Bad-boy British novelist Martin Amis  is in the news for proposing euthanasia "booths" on street corners where the old old could off themselves with "a martini and a medal.” Amis maintained that his comments were meant to be "satirical" rather than "glib", but there’s something to offend just about everyone in his prediction that “a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, [will be] stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops.”

These videos of Olga Georgia came to me via her daughter Olivia, who thought that Olga might not fit my demographic unless I counted her vivid imagination. Surely all viewers will agree, however, that this woman is hard at work. She’s 85, and lives next door to Olivia, who shot the video.

Thanks to Sue Swartz for her kind words about this blog as Curator-of-the-Week for She Writes, a forum for women writers.  Quoting my observation that “Age is a frontier and these are our scouts,” Swartz writes, “Now that I’ve reached AARP membership age myself (if you don’t know what that is, you’re probably under 45), I find myself more interested in what happens to our lives at the point that we’re “supposed to” retire.

My new year’s resolution is to start integrating more personal reflections into the blog. No better place to begin than a BBC News story that came my way last week about a link between youthful looks and longer lives. Studies show younger-looking twins in both Denmark and the UK outliving their siblings. As ever, it’s a dance between genetics and environment. Worn faces probably reflect harder lives, and those subjects also had shorter telomeres (pieces of DNA that protect the ends of chromosomes from deteriorating).

One of the pleasures of this project is listening to the history that my subjects have lived and witnessed. One of the difficulties is weighing how much to include, and my general rule has been less not more.  When I interviewed master ceramicist Eva Zeisel, for example, I learned that she had been involved with novelist and essayist Arthur Koestler and figures in his masterwork Darkness at Noon, which George Orwell drew upon when writing 1984. 

An entry in the New York Times Magazine’s annual Year in Ideas issue tackled the “reputational stigma” that penalizes people over 45 in today’s brutal job market. When economists pitted "seniors" (over 50) against "juniors" (under 30) in a set of decision-making tasks, the older group proved only “very slightly less” competitive. They also cooperated better, leading to the welcome conclusion that the ideal workforce consists of workers of all ages.

On Veterans Day, PBS aired a documentary called "The Way We Get By."  Much of it was shot in Bangor, Maine’s tiny airport, where flights from military bases all over the U.S. and inbound from Iraq and Afghanistan stop to refuel. Filmmaker Aron Gaudet’s mother Joan is one of the Maine Troop Greeters:  a group of older men and women who’ve taken it upon themselves to shake the hands of every soldier passing through.

This week I gave a mini-presentation to my colleagues at Yale’s Information Society Project. Below are some of the broad questions I put to them.

Stereotypes underlie all prejudice. As I point out in my Introduction, we call out racist and sexist attitudes but seldom question descriptions of older people as confused or feeble. In fact, variability is a hallmark of older populations. Why are ageist attitudes given a pass?

Angelo Mucci had served in the Army Air Corps and was enrolled in college when he met Rose. “I thought, 'You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to get a job and go to work and get married," he told me. "We had a great big Italian wedding. It was just outstanding. You weren’t there.”

I learned yesterday of the death of gerontologist Gene Cohen, whom I was lucky to hear at a journalism seminar on longevity two years ago. As I describe in this post, Cohen was a gifted and original evangelist for the creative potential of the aging brain.