Memoir, Autobiography, and the Aging Urge to Explain Yourself Let me confess something at the outset: As part of my Elderware project, I'm writing a memoir. Or trying to. Some days it feels like archaeology, digging through fifty years of political theater, community organizing, and one particularly regrettable
Age, ideology, and the myth that getting older means getting more conservative The Folk Wisdom and Its Problems Let's start with what the research actually says, because it's more interesting than the bumper sticker version. Folk wisdom has long held that people become more politically conservative
Here in the Commons, we have all types of aging folks. Some with families on site living in old school multi-generational homes, some with kids not too far away, some with kids spread across the country, some built over one long relationship, some blended from several, but we also have
This Saturday, May 16th, Studs Terkel would have turned 114 years old. He was born in 1912, the year the Titanic went down — a fact he loved to cite, usually with that impish grin, as if to say: I came in on the wreckage and I'm still here.
How often does a piece of music take you away? One minute you’re sweating the details of life’s to-do list, and the next you are singing out loud in your car in the gym parking lot. Okay, that was me today. Possessed and waves of emotion rushing through
Imagine you are fifty years old today (and yes I know most of my audience for this experiment passed that toll booth more than a few years back). But go ahead, imagine you are one of your children around 50, I have one of those so I will imagine myself
Tracking my weight, metabolism, and what it means to finally ask for help My father was a diabetic. Diagnosed the same year of my birth, 1957 — as though we arrived in the world together, he and his disease, just in time to greet me. And so for all seventeen years
On Eric Topol, inflammation, and the stories we tell ourselves about showing up Most mornings I walk into a gym that could pass for a senior center with better equipment. The median age in the cardio section hovers somewhere around 68. There are people on the ellipticals who have been
Elderware | Monday, April 7, 2026 Georgia Gilmore lost her job on a Tuesday. By the following weekend she was cooking out of her kitchen on Dericote Street in Montgomery, Alabama, feeding the people who were walking to work rather than riding buses that humiliated them. The crowds waiting for plates
Dispatches from the Longevity Innovations in Higher Education Summit I'm sitting in the Lifelong Learning Auditorium at Mirabella at ASU — one of the more remarkable spaces I've been in lately, if you think about what it represents. This is a continuing care retirement community built on
Veterans, Aging, and the Wars We Keep Fighting As I write this, the United States and Israel have launched what the administration is calling "major combat operations" against Iran. The Minab girls' school is rubble. Somewhere between 80 and 148 children — the numbers are still coming in,
Enshittification, Elders, and the Social Media We Deserve There is a word I keep coming back to. It is not a polite word, but it is an accurate one, and sometimes accuracy matters more than politeness. The word is enshitification, coined by Canadian writer and tech critic Cory Doctorow in