"What accounts for the growing number of octogenarians and beyond who are accomplished and still accomplishing?"

Asks Jane Brody in "A Birthday Milestone: Turning 80!" (NYT). 

The article doesn't really answer the question, not any better than you'd answer it on your own: Maintain your physical and mental well being so you can continue accomplishing, and also get yourself into some line of accomplishment that's intrinsically motivating. Brody names some famous people who are still productive in their field after the age of 80 (but fails to mention Bob Dylan, who's about to turn 80).

Here's a little text from the end of the article, about regrets (which is really a different topic!):

Have I any regrets? I regret taking French instead of Spanish in high school and I keep trying to learn the latter, a far more practical language, on my own. I regret that I never learned to speed-read; whether for work or leisure, I read slowly, as if everything in print is a complex scientific text. Although I’d visited all seven continents before I turned 50, I never got to see the orangutans in their native Borneo or the gorillas in Rwanda. But I’m content now to see them up close on public television....

I thought speed-reading was a hoax. And I think it's best to leave the great apes alone. I'm put off by the elaborate fakery of traveling to Borneo/Rwanda in pursuit of an authentic encounter with orangutans/gorillas. 

And is Spanish a "more practical language" than French? French is as practical to French-speaking people as Spanish is to Spanish-speaking people, I would imagine. I think she doesn't mean Spanish is a "more practical language" but that someone living in America will find it more practical to know Spanish than to know French. One reason for slow reading is that people writing in their first language are not taking the trouble to think about what they are writing.

ADDED: My line of accomplishment is blogging, and I find it continually intrinsically motivating. So though I'm only 70, let me offer some different advice about remaining active while aging. You don't have to keep powering along in the career you chose for yourself decades ago. You can discover something within or adjacent to it that is more purely what inspires you and brings you flow. Then retire and do exactly that. I called blogging a line of "accomplishment," but I'm no longer oriented toward accomplishing anything. I live in the day. A day lived now is as good as a day lived anywhere else in the string of days that is your life. What does it matter how close to the end of the line it is? 

ALSO: From the Wikipedia article "Speed Reading," here's a photo captioned "Jimmy Carter and his daughter Amy participate in a speed reading course":

Do you think they are speed reading? The speed-reading craze got started with President Kennedy. Was he really speed-reading? Skim a few articles on the subject and I think you'll quickly get the main idea: People who claim to speed read are skimming. To read, you have to read all the words in order. You don't have to read. You can go way more quickly by skipping a lot of the words. But even skimming the articles on the subject, you should know you're bullshitting if you call that reading and claim to be "speed reading."

AND: Here's an article by Timothy Noah at Slate, "The 1,000-Word Dash/College-educated people who fret they read too slow should relax. Nobody reads much faster than 400 words per minute":

Studies show that people who read at or above the college level all read at about the same speed when they read for pleasure.... When you factor out the amount of time spent thinking through complex and unfamiliar concepts—a rarity when people read for pleasure—reading is an appallingly mechanical process. You look at a word or several words. This is called a “fixation,” and it takes about .25 seconds on average. You move your eye to the next word or group of words. This is called a “saccade,” and it takes up to about .1 seconds on average. After this is repeated once or twice, you pause to comprehend the phrase you just looked at. That takes roughly 0.3 to 0.5 seconds on average. Add all these fixations and saccades and comprehension pauses together and you end up with about 95 percent of all college-level readers reading between 200 and 400 words per minute, according to Keith Rayner, a psycholinguist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The majority of these college-level readers reads about 300 words per minute....

John F. Kennedy was said to read 1,200 words per minute. The speed-reading huckster Evelyn Wood claimed that a professor boasted of consuming more than 2,500 words per minute “with outstanding recall and comprehension.”... (Speed-reading courses teach skimming, not reading, though most won’t admit that.)...

"Should older people with slightly above-normal blood sugar readings — a frequent occurrence since the pancreas produces less insulin in later life — be taking action..."

