Reassuring, timeless, safe: how Angela Lansbury set the style for female TV sleuths
Lisa Dresner, associate professor at Hofstra University, New York and author of The Female Investigator in Literature, Film and Popular Culture, says that Fletcher, as an older woman, appealed to both male and female audiences. “She doesn’t explicitly deal with sexism so she is very reassuring as a desexualised character,” Dresner said.
5 Apps and Tech Skills That May Lead to a Healthier You
Pam Holland is the founder of TechMoxie, “which provides technology coaching and support for the tech-hesitant.” Here she shares some tips to help older adults “compensate for physical and cognitive decline using simple everyday technologies.”
An Introduction to Older Adults Technology Services (OATS)
OATS is “a charitable affiliate of AARP.” Here are some testimonials and articles about how knowledge and use of technology can help improve older adults’ lives.
At 66, Elizabeth Strout Has Reached Maximum Productivity
“The Pulitzer Prize-winning author has written five books in six years and been nominated for a Booker Prize for ‘Oh William!’ What’s gotten into her?”
“I’m getting older, and I’ve taught myself how to get these sentences down, how to know when they’re worth getting down,” said Strout, 66. “It’s like I’ve been training for a marathon my entire life and now there’s an acceleration happening.”
Jamie Lee Curtis has aging advice: ‘Don’t mess with your face’
The “Halloween” franchise actress calls herself “pro-aging” and tells her own daughters “don’t mess with your face.” . . . Instead, she said, she tells her kids to focus on what they can contribute to help people.
Keepsakes and memories: Finding, in the clutter, a life well lived
Preparing to move from the United States to Italy, Bob Brody “sorted through every possession in our New York apartment belonging to our family of four.” What he found was a lot of paper. After describing what pieces of paper he chose to keep, he concludes: “In the end, my paper chase gave me tangible, irrefutable, verifiable proof of a life lived: a marriage navigated, children raised, business transacted, and struggles long since won or lost. It’s a life lived to the fullest.”
A Low-Pressure Guide to Make Strength Training a Habit
“For real this time.”
Danielle Friedman admits that strength training “not only lengthens life span but improves people’s quality of life and well-being,” including maintaining cognition and decreasing depression and anxiety. Yet she also admits that she, like the “majority of Americans struggle[s] to carve out time for strength training.”
So she “asked exercise psychologists, scientists, trainers and muscle evangelists for their best advice on launching a lasting strength-training routine.” Read what she learned. I especially appreciated a “20-minute starter routine.”
Opinion: The Cuban missile crisis was 60 years ago, but it’s urgently relevant today
Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of Nation magazine, believes that the Cuban missile crisis—“the 13-day standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union widely regarded as the closest we ever came to global nuclear war”—can guide us in resolving the current threat of the war in Ukraine.
Geena Davis Is Ready for the Geenaissance
if your perception of Geena Davis boils down to “Beetlejuice” and “Thelma & Louise” and “A League of Their Own,” you’ve been missing a much quirkier, more eclectic, more persistent person. And yet, to hear Davis tell it, she’s spent a lifetime trying to build up inner conviction. “I kicked ass onscreen way before I did so in real life,” she writes in her new memoir, “Dying of Politeness.” “The roles I’ve played have taken me down paths I never could have imagined when I dreamed of becoming an actor. They have helped transform me, slowly, in fits and starts, into someone of power.”
Learn more about the eclectic life of actor Geena Davis, now age 66, in this interview.
© 2022 by Mary Daniels Brown