Former ER star Noah Wyle has found his way into another high-stress hospital gig. Playing “Robby” Robinavitch, chief attendant at a relentlessly busy Pittsburgh emergency room, he may remind you of his ER alter ego, only more battle-scarred, more avuncular, and more traumatized by the deaths he’s seen than he’s willing to admit. Each tension-filled episode covers an hour in one 15-hour shift. Available on Max, with new episodes arriving each Thursday.

by James Chappel

James Chappel’s new book is “both a thorough history and a call to action,” said Anita Jain in The Washington Monthly. A history of aging in America, it begins with the invention of retirement in the early 20th century, tracks the politics that produced Social Security and Medicare, and shows how the nation has since reached a moment when life expectancy is growing, health-care expenses are rising, and most citizens are facing old age without enough funding to maintain the lifestyle they’ve known. “Throughout the book, Chappel airs his frustration over the country’s failure to do more for our aging population,” emphasizing that the U.S. provides less support for seniors than other industrialized nations. The author, a historian at Duke University, never does say how the federal government might devote more to the elderly than the $2 trillion it already spends annually. Still, he’s provided “a welcome primer” on a major public concern. 

“There are many myths about why aging is particularly fraught in this country, each of which Chappel dismantles in turn,” said Heather Souvaine Horn in The New Republic. No, there was never a past America where it was common for the elderly to be cared for by their own families. The older generations died too young. Further, as much as Chappel champions the achievements of Social Security since 1935, he takes pains to highlight prior initiatives that would have more generously supported old folks of all races, genders, and career earnings. To Chappel, the great tension today in public policy toward the aging is that so many older people are eager to resist the label that the subset who are disabled by aging’s health effects have too few advocates. 

“The answer to ‘Who speaks for the old?’ is, increasingly, no one,” said Anne Matthews in The American Scholar. “Even the vaunted AARP, Chappel tartly notes, is more interested in selling private-sector products than in pressuring government,” and too many of us forget that our principal obligation to everyone weakened by age is our care. “Golden Years is most compelling when it walks right up to the line between scholarly distance and social justice and offers, if not solutions, then goals: much higher pay for home health aides; safe, regulated nonprofit nursing facilities; decent senior housing; better pensions all around.” Written in “baked-potato, hold-the-butter-and-salt prose,” the book is “no fun to read at all,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Still, Chappel “knows this material front to back,” and “he gets some important things said.”

The president who became a Nobel-winning humanitarian

Jimmy Carter rose from peanut farmer to president, yet made his greatest mark after leaving the nation’s highest office. The Georgia governor, a devout Baptist, was largely unknown before he ran for president as a Democrat in 1976. That outsider status, combined with his penchant for micromanaging and preachiness, led to friction in Washington, while foreign developments—surging oil prices, the Iran hostage crisis—tanked his popularity and doomed him to a single term. But Carter then embarked on the most consequential post-presidency in American history, winning admiration at home and abroad and setting a new standard for former leaders. He became the face of Habitat for Humanity, personally building more than 4,400 houses; his Carter Center oversaw democratic elections in dozens of countries; his diplomacy defused tensions in hot spots around the world; and he all but eradicated Guinea worm disease from the planet. “The bond of our common humanity,” he said upon accepting the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, “is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices.” 

James Earl Carter Jr. came into a world that was “primitive by today’s standards,” said The New York Times. Though his father owned enough land in Plains, Ga., “to make a comfortable living,” the clapboard farmhouse he grew up in lacked electricity and running water. Yet his mother, a nurse, had “a keen interest in public affairs,” and with an uncle in the Navy, young Jimmy “set his sights on Annapolis.” A month after graduating from the Naval Academy in 1946, he married his sister’s best friend, Rosalynn Smith, who would become his trusted partner. As a naval lieutenant, Carter did graduate-level work in nuclear physics and served on a nuclear submarine. But after his father died in 1953, he resigned his commission to run the family farm, disappointing Rosalynn, who “had no interest” in returning to Georgia. 

