A Little Weekend Link Round-Up

A fresh batch of Oldster-ish content for you...

I tend to read, watch, and listen to an awful lot of Oldster-ish content (or which at least has Oldster-ish elements to it). Now and then I’ll pass some of it along to you.

What makes something qualify as Oldster-ish? It either highlights or calls into question what it means to be a particular age. Or, it’s nostalgic for any age group’s heyday.

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• “She had already learned to conceal her feelings as a girl of the 60s, when it was ‘understood that women were stupid’…” This Laura Snapes Guardian profile of 61-year-old singer-songwriter Aimee Mann is filled with so much interesting introspection and news—a new record inspired by Girl, Interrupted…a graphic memoir in the works.

• “…if 2021 truly is the year of the old Jewish man, it’s thanks to Bernie Sanders.” It appears alta cockers like Larry David, Mel Brooks and Elliott Gould are suddenly having a moment. At GQ, Jason Diamond considers why that is, and declares 2021 the year of the old, Jewish man.

• “Trust defined my youth back then, trust and hunger for what I didn’t know…” at Full Grown People, 80-year-old Abigail Thomas (who recently contributed a wonderful short piece to Oldster) looks back at her life in 1969, in New York City.

• “Teaching women to fear aging is just culture’s thinly-veiled hope that we won’t catch on to how great it actually is.” In her newsletter, All in Her Head, 43-year-old Feminist writer Jessica Valenti makes the case for why getting older is good—and why our patriarchal culture wants women to believe otherwise.

• “It’s never too late to find the love of your life.” For those feeling pessimistic about finding a parter later in life, Jo An Fox-Wright’s later-in-life love story on Medium offers hope.

• “…neither wanted a traditional marriage with combined households and full days spent together. ‘I liked doing whatever I want to do in the daytime,’ Mr. Mirra said. And ‘I felt like, I’m not going to sit in your house all day twiddling my thumbs while you’re out doing your thing,’ Ms. Valonis said.” At the New York Times, Tammy La Gorce writes about Harry Mirra and Ginny Varonis, an octogenarian couple who decided to marry but maintain separate homes.

• “I want my TV shows to serve as a cool aunt, pulling back the curtain on the mystery of adulthood and cautioning that life is more than simply racking up milestones.” For The Lily, twentysomething writer Elizabeth Djinis explains why she prefers TV shows about women twice her age, like Julie Delpy’s “On the Verge”.

• “…absolute time does not exist. For each clock in the world, and for each of us, time passes slightly differently.” For years I’ve been saying I have a strange relationship to time, but maybe I’m not so unique. At Big Think, Stephen Johnson explores the ways in which time is “elastic.”