I took an instant liking to Claudia Fine, the Executive Vice President of SeniorBridge, a national organization that provides health and care management. We met in her midtown office, following up on a connection I’d made through a journalism seminar. She was warm, candid, and impatient with institutional dumbness.

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.”

The card sharks of Laguna Woods, an Orange County, CA, retirement community, can’t even play bridge in peace. They’re part of the world’s largest decades-long study of health and mental acuity in the elderly. Begun by University of Southern California researchers in 1981, the 90+ Study has tracked more than 14,000 people aged 65 and older — the first group “large enough to provide a glimpse into the lucid brain at the furthest reach of human life,” as Benedict Carey wrote in the New York Times.

If I had to live the rest of my life without breaking a sweat, I could cope. Strapping lads could carry me up subway steps on a litter. Somehow, I’d get my brain from place to place. Vigor, agility, beauty . . . those, too, I can acknowledge losing, though not without a struggle. They don’t hold a candle to my deepest terror: that I’ll lose my mind. Just how reasonable is this fear?

So says Professor Leon Simons of the University of New South Wales, whose study
tracking 3000 people for two decades was just published in the Medical Journal of Australia.  What he actually said was, “A drink a day can keep dementia away.”  He found that one alcoholic drink per day cut the risk of dementia by 34 per cent. And you should garden while you drink. 

Elbowing its way through the global recession and onto the front page today is a New York Times story about what professionals call “elderspeak – the sweetly belittling form of address that has always rankled older people.”  

In Slate’s geezer-centric issue, Daniel Engber takes a lucid look at sexual activity — or, more likely, its prohibition — in an article titled "Naughty Nursing Homes."  Engber cites an August 2007 article in the New England Journal of Medicine  about sexual activity among older people. Some predictable findings: people who described themselves as healthy were more likely to be sexually active, women were less so then men, and sexual activity declines with age. But not so fast!

That’s geriatrician Joanne Lynn’s copener when she critiques the lame state of end-of-life care in this country, a presentation described on the New York Times’ “New old age” blog. Hands went up a lot faster when she asked listeners if they’d prefer to be old when it happens.