"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.)...

"I don't listen to podcasts. The format has never appealed to me. I am a visual learner. I love to read. Reading allows me to jump around..."

"... skim where I think it appropriate, moderate my pace, and return to passages that are important. With reading, I can easily highlight, or copy and paste a key phrase into a blog post. Moreover, much more care is put into the printed word. Authors (present company included) labor over every sentence, word, and syllable. Podcasts are different. Less care is put into the spoken word. Unless the narrator is reading from a transcript, we are left with the normal flow of conversational english.... Sure, I can play it at double-speed, but I am still stuck with his chronology...."

Writes Josh Blackman (at Volokh Conspiracy).

The thing I don't do — and for some (but not all) of those reasons — is watch the news and news commentary shows on television. You have to give yourself over to their control of your precious time. With text, you control your own time, according to your needs and abilities and predilections. And it's so passive. I can't easily blog it or send it to somebody. I'd have to either transcribe it or make a little video clip of it. So I would be either bored or agitated by the slowness, the repetition, and the loss of the opportunity to do something with it. 

But I wouldn't designate myself a "visual learner." I'm just someone who likes to do things with text. So, mostly, I read.

I have my uses for audio, including audiobooks and podcasts. I like an audiobook for a long walk for 2 reasons: 1. It keeps me from dwelling on the walk as a slog, and 2. It forces me to continue linearly through an entire book. And I like the right podcast while doing various tasks — housecleaning, personal hygiene, and so forth — that require some but not that much engagement. I like the sound of good conversation, the feeling of human company, and some random material to mix with my stray thoughts.

"Liz Cheney is a bitter, horrible human being. I watched her yesterday and realized how bad she is for the Republican Party."

"She has no personality or anything good having to do with politics or our Country. She is a talking point for Democrats, whether that means the Border, the gas lines, inflation, or destroying our economy. She is a warmonger whose family stupidly pushed us into the never-ending Middle East Disaster, draining our wealth and depleting our Great Military, the worst decision in our Country’s history. I look forward to soon watching her as a Paid Contributor on CNN or MSDNC!" 

So blogs Donald Trump. I got there via Memeorandum, not because I check Trump's blog with regularity. The link went to the post page, not to the blog proper, and I was thrown for a moment by the words just above the post: "back to feed."

Those words appear right next to an image of Trump bent over a table, and, without looking more closely, I thought: He's back to feed — feed upon the other politicians, upon the journalists, upon random tidbits of American culture. We're all a grand feast for him! I think of Robert Bork's "I think it would be an intellectual feast...."

But of course, "back to feed" was a hot link, a place to click, that would get you back to his "feed," that is, his blog. If you're on an individual post page of my blog, the hot link to click on says "Home." It would be weird if it said "feed." But this is an out-and-proud blog, and Trump's blog is trying to seem like Twitter. Arguably, Twitter is a blog — "micro-blogging" — but it's different from a blog because all the blogs are interwoven in one humongous feed. There we feed/we are the feed.

"In the final months of his life, when it was clear that he wouldn’t recover, Atwater lamented the dirty, divisive campaigns he’d run, and apologized far and wide for them."

"His memoir calls on politicians to instead follow the Golden Rule. Roger Stone, who formed an early consulting and lobbying firm in the Washington area with Atwater, along with Paul Manafort and Charles Black, remains unconvinced about Atwater’s spiritual awakening. 'Lee was a great storyteller,' Stone told me in a recent interview. 'But, in the end, he was just grasping at straws. The Atwater family disagrees and has no doubt that he became a Christian. But at that point he was also Buddhist, Hindu, and everything else.'... In Stone’s view, however, Atwater was more of an opportunist. 'We both knew he believed in nothing,' Stone told me. 'Above all, he was incredibly competitive. But I had the feeling that he sold his soul to the devil, and the devil took it.'"

Writes Jane Mayer in "The Secret Papers of Lee Atwater, Who Invented the Scurrilous Tactics That Trump Normalized/An infamous Republican political operative’s unpublished memoir shows how the Party came to embrace lies, racial fearmongering, and winning at any cost" (The New Yorker).

Gah! Why don't I have a "Lee Atwater" tag? I have about 10 old posts with his name. I'll bet every time I thought something like: No, he's a secondary character from a bygone age, not likely to come up enough to deserve his own tag. Meanwhile, I've got hundreds of tags for individual names that I've only used once. Atwater comes up a lot because his name is synonymous with "dirty tricks" and because he supposedly regretted it all when he came face to face with Death.

So that explains why I'm blogging this snippet from The New Yorker: It casts doubt on the deathbed conversion story. But it's just Roger Stone. We never actually believe Roger Stone. Then again, does it matter? Does it matter that a man regrets his evil deeds when he's no longer in a position to benefit from them? He took all his advantages when it worked in his favor, but he tells you to follow the Golden Rule. What's the basis for believing him?

FROM THE EMAIL: Richard writes: 

The New Yorker headline of "Lee Atwater, Who Invented the Scurrilous Tactics That Trump Normalized" is ironic in so many ways. First, "Scurrilous Tactics" rather well describe the Democrat attacks on Trump, beginning with the Russian Collusion myth and the Impeachments. Second, the Daisy Nuclear Holoucast ad that the Democrats ran against Barry Goldwater in 1964- an ad that ordained Baptist minister Bill Moyers approved- points out once again that Democrats are not unfamiliar with using "Scurrilous Tactics" themselves.

