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What a Stalin biography tells us about our time

History illuminates the present. I’ve been reading Stephen Kotkin’s widely and justly praised multivolume biography of Joseph Stalin and have encountered many passages that illuminate the present. I learned, for example, that Stalin met the exiled Vladimir Lenin more than a decade before the October 1917 revolution, and that by the early 1920s until his death in 1924, Lenin was in failing health, confined to an estate with “a staff, including the worker-cook Spiridon Putin,” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s grandfather. That provides an interesting context for Vladimir ...

Dear Annie: Leave your worries for tomorrow

Dear Readers: Wishing you all a very happy Labor Day. The expectation of this holiday is to take the day off, put our feet up and enjoy the last stretch of summer. How many of you are actually able to take the time to reset and rest today? We say we are going to relax, and then we answer a few emails. We clean the kitchen. We run to the grocery store. We start thinking about everything that needs to happen in September. Before we know it, our day off has turned into another day of checking things off a list. Maybe this Labor Day, we can try something different. Ralph Waldo ...

Pneumonia patient most likely has a Legionella infection

DEAR DR. ROACH: I was recently admitted to the hospital with pneumonia in both lungs. Given the recent outbreak of Legionella where I live, I was concerned whether I might have had this instead. They did do some tests in the hospital to try to find out. — R.C. ANSWER: I looked at the labs that you sent me, and several of them are consistent with Legionella. You had a very high C-reactive protein level, a relatively low procalcitonin level, pneumonia in both lungs, low blood sodium, and a relatively low heart rate. All of these suggest Legionella rather than pneumococcal pneumonia ...

Dear Annie: How to declutter without starting a war

Dear Annie: I am desperate to declutter our house, but my husband has a very hard time letting go of anything. Our closets are overflowing, the garage is packed, and we have boxes of things we haven’t opened in years. There are old tools, clothes that no longer fit, broken electronics, stacks of paperwork and even things from hobbies he hasn’t touched in decades. Every time I suggest donating or throwing something away, he finds a reason we might need it someday. I’m not trying to get rid of everything or make our home look like a showroom. I just want to be able to open a closet ...

Cardiac patient’s thirst runs rampant in the evenings

DEAR DR. ROACH: I’m 74 years old, and I was diagnosed with congestive heart failure with a recent ejection fraction of 25%. My cardiologist has me taking empagliflozin (Jardiance) and furosemide (Lasix) daily. With moderate cardio exercise therapy every other day and two diuretics daily, my thirst runs rampant during the evenings, and I find myself drinking fluids to compensate. Am I nullifying the intended purpose of the diuretics? — D.P. ANSWER: The main purpose of diuretics is to remove excess salt and water from the body. However, we all need some salt and water, so the ...

Why working‑class people account for around 1% of lawmakers in the US – and only 2% in the average democracy around the world

Both major U.S. political parties regularly tout their commitment to working-class Americans and claim to be the party of the working class. However, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans nominate many candidates who spent substantial time in working-class jobs. This near-absence of people from working-class jobs in the halls of power matters. According to research in the U.S. and in other democracies, safety net programs are stingier, business regulations are flimsier and protections for workers are weaker than they would be if people from working-class jobs went on to hold office ...