Last Week’s Links

The new Golden Girls: Baby boomers are moving in together to save money

In 1987 Betty White told an interviewer for NPR that the older women in the hit TV show Golden Girls lived together not for economic reasons but for social ones, namely companionship. Although loneliness and social isolation remain crucial problems as people age, economic necessity is now forcing many to look for a roommate.

Soo Youn reports for The Washington Post:

Faced with escalating home prices and rents in tight housing markets, as well as careers or earnings curtailed by age or the pandemic, some boomers are looking to share their homes. Enter the boommates.

The article includes references to nonprofit, commercial, and municipal programs that help older adults looking for shared housing.

Margaret Atwood is not your ‘elderly icon’ or ‘witchy granny.’ She’s better than that

Carolyn Kellogg profiles Canadian author Margaret Atwood: “Audiences want to hear from the 82-year-old author whose fiction foresees the rise of a patriarchal fascist state and cataclysmic environmental collapse.”

The piece centers on Atwood’s recently published book Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021.

Eleven Over Sixty: A Reading List of Later in Life Debuts

Kathleen Stone recently published her first book, They Called Us Girls: Stories of Female Ambition from Suffrage to Mad Men. “With a career in law behind her and over 60 herself, she was thrilled to discover 11 other writers who debuted between 60 and 93 years of age.”

Al Pacino on ‘The Godfather’: ‘It’s Taken Me a Lifetime to Accept It and Move On’

“Fifty years later, the actor looks back on his breakthrough role: how he was cast, why he skipped the Oscars and what it all means to him now.”

In this interview with Dave Itzhoff, Al Pacino, now 81, recalls “making ‘The Godfather,’ the weight of its legacy and why he never played another film character like Michael Corleone after it.”

Denzel Washington tackles Shakespeare and life’s fourth quarter with grace

Denzel Washington has been one of my favorite actors for a long time. I regret that I haven’t yet seen him and Frances McDormand in The Tragedy of Macbeth, which is still available only on the streaming service Apple TV+.

I don’t read many celebrity-lifestyle pieces, but I’m glad I read this one, in which the 67-year-old Washington talks with Glenn Whipp, film and television critic for the Los Angeles Times. They talk about the Bible, Shakespeare, music, and preparing for life’s fourth quarter:

The only way to get overtime is doing the work now. If life has four quarters — zero to 20, 20 to 40, 40 to 60, 60 to 80 — you’re about to enter the fourth quarter. Anything after 80 is overtime.” He pauses, then reconsiders. “This is a sliding scale now that I’ve passed 65. Let’s say, 65 to 85. But the principle remains: You prepare for war in times of peace.”

© 2022 by Mary Daniels Brown