General List Made Up From World Around

Germany bare.
 Germany, says Alice Gregory (presumably an American) writing in the NY Times, so it must be true, has a widespread, curious habit of baring all.  Nudity is big, taking in 10 or 15% of the people, especially those over 50 and those in the east, the old Russian piece of Germany.  We understand that nudity on many beaches all over Europe is normal and yawned at.   The American journalist shows up in a bikini but ditches it as no one pays any attention, her relative youth being ignored.  Her act makes her swimsuit seem "lifeless, damp, maybe even diseased."
Yet she fills two pages without a line about going bare as a way to become more comfortable with and accepting of your body.  The notion that baring your body around others who do the same can help you be more comfortable with your body seems kind of self-evident to me, and maybe the best defense of an otherwise questionable practice of naturism.  Being a female writer for the NYT, she seems likely to be friendly to feminism's urges to be less wound up with your physical form, and doesn't seem to have noticed Germany's hobby may help with this.  ??

Bayonne covered.
Move from paunchy white nude Germans to a trim dust-and-debris-covered 28-year-old black legal assistant named Marcy Borders from Bayonne, NJ.  Though she was told "no big deal, keep working," she hurried down 81 floors of the World Trade Center on Sept 11, 2001.  Out on the street when one tower collapsed, she was knocked down and covered in dust.  She was afraid she might die there and then, but a guy helped her up.  A photographer caught her looking like a white-out--Dust Lady.  Only her facial features and the darkness of her lips hint she is African-American.  She went home, but perhaps the fear of it sucked half the life out of her.  She never went back to work for Bank of America, like the guy who told her to keep working, though we would suspect he followed his own advice and died.  Marcy wouldn't go into Manhattan, stopped talking to people.  Life fell apart for her.  Ten years later she started getting it back together, working for a politician.  Two years ago she had stomach pain, delayed seeing a doc due to no insurance, ended up with stomach cancer.  She wondered whether to blame it on the attack, since, the NY Times tells us, 4000 people who were there later got cancer.  Borders left from this physical realm in 2016 at age 42.  She escaped the building, but not the terror.

Alzheimer's treated?
Alzheimer's has so far been untreatable, with lots of drugs  (200 in 15 years) tested that failed.  Amyloid protein formation is one problem, though lots of us over 60 have amyloid and don't have dementia.  Another protein called "tau" plays some role in the nerve damage, too.  Dr Longo of Stanford is testing a drug called C31.  C31 is said to interfere with "10 of 14"  triggers that lead to disease.  Meanwhile prevention?  In recent years the word "exercise" has become part, perhaps the first part, of the answer to "what do I do to prevent dementia?"  Wanna go for a bike ride?  I did six miles yesterday.  The biking held fun and neighborhood discovery and work and pain all together.

A New Age not relying on astrology.
One type of "New Age" that seems obvious and may have nothing to do with taro card reading.  In 1932 Alice Bailey described a "new age" that makes sense to me (her book:  From Intellect to Intuition, p. 4).    "We are now one people.  The heritage of any race lies open to another; the best thought of the centuries is available for all; and ancient techniques and modern methods must meet and interchange."  I conclude we live in a "new age" in which virtually all the scattered pieces of humankind are in lots of contact with the other pieces.  It's a New Age because it's a global era of interconnection.  In theory we should be able to take from East and West, from new and old, from Jew and Gentile, land and sea, from outer space and a computer's innards (on which I'm writing this), from Mahatma Gandhi, Steven Hawking, and Sandra Day O'Connor.  With all this we may well be able to brainstorm, write out, create, find inspiration to make better lives for more humans on Earth than ever before.
Bailey, says Wikipedia, was one of the first to use the term "new age" to describe our era.  The above lines show, to me, that she articulates a way we are in a new age, better than others.