Articles and Essays

If you find yourself straining to hear in crowded places or saying, “What did you say,” more often than you used to, you may need a hearing aid. If despite the strain, you tell yourself that your hearing’s fine, you’re not alone.

TV reporter Melike Ayan grimaced to herself during an on-air interview. “I must sound like Donald Duck!” she worried. “What was the last question I asked?” The 49-year-old couldn’t remember, as the congested sound of her own voice had been echoing in her head, making it impossible to focus.

With her blood pressure at 160 over 100, Antoinette Paris was determined to do whatever it took to avoid suffering a stroke, as her father had. But she never imagined she would dance her way back to health.

Are you wondering how to call a cab in the era of Uber and Lyft? It takes tech savvy to sign up for ridesharing apps—and they’re not as simple as the younger generation makes them seem.

Earth Day is coming up on April 22nd. Why not take a look at how you—as an individual or family—can go green and help save the planet by lowering your carbon footprint?

Used hearing aids may seem like a good way to save, but they could cost you in the long run. Here are other things to avoid when shopping for a hearing aid.

No matter how old the children are, when parents divorce, they are losing their family as they always knew it, and that's going to hurt.

It’s hard to overstate the romantic appeal of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara to 60s radicals like Bernie Sanders and myself. I am about the same age as him and came of age politically at the same time he did. With its funky fatigues, beards and revolutionary rhetoric, the Cuban revolution captivated u…

I was a fat kid, a fat teen, a fat adult, and have been “fat shamed” ever since I can remember. When I was a kid they just called it “teasing.” But there is one moment that stands out as the most humiliating of my life.

I couldn’t find one other person on that trip who agreed that trying to violently overthrow the US government was insanity. That such a thirst for blood had taken over a group of otherwise ordinary, middle-class kids was incomprehensible to me — and scary.

So goes Broward, so goes Florida, so goes the entire election, according to pundits. As I sat in the rain in a library parking lot in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, trying to get up the nerve to approach strangers on the first day of early voting, I wondered what the hell I was doing there. Why had I volunteered for Linda Thompson Gonzalez, a down-ballot Democrat running for the state house in Broward County?

“She’s just a young woman wrapped up in an old body,” this newspaper once wrote of Disco Sally, a 77-year-old woman who dirty-danced all night with the young, wild kids at Studio 54 in New York. When I read about the recently widowed former lawyer in the 1970s, she had a boyfriend in his 20s, and the likes of Bill Murray and Dustin Hoffman were lining up to dance with her.

I’m not an easy person to get along with—I admit it. I’m pushy, curmudgeonly, sarcastic. At one time or another I’ve had fallings out with all my friends. Except Lonnie. Lonnie is the one friend I never lost—until last week. She died at age 79 after a long bout with cancer. We were the same age. She was the closest to a sister that I had, or will ever have. She fought fiercely to live. In the words of Dylan Thomas, she did not go gentle into that good night. She raged, raged against the dying of the light. I would never have expected that since she was self-effacing by nature and never fought for anything else.

Elder, older, older adult, senior citizen, golden-ager, retiree, what do we want to be called when we get to “a certain age?” Whatever term you use, it’s guaranteed that them’s going to be fightin’ words for at least some people who have reached that age.