The Heart of Power – Episode 12: The Quietest Crisis
A narrative nonfiction analysis of Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s disease, exploring how memory, power, and performance separated without collapse.
Because Good Medicine Deserves Better Explanations
A narrative nonfiction analysis of Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s disease, exploring how memory, power, and performance separated without collapse.
When tests are normal but patients aren’t, medicine struggles. A reflection on the “medical orphans,” uncertainty, and what it means to stay.
Mrs. Alvarez sits in the waiting room with a purse full of appointment slips. They’re soft at the edges, creased from weeks of being handled and rehandled. Inside the purse is a worn photo of her newborn grandson. It isn’t decoration; it’s something steady to look at when the day begins to tilt…
Around fifty, a surprising number of men begin to sense that something inside them has shifted — not a symptom, not an illness, just a quiet feeling that things aren’t quite the same. And most of them keep it to themselves.
This episode explores that hidden landscape: the subtle physiological changes, the stress, the disconnection, and the silence that shape the health of middle-aged men long before anything shows up on a scan.
This is the 11th episode in The Heart of Power: Medical Histories from the White House, a series that looks past the legends to the bodies and pressures behind them. John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe are almost always mentioned together as rumor, as shorthand, as something half-imagined. But when I looked closer, the familiar … Read more