“The Carters soon found their footing” in local civic life, said The Washington Post. After serving two terms in the state senate, Carter ran for governor in 1966 but suffered a demoralizing loss to staunch segregationist Lester Maddox. The next cycle, he wooed rural whites by praising Alabama segregationist George Wallace, only to execute “a stunning political pivot” once in the governor’s office, declaring that “the time for racial discrimination is over.” As governor, Carter “largely lived up to his lofty words,” appointing more Black and female officials than all his predecessors combined. Soon he was mounting a long-shot bid for the presidency, positioning himself as untainted by Watergate-era corruption. Coming in first among named candidates in the 1976 Iowa caucuses gave Carter a “burst of publicity and momentum.” While there were major “public doubts about the born-again peanut farmer,” there were more about President Gerald Ford, who had just pardoned Richard Nixon. The New South Democrat eked out a win. 

Carter signaled his intention to be a humble, no-nonsense president by walking some of the route to the White House with his family on Inauguration Day, said Politico. “And for a time, voters embraced him.” He pardoned Vietnam War draft dodgers, installed solar panels on the White House roof, further normalized relations with China, and got the Senate to ratify a 1977 treaty that gave the Panama Canal back to Panama. His brokering of the Camp David Accords, in which he persuaded Egypt to recognize Israel in exchange for the return of the Sinai, still “stands as a milestone of modern diplomacy.” But Congress resented his unwillingness to do backroom deals and insistence on balancing the budget, and his “disarmingly candid” addresses to the American public came across as condescending. In his first televised speech, Carter wore a sweater and urged Americans to turn their thermostats down to 55 degrees at night to conserve energy; in another—the “malaise” speech—he admonished them for being wasteful. He wasn’t helped by the antics of his brother Billy Carter, who tried to milk his proximity to power by registering as a foreign agent for Libya. Critics “quickly pronounced the new president a rube” who was out of his depth. 

Then came “the traumas that played out in his last year,” said The Philadelphia Inquirer. Days after Carter allowed the deposed shah of Iran into the U.S. for cancer treatment in 1979, militant Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran; they would hold 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. An attempt at a military rescue ended in catastrophe when one of the helicopters crashed, killing eight soldiers. Soon after, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and as part of U.S. sanctions, Carter made the extremely unpopular decision to boycott the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. Meanwhile, Americans were facing rising unemployment, inflation near 15 percent, and lines at the gas pump that could stretch hundreds of cars long. With Republican challenger Ronald Reagan asking, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Carter lost the 1980 election in a landslide. Minutes after Reagan was inaugurated, Iran released the hostages. 

Carter “began a new chapter,” said The Wall Street Journal, becoming “the most active former president in modern U.S. history.” Guided by their Baptist faith, he and Rosalynn devoted themselves to giving back, creating the Carter Center to promote peace, democracy, and health around the world. Until their 90s, the couple spent one week a year building homes for Habitat for Humanity. They also “threw their energy into fighting diseases.” In 1986, when they began a campaign against Guinea worm disease, a painful affliction caused by a parasite, there were 3.5 million cases in Africa and Asia a year; now there are only about a dozen. A kind of diplomat on call, Carter went on numerous missions to war zones or to negotiate peace accords for Republican and Democratic administrations alike—to Ethiopia and Sudan for George H. W. Bush, to North Korea, Haiti, and Yugoslavia for Bill Clinton. “But he was also quick to openly criticize U.S. policies he opposed,” such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and unafraid to anger foreign leaders, saying in 1989 that Panama’s Manuel Noriega had rigged an election. Back in Plains, where he still taught Sunday school, he wrote 32 books, including memoirs, a novel, and many on politics, such as the controversially titled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006). 

Diagnosed with liver and brain cancer in 2015, he was believed to have just weeks to live, said The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But he endured, and “seemed to revel in the extra time he’d been granted,” publishing a final book, on faith, in 2018. Both he and Rosalynn began receiving home hospice in 2023, with Jimmy out-living her by over a year and managing to cast a vote for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Carter wrote in a 2022 New York Times op-ed that he feared that Donald Trump’s lies had irrevocably damaged the nation. “Our great nation now teeters on the brink of a widening abyss,” he warned. “We are at genuine risk of civil conflict and losing our precious democracy.”