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.

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?

As a little girl in Missouri, Penny Kyle thought that teaching was “the greatest thing.” Seventy-plus years later, nestled in the study of her 1930s Tudor house in Detroit, she adds wryly, “I didn’t know any better. Well, teaching isn’t the greatest thing. It’s low pay, and it’s very difficult work.”

Unless he’s traveling, Harold Burson can be found in his corner office at Burson-Marsteller, Inc., the giant public-relations firm he founded in 1946. His parents emigrated from England in 1920 and opened a hardware store in Memphis, Tennessee, but were wiped out by the Depression. Burson’s mother supported the family by selling clothing door-to-door, and he declares that, “if she’d ever had $25,000 in capital, she’d have been Sam Walton.”

That’s just one take-away quote from a terrific op-ed by Gloria Steinem ago about sexism in the ‘08 presidential race. (A correction notes that it misstates Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s position; presumably it will be amended to note that Kennedy today endorsed Obama — which probably won’t take Steinem by surprise.)