Adam Gopnik on Aging, and a Visit to Maine with Elizabeth Strout

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 4 October 2019

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In fifteen years, people of retirement age will outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history. But, the staff writer Adam Gopnik finds, the elderly are poorly served by the field of design, whether it’s a screw-top plastic bottle or the transportation system of a major city. Gopnik visited the M.I.T. Age Lab, where he tried on a special suit that simulates the pains and difficulties of advanced age for research purposes. And, to put the issues in context, he called a much older friend: the painter Wayne Thiebaud, who, at ninety-eight, is still leading an active career and is preparing for an upcoming exhibition. Plus, the writer Elizabeth Strout has set many of her books in Maine, including “Olive Kitteridge.” She brought us to one of her favorite haunts: a steep hill on her college campus, where she would sit and look out over the world. And in a new sketch by Colin Nissan, a routine call for technical support leads to a chilling transformation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:10.6	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In 40 years, nearly 100 million Americans will be of retirement age. something like a quarter of the population by that
0:21.6	time. Staff writer Adam Gopnik has been reporting on how we're preparing or not preparing
0:27.6	to live in an aging society. Last August, two things happened to me. I turned 63, and so I decided
0:36.7	to write something about aging.
0:39.4	Now, I don't think of myself as old,
0:41.4	but one of the things I discovered when I started reporting this piece
0:44.9	is that no one thinks of himself or herself as old.
0:49.4	We will all reject the label of being old
0:52.1	no matter what it costs us in convenience. If you have
0:55.7	a device that is especially helpful to the elderly, one thing you can be sure of is that no elderly
1:01.4	person will ever buy it. That's the paradox of aging, which governs the whole realm of geriatrics.
1:10.8	A couple of months ago, I went to visit the group of people who, perhaps more than anyone
1:15.4	else in America, are spending all their time thinking about aging.
1:20.1	They are software engineers, urban planners, public health researchers, just a whole slew of
1:24.7	specialists who work together at this center in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1:28.9	called the MIT Age Lab.
1:32.4	The feel, the vibe of this place is very sort of, you know, George Jetson.
1:38.8	Everyone's at their desk at their carol.
1:40.8	There's the famous Japanese robotic seal. It's a wonderful help to Alzheimer's
1:49.3	patients and so on. Hello. The Age Lab offers a whole range of products and ideas, but I was there to try
1:58.1	a special suit that the lab has made. The suit mimics the physical conditions of aging.
	...

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