ones too).
Underneath all of the tiresome discourse about enhancing human productivity or rejecting it as a concept, there is a bedrock truth that tends to get lost. There probably is a bunch of stuff that you need or want to get done, for reasons that have no discernable moral or political valence—making a long-delayed dentist appointment, picking up groceries, returning a few nagging emails, hanging curtains in your new apartment. For that, I come bearing but one life hack: the humble to-do list, written out on actual paper, with actual pen.
First, cards on the table: I’m not an organized person. Much of the advice on these topics is given by people with a natural capacity for organization and focus—the people who, as kids, kept meticulous records of assignments and impending tests in their school-issued planners. Now they send out calendar invites to their friends once next weekend’s dinner plans are settled and have never killed a plant by forgetting to water it. They were, in my opinion, largely born on third base and think they hit a triple. I, by contrast, have what a psychiatrist once called a “really classic case” of ADHD. My executive function is never coming back from war. I have tried the tips, the tricks, the hacks, the apps, and the methods. I have abandoned countless planners three weeks into January. Years ago, I bought a box with a timed lock so that I could put my phone in it and force myself to write emails. Perhaps counterintuitively, that makes me somewhat of an amateur expert in the tactics that are often recommended for getting your life (or at least your day) in order.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to try putting pen to paper. By the time I was in the working world, smartphones were beginning to proliferate, and suddenly, there was an app for that. In the late 2000s, optimism abounded about the capacity for consumer technology to help people overcome personal foibles and make everyday life more efficient. Didn’t a calendar app seem much neater and tidier than a paper planner? Wouldn’t a list of tasks that need your attention be that much more effective if it could zap you with a little vibration to remind you it exists? If all of your schedules and documents and contacts and to-do lists could live in one place, wouldn’t that be better?
Fifteen years later, the answer to those questions seems to be “not really.” People habituate to the constant beeps and buzzes of their phone, which makes rote push-notification task reminders less likely to break through the noise. If you make a to-do list in your notes app, it disappears into the ether when you finally lock your phone in an effort to get something—anything!—done. Shareable digital calendars do hold certain practical advantages over their paper predecessors, and services such as Slack and Google Docs, which let people work together at a distance, provide obvious efficiencies over mailing paperwork back and forth. But those services’ unexpected downsides have also become clear. Trivial meetings stack up. Work bleeds into your personal time, which isn’t actually efficient. Above all, these apps and tactics tend to be designed with a very specific kind of productivity in mind: that which is expected of the average office worker, whose days tend to involve a lot of computer tasks and be scheduleable and predictable. If your work is more siloed or scattered or unpredictable—like, say, a reporter’s—then bending those tools to your will is a task all its own. Which is to say nothing of the difficulty of bending those tools to the necessities of life outside of work.
My personal collision with the shortcomings of digital productivity hacks came during the first year of the pandemic, when many people were feeling particularly isolated and feral. Without the benefit of the routines that I’d constructed for myself in day-to-day life in the outside world, time passed without notice, and I had trouble remembering what I was supposed to be doing at any given time. I set reminders for myself, opened accounts on task-management platforms, tried different kinds of note-taking software. It was all a wash. At the end of my rope, I pulled out a notebook and pen, and flipped to a clean page. I made a list of all the things I could remember that I’d left hanging, broken down into their simplest component parts—not clean the apartment, but vacuum, take out the trash, and change your sheets.
It worked. When I made a list, all of the clutter from my mind was transferred to the page, and things started getting done. It has kept working, years later, any time I get a little overwhelmed. A few months after my list-making breakthrough, I tried to translate this tactic to regular use of a planner, but that tanked the whole thing. I just need a regular notebook and a pen. There’s no use in getting cute with it. Don’t make your to-do list a task of its own.
