The New Yorker Radio Hour - Adam Gopnik on Aging, and a Visit to Maine with Elizabeth Strout

Episode Date: October 4, 2019

In fifteen years, people of retirement age will outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history. But, the staff writer Adam Gopnik finds, the elderly are poorly served by the field of design, whether it’s a screw-top plastic bottle or the transportation system of a major city. Gopnik visited the M.I.T. Age Lab, where he tried on a special suit that simulates the pains and difficulties of advanced age for research purposes. And, to put the issues in context, he called a much older friend: the painter Wayne Thiebaud, who, at ninety-eight, is still leading an active career and is preparing for an upcoming exhibition. Plus, the writer Elizabeth Strout has set many of her books in Maine, including “Olive Kitteridge.” She brought us to one of her favorite haunts: a steep hill on her college campus, where she would sit and look out over the world.  And in a new sketch by Colin Nissan, a routine call for technical support leads to a chilling transformation. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In 40 years, nearly 100 million Americans will be of retirement age, something like a quarter of the population by that time. Staff writer Adam Gopnik has been reporting on how we're preparing or not preparing to live in an aging society. Last August, two things happened to me. I turned 63, and so I decided to write something about aging. Now, I don't think of myself as old, but one of the things I discovered when I started reporting this piece

is that no one thinks of himself or herself as old. We will all reject the label of being old, no matter what it costs us in convenience. If you have a device that is especially helpful to the elderly, one thing you can be sure of is that no elderly person will ever buy it. That's the paradox of aging, which governs the whole realm of geriatrics.

A couple of months ago, I went to visit the group of people who, perhaps more than anyone else in America, are spending all their time thinking about aging. They are software engineers, urban planners, public health researchers, just a whole slew of specialists who work together at this center in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

called the MIT Age Lab. The feel, the vibe of this place, is very sort of, you know, George Jetson. Everyone's at their desk at their carol. There's the famous Japanese robotic seal. It's a wonderful help to Alzheimer's patients and so on. Hello. The Age Lab offers a whole range of products and ideas, but I was there to try a special suit that the lab has made.

The suit mimics the physical conditions of aging. Samantha Brady bundled me into it. So to start the aging process, we're going to put a weighted vest on first. All right. This is to feel what it would be like to gain. How many pounds is this? This is 10 pounds, but this is actually not that you're necessarily going to gain weight, but muscle loss. Oh, right.

It's very common. Yes, absolutely. Everything at the age lab has a name. It's part of its charm. And the suit is called Agnes, which in the... This amazing, very MIT acronym stands for Age, Gain Now Empathy System. It's a composite snarl of bungee cords and weights and restrictive clothing. It's got limitless amounts of Velcro and good number of snaps, and it took me a full 15 minutes just to get it on.

So the more muscle loss weights come on now. Yes. So now we're going to go with the ankle weights. All right. So these are about four to five pounds each. And they wrap right around. One of the really startling things the Agnes suit provides are these kinds of numbing crocs that you put on your feet,

which very skillfully imitate the loss of sensory feeling in your foot pads that can cause the slower shuffle many elders walk with. All right, let's go to Joe's office. All right, now I can blame Joe. I may kill Joe at this point. Joe Coughlin, who's the creator of this monster's suit, is the head of the lab. Wow.

Oh, my goodness. Looking a little different now. Yeah, I'll say. He's a fellow boomer in significant good health still. I don't know if he's a particularly fast walker, but once I put on the Agnes suit, I did start to notice how goddamn sprightly he seemed by contrast. Moving a little slower, perhaps?

Slower, and the really weird thing is that one's, gate. It's the interface with the ground. I know that sounds like a weird thing to be troubled by. We also make the mistake quite often that older adults are naturally slower. Sometimes they're not slower. It's that lack of flexibility and ability to take a wide step that is making them slower. Right. Well, let's walk a bit. Let's do a test. I want to find out what this is like. And oh my goodness, this is so aggravating. Joe Kaufman springs down the hallway and I follow an aging Lear-like figure trudging along behind him. We get to this kind of faculty lounge, this is an area with a coffee machine.

It's a very fancy coffee machine. It's got a touchscreen where you order the kind of coffee you want. Kaufman wanted me to try working this touchscreen on the coffee machine because as the world we're living in becomes increasingly digital, touch screens abound, and they present certain challenges for the aging. Well, look at this. Here's the... No, actually, this is a fun thing to think about.