"... as the American Diabetes Association has urged? Or does labeling people prediabetic merely 'medicalize' a normal part of aging, creating needless anxiety for those already coping with multiple health problems?... Defenders of the emphasis on treating prediabetes, which is said to afflict one-third of the United States population, point out that first-line treatment involves learning healthy behaviors that more Americans should adopt anyway: weight loss, smoking cessation, exercise and healthy eating. 'I’ve had a number of patients diagnosed with prediabetes, and it’s what motivates them to change... They know what they should be doing, but they need something to kick them into gear.' Geriatricians tend to disagree. 'It’s unprofessional to mislead people, to motivate them by fear of something that’s not actually true.... We’re all tired of having things to be afraid of.'"

From "How Meaningful Is Prediabetes for Older Adults?/A new study indicates that the condition might be less of a worry than once believed" (NYT).

"I wasn’t always quite as comfortable with queering our hetero-union."

"She came out to me a few years into our marriage, late on a weeknight.... Silent tears flowed down her cheeks as she confessed her desire to transition.... I responded with an affirmation of her feelings before I shared my own fears and frustrations.... At the time, I couldn’t say whether I wanted to be with a woman. It was something I’d never even considered before.... I struggled with my own internalized transphobia, expecting to mourn her body hair, mannerisms, deep voice and broad shoulders — the features I’d grown to know and love about her former appearance — but the transformation hasn’t been a hurdle for me.... [H]er body’s changes feel like part of the uneventful shifts in appearance everyone encounters as we age and develop or abandon certain habits. Over the years, I’ve gained more than a few pounds — making my midsection lumpier, my face rounder, my thighs thicker. I changed my own hairstyle once or twice.... My breasts sag now that I’ve fed two children from them.... We already act like the two old ladies that we will one day become...."

From "I’m a straight woman whose spouse came out as trans. It didn’t change a thing/Our friends were sure we were on the verge of a breakup at the time. They shouldn’t have worried" by Lauren Rowello (WaPo).

"In the first presidential race in which the combined age of the two leading candidates exceeds 150 years..."

"... mental acuity and physical health have become a central theme as the 77-year-old Biden and the 74-year-old Trump compete for votes. While previous presidential contests have included whisper campaigns and rumors about candidates’ health, the open charges of senility flying between the two camps sets the 2020 contest apart.... As the video of Trump on the ramp trended online Saturday, the president took to Twitter to explain his cautious stroll. 'The ramp that I descended after my West Point Commencement speech was very long & steep, had no handrail and, most importantly, was very slippery...'...  'I honestly don’t think he knows what office he’s running for,' Trump said.... 'They’re going to put him in a home and other people are going to be running the country and they’re going to be super left radical crazies.'... A Washington Post-ABC News poll released May 31... found that only 46 percent of voters thought Trump had the 'mental sharpness' necessary to serve effectively as president. For Biden, the number was 51 percent.... Some Biden supporters have pushed him to take Trump on more directly and more aggressively on the issue of mental and physical fitness. Some have highlighted how Trump effectively raised doubts about Hillary Clinton’s health in 2016. Philippe Reines, a former top Clinton adviser... publicly pleaded... 'PLEASE force the TRUTH about donald trump’s physical & cognitive health into the open... BEFORE his LIES about YOUR health harden any further.'"

From "As Trump casts Biden as ‘sleepy Joe,’ his critics raise questions about his own fitness" (WaPo).

I'm worried about both of them, so I'm creating a tag — "candidate infirmity" — to keep track of them. That's my absurd little way to help — make a tag about it. I dislike both candidates. Maybe you've noticed. Ever since Trump's West Point ramp descent down that ramp...



... I've visualized him taking the off ramp from the presidency and letting Pence go forward into the election. I can't believe we're left with the choice of Trump or Biden.

ADDED: Presidential visits are carefully set up, with the safety of the President meticulously attended to. How could they have provided him with a long, steep, slippery ramp?! That makes no sense.

"It’s a normal part of the life cycle for adult children to start parenting their parents. This generational role reversal may be a prelude to the demographic shift to come..."