All of this might sound preposterously simple and obvious. If you were born with this knowledge or learned it long ago, then I’m happy for you. But for people like me for whom this behavior doesn’t come naturally, that obvious simplicity is exactly the genius of cultivating it. Your list lives with you on the physical plane, a tactile representation of tasks that might otherwise be out of sight and out of mind (or, worse, buried in the depths of your laptop). It contains only things that you can actually accomplish in a day or two, and then you turn the page forever and start again. If you think of more things that need to be on the list after you think you’re done making it, just add them. If you get to the last few things on the list and realize they’re not that important, don’t do them. This type of to-do list doesn’t take any work to assemble. It isn’t aesthetically pleasing. It doesn’t need to be organized in any particular way, or at all. It’s not a plan. It’s just a list.
If you’d feel more convinced by some psychological evidence instead of the personal recommendation of a stranger with an aversion to calendars, a modest amount of research has amassed over the years to suggest that I’m on the right track. List-making seems to be a boon to working memory, and writing longhand instead of typing on a keyboard seems to aid in certain types of cognition, including learning and memory. My own experience is in line with the basic findings of that research: Writing down a list forces me to recall all of the things that are swimming around in my head and occasionally breaking through to steal my attention, and then it moves the tasks from my head onto the paper. My head is then free to do other things. Like, you know, the stuff on the list. There are no branded tools you have to buy, and no subscriptions. It cannot be monetized. Write on the back of your water bill, for all I care. Just remember to pay your water bill.
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Amanda Mull
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Quit Your Bucket List
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Years ago, just after I finished my psychiatry residency, a beloved supervisor called to say she had some bad news. At a routine checkup, she had glanced at her chest X-ray up on the viewing box while waiting for her doctor to come into the room. She was a trauma surgeon before becoming a psychiatrist and had spent years reading chest X-rays, so she knew that the coin-size lesion she saw in her lung was almost certainly cancer, given her long history of smoking.
We had dinner soon after. She was still more than two years away from the end of her life and felt physically fine—vital, even. That’s why I was so surprised when she said she had no desire to spend whatever time she had left on exotic travel or other new adventures. She wanted her husband, her friends, her family, dinner parties, and the great outdoors. “Just more Long Island sunsets. I don’t need Bali,” she told me.
At the end of life, you might expect people to feel regret for all the things they wanted to do and never made time for. But I have yet to know a patient or friend who, facing the blunt fact of their own mortality, had anything close to a bucket list. This squares with some recent research that shows that people tend to prefer familiar experiences more when they are reminded that their days are limited. The people I know even regretted the novelty they’d chased along the way, whether it was recreational-drug use or dating exciting people who they knew weren’t relationship material.
Deathbed pronouncements can have limited applications for the rest of life, but this pattern suggests that novelty is perhaps overrated. Chasing the high of new sensations simply isn’t appealing for many people, and can sometimes even be bad for our health. I suspect that’s because, too often, the pursuit of novelty requires sacrificing the things we already know we love.
It’s a common misconception that people who don’t have a taste for the newest, sexiest experience are dull, incurious, and unimaginative. A 2002 study found that people will switch away from their favorite, habitual choices when they know others are watching in order to avoid being judged as narrow-minded. And yet, Warren Buffett notoriously eats breakfast at the same fast-food restaurant every day and sticks to a strict work schedule. Taylor Swift’s music can be redundant and predictable. Barack Obama is famous for his strict morning exercise regime and daily reading time.
Even when they’re not facing death, many people just don’t seem to like novelty that much. In 2017, a poll by a British soup company found that 77 percent of U.K. workers had consumed the exact same lunch every day for nine months and that one in six people had done so for at least two years. You might think it’s just a matter of convenience or economic exigency (the study didn’t say), but I’m not so sure; wealthy people I know partake in similar behavior, even if they do it at a fancy restaurant. Consider, too, that when people lose a pet, many run out and get a replacement of the same breed with a similar temperament. They repeatedly date people with the same quirks and problems. They return to a favorite vacation spot. They listen to the same musical artists and styles time and again.
Research shows that humans have an intrinsic preference for things and people they are familiar with, something called the mere exposure effect. Several studies have shown that people who listen to unfamiliar songs repeatedly grow fonder of the songs they hear most by the end of the experiment, even if they did not initially like them very much. You don’t even have to be aware that you’re growing used to something for the effect to work.
