What to Read by the Holiday Fire...
...or the fake electric fireplace if you're me, and your boiler went out this morning. A link roundup.
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.
“Gendered ageism — the impact of both sexism and ageism, which means women feel the effects of ageism more keenly than men — is an issue not likely to be resolved by a flourish of older women on magazine covers.” Don’t miss How Not to F*ck Up Your Face newsletterer (and Oldster Magazine Questionnaire taker)
on her issues with the “grannycore” trend. In The Cut/NY Magazine.“Here, Harper’s Bazaar gathers a group of Black punk creators, across generations to discuss their work in the scene; artistic influences and what the ethos of punk has brought to their creative lives.” - at Harper’s Bazaar, Kaitlin Greenidge speaks with Black veteran punk musicians.
Fun to see my pal, singer-songwriter and author
in this article about veteran rockers moving to the Catskills. By Sal Cataldi for The New York Times.You love to see King Charles dancing the hora with Holocaust survivors at a Chanukah party in the UK. By Janine Henni in People.
Speaking of Holocaust survivors…Meet Fred Schuster, survivor, and owner of S&S Cheesecake.
“So how does someone with no sporting precedent become an ultradistance runner in his 60s and 70s?” - on running a 100-kilometer marathon at 70, despite arthritis. By Paula Cocozza in The Guardian.
“Winfrey explained that her desire to learn more and destigmatize the experience of menopause began when she realized that a lack of knowledge had put her through near hell.” At Today, Oprah Winfrey and Maria Shriver talk turkey about menopause.
Speaking of menopause, you had to know capitalism would eventually turn it into a lucrative business. From Amy Larocca at the New York Times.
“I remain divided between two worlds. Writing is the place where, with these tools I have acquired, I see the world, but always from the world of my youth, which I never could erase, what the writer Albert Camus called ‘The First Man.’ Well, there is the first woman in me, which means that I will always write from that separate place.” - 82-year-old Nobel Prize winner Annie Erneaux in an interview with PBS’s Jeffrey Brown.
“She had spent years studying death as an abstraction, urging others to approach it with joy and wonder. Now she faced a cancer that is relentlessly concrete, and a health care system that is both fractured and, since Covid, grievously understaffed.” - In the New York Times, John Leland chronicles 92-year-old “positive death movement” proponent Shatzi Weisberger’s last days.
“But what you can’t outrun — what we don’t talk about enough — is what it means to really age, how time reshapes us.” In The Cut/NY Mag, Amil Niazi on what we get wrong about midlife.
“In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.” At The Marginalian, Maria Popova writes about Simone de Beauvoir’s attitude toward aging.
“Her collection “Odes,” published when she was 73, began with an “Ode to the Hymen” and went on to include odes to the clitoris, penis, condom, tampon, douche bag, menstrual blood, stretch marks and testicles.” In the New York Times Magazine, Sam Anderson profiles poet Sharon Olds.
“At the time, I was arguably one of the most recognizable high schoolers in America, but it had been a while since I had felt my age.” - In The New Yorker, Gen X-er Molly Ringwald recalls being directed by Jean Luc Godard in his 1987 adaptation of King Lear.
“Ageism affects everyone regardless of gender, race, religious, or political beliefs. Yet businesses feel free to marginalize people at a certain age; advertising and entertainment brands shovel out cliché after cliché of outdated representations of people over 50; and certain elected officials would like nothing more than to reduce the social benefits for an aging population and oust any older political leader.” - Michael Clinton on the scourge of ageism in politics and elsewhere, in Esquire.
“‘I wrote your eulogy so you could hear it now!’ ‘What a coincidence because I wrote your eulogy, too!’” Alta cockers Steve Martin and Martin Short recently eulogized (read: roasted) each other on SNL. Via Vulture/NY Magazine.
Wishing a merry Christmas and happy last couple of days to Chanukah to all who celebrate! And wishing peace and ease to those who find the holidays hard. 🎄🕎 (That cartoon up top by Carolita Johnson is for my fellow lonely Jews at Christmas, who have often spent the holiday eating Chinese food and going to the movies.)
So needed all of this today. Thank you!
Thanks for the shoutout, Sari! And for your continuing good works! ❤️