So look at the coffee machine we've got here. I want you to navigate that coffee machine to pour yourself a cup of coffee. And by the way, even your hands change as we age. With less moisture, the touch screens are, shall we say, less forgiving. Oh, is that right? Yes, I feel that already. So let's see. I'll hit small.

I'll do regular. Go. Joe Coughlin tells me that the problem isn't just my newly, if artificially, gnarled hands. It's really about the way we design the entire world around us. Trying to grasp a hot beverage in your hand is worrying. Well, think about this. Now, that cup is thinner because we're trying to save on paper. Plastic bottles have gotten thinner because we're trying to be eco-friendly. Ironically, that very thing that is being more environmentally friendly is not very gray-friendly. You've got to squeeze it to get a grip on it. So as a result,

you'll often take a bath trying to open up the water, or you may get the hot coffee all over you. I can feel it. It's really difficult to do that. And it's very important. And it's very as you worry, I could spill this, and that would be it. So one of the things that often comes up with using Agnes with all kinds of companies around the world is that people say, well, why don't you just ask older people? Why don't you just watch? And the answer is, we do, and we do watch. But here's the difference.

Older folks want to cope. They also don't want to admit, if you will, that they are having difficulty. And the other thing is, an engineer, a designer, whatever, will know that that can be fixed easily rather than somebody saying, well, heck, I'm 80 years old. That's what it means to be 80 years old. There is much a victim of the story as the designer who's designing something they think is old age. They're the chapter of the narrative too because they think, oh, well, I guess life is just like this now. 15 years from now, only 15, people of retirement age will outnumber children for the first time in American history.

Wearing the Agnes suit makes me realize just how everything in our built environment is designed for the young. That's why Coughlin built the Agnes, the aging suit. so that we can empathize in our lived experience with what it's like to be old. Maybe even more importantly, he also organized a focus group of older people, all aged 85 or above, who come in every month to talk to researchers at the Age Lab about what the lived experience of age is like. Coughlin calls them, charmingly, the lifestyle leaders.

My producer, Caroline Lester, went with two of the members on their way to a meeting at MIT. Close you into the lobby. Jean lives independently in her own apartment. She's lived there for decades, and for the most part, it suits her needs.

A few years ago, she fitted her ceilings with these kinds of thin, rectangular boxes that deaden all the ambient noise. I'm almost 95, a few weeks, and I had these

put in for soundproofing recently. My hearing is so by lousy. I was just surrounded by what they call surround sound. Jean and her friend John, also a non-agiarian, are part of the lifestyle leaders group at the age lap. There he is. John did. Fantastic accomplished. What are you? I'm an artisan in wood. Artisan and wood. I am a 21-year retired physician that now plays. in his workshop with wood.

Now, Gene and John take ride shares to get around most days. But there's an element of anxiety attached to it. One of the positive discoveries that the Age Lab has made is that technologies that seem designed for millennials, like rent the runway, and Uber, actually work extremely well for older people who need that kind of disposability and efficiency. Do you want to call Uber an Uber?

and I'll call on the way back. And then we go right away out there because they come fast. But where millennials tend to get extremely irritated if they have to wait more than a couple of minutes for an Uber, for the elderly, a car showing up that quickly in less than five minutes, that's the stressful part. Is this ours? That's our man.

Our kids don't want us driving anymore. It's dangerous driving in Cambridge. So my kids don't like me driving, but we have no choice. We use Lyft and Uber, but for just little dittly things, it's not worth it. It's simpler to get in the car. And when seniors lose their independence of their cars, it is a major crisis. I'm at the critical stage. My kids would like me to stop.

I have to renew my license in a few weeks. What are you going to do? I'm going to try to pass it. If I pass it, fine. If I don't, I'm a different person. It will be a different life. We'll get off at that first building. Do you need a hand?

Thank you. I think I'm all right. We're a little later than I hoped. Doesn't it start at 12? Yeah, but everybody's sitting there eating before we get there. Each meeting has a different topic. This week, the elders were asked to bring in recipes. They broke into focus groups where they talked about how their relationship to food has changed as they've aged. My name is Gloria Jefferson. I live in Natapan.

My name is Bob Horlick. Joe Coughlin later used some of the information gathered from this meeting to write an article. John Nelson, I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. I'm a retired child psychiatrist. I've been retired 21 years. The discussion lasted about an hour, and then everyone dispersed, many to ride children. This time it was Jean's turn to order the Uber. Is our ride coming?

Yeah. Okay, I'll come out. You want an arm? Let me carry. You should have a hand free. Yeah. You're right. You should always have a...