This tendency toward repetition may seem natural, even lazy, but it runs counter to much of our history. We, along with other animals, evolved to be exquisitely sensitive to novel experiences. Way back in the Paleolithic era, there was a clear survival advantage to being attuned to new situations, which could lead someone to a potential mate or a piece of mastodon, or reveal a deadly threat. Nowadays, though, with every conceivable reward—food, sex, drugs, emotional validation, you name it—either a click, tap, or ChatGPT query away, conventional novelty-seeking has lost much of its adaptive advantage.
As Arthur Brooks has written in The Atlantic, novelty can be fun and exciting. New and unexpected experiences activate the brain’s reward pathway more powerfully than familiar ones, leading to greater dopamine release and a more intense sense of pleasure. But on its own, excitement won’t bring about enduring happiness. Human beings habituate rapidly to what is new. To achieve a lifetime of stimulation, you would have to embark on an endless search for the unfamiliar, which would inevitably lead to disappointment. Worse, the unfettered pursuit of novelty can lead to harm through excessive thrill-seeking—including antisocial behavior such as reckless driving—particularly when the novelty seeker has poor impulse control and a disregard for others.
There’s a better way. Research shows that when novelty-seeking is paired with persistence, people are far more likely to be happy, probably because they are able to achieve something meaningful. You might, for example, take a variety of courses in college or try different summer internships if you’re not yet sure what interests you. When one really clicks, you should explore it in depth; it might even become a lifelong passion. This principle relates to less consequential pleasures, too: If you’re checking out a new neighborhood joint, consider ordering different things during your first few visits, then picking your favorite and sticking with it.
Novelty-seeking is most valuable when you use it as a tool to discover the things and people you love—and once you find them, go deep and long with those experiences and relationships. The siren call that tells you there might be a new and better version of what you already have is likely an illusion, driven by your brain’s relentless reward pathway. When in doubt, pick a beloved activity over an unfamiliar one.
This golden rule of novelty may help explain why some people at the end of their life regret having spent so much time exploring new things, even if they once brought fleeting pleasure. Age, too, might partly explain this feeling, because older people tend to be less open to new experiences. But that’s probably not the whole story. My colleagues who treat children and adolescents have mentioned that, in the face of life-threatening diagnoses, even young people prefer the familiar. They do so not only because the familiar is known and safe, but because it is more meaningful to them. After all, things become familiar to us because we choose them repeatedly—and we do that because they are deeply rewarding.
Imagine, just for a moment, that your death is near. What might you miss out on if you put your bucket list on hold? Sure, you won’t make it to Bali or Antarctica. But maybe instead you could fit in one last baseball game with your kids, one last swim in the ocean, one last movie with your beloved, one last Long Island sunset. If you prioritize the activities and people you already love, you won’t reach the end of your life wishing you’d made more time for them.
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Richard A. Friedman
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How People With Dementia Make Sense of the World
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Elizabeth often met her husband, Mitch, after work at the same restaurant in Lower Manhattan. Mitch was usually there by the time she arrived, swirling his drink and joking with a waiter. Elizabeth and Mitch had been friends before becoming romantically involved and bantered back and forth without missing a beat. Anyone looking at their table might well have envied them, never suspecting that Elizabeth dreaded these pleasant get-togethers.
Elizabeth, a tall, elegant woman, told me about those evenings in a composed, confiding tone, which only makes her story more uncanny. (Both her name and Mitch’s have been changed to protect their privacy.) Once the meal was over, Mitch would invariably give her a wary, skeptical look and say, “Now you’ll go to your place and I’ll go to mine.” Hearing these words, Elizabeth would nod meekly, then duck into the bathroom for a minute before running out. She’d cross the street, wait for Mitch to emerge—making sure that he was headed in the right direction—and then hurry home to wait for him.
It always struck her how normal Mitch appeared. It was herself she barely recognized: the nervous, frazzled woman hiding behind lampposts, following a man who looked so at ease in the world. Then, with a burst of speed, she managed to get back to their apartment a few minutes before he did.
Arriving home, Mitch always gave her the same cheerful greeting: “Hey, honey, how are you?” He had already forgotten their rendezvous.
