The Necessity of Our Illusions: Oliver Sacks on the Mind as an Escape Artist from Reality | Fentanyl is spreading the opioid crisis into America’s big cities | Book Review: ‘Flight of the WASP,’ by Michael Gross | What to Know About Long-Term Care Insurance

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The Necessity of Our Illusions: Oliver Sacks on the Mind as an Escape Artist from Reality - The Marginalian

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Fentanyl is spreading the opioid crisis into America’s big cities - The Economist

In a world where open data makes spreadsheets with tens of thousands of anonymised entries available to the public, sometimes individual detail can still stand out. On Christmas Day last year, according to data downloaded from the Cook County medical examiner, the coroner in Chicago and its closer suburbs, four people died from opioid overdoses. One, a 34-year-old man, had apparently been taking cocaine. Another, a 43-year-old, was suffering “complications of chronic ethanolism”. All four, however, were almost certainly killed by the first drug listed as cause of death: fentanyl. They were among exactly 2,000 people killed by opioid overdoses in Cook County last year, accounting for close to one in 20 of all deaths. Over the past eight years, the annual total has tripled. Nine in ten deaths involved fentanyl.

When opioids first started killing Americans in very large numbers, it was disproportionately white people, often in rural areas, who were the victims. Cities and ethnic minorities generally suffered lightly. Yet a far worse wave of death is under way now, caused almost entirely by fentanyl, an incredibly powerful synthetic opioid that can be used legally as a painkiller, but is mostly produced by Mexican cartels and smuggled into America.

In 2021 opioid overdoses killed 80,000 Americans, according to data from the Centres for Disease Control, a government agency. The figures from Cook County suggest that cities are now being hit hard too, as are ethnic minorities. Of deaths in Cook County last year, a majority were African-American. Nationally in 2021 black Americans made up 18% of victims, up from 13% in 2018, even though deaths of people of all races continue to rise.

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Book Review: ‘Flight of the WASP,’ by Michael Gross - The New York Times

In “Flight of the WASP,” the inveterate dirt-digger Michael Gross gives America’s elite families the white-glove treatment.

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

Has social media killed the Social Register? Or do WASPs still have something to offer the rest of us?

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What to Know About Long-Term Care Insurance - The New York Times

Deciding when, or whether, to buy long-term care insurance can be complex. Here’s what to know.

This article is part of the Dying Broke series examining how the immense financial costs of long-term care drain older Americans and their families.

If you’re wealthy, you’ll be able to afford help in your home or care in an assisted-living facility or a nursing home. If you’re poor, you can turn to Medicaid for nursing homes or aides at home. But if you’re middle class, you’ll have a thorny decision to make: whether to buy long-term care insurance. It’s a more complex decision than for other types of insurance because it’s very difficult to accurately predict your finances or health decades into the future.

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