The luxury skincare firm Estée Lauder just announced a partnership with the Stanford Center on Longevity. According to the press release, the goal of this new “longevity expert collective” is to “reframe the conversation from anti-aging to visible age reversal.” Let’s be clear: “anti-aging” and “age reversal” are the same. “Age reversal” is just the latest beauty-industry buzzword for the latest anti-aging trend. Take Kim Kardashian’s announcement of her new luxury skincare line, for example: in the same article she renounced the term “anti-aging” and offered to “eat poop every single day” if ..read more

“Ageism, and an older person’s perception of aging, may hold the keys to a longer life.”  That’s the first sentence of Why age bias has real world health effects, just published  by the Center for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. The catalyst was a new study published in The Gerontologist. The two-year study monitored 5,483 New Jersey residents ages 50-74 and assessed their risk of dying over a 9-year period. The researchers used a metric called “subjective successful aging”:  subjective criteria used by older people to assess how well they are aging. (The lower the sc ..read more

Since the 1970s, population aging—the proverbial “gray tsunami”—has been used to justify “pension reform,” austerity, and privatization across the wealthy nations. Alarmist projections have long fueled neoliberal, small-government policy reforms. In the Fall 2023 issue of Jacobin editor-at-large Seth Ackerman argues that it’s time to quit the hand-wringing and look at the data. (See The Welfare State Can Survive the Great Aging; paywall, alas.) The “staggering” increases in pension costs that have people so worried “are only staggering because of how shockingly small they are,” he writes. Ever ..read more

Concrete evidence of culture change is rare. My latest newsletter is packed with it! Let’s celebrate huge progress in raising awareness of ageism around the world, draw inspiration from it, and encourage others to build on these efforts ..read more

On Saturday I received this note via LinkedIn from a woman named Amy Claire Massingale. Massingale has a background in business development and marketing, and is also a published poet. She had applied for a position as a business development director for a medical manufacturing company. Her story bears eloquent, maddening testimony to the job discrimination that older people, and women of all ages, continue to confront. “I was rejected yesterday. After an interview with the decision-maker and then a second interview with his younger male counterpart, I was told that they were looking for someo ..read more

My latest newsletter, about giving up my old bike and why. I loved hearing back from a subscriber, who responded with a story of a doctor who tells his patient, “I’m sorry, I can’t make you any younger.” “I don’t want to get younger,” responded the patient. “I want you to help me get older ..read more

Why are women still so underrepresented in positions of power?  In the US, for example, why do women still make up only a meager 10% of people running Fortune 500 companies? Take heart, there’s always a reason. (Content warning: this article, just out in the Harvard Business Review, may raise your blood pressure.) The authors of “Women in leadership face ageism at every age” surveyed 913 U.S. women leaders across four industries (higher ed, faith-based nonprofits, law, and health care). Their conclusion? “There was always an age-based excuse to not take women seriously, to discount their ..read more

Age and age discrimination have never gotten more media coverage, especially in the wake of President Biden’ announcement that he’s running for re-election. If there’s anyone who should be delighted, it’s me. I’m in the age-and ageism business, after all. Instead, it’s making me mad. Many of the headlines are alarmist clickbait. (“Biden Would End His Second Term at 86. What Could That Mean for His Brain and Body?) Many of the stories, like that one, which ran the in the New York Times and another that ran in the Wall Street Journal, say little more than what I and countless geriatricians have ..read more

A growing body of fascinating research shows that attitudes towards aging have an actual, measurable, physical effect on how our minds and bodies function. People with more positive feelings about aging—fact- rather than fear-based, that is—walk faster, heal quicker, live longer, and are less likely to develop dementia—even if they carry the gene that predisposes them to the disease. Much of the research has been conducted by Yale’s Becca Levy, the author of Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live.  Her latest finding, published on Apr ..read more

I hardly ever cross-post questions from my Yo, Is This Ageist? blog here. I’m making an exception because the question below below occasioned such a meaty discussion during this week’s Old School’s Office Hours meetup. It also helped me understand why the phrase “parenting your parents” is unacceptable. Colleague and Office Hours regular David Wilson (@oldscoolmoves) contributed a great deal to this response. I sit at a table for the “Prevention of Senior Abuse” (I didn’t choose the name). As I was thinking about it, I was wondering if this concept is itself ageist? Does having initiatives dir ..read more