The nightmare would officially begin after Mitch had made himself comfortable. Without any warning, he’d look up from a magazine or the TV, stare at Elizabeth, and ask her to leave. Calmly at first, he’d order her out of her own home. When she tried to convince him that she was home, he’d scoff. How could it be her home, when he lived there? Although he sensed that they knew each other, he had forgotten they were married. Moreover, he felt threatened by her presence.
When Mitch first began to act this way, Elizabeth had done her best to plead her case. She’d point to things in the apartment and remind him of where they came from. “Look,” she’d say. “Our wedding picture, see?”
Unfazed, Mitch would reply. “Yeah? You must have planted it there.”
“But look, I can tell you everything that’s in the closet or anywhere else in the house. We’ve lived here 15 years, me and you, remember?”
“So you’ve been snooping around my apartment. Now stop touching my things and get out before I call the cops.”
Some evenings, when she stalled, he flew into a rage, grabbed her by the neck like a stray cat, and pushed her out the front door, where she sat all night in the hallway.
But Mitch wasn’t predictable—sometimes he seemed perfectly normal in the evenings; at other times, he magnanimously let her remain. But as his episodes grew more frequent and his recalcitrance more extreme, her exile in the hallway became almost a nightly routine. She took to carrying a spare key in her pocket and would let herself in when she thought Mitch had fallen asleep.
Mitch had Alzheimer’s. I met Elizabeth in 2016, when I was a volunteer at an Alzheimer’s organization in New York City. I’ve remained in touch with her since, even after Mitch’s eventual death from the disease, in 2020. Although Mitch had already been diagnosed by the time Elizabeth and I began discussing her case, she was surprised at the turn his condition had taken. Many people with dementia experience occasional delusions and hallucinations, but relatively few become as fixated as Mitch did on the fact that a spouse is an imposter. I once asked Elizabeth why she thought she continued to argue with Mitch when she knew it wouldn’t do any good. She chuckled. “The thing is, he had an answer for everything. No matter what I said or could prove, he had an explanation. I just couldn’t let it go.”
When patients with dementia have an answer for everything, caregivers get caught in a loop. It’s surprisingly hard not to be goaded by a patient’s responses. Even if the answers are nonsensical, the patient’s ability to provide them suggests that we’re still dealing with a functional mind. Indeed, the part of the mind that helps patients produce a steady stream of answers remains intact. It was this part—what the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga has termed the “left-brain interpreter”—that Mitch was now leaning on. The “interpreter” is an unconscious process responsible for sweeping inconsistencies and confusion under the rug. When things don’t add up, when our expectations are flipped, when our environment suddenly changes, the left-brain interpreter provides explanations that help us make sense of things.
For instance, patients feeling anxious or afraid because of memory loss or confusion will come up with explanations for their disorientation. They’ll blame the aide for misplacing a purse or insist that people are conspiring against them. When they feel internal discord, their unconscious mind searches for an external source, and this source gives shape to their paranoia. So when Mitch was confronted by evidence that Elizabeth was his wife, which contradicted his impression that she was someone else, his left-brain interpreter found explanations for that evidence—for instance, that it had been planted in his apartment.
This is partly why so many patients are adept at coming up with quick (albeit wrong) answers and rationalizations for their warped views. The mind’s propensity to create believable narratives is all too human. In a 1962 study that would surely be considered unethical today, the psychologists Stanley Schachter and Jerry Singer administered epinephrine to their subjects. Epinephrine, a synthetic hormone that narrows blood vessels, can produce anxiety, shakiness, and sweating. Some participants were then informed that they had been given a vitamin that had no side effects. The others were told that the pill could produce a racing heart, tremors, and flushing. Those who knew about the possible side effects immediately attributed their discomfort to the drug. Those unaware of possible side effects and who experienced agitation blamed their environment, even thinking that the other participants were responsible.
We evidently have a tendency to find reasons for what disturbs us rather than remain in the dark. This need to ascertain cause and effect is yet another function of the left-brain interpreter, and it plays out in many ways. For example, we’ll assign reasons to our feelings despite often not knowing their true cause. We’ll twist facts, defend misconceptions, and opt to believe whatever makes sense of what’s happening around us. So when patients argue, caregivers may find it difficult to distinguish pathology from the mind’s normal tendency to resist what it doesn’t know.