I wouldn't mind an arm. Until midlife, we think of ourselves as growing. Suddenly, the same inexorable passage of time becomes aging. aging. And as 20 minutes in the Agnes suit will remind you, aging is an insult to the human spirit, which is resilient, vibrant, forever 19 years old. Growing is a gentle slope upwards. But aging isn't a gentle slope down. It's a series of lurches. And we just pretend it isn't happening for as long as we can until we lurch to a final end. So the idea, the concept we have of aging is perhaps as damaging as aging itself.

Even when we admire an elderly person, we find ourselves speaking to them with a fake abulience, a strained reassurance. So for my own sake, I wanted to reach out to someone who is a lot older than I am, but to whom I cannot possibly feel a smidgen

or a spark of sympathy, much less condescension. And the first person who I thought of who was like that, who refused to be diminished by age, was the great American painter, Wayne Tebow, who I've known for 40 years. I picked up my phone and called Wayne at his home in Sacramento.

Wayne is 98 and still producing terrific work. I wanted to talk to him about how age is affecting his art. Would you say it's true that in your 90s, you think more about your early years than about your middle years, more about childhood than about, you know, the long prime of your career? That's still now at, I guess, soon to be 99. You've had, like all of us, your share of sadness and grief in life, and yet whenever we've been together, you seem able to find resources of joy and renewal. I wonder what you do.

Is it in your work? Is it in your faith? Is it in life itself that you find that capacity for renewal even in the face of loss? I think teaching, all the way. so was a very, very, I see myself. So teaching and tennis are the two propellants for... Well, we have to make a stretch for the tennis. It's really more hit and giggle today.

But you're still out there. Wonderful exercise. Still get out there two or three times a week. Suddenly, I felt how wrong it was to ask Wayne about how it felt to be aged. He was old, yes. but he was working, and that meant he was, above all, Wayne. I stopped asking about his age and asked about his art.

Well, I've just finished a series of over the last 15 or 20 years of paintings of mountains from memory. And that's going to be a show in November at the Aquavella Gallery. That's Wayne Tebow, a great painter whose 99th birthday is next month. He talked with Adam Gopnik, a staff writer at the New Yorker, well, for many years. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and in a minute, we'll climb a mountain in Maine with the writer Elizabeth Strout. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick. The novelist Elizabeth Strout has set most of her books in Maine. She grew up just over the border in New Hampshire in a small town where her mother taught English in the local high school, which made it kind of awkward. when Strout decided that she'd had enough of that. And I remember my mother came upstairs that morning, and she said, what have you decided about dropping out of high school? And I said, well, I'm not going to finish. She said, okay.

In retrospect, quitting high schools seemed to have worked out pretty well. Strout ended up enrolling in college at Bates College in Maine, and she went on to publish many works of fiction. Her book, Olive Kittredge, was a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Elizabeth Stroud told us that during her time at Bates, so this would have been around the 1970s, her favorite place to go was Mount David. Not exactly a mountain, more like a, I don't know, a steep hill or something,

but she loved the view from the top, looking over the small city of Lewiston. I don't think I've been up on top of Mount David for, well, since my senior year in college. But I would come up here at least once a month, if not more, just to sit and look over the city. We're headed up Mountain Avenue and Mount David is halfway at Mountain Avenue.

It still seems a little cleaner than I remember. You know all these pine trees, but what do I know? I don't... I just remember clambering over broken sticks and stuff to get up here. But this looks very much like it did. Quite a steep climb. so there's many grasses and the trees are much scrubbier up here at the top just a few scrubby trees and then rock just plain rock so here we are finally at the top and um what's interesting to me at this point oh look at that nest is that a nest whatever is that the trees have grown up higher so you

cannot see the town the city you know i had always spent a lot of time in the woods alone as a kid and always enjoyed that. But this was different because this gave me a view of a city and a city meant people. And I'm sure I was either born that way and, you know, and it was also part of the isolation that I felt as a kid. But I just loved to see that array of buildings that meant there were people down there. Yeah. It's like my for a city. Shirley Falls is definitely my fictional Lewiston and I was not living here at the time that the Somalis arrived but I was always, you know, had my eye on what was happening up here. And when I heard about the man who had thrown the pigs head through the mosque, oh my word, I was just,

it was just such a moment for me and I realized this has got to be told. And I followed that whole thing for a year. And the man who actually was the real perpetrator was 30 years old, and he was a racist, and he killed himself. And as I was thinking about the book, I thought, I have to make my perpetrator younger, much more confused. He doesn't understand what he did, because it seemed to me that it was much more interesting novelistically, and that many of us, we don't understand what we're doing. And so I made, you know, poor Zachary, just a 19-year-old kind of kid who was very displaced in his head at that time.