Consider the Willie Horton ad. Willie Horton was a convicted murderer, in prison for life without parole. He committed rape and armed robbery in Maryland while on a weekend furlough from prison in Massachusetts. First, Governor Dukakis vetoed an addition to the inmate furlough program that would have prohibited convicted murderers from being eligible for weekend furloughs. Second, Al Gore was the first to bring up the furlough program during the campaign, though he didn't mention Willie Horton.

Finally, while The New Yorker and assorted Democrats may disagree with this point, "soft on crime" was a valid description of Dukakis. Willie Horton wasn't the only example. In one of the debates, Dukakis stated that he opposed the death penalty for someone that had raped and murdered his wife.

And Shane writes:  

Without excusing whatever was done or believed to have been done in 2016/2020, I just don't understand the "Trump normalized" nasty politics and racial fear-mongering thing. "Put y'all back in chains"? "Binders full of women"? the stupid high school forced haircut? Bork and Clarence Thomas? Biden saying his wife and child were killed by a drunk truck driver, when by all other accounts the truck driver was heroic and suffered for Biden's lies. Politics at a local level can be nasty, but once you reach the statewide, let alone federal political arena, its bare knuckles as it has been for centuries. Jefferson/Adams, Grover Cleveland, Harding, FDR and JFK personal lives cover up. Trump only normalized the media exposing their blatant taking of sides, and then only after they dumped him as a useful foil that backfired on them.

"I went to England and in the course of us meeting the Beatles, I became friends with George. He was a very nice cat, very open..."

"... a very decent human being. Invited me over to his house for dinner, that kind of thing. Hung out with us. Later on, he tells me that he’s gone to India and met this teacher, this guru. George is smitten by him. I listened to what he was saying and I wanted to say to George, 'That’s great, but take it with a grain of salt,' because usually when somebody comes on that strong that they’ve got the answer, it’s bulls—. I wanted to say, 'Have some skepticism.' But I was too chicken to do it, because I had too much respect for George. So I wrote him that song. 'I thought I met a man who knew a man who knew what was going on.' And I ended it by saying, listen, I don’t think he does know what’s going on. I don’t even know if George ever heard the song."

Said David Crosby, in an interview with the L.A. Times. 

Here's the song, "Laughing":

 

That's from Crosby's 1971 solo album that the critics "just didn’t understand," as Crosby puts it. "They were looking for another record that was full of big, flashy lead guitar and blues licks and screaming lyrics. It was not where everything else was going, so they thought it was irrelevant." 

Lester Bangs called it "a perfect aural aid to digestion when you’re having guests over for dinner." In 1971, that was a worse kick in the head than being told your music makes me want to vomit.

ADDED: Not only do I have a tag for Lester Bangs, the Lester Bangs tag appears on a post written on the first day of this blog, January 14, 2004. There is no other tag for a specific human being until the next day, when Herbert Muschamp and Dennis Miller appear. Interestingly, George Harrison shows up on January 17, 2004.

"Scroll casually through your platform of choice and you’ll see kids. Kids protesting on Pinterest; kids posing on Instagram..."

"... kids socially distanced proms and graduations on Facebook. Kids of people you know I.R.L. and kids of people you don’t. Kids who most likely haven’t given their permission for you and me to see them or who have simply accepted this exposure as part of modern life. Every time we post a picture, we’re telling a story, crafting the myth of our own life. Images of our children become part of that mythology. A shot of kids frolicking on the beach or posing at Disney World tells a story about prosperity, happiness and ease. A photo of well-scrubbed kids on the first day of school says My children are thriving. I’m a good mom.... When my older daughter and blogs were both in their infancy, I posted pictures of my new baby and wrote about new motherhood. I found community and support from other new mothers. But as my daughter got older, as she went from a sleeping, pooping blob to an actual person, and as the world soured on so-called mommy blogging, the sharing got harder to justify. After all, my daughter had never consented to appearing on my blog. How would she feel when she got old enough to Google and discovered her entire life online?"

Writes Jennifer Weiner in "Should Any Parents Be Instagramming Their Kids?/Sure, those of us who do may not all be Myka Stauffers. But we’re all selling some kind of story about ourselves, and using our children to do so" (NYT).

"Mx. Baggs was concerned that autism awareness had become a trendy catchphrase..."

"... 'whether it’s parent groups who throw the word "autism acceptance" around to sound current but don’t actually accept the slightest thing about their autistic children, or whether it’s autistic people who’ve fallen in love with the words and forgotten the meaning.' There were blog posts about hir father’s death, hir cats and the 'snake words' used in the disabilities-services industry that sounded helpful to clients but, Mx. Baggs said, were actually harmful. ('Apologies to actual snakes,' one of these entries noted.).... Mx. Baggs took the name of the ballastexistenz blog from “ballast existence,” a concept employed in Nazi propaganda to justify killing people with disabilities...."

From "Mel Baggs, Blogger on Autism and Disability, Dies at 39/Candid blog posts and a widely viewed short film sought to expand the very definition of what it means to be human" (NYT). Baggs died of "respiratory failure, though numerous health problems may also have played a part."