At one of our meetings, Elizabeth described a particularly unsettling moment with Mitch. One evening, amid a harrowing confrontation, instead of throwing her out, Mitch suddenly relaxed and turned on the TV. He flipped through the channels, then stopped on the opening credits to the movie Doctor Zhivago and, hearing its music, reached for her hand.
“Imagine,” Elizabeth said softly, looking at me, “we’re holding hands.”
The perpetuation of the sweet Mitch is what kept her off-balance. Because alongside the man who didn’t recognize her was the man who might stroke her hair and ask how she put up with him. Alongside the man who threw her out was the man who made a video for their anniversary in which he confessed how lost he’d be without her. If that Mitch did not exist—if Elizabeth had had only the delusional Mitch to deal with—her left-brain interpreter would have had less to contend with. Instead, her brain was badgered by inconsistency and uncertainty.
When we think of Alzheimer’s, we usually think of it as erasing the self. But what happens in most cases is that the self splinters into different selves; some we recognize, others we don’t. In fact, the self, or, more accurately, “self-representation” in the brain, is not, as the philosopher Patricia Churchland phrased it, an “all-or-nothing affair.” Instead, our “self” is distributed throughout the brain, which can make Alzheimer’s even more complicated than is generally believed. If the self is, in some sense, already fragmented, its gradual erosion can remain unnoticed behind the ebb and flow of a person’s familiar personality. Cases, of course, vary, and quite commonly Alzheimer’s doesn’t get rid of the self as much as it brings parts of it to the fore.
For Elizabeth, Mitch was still Mitch. A loved one’s identity doesn’t evaporate when change occurs. One reason for this may be our unconscious belief in what the psychologist Paul Bloom refers to as the “essential self.” Early in our development, we attribute to other people a permanent “deep-down self.” And though our understanding of people becomes more complex as we grow older, our belief in a “true” or “real” self persists.
When experimental philosophers, interested in how we define the self, asked participants to consider what happens when a hypothetical brain transplant affects a subject’s cognitive abilities, personality, and memory, most participants continued to believe that the subject’s “true self” remained intact. Only in those cases where the subject began to behave in morally uncharacteristic ways—kleptomania, criminality, pedophilia, or engaging in other abhorrent behaviors—did participants conclude that the “true self” had been radically altered.
Bloom explains that we’re more likely to associate the “good” qualities in people with their true selves—“good,” of course, as defined by our own values. In this sense, another person’s “true” self is an extension of what we hold dear. So if the essential self is intuitively equated with the moral self, then the cognitive problems attending dementia can seem peripheral as long as changes in behavior do not run “deep enough” to redefine a husband or a father. The reason Elizabeth kept arguing with Mitch was that she was appealing to the “real” Mitch, the “good” Mitch, the one “still in there,” the one who, in the past, would have come to her aid.
For caregivers, the idea of a “real self” can be a double-edged sword. If, on the one hand, it encourages us to argue with afflicted loved ones in the hope of breaking through to their “real selves,” it can also be a source of great frustration. If, on the other hand, we start to doubt the existence of an essential self, how can we account for the person we’re caring for? Who is it that we are suffering and sacrificing for?
As Mitch’s cognitive capacity ebbed, so too did his confusion. He became calmer—and so did Elizabeth. Even so, Elizabeth told me that he could still, on occasion, become upset. One day when Mitch was filling in a coloring book, an activity he previously would have found beneath him, he looked up and said, “I think there’s something wrong with me.”
“Well, honey,” Elizabeth said gently, “you have something called Alzheimer’s, and that’s okay, I’m here for you.”
Mitch furrowed his brow. “No, that’s not it. I don’t have that. Why would you even say that?”
Telling me this, Elizabeth reprimanded herself: “I felt awful upsetting him.” But her response was only natural. When Mitch sensed something was wrong, she thought, for a moment, that she had glimpsed the old Mitch, the true Mitch. So she had confided in him as she had in the past, hoping he’d understand.
