Ladyparts by Deborah Copaken

Last weekend, I was hanging out with two women in their late fifties, each of whom has or had a parent living with dementia. “Do you worry about getting it, too?” I asked one of them. “Of course,” she said. “I think about it all the time.” “Well, just keep doing those thigh exercises, I guess,” I said. “What do you mean?” “You know, squats? Lunges?” My friend looked confused. What, she wondered, did squats and lunges have to do with cognitive health?

I started feeling the telltale signs Thursday night before the Fourth of July weekend: the urgency, the frequency, the pain. Ugh. Not this. Not here. Not now. After ten agonizing years of recurring UTIs, I hadn’t come down with one in quite some time, thanks to a steady cocktail of thrice-a-week vaginal estrogen cream in combination with a daily probiotic and a daily cranberry supplement specifically recommended by my urologist and personal savior, Dr. Alexa Meyer.

The “I want more time” tree ©Deborah Copaken I don’t normally notice or admire individual trees, but this one caught my eye. Perfectly round, symmetrical and lush, it stood solo on a diligently well-manicured lawn in front of a farmer’s modest house. What kind of tree was it? I had no idea. I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve never been good at knowing the names of trees.

If you grew up in the U.S. in the sixties and seventies, as both Christina Baker Kline and I did, your two pre-google options for random info and trivia, aside from the local library, consisted of the World Book Encyclopedia and the Guinness Book of World Records.

Playback speed × Share post Share post at current time Share from 0:00 0:00 / Transcript Jane Green is rewilding herself NYT bestselling novelist, Jane Green, has written her first memoir, REWILDING. It's about chucking the life, mask, marriage, and quiet Connecticut life she had to become her authentic self in Morocco.

Because it’s hard to talk about the delightful new novel A PERFECT HAND without giving away its surprise ending, I asked author (and screenwriter, and show runner, and quilter, and lawyer, and, yes, full disclosure, one of my closest friends in the whole wide world) Ayelet Waldman to dive deep into the origins of the novel; her love of both the marriage plot and its expert practitioner, Jane Austen; the importance of reciprocity in modern-day marriages; and how her long and successful...

My grandmother Kate and her sisters, Ruth and Gussie, all wore the kinds of 1950s-era bullet bras that turned their ample bosoms into, well, not really bullets per se but more like torpedos. I couldn’t wait to have a similarly large and pointy pair of my own. Grandma Kate never knew me with breasts, as she died young of a heart attack when I was nine. Great Aunt Ruthie went next, felled by a broken hip.

April 13, 2026 in Prospect Park ©Deborah Copaken Four things happened on a single day thirteen years ago that would alter the course of my life. My then husband and I ended our 20-year marriage; he moved 3000 miles away; I drove our eldest son to his first year of college; I felt a lump in my breast. The rest of that story lives on in my divorce memoir, which ended on a hopeful note.

Jennie Young, PhD, is a professor of rhetoric and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, which, as I told her in our interview above, is the academic Reese’s peanut butter cup of my dreams. In her spare time, however—thanks to her own past disillusionment with dating—she teaches hundreds of thousands of single women online how to avoid obvious red flags and notice rhetorical patterns in dating app profiles. How?

Back in 2022, Paul Schulz, MD, professor of neurology at UTHealth Houston, published a study showing a 40% risk reduction in contracting Alzheimer’s Disease for those who received a yearly flu shot. When public health officials learned of his work, they asked him whether or not he’d noted a difference between the standard dose flu shot and the higher dose flu shot that the CDC suggests Americans older than 65 receive once their immune system becomes less effective at combatting illness.