How the Science of Brain Health Inspires a Storyteller

Loneliness. Aging. Empathy. Josh Kornbluth, a storyteller whose work positions him at the intersection of art and science, explores these crucial topics in “Citizen Brain,” a series of engaging short videos about what current research in brain health c… Continue reading

The Spiritual Practices of a Lapsed Protestant

It’s 6:30 a.m., and I have just left my “holy corner,” where I sit alone every morning for an hour or two. The early morning is for me a sacred time, what the Celts call a “thin place,” where the gap between the sacred and the secular is very narrow. T… Continue reading

Winter Reading Picks to Intrigue and Inspire

A book. That’s the answer, whether the question is what makes a great holiday gift or what will see you through a chilly winter weekend.  Or maybe the answer is plural: Books. “In winter, I jump into bigger books like Richard Powers’ The Overstory, say… Continue reading

The 4 Poignant Questions Older Men Ask Themselves

(We’re always interested in new research and insights about growing older in America and the new book by Thomas Cole, Old Man Country: My Search for Meaning Among the Elders, has them in spades. Cole traversed the country interviewing men in their 80s … Continue reading

Painting a Picture With Words

Students in the Visual Memoir class at Pillsbury House and Theatre in Minneapolis come prepared with a starting point for the art projects they will be creating: their own words. The class is part of Pillsbury’s Centerstage creative writing program for… Continue reading

My Mom’s D-E-V-O-T-I-O-N to Crossword Puzzles

There are constants in life. Like the seven days of the week or the bright green flowers on the wallpaper in my mom’s kitchen or my mom herself, who insisted on correcting my sisters’ and my spelling errors on our letters home from summer camp. She’d i… Continue reading

So You Want to Write a Book…

Patricia Jacobson had been working on her novel Fern  since 1986. She was beyond excited to call herself a published author at last, when her first five copies arrived a month ago at The Heights senior living home in Burbank, Calif. where she lives. Ja… Continue reading

5 Things About Aging I Learned From My Favorite Books

Writers have strived to survey the landscape of old age since Shakespeare wrote King Lear. But the Bard’s iconic image of the dying and raging patriarch is hardly a contemporary portrait. Today, when writers, like all of us, are living and working into… Continue reading

Figuring Out a Budget for Your College Student

As the mother of two college students, I continue to scratch my head about a simple question. How much do my sons need for spending money, and what portion of it should I provide? Unfortunately, experts say, there’s no one answer, either on the amount … Continue reading

This Harvard Geneticist Says People Will Someday Live to 150

(Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of the book Lifespan: Why We Age — and Why We Don’t Have To, by David A. Sinclair, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. In the book, published in September 2019, Sinclair explains his theo… Continue reading