This article has been excerpted from Dasha Kiper’s new book, Travelers to Unimaginable Lands: Stories of Dementia, the Caregiver, and the Human Brain.
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Austin Pets Alive! | Dr. Jefferson’s #NoKillDecade Story
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Sep 21, 2021
Q: Tell us the story of each of your pups.
A: Bernese is 9 years old and she’s from the San Antonio shelter. Back in 2012, she was part of a litter that was there and her littermates all got adopted and she didn’t for a year. She grew up in a kennel. Not a good situation at all. She was so fearful of people, that’s why she didn’t get adopted. She kept cowering in the back. And so when they were going through a space crisis, I asked if I could foster somebody that would help save them space and would help them save lives.
Bernese and Buster Back then we were trying to do San Antonio Pets Alive! and trying to help that city and they gave me her. She was untouchable for several months so we just adopted her thinking she’d never warm up to people. But she’s done a lot better. Now she’s 9 and she’s mostly chill. Her biggest problem is that she’s terrified of people.
Q: Is that because she was alone in her kennel during that time?
A: Yeah, she’s tricky. She definitely has some dog/dog issues and some dog/people issues, but she’s my most normal.
A: Buster was in Hurricane Harvey. He was in rabies quarantine in a Houston shelter. At that time they weren’t vaccinating for distemper because they thought they weren’t allowed to since the law says they have to wait for the rabies vaccine at the end of quarantine, but it’s not true that it’s illegal and we’ve since worked with them and they now vaccinate every dog that’s going through rabies quarantine. He was really, really sick.
He was paralyzed for a month. He lost all of the muscles in his head so he can’t open his mouth. His esophagus didn’t work. He’s a total disaster. He has a stomach tube on the side of his stomach where he still gets fed because he can’t open his mouth. It’s been 4 years and it’s taken him this long to start licking food out of a frying pan after he gets his medications to get his esophagus to work. He’s come a long way. He’s not paralyzed anymore, but he can’t open his mouth. He can get his tongue out a tiny bit and he’s so sweet. He’s a miracle dog. We don’t know exactly how old he is. We thought he was maybe 2 when he came into the shelter so he’s probably around 6.
A: Echo is the little brown one and she was right before Hurricane Harvey.
Echo She was a distemper puppy pulled from San Antonio that came over to APA! that was in a foster home with her brother. Her brother died immediately and she got really sick and became paralyzed. She was 8 weeks old when that happened. She was paralyzed for 2-3 months. Me and Pam Martin shared custody of her when I was going back and forth to Houston.
This happened right when Harvey hit. She has a ton of developmental issues because she couldn’t move during her growth phases. She has one arm that goes to the side. It was the only one she could move for a few months so that one’s become her most muscular arm, kind of in a weird position which then made it hard to fit her for a cart or to get anybody to help with her because her limbs go in all different directions and her back legs don’t really work. So she’s permanently paralyzed and she’s mostly continent. When she scoots around, she goes to the bathroom. She’s kind of the highest need dog we have even though Buster has a lot of problems. She’s really sweet too. She’s very loving but because she was going to die when she was a baby, she never got exposed to people except for me and Pam. So she hasn’t developed any socialization skills which is why she barks like crazy. But she warms up pretty quick.
A: Bullfrog is also from San Antonio. He was born in 2012. They were going through a massive distemper outbreak.
Bullfrog When shelters go through the evolution of massive killing to saving more [lives], that exposes all of the problems. So shelters like San Antonio and Houston that had really high death rates, never knew they were spreading distemper everywhere because all of the animals died so they didn’t exhibit symptoms. So as you start seeing that trajectory upward of live release rate, distemper comes out in an outbreak because they’re not vaccinating at intake. They’re not keeping anyone separate. They’re not doing any of the things to help the disease spread. So he was exposed as a baby. His whole litter died. He also had Parvo and I had all of the Parvo puppies from San Antonio for a year. He got over Parvo and got really sick with distemper. He couldn’t lift his head off of the ground for 2 years and couldn’t open his mouth for 2 years, so we also thought he was going to die because he was in such bad shape so we didn’t socialize him either. Now he can run around and bite people which is not great. At least he’s controllable because he only has 3 legs.
