In a lot of families, there is one person everyone calls when something goes wrong. The one who can be relied on to think clearly
There’s a kind of loneliness that doesn’t look anything like loneliness, which is the precise reason it goes unspotted for years. It isn’t carried by
Somewhere in their seventies, a lot of people start saying no more often. The invitations that once got an automatic yes begin coming back declined.
I was never sent to bed as a child. Not in the way most children were, marched off at seven so the grown-ups could talk
In the Finnish city of Oulu, about 95 percent of families with babies under two routinely put their infants outside to nap, in prams, in
In Tenochtitlan, a lake city of 200,000, canoes collected human waste each dawn from public latrines and delivered it to the chinampa farms at the city’s edge — a closed nutrient loop that produced up to seven harvests a year and outperformed European sanitation by three centuries.
We picture age as a slow souring. A landmark study of how personality moves across a lifetime found the opposite trend for most people — and a few real exceptions worth keeping in view.
There is a moment in late-life interviews that tends to go the same way. The interviewer asks the seventy-something what they regret most. The expected
There is a thing people say in the first year of grief that sounds like comfort but is actually a postponement. They say: give it
It looks like restraint, or maybe resignation. The daily-diary research suggests it is something else: a learned habit of stepping around the small fights, one that costs older people less than it costs anyone younger.
We treat the years after fifty as a slow winding-down. One line of research reads them the opposite way — as the part of the human lifespan that may have made the rest of it possible.
Picture the people you know who are still in genuinely good shape in their seventies. Not gaunt, not frail, but strong, mobile, upright, alive in