I'm an Oldster, You're an Oldster...

A welcome and a guided tour for new subscribers—plus a thank you to everyone on board.

Jul 24, 2023

Readers,

Greetings from Oldster Land, where everyone is simultaneously old and young, and also maybe every age they’ve ever been.

(Or so I’ve heard from the many respondents to The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire. It’s true for me, too.)

There are suddenly many more of you! On Saturday, Isabel Fattal, a writer and editor at The Atlantic, mentioned and linked to Oldster Magazine in a newsletter featuring that magazine’s recent articles on aging. Prior to that, in April, Jennifer Senior quoted me and linked to Oldster in “The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are”—a fantastic article.

Fattal’s newsletter sparked many new subscriptions, taking the count up to over 21K (only a fraction of which are paid) and I couldn’t be more grateful. 🙏 Thanks for signing up!

Get 10% off a paid subscription

I thought I’d take a moment to say hi to all you newcomers, give you a little tour around the joint, and also say thank you to all my subscribers and contributors, without whom Oldster Magazine would not exist. So, officially:

As you might have already gleaned, Oldster is not your standard aging-related periodical. I’m a fan of what AARP and other sites do, but this is not that. Oldster grew out of my curiosity about what it means to get older, and which milestones you’re supposed to meet when—something I’ve been obsessed with since I was 10. (I’m on the tall end of 57 now; I’ll turn 58 in October.)

Oldster Magazine is not just for or about old people; it’s about getting older, and the mind-blowing milestones we pass through along the timelines of our lives. Its official slogan is: “Exploring what it means to travel through time in a human body, at every phase of life.”

That exploration happens primarily through a combination of Q&As filled out by a diverse array of respondents—of various age groups, and all genders—and storytelling in contributors’ own voices, about some aspect of what it means to be exactly their age. Some of those contributors are well known; many others you’ve likely never heard of before; I like hearing from an eclectic mix of people from all walks of life.

Oldster Magazine’s official slogan is: “Exploring what it means to travel through time in a human body, at every phase of life.”

While I’ll occasionally share something service-y in a blog post, for now at least, Oldster isn’t about service journalism.

With some degree of variability, most weeks I publish:

Personal essays on Mondays (although, tomorrow, a Tuesday, I’ll be publishing one by Elaine Soloway.)
Oldster Questionnaires on Wednesdays
On Fridays I tend to alternate between link roundups (sometimes including playlists from Modern Sounds radio host Cliff Chenfeld) and open threads, or other blog-like posts.
On the second Thursday of each month, I publish an installment of “Notes on Another New Life,” a series by wonderful writer
Laurie Stone
.
On the third Tuesday of each month, I publish an installment of “Ask a Sober Oldster,” a collaboration between Oldster and
the small bow
,
A.J. Daulerio
’s moving and insightful newsletter about recovery and mental health.

Let me show you some highlights…

Oldster will turn 2 on August 31. In the time since I launched this magazine I’ve published Oldster Questionnaires and essays by many, many contributors. Some of the more notable contributors include:

Cheryl Strayed, Lucy Sante, Abigail Thomas, Neko Case, Hilma Wolitzer, Michael Imperioli, Deesha Philyaw, Celeste Lecesne, Elissa Altman, Jerry Saltz, Kimberly Harrington, Beverly Donofrio, Michael Musto, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Kim France, Jennifer Romolini, Dante Stewart, Laura Lippman, A.J. Daulerio, Dani Shapiro, Michael Maren, Mari Naomi, Meredith Maran, Maggie Smith, Carolita Johnson, Ann Friedman, Dionne Ford, Martha Frankel, Mary Pipher, Michael A. Gonzales … the uncle who initially inspired my inquiry into age and aging when he told me, at my 10th birthday party, that I’d never be one digit again.

I could go on and on…

Some Oldster Magazine Questionnaire takers: TopL-R: Deesha Philyaw, Holocaust survivor Tibor Spitz with his wife Noemi; Cheryl Strayed. Middle, L-R: Hilma Wolitzer, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Celeste Lecesne. Bottom, L-R: Irwin Epstein with his late wife Fran, Michael A. Gonzales, NY Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz.

As with most magazines—and especially since I am ambitiously featuring voices from a wide range of ages and backgrounds—not every article or interview will appeal to everyone. If something you read here doesn’t resonate with you, I hope you’ll hang in there and wait for another piece that does.

I also hope you’ll open your minds to the experiences of those both older and younger than you. I’ve heard from many readers about how inspired they’ve been by what others, in both directions, have written about getting older. I’m trying to get an intergenerational conversation going here—to normalize and de-stigmatize aging by demonstrating that it’s happening to everyone, in every age group, all the time.

Who am I?

Sari Botton's memoir in essays, And You May Find Yourself...Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo, was chosen by Poets & Writers magazine for the 2022 edition of its annual "5 Over 50" feature. She was a contributing editor and columnist at Catapult (RIP), and the Essays Editor at Longreads. She edited the bestselling anthologies Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving & Leaving NewYork and Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York. She publishes Oldster Magazine, Memoir Land, and Adventures in Journalism. She was the Writer in Residence in the creative writing department at SUNY New Paltz for Spring, 2023.

A while back, Substack interviewed me about Oldster.

A discount I’m offering now through August 31st, Oldster’s 2nd birthday…

I appreciate every subscription, free and paid. But paid subscriptions help me to keep doing this work—ironically a job I created for myself after I couldn’t get one, thanks in part to ageism—and to pay contributors. My rate of $55 a year or $6 a month is a lot less than what many other newsletters charge.

Here’s added incentive to go paid now: Through August 31st, Oldster’s 2nd birthday, I’m offering 10% off. If you take this offer, you’ll be locked into your discounted rate ongoing, year after year. (Also: more paywalled content is coming soon!)