"... as baby boomers age out of late-late 'middle age' and are forced to relinquish their invincibility, while their children take on the burdens of caring for elderly—yes, elderly—parents. But the pandemic has pressed the issue, putting many people in their thirties and forties in the tense new role of protectors and even scolds. It’s a twisted inverse of the generation gap of the sixties, when young boomers screamed across the table at their parents about Vietnam—except that now we’re telling ours not to leave their homes. The literary agent Lucy Carson pleaded on Twitter, 'Best advice for convincing a diabetic boomer parent to stop commuting into the city? Rage-sobbing into the phone isn’t helping my cause.' At Vogue, Molly Jong-Fast wrote about a similar dynamic with her 'fabulous feminist mother,' the generation-chronicling author Erica Jong. 'I know everyone is going to get mad at me, but this is not about your conflicted feelings about growing older,' Jong-Fast wrote.... A journalist couldn’t convince her parents to ditch their theatre tickets, until the theatre closed and they had no choice.... The writer Robin Wasserman reasoned, 'My theory is that coming of age at the height of the Cold War/nuclear panic inculcated a faith that no matter how scary things look, the Bad Thing never actually happens.'"

From "Convincing Boomer Parents to Take the Coronavirus Seriously" by Michael Schulman (in The New Yorker).

"New C.D.C. data showed that nearly 40 percent of patients sick enough to be hospitalized were aged 20 to 54. But the risk of dying was significantly higher in older people."

A subheadline at the NYT (which should be accessible whether you have a subscription or not).

I'm questioning "sick enough." Perhaps the degree of sickness warranting hospitalization is lower for younger people. Should the care be used on the sickest people or on the ones most likely to benefit from care?

Anyway, it's important for people who are faced with the effort of social distancing to see that youth is not immunity. Though "20 to 54" is a big category. What about those under 40? Under 30?

Here's a closer look from the underlying CDC report (also on this table):

As of March 16, a total of 4,226 COVID-19 cases had been reported in the United States, with reports increasing to 500 or more cases per day beginning March 14 (Figure 1). Among 2,449 patients with known age, 6% were aged ≥85, 25% were aged 65–84 years, 18% each were aged 55–64 years and 45–54 years, and 29% were aged 20–44 years (Figure 2). Only 5% of cases occurred in persons aged 0–19 years.

Among 508 (12%) patients known to have been hospitalized, 9% were aged ≥85 years, 26% were aged 65–84 years, 17% were aged 55–64 years, 18% were 45–54 years, and 20% were aged 20–44 years. Less than 1% of hospitalizations were among persons aged ≤19 years (Figure 2). The percentage of persons hospitalized increased with age, from 2%–3% among persons aged ≤9 years, to ≥31% among adults aged ≥85 years. (Table).

Among 121 patients known to have been admitted to an ICU, 7% of cases were reported among adults ≥85 years, 46% among adults aged 65–84 years, 36% among adults aged 45–64 years, and 12% among adults aged 20–44 years (Figure 2). No ICU admissions were reported among persons aged ≤19 years. Percentages of ICU admissions were lowest among adults aged 20–44 years (2%–4%) and highest among adults aged 75–84 years (11%–31%) (Table).

Among 44 cases with known outcome, 15 (34%) deaths were reported among adults aged ≥85 years, 20 (46%) among adults aged 65–84 years, and nine (20%) among adults aged 20–64 years. Case-fatality percentages increased with increasing age, from no deaths reported among persons aged ≤19 years to highest percentages (10%–27%) among adults aged ≥85 years (Table) (Figure 2).

It's easy to know how old each person is, but the differences may have more to do with each person's health and strength, which correlates roughly to age. If so and if anyone is thinking that those who vulnerable to this disease should accept their fate and not expect so much sacrifice from the rest of us, they ought to realize that it's not just about old and young. It's about weak and strong.

From the NYT article:

The report included no information about whether patients of any age had underlying risk factors, such as a chronic illness or a compromised immune system. So, it is impossible to determine whether the younger patients who were hospitalized were more susceptible to serious infection than most others in their age group....