Q: How do they all get along?
A: Ehhhh. Echo is the biggest problem because she’s a bossy bee. She’s always growling…so we have to keep her separate when we’re not home.
Q: Can you share the story of how the Parvo ward started in your bathroom?
Dr. J looking back at the bathroom where it all started. A: It started in that bathroom [points]. It’s all tile so it’s a great place to have Parvo. I took home the first litter and it just kept being the Parvo ward after that. The upstairs bathroom wasn’t finished when we moved in so I painted the floors with sealer so we could put puppies up there. We didn’t have enough money at the time to finish it. The upstairs and downstairs are where I tried to segregate the dogs.
Q: When did that start?
A: The first litter of puppies was Thanksgiving 2008. That was the first litter we got that was really sick. I went to pick up healthy puppies to transport for somebody and the shelter said, “I don’t think you want those puppies, they’re pretty sick.” I went back and looked at them and I was like I can handle this.
Q: Did you know how to treat Parvo at that time?
A: Oh yeah, you learn that in vet school. All vet clinics can do it. We treated it in every vet clinic I worked at – it’s common. That was the real epiphany, why can’t shelters treat it? There was an unspoken rule that shelters aren’t allowed to treat it because of potential spread throughout the shelter. Even when we started treating it, shelter professionals came out of the woodwork to shame us. It really helped that I was a vet and I could be like, “That’s ridiculous.” It takes one person to really damage your reputation.
Dr. J holding one of the parvo puppies in her home A: They were just killed hand over fist. All of these purebred pugs and basset hounds, all sorts of things that come through the shelters because they have Parvo and they’re surrendered. Somehow people know to do that, and that still happens all across Texas. It is kind of sad to think that people have purchased these dogs and I assume they love them. Some of the bills they’re quoted are like $10K. That’s part of what I’m really excited about with the future and HASS. If we can start helping people when their dogs get sick, then it helps prevent them from just getting another one, because who’s telling them not to bring another puppy into that environment where it’s all over the place? Nobody.
Q: What was it like having all of those puppies in your home?
A: When all of the San Antonio puppies were here, it was the most. It was 25 at a time. Our whole guest room was filled with crates and the bathrooms were filled with Parvo puppies. I probably spent 8 hours away cleaning and treating dogs.
Obviously, it needed to be more sustainable and San Antonio has their own Parvo ward now. After that first year, they didn’t need help in someone’s home anymore. It’s a horrible odor.
Q: Was it just you? (photos below are some of the parvo puppies she saved in her bathroom)
A: Yeah. I didn’t really have anybody to help. It’s really hard to come into somebody’s house and help with that. So yeah it was just me. It’s all of the goal to never do that again. It’s sad to think that those 25 puppies were just fine.
Q: What does the 10 year anniversary of No Kill Austin mean to you?
A: I think that it’s awesome. We’re the longest-standing No Kill community. It’s really exciting. It’s amazing that when we started everybody said it’s not sustainable, it’s not going to work, you guys are going to be overloaded. You can’t possibly keep up with all of the animals that need to be saved. I think it’s good that that has proven to be untrue. It is sustainable in a way. I think what we’re trying to head towards now is more sustainability that doesn’t rely on APA! having to do acrobatics to make sure every animal is safe. It should be more institutionalized in the government system. But as long as we’re here, it’s sustainable. It’s inspiring.
Dr. J at examining a dog in APA!’s trailer at Austin Pizza Q: Why do you think people are still so hard-headed around the idea that No Kill is impossible?
A: It’s not people outside the system. It’s typically people inside the system. And when you’ve been doing it for so long…I can see the change of people who join the movement in an organization that has a high rate of killing. I can see the psychological change that happens. They cross the line and they recognize that they can’t do it [become No Kill] and they’re okay with it. I don’t mean okay, it’s still damaging. There’s a shift that happens. I don’t know if you can ever get back from that.
Q: Do you think it’s going to take a younger generation to have new ideas to make a change?
