Link-O-Mania

Your occasional dose of Oldster-adjacent content from "the computer."

Cartoon by Carolita Johnson, originally published in The New Yorker. Reprinted with permission.

I tend to read, watch, and listen to an awful lot of Oldster-adjacent content. Now and then I’ll pass some of it along to you in a link roundup like this one.

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• “One thing I have learned, now that I’m 53, is that words like success or failure are loaded, value-judgment words for what is all just experience.” - at Fast Company, Gen X style icon and State of Menopause co-founder/CEO Stacy London writes about a career “mistake” she no longer regrets.

• “It’s ironic that a Gen X so well-versed in puberty and periods can feel, as we enter middle age, that we’re suddenly without guidance.” - Oops, someone forgot to inform my generation about menopause. (Thank goodness for the likes of Stacy London.) By Leslie Gray Streeter in the Baltimore Banner.

• “My parents do not have a single dollar saved for retirement…In their golden years, they’ll have some Social Security benefits, but they’ll rely mostly on financial support from my two siblings and me to live out the rest of their lives.” - My wonderful former Longreads editor Mike Dang, in the New York Times, where he is now an editor on the Business desk.

• Huge congratulations to Oldster Magazine contributor

  Laurie Stone
  , whose latest book, Streaming Now: Postcards From the Thing That is Happening has been long-listed for a Pen/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay!

  

  Get the book!

• “‘We’re being told to work more,’ said Ms. Jagueneau, who is eager to work and feels dismayed to be collecting unemployment for the first time in her life. ‘But it’s almost impossible for older people to get jobs, because companies in France won’t hire them.’” - Older workers in France are alarmed about the retirement age being moved from 62 to 64. By Liz Alderman for the New York Times.

• “In fact, just one thing distinguishes the crowd from nearly any other rock ’n’ roll show in a small city in America: Almost everyone is over 65.” - at the New York Times, Joseph Bernstein reports on “Geezer Happy Hour” in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

  Jerry Saltz @jerrysaltz

  Don’t wait until you are old to realize what a wonderful life you are having.

• “It wouldn’t be completely accurate to say my mother has no qualms about aging, but it occurs to me now that she came to terms with it long before I could even realize it was happening.” - I just love an intergenerational conversation. At Fortune, Trey Williams has a conversation about aging and happiness with his 64-year-old mom.

• “Now, without the use of my hands, or any other limbs, which is a considerable inconvenience, I write a daily dispatch from my hospital bed, which I dictate to my family who then send it out to you.” - in a Substack newsletter titled The Kureishi Chronicles, 68-year-old novelist, screenwriter (My Beautiful Launderette), playwright and director

  Hanif Kureishi
  is documenting his recovery from a devastating, debilitating fall in Rome last month.

• “I hadn’t ‘rendezvoused’ in eight years. That’s when my first husband died in a car accident on his commute home from work. I was about to end that lengthy dry spell with Steven, a dear man I’d met on Match.com.” - at the Huffington Post, Diane Gottlieb on ending a 10-year dry spell, later in life.

• “He wants to have the brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, tendons, teeth, skin, hair, bladder, penis and rectum of an 18-year-old.” - Ashlee Vance at Bloomberg reports on a 45-year-old man’s $2 million quest to turn back his biological clock by decades, and it is equal parts fascinating and disturbing.

• “But unfortunately, the macroeconomic environment has shifted in ways none of us could have foreseen, from an economy in which I did feel like paying you, to one in which I’d rather not.” - for McSweeney’s, Mike Lacher so accurately diagnoses one of the ills of unfettered capitalism, I had to keep reminding myself it was satire rather than investigative journalism. (This has nothing to do with aging, but it’s too good not to share.)

  90sanxiety

  

  A post shared by Nineties Anxiety (@90sanxiety)

• RIP Full Grown People, Oldster contributor

  Jennifer Niesslein
  ’s 10-year-old wonderful magazine about mid-life. (And good riddance to the cancer she has kicked!)

• Also, RIP Revel, Nina Lorez Collins’ online platform for women 40 and older, with which Oldster collaborated on an essay series and Zoom reading last year for International Women’s Month. (Revisit the essays by: Abigail Thomas, Naz Riahi, Blaise Allysen Kearsley, and Emily Rubin.)

• As you can see, it’s tough for publications and media platforms to stay alive in these times! Support the media and creators you’d like to see continue. (If you count me and Oldster among creators and media you enjoy, and you’re not yet a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one!)

• Mea cupla: I know a number of you are waiting for me to publish your pieces, and I will get to them in time! I’m doing this all by myself (plus other jobs) and have been so incredibly overwhelmed. I accepted more pieces than I can use in a short amount of time, resulting in a bottleneck. I’m also trying to distribute them in a thoughtful way that I alternate ages, genders, backgrounds, voices, and more. Thank you for your patience! 🙏

• I’m also trying to make more room for my own voice here on Oldster. With that in mind, get ready for an advice column I’ve long planned, and am preparing to launch soon (in Feb or March?): “Ask The East Village Yenta.”

  

  Have a great weekend, everyone!

  -Sari