The Future of Retirement

By Flora Davis
Someday, Americans may recall the 20th century as the heyday of retirement, when individuals left the workforce in their 60s with decades ahead in which their time would be their own. Life’s later years are apt to be very different in the future—for better or worse. A quick look at the past suggests why that’s so and what may be in store for us.  Read more...
 

What Is Old Age For?

By William Thomas, MD
Old age is humanity's greatest invention, and on an even deeper level, it invented us. Old age transformed the way our most distant ancestors gave birth, reared their young, lived together, and fed themselves. Later it propelled the development of culture, language, and society.  Read more...
 

Single, but Not Solo

By Dana DiFilippo
Cindy Abrams never married or had children, a fate forged partly by chance and partly by choice. The Connecticut woman once dated a man she thought could be The One but chucked him when her dad objected because he wasn't Jewish. Subsequent romances were fleeting, infrequent, unimportant. She prioritized her profession above all else, climbing high in fields of finance and earning enough to easily indulge her love of travel and sports.  Read more...
 

The Home Care Revolution: Are Robots the Answer?

By Barbara Peters Smith
If you are 55 years old, you could wake up 30 years from now to the warm, affectionate voice of your personal care robot, asking what you would like for breakfast and why you slept for only 5.8 hours last night instead of your usual 7.3.  Read more...
 

I Lied to My Father on His Deathbed

January 29, 2015 By Bob Bostock
My generation has been called the sandwich generation, people in middle age who bear some level of responsibility for their children and their parents. While reliable statistics are not readily available, it is estimated that almost half of people in their 50s and early 60s find themselves in this demographic.  Read more...
 

The Accident

January 19, 2015 By Alix Kates Shulman
One day it happens, the dreaded event that will change your life, the more ominous because you don't know what form it will take or when it will occur. To me it happened on July 22, 2004, at two a.m. on a Maine coastal island in a remote, seaside cabin, with no electricity, plumbing or road, when my beloved husband fell nine feet from a sleeping loft and injured his brain.  Read more...