A: Yes. I think there has to be a changing of the guard. There has to be an expectation that it’s not acceptable to kill animals. And then things start to change. The system is rooted in this powerless feeling of “Well we just have to clean up the mess from the irresponsible pet owners.” Anytime the language is used that way, it’s outside the power of the org, people’s irresponsibility is outside the power, as soon as the conversation shifts to that, you lose the ability to change things you can’t control. When you talk about it in terms of things you can’t control, you can’t do it. When you talk about things in terms of things you can control, then you can do it. But I think it will take more people to be aware that it’s possible and that it should be done in order to remove the expectation that it’s okay not to. All governments have accepted that that’s okay.
Q: What are you most proud of over the past 10 years?
A: I’m so proud of the organization. We’ve done so much as a group. It’s incredibly difficult work. It’s not easy. It’s not always fun. It causes burnout. I’m proud that we’re at the point where we are. We’re having discussions on how to make things sustainable.
Dr. J in the early days of APA! at Town Lake Animal Center We don’t rely on people who are burning out and then passing the baton to someone else to burn out. I’m proud that we’re here. I’m proud that we made it happen and I’m proud that we’re still doing it and I’m proud that we’re looking to make it better.
Q: Where do you see the movement in the next 10 years?
A: By starting to crack the nut of animals not dying in shelters, it starts to show that there can be some systemization to anything in the shelter. The only systemization that existed forever was to take them in for 3 days and kill them. That happens over and over everywhere across America. So clearly it has some roots in institutionalization. By being able to automate lifesaving to a degree, we’ve got the Bottle Baby ward where kittens go, there’s a place for every type of animal to go so they don’t die. What we need to do next is create that same kind of pipeline for animals that aren’t going to die, even in our own shelter. The pipeline needs to be clear of how they’re getting out. A big dog that’s rowdy at the city shelter comes to our shelter and there needs to be a very clear path on how it gets out. Instead of focusing on the care in the shelter, maybe in addition. So that’s step one, making sure the whole system is automated.
A: The next piece is trying to untangle why animals are coming in, to begin with. It’s always this assumption that pet owners don’t care and animals are just stray and have no owner. And probably none of those things are true. We have to start looking at the things we can control and can be changed and that’s never been done before. It’s just astounding for this time and age. I think it goes back to if you think you can’t control it, you don’t try to. It’s a mindset.
A: Hopefully we will spend the next 10 years making Austin the epicenter of lifesaving for not only Austin but for everywhere else. Austin is on the brink of going one way or the other. Either we’re just a mediocre shelter, in a mediocre system, in a city with a good live release rate, which many cities have caught up to. Or we’re going to continue leading the charge and revolutionize the ways shelters operate. I hope we will spend the next 10 years making Austin the place people can come and learn, people can come and see it in action. The whole city understands how the intervention part works, how the care works, how the live outcomes work and it’s not just magic.
Q: How do you feel about Austin being the epicenter of lifesaving and then Texas and California killing the most animals?
A: I think we can change that dramatically. We already work heavily outside of Austin in Texas shelters. By focusing more on government laws and budgeting, giving governments the tools to make the changes even if they don’t have the right personality at the shelter or they don’t have the right city council. It shouldn’t have to be a perfect set of circumstances that causes No Kill. It should be a turnkey process. I think we can help a lot. One of the things we’re working on with HASS is a benchmarking system. Anyone in the public can compare their community with other communities which are then compared to what people want, not how shelters operate. People can use the public’s expectations to drive change. They’ve never had the tools in the past, and they still don’t have them, but if we can build those out for the average animal lover to make a change and drive that apathy then that’s a game-changer. I don’t think anyone wants pets to be killed in shelters.
With Dr. Jefferson at the helm, the trajectory of APA! has exceeded anyone’s expectations. With her leadership and your support, we can ensure Austin will remain No Kill for more than 10 more years and counting.
Join us in celebrating Austin’s 10th No Kill Anniversary by making a donation today. Thanks to a generous board member, all gifts will be DOUBLED up to $10K!
Want to share your experience with Dr. Jefferson or APA!’s early days? Whatever your APA! story is, we want to hear it. Interact with all of our social posts this week to tell us your story using #NoKillDecade.
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