What happens when a mother and daughter with different political concerns discuss issues of race in America? In 2015 on a visit home to Alabama, Patricia Foster and her mother argue over the riots in Ferguson, Missouri. This encounter becomes the catalyst for Foster’s visit to Africatown in Plateau, Alabama (forty miles from her hometown), where the last American slave ship, the Clotilda, arrived in 1860 after the U.S. had abolished the international slave trade in 1808.  What Foster...

Senior Health Insurance Information Program (SHIIP) counselors Gary Schwartz and Kevin Ward will clarify the distinction between traditional Medicare with Medigap and prescription drug supplements, in contrast to the all-inclusive Medicare Advantage plans. Gary has been a SHIIP counselor since 2006. Kevin is beginning his third year as a SHIIP counselor. They are trained to clearly present enrollment guidelines, premium costs, and benefits for Medicare A, B, C, D, and supplements. Monday...

Sonatina Fernandes, senior UI HR specialist, Rebecca S. Olson, senior director of Benefits, and Anne Thurston, client consultant with Health Alliance Medical Plans, will present an overview of the 2023-24 UI health care enrollment options available to UI retirees. Tuesday, October 24, 2023, 1:00 p.m. via Zoom Expect the Zoom link on October 22. If you lose the link, contact Ed Dove, edwin-dove@uiowa.edu.

Participants will alternate tours of the photo studio and Iowa Ceramics Center. If you would like an im-mersive experience, for a $25 fee, there is a 45- minute opportunity to use a pottery wheel. Partici-pants will learn how to pull up a small cup or bowl. Clay will be returned at the end of the session. Reser-vation required and payment to be made directly to the Iowa Ceramics Center on the day. A map to the venue will be sent to participants. If you wish to car-pool, please indicate your...

  Our Medical System Is Frayed: Why Did Humpty Dumpty Fall Off The Wall? Victoria Sharp, M.D., M.B.A. Professor Emeritus, Department of Urology Acting Chief of Staff, Iowa City VA Healthcare System Living in the United States, great health care is something we all expect to be available and reliable. Busy in our lives focusing on what is important to us and what we are good at, in general, you wouldn’t think we would need to do much more than eat healthy, exercise, drink alcohol in...

All multicellular organisms use “innate immune” receptors to detect and mobilize defensive responses to invading microbes. This includes proteins recognizing lipopolysaccharides (LPS) of Gram-negative bacteria. LPS-recognizing defense systems have been characterized in both humans and horseshoe crabs that have inhabited the Earth for 300+ million years. The ability of horseshoe crab LPS-binding protein to detect minuscule amounts of LPS has prompted pharmaceutical development of the horseshoe...

When you reach for your smartphone, is your hand reaching for it, or is the device now reaching for your hand, with its alerts, beeps, vibrations, and suddenly glowing screen? Does your hand want it, or does it want your hand? In this talk, I want to think about Walt Whitman’s most intimate passages, with his claims of a sentient physical book (codex) in mind—a kind of proto-smartphone—and see how his words work to evoke, to enact, the physical interaction between a living reader and a book...

In popular culture "time management" means planning every minute, being efficient, and getting everything done. It's something you need for your career, not your life. This time management does not fit with anyone's vision of "retirement." But there is another, more useful, more accurate version of time management: Time is all we have. We want to use our time to create a life worth living. To do that, we need to decide what to do, plan (enough) to make those things happen, and do them with...

Patricia M. Zebrowski   On Nov. 8, 2022, Iowans will vote on the addition of an amendment to the state constitution. The "Right to Keep and Bear Arms" amendment uses language that goes beyond the protections laid out in the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment. Specifically, the measure on the ballot will read: "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The sovereign state of Iowa affirms and recognizes this right to be a fundamental individual right. Any and all...

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called the recent UN report on climate change a “code red for humanity.” Among its many findings, “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land." Furthermore, greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are the highest concentration in the atmosphere for at least 2 million years; methane and nitrous oxide are the most in more than 800,000 years; and our average temperature on earth is the warmest in at least 2,000 years. All...

The Annual Meeting of the Association of Emeritus Faculty will take place on Monday, May 16 from 10 a.m. until noon, via Zoom (meeting ID 825 854 6688). In addition to updating you on Emeritus activities, at 11 we will have a guest speaker, Professor Harleah Buck from the College of Nursing and Director of the Csomay Center for Gerontologic Excellence. Her presentation is titled Envisioning a Future of Optimal Aging and Well-Being for Older Adults and Their Caregivers: The Barbara and Richard...

In most states, tenants who are victims of domestic violence have NO right to terminate their leases. This forces victims to choose between remaining in their homes and risking more violence and possibly death, or leaving their apartments and incurring substantial debt to their landlords for unpaid rents. Reforming landlord tenant law to allow tenants who are victims of domestic violence to terminate their leases without owing further rents seems like a sensibile solution. As with all reforms...