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.
The ‘Grandpa in a Nightclub’ Problem February 15, 2016 - A while ago, Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab ran a piece about the New York Times’ digital branding efforts. It quoted a series of tweets by Max Pfennighaus..
Having the Talk—Not the One about Sex, the One about Dying January 20, 2016 - 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…
How Do I Get Old Faster? November 23, 2015 - That’s a question that Laura Carstensen, PhD, regularly fields after explaining why older people are happier than younger ones—the basis of the ubiquitous Happiness U-curve. I didn’t really believe the curve existed until I understood why. Carstensen, a psychologist and the founding…
What’s Missing from Marc Freedman’s Plan to Make the Most of Longer Lives? November 8, 2015 - 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…
Want Older People to Be Healthy? End Ageism October 19, 2015 - There’s a lot of disagreement around how to frame the last century’s unprecedented increase in human lifespan. Is it a crisis or an opportunity? Will a “grey tsunami” of incapacitated freeloaders sweep us off our feet, or will we tap…
So I Dyed My Hair White September 28, 2015 - 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…
Beating the Age Barrier in Online Dating August 20, 2015 - 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.
Is a Generation of Powerful Women Turning Age into an Advantage? Not Exactly July 7, 2015 - "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.
Why Would You Even Ask? May 11, 2015 - “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.
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.
