Blog Posts - intergenerational

If Aging Is So Awful, How Come No One Wants to Be Younger?

October 18, 2017 By Ashton Applewhite
You hear people say “I wish I were young again” all the time. Yet I’ve never met anyone who would actually choose to move their game piece back on the board unless they could transport their present-day consciousness along with it. No one actually wants to be younger, despite a lifetime of being bombarded by messages that old = awful and “it’s all going to suck.”  Read more...

Ageist Trolls on Social Media and in the New Yorker Too

October 04, 2017 By Margaret Morganroth Gullette
The Internet is notorious for commenters who feel grossly entitled to dismiss vulnerable others. This past summer, Harvard University hit hard against racist and sexist speech on Facebook, rescinding admissions to some potential first-year students.  Read more...

Let’s Get Intergenerational!

August 04, 2017 By Ashton Applewhite
A century ago, Americans didn’t need programs to connect the generations: homes and communities housed people of all ages. But as people started living longer and moving into cities, we started thinking differently about those at both ends of the age spectrum. Schooling became mandatory, child labor was outlawed and Social Security and Medicare made a secure retirement possible for millions. The benefits were significant, but so was the downside: the natural order of things was subverted, and the generations lost contact. Our society is now acutely age segregated.  Read more...

What Does ‘Old’ Look Like to Millennials—and to AARP?

May 19, 2017 By Ashton Applewhite
AARP’s new #DisruptAging site has some commendable goals: to “hold a mirror up to the ageist beliefs around us,” and “change the stories we tell ourselves about aging.” In other words, as they put it, to “disrupt aging”—which also just happens to be the title of AARP CEO Jo Ann Jenkins’ new book. The site has featured me as an “age disruptor,” which I appreciate. It’s produced a few videos, the most recent of which has gotten a lot of traction.  Read more...

In the Fight against Bigotry, Where Does Ageism Fit In?

February 15, 2017 By Ashton Applewhite
I wake these days remembering that something awful has happened. Reality assembles itself, and I feel worse. The multicultural, egalitarian, globalized society I hope to inhabit is under assault. Bigotry is ascendant. Racism, sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance—pick your prejudice!—are sanctioned, even celebrated. How do we respond to attacks on those most vulnerable? How does the mission to build a movement against ageism fit into this historical moment?  Read more...

Mom's Bridge Club

February 01, 2017 By Pepper Evans
Lately I'm reading a surprising number of memoirs written by adult children about their experiences with their parent(s) as they age. I find myself identifying so often with the authors' stories, though my parents are no longer living.  Read more...

Think Old People Will Tank the Economy? That’s Just Plain Wrong

October 19, 2016 By Ashton Applewhite
Many economists agree that, as the number of boomers leaving the workforce swells, younger workers will shoulder ever-greater burdens. Social Security will be bankrupted by all those lazy old people! Medicare exhausted! These dire predictions of economic turmoil are biased, outdated and just plain wrong, and it was great to see a recent article in the New York Times, “Disproving Beliefs About the Economy and Aging,” take aim at them.  Read more...

They're Baaaaack!

October 03, 2016 By Pepper Evans
I was intrigued to read a Gallup-poll finding that 14 percent of 24- to 34-year-olds are living with their parents, and more than half of 18- to 23-year-olds are still at home (or are back there again).  Read more...

Age Takes Center Stage around the Brexit Vote—Not in a Good Way

September 14, 2016 By Ashton Applewhite
On June 23, 2016, a referendum (a vote in which everyone of voting age can take part) was held to decide whether the United Kingdom should leave or remain in the European Union. Leave won by 52 percent to 48 percent. The unexpected result generated widespread shock—no surprise, given the far-reaching economic and political consequences. What did take me aback was the vitriol directed at older voters, who were blamed in appalling terms.  Read more...

The “Grandpa in a Nightclub” Problem

February 15, 2016 By Ashton Applewhite
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, who is the executive creative director of brand and marketing at the Times and previously held a similar position at NPR, and whose job is to build the newspaper’s digital brand. He described the core challenge as the “grandpa in a nightclub” problem.  Read more...

Addicted to Tech

November 24, 2015 By Pepper Evans
My teens are considered “digital natives,” because they grew up with computers and other tech marvels. I, on the other hand, am considered a “digital immigrant,” because computing is a foreign language to me and people in my age bracket. I will say, though, that just to stay relevant, I took up computers as a second language, and I'm connected almost all the time with my smartphone, tablet, laptop and home desktop. I'm not “fluent” like my younger friends, but I'm not in the dark either. I know folks who never turn off their tech. I'm not one of them, but I followed along with a radio quiz about tech habits, conducted by a therapist, to determine if I am “addicted” to tech. I take lots of quizzes. Maybe I should see if I am addicted to quizzes.  Read more...

The Intern, 2015, USA, 121 min.

October 28, 2015 By Pete Croatto
The Intern is a Nancy Meyers movie, for sure—all sunny skies and characters with straight teeth living in Brooklyn brownstones straight from Architectural Digest. At first glance, it’s another one of Meyers’ puddle-deep salutes to woe among upwardly mobile seniors (It’s Complicated, Something’s Gotta Give). But the longer you stay with it, the more Meyers wins you over with her tale of two colleagues falling into a friendship. Of course, it helps to have Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway obliterating the artifice.  Read more...

No Heirlooms for One’s Heirs?

September 21, 2015 By Bob Bostock
My wife and I were at a neighborhood cookout when one of our friends mentioned he had been in another neighbor’s basement recently to help her turn off the water to her leaking hot-water heater.  Read more...

While We’re Young, 2014, USA, 97 min.

April 20, 2015 By Pete Croatto
Getting old doesn’t just happen. You age every day, until like Cornelia and Josh in writer-director Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young, you wonder how the hell you got here. The bittersweet fun of Baumbach’s tart comedy is how Cornelia and Josh keep dodging the hard truth: they don’t have the energy—or the stomach—to stay young. Yet they try longer than they should. We understand why. We’ve been there or soon will be. Reality bites.  Read more...

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, 2015, USA, 122 min.

March 19, 2015 By Pete Croatto
The nicest thing about The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011)—where a group of senior Brits get recharged in India and in a creaky hotel—was how relatable it felt. Following the characters through their highs and lows was far from a chore.  Read more...

Empty Nest

November 12, 2014 By Bob Bostock
Early this spring, one of my Facebook friends posted a photo of a robin’s nest that had appeared in a lilac bush outside her porch. A few days later, she posted another picture: the nest now had two beautiful, blue eggs resting in it. And then, a few weeks later, a photo of the nestlings, their necks extended to the sky, their mouths wide open waiting for their next meal. This was followed, predictably, by a final image—the nest was empty again.  Read more...

Uncle Ralph

May 09, 2014 By Victoria Robinson
Late one cloudy October afternoon, my sister sent me an email with the two-word subject “Uncle Ralph.” I knew before opening it what the email would say. I knew it would say that Uncle Ralph had died.  Read more...

The Doomed Experiment in Intergenerational Living

April 23, 2014 By Pepper Evans
I recently picked up Katie Hafner's Mother Daughter Me: A Memoir (2013). All it took was a glance at the book jacket for me to know that the author was telling part of my story along with her own.  Read more...