Author and activist Ashton Applewhite has been recognized by the New York Times, National Public Radio and the American Society on Aging as an expert on ageism. She blogs at This Chair Rocks, speaks widely, and is the author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, “a book we have been waiting for… that blows up myths seven to a page like fireworks” (Los Angeles Review of Books). In 2016, Next Avenue, a website that’s part of the PBS system, named Applewhite its Influencer of the Year, for sparking a revolution against ageism.
Midlife Malaise and the Happiness U-Curve March 11, 2015 - 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.
Oh, Grow Up! January 13, 2015 - That was my visceral (and ever so mature) reaction to “Who Are You Calling Grandma?,” a fluff piece in the New York Times about how baby boomer grandparents, especially celebs, are rejecting traditional grandmonikers for hipper titles.
How Problematic Is This Atlantic Cover Story? Let Me Count the Ways October 20, 2014 - 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…
Guess Who’s Confronting Ageism Now? July 23, 2014 - Ageism in Silicon Valley has been all over the news lately. “The Brutal Ageism of Tech,” a March 2014 feature story in the New Republic, noted that some male techies, still in their 20s, are contemplating Botox and hair transplants, while middle-aged engineers, a swelling cohort of “highly trained, objectively talented, surpassingly ambitious workers,” are being sidelined “for reasons no one can rationally explain.”
Finding ‘Modest Delight’ in Asking for Help March 27, 2014 - When I moved to a Brooklyn neighborhood with a median age of around 23, I said to myself that it would be time to move again when I could no longer hustle up the subway steps as fast as the…
Who’ll Be in Charge When We Die? March 26, 2014 - 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…
Why Ageism Matters March 17, 2014 - In 2007 I started interviewing people over 80 who were in the workforce. At the same time, I was reading and writing about longevity. To my surprise, the more I learned, the greater the discrepancy that emerged between my grim notion of late life and the lived reality.