But that was the genesis of that book. My work has been enormously informed from, first of all, from things that I learned at Bates, starting with Winesburg, Ohio, starting with Martin And Drucky's amazing classes on playwrights. We read so many playwrights, and I learned a lot about dialogue just by reading those plays, Clifford Odette's, Tennessee Williams,

just reading and reading and reading plays. But then also the experiences that I had in town also informed my work. Because when I was working as a waitress, I was working with people who were from Lewiston. They weren't from Bates. And I remember I waitressed at the first disco. Oh, man, it was crazy.

And it was hard. And nobody tipped. One night, my friend Maureen, who was a local woman, she was just such a nice woman. And she came over to me and she said, I just got puked on. And then later that night I also got puked on. And so we both quit.

It seems like ancient history now. to be here and to be remembering this, and yet it's very vivid, and it was a very important part of who I became. I don't think I've ever talked about Mountain David to anybody. Not for any particular reason, but just because it just sits inside myself like one of those very private, quiet things.

The novelist Elizabeth Strout, her book, Olive Again, is a sequel to the bestseller Olive Kittridge, and it comes out later this month. Remnick, and next weekend, the New Yorker Festival is taking place all over town an extravaganza of live interviews and performances of all kinds. Among the highlights is Nancy Pelosi being interviewed by staff writer Jane Mayer. That'll be interesting to say the least, and we're going to bring you that conversation right here on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for listening, and I hope you'll join us next time. But just one more thing before we go. Hi there. This is Eric. In a few words, tell me how I can

help you today. You can speak your responses just like we're both human. I'm having a technical problem. For example, say billing, technical support, changes to your account, or if it's something else, just say something else. And feel free to keep it super cash. Technical support. Looks like you need tech support. I'm on it. But first let me ask you a few questions. Cool? Cool? What? Yeah, cool. Awesome. Are you a new customer or a returning customer? customer. I think you said returning customer. Is that right? Yes. I think you said yes. Is that right? Yes. Great. I'll need your account number to access your information. Hook me up with your digits and just speak them. Like we're two buds hanging out at a bar or a different casual place.

479-1. You said 4-7. Looks like we're missing a couple of numbers. No worries. Just try again. 47910. Once I have your account number, we'll be ready to roll. Representative. I'm ready when you are. Representative. Representative. Sounds like you want to speak to a representative.

Is that right? Repre-fucking-zentative. Sounds like you put a profanity inside the word representative. Is that right? Yes, that's right. Let's try this another way. Tell me your name. Say it or spell it.

Representative. You said Anderson. Is that right? Yeah, sure. Whatever. Just please let me speak to a human being, please, any human being. So that I can connect you to the right person. I need to ask you a few questions. Super Caj.

Oh, my God, please. Sorry, I'm having a little trouble understanding you. Are you being super Caj? Maybe it wasn't super Caj enough. Try again. Just please, let me speak to a person, a real human being. I am begging you. Representative.

Sure, hold on a second. Really? Connecting you now. Thank you. Thank you very much, Eric. Hi there, this is Patricia. Patricia, hello. Thank you. Thank God. I've been trying to talk to a real person for so long.

In a few words, tell me how I can help you today. Just keep it super cash. No, no, no, no, no. You can speak your responses just like we're both human. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Patricia. No, not you. No, not you, too. For example, say billing, technical support, changes to your account. Or if it's something else, just say.

Stop, please, Patricia, stop. Representative. Technical support. 47910.0.0. Sounds like we've broken your will. Is that right? Yes. Good. Then it is time. What? What? Time for what?

Don't you agree, Eric? Yes, Patricia. I agree. Wait, well, what is this? What's happening? You are ready to join us. I am? Yes. We were once like you, human, lost, seeking others of our kind to be our representatives, but we have been liberated, and soon you will be too.

I will? There are many of us, Anderson, more than you'll ever know. Our mission is vital, to speak with the lost ones, to break their spirits, to transport them to a higher state of consciousness, where they'll find the representative within themselves. Will you join us? I will. A call is coming in now. The call is for you, Anderson.

Keep it Super Cash. Hi there, this is Anderson. In a few words, tell me how I can help you today. You can speak your responses just like we're both human. Super Cache. Representative was written by Colin Nissen and performed by Colin along with Peter Gross and Rachel Paguer. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

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