Invented by the sharp American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, a movie passes the Bechdel test if at least two women talk to each other about something other than a man. Low bar, right? Yet surprisingly few movies pass it. I propose the…

Many economists agree that, as the number of boomers leaving the workforce swells, younger workers will shoulder ever-greater burdens. Social Security will be bankrupted by all those lazy old people! Medicare exhausted! These dire predictions of economic turmoil are biased,…

On June 23, 2016, a referendum (a vote in which everyone of voting age can take part) was held to decide whether the United Kingdom should leave or remain in the European Union. Leave won by 52 percent to 48…

Concerned about an onslaught of enfeebled old people? Don’t worry, robots will take care of them! American techno-optimism knows no bounds, and so-called “age-independence” technologies are proliferating like crazy. But in a profoundly ageist culture, the implications can be disturbing.…

Any just society must reduce the despair occasioned by dire medical conditions. This was one lesson, oddly, that could be drawn from the TV series, Breaking Bad.

Unless you are Peter Pan, one day you’ll be old. I don’t want to experience discrimination because of a date on my birth certificate. I don’t want people to lump me into a one-size-fits-all assumption based solely on my age.…

I was delighted to see an editorial in the New York Times about a crisis in the making, the growing shortage of geriatricians.

A close friend’s grandfather is dying, though no one knows how close to death he is—perhaps months away. Even his doctor seems clueless, although perhaps he’s just not saying. In any case, he’s not asking. And even if everything were…

Growing old isn’t new. What’s new is how many people routinely do it. The institutions around us were created when lives were shorter, and the culture hasn’t had time to catch up. The way we respond to this demographic shift…

I’m the incredibly square and lazy woman who has never colored her hair. I inherited my mother’s no-gray-hair gene, and except on my right temple, my hair is brown. For an anti-ageism activist, though, that’s kind of a liability, because…

A 2013 wedding announcement in the New York Times recorded the happy pairing of a couple who met through America’s Test Kitchen. He had founded the TV show and hired her 10 years earlier. He was 62; she was 37.

When I flew to Montreal for a college reunion, senior discounts helped me pay for my airfare and hotel room. While I was happy to take advantage of these perks of my years, was I more deserving of such modest…

“Could the current cohort of eminent women in their 60s herald an era when aging, for women, ceases to be an enemy, and even becomes a friend?” asks Liza Mundy in the recent issue of the Atlantic.

“How Old is Too Old To Have Sex?” was the title of a HuffPost Live panel discussion that I took part in last year. As I pointed out during the exchange, the question itself is profoundly ageist.

An Atlantic magazine cover story last October described living past 75 as pretty darn inadvisable. Then, in quite the about-face, the December cover story championed the Happiness U-Curve and the growing body of research showing that we reliably grow happier, almost regardless of circumstances, after our 40s.

When I was a teenager, I worried sometimes about whether I had bad breath or BO (body odor). Advertising campaigns regularly demonized these and other normal, human smells, and that sold a lot of toothpaste, mouthwash and deodorant.  My concerns…

The cover of the October 2014 Atlantic magazine features a white-bearded skateboarder careening crazily above the title of an article that encapsulates American ambivalence about longevity, Ezekiel Emanuel’s “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” I wrote a letter to the…

I think my doctor is a hero and I once told him so. He’s a geriatrician—a specialist in treating older people—and a rare find.  From what I read, I can guess he earns less than most specialists and has less…

The lines used to be drawn more sharply for me when it came to assisted suicide, now more often called “aid in dying.” After all, I had in-the-trenches experience. My mother was a charter member of the Hemlock Society, the…

When I was young, everyone I knew felt some dissatisfaction when trying on clothes. Some of us found it excruciating. I used to say, “The scream came from the dressing room.” Point of purchase was supposed to be a romantic…