Good advice for older travelers
It’s easy to be irritated with the New York Times “Booming” section, or subdomain, or whatever we are supposed to call it. Like many features aimed at Baby Boomers, it seems to slide easily into the morbid. There are upbeat stories, certainly (like a recent slideshow on attractive women who have decided not to dye...
Love, fractally
Simon Beck is back at his winter home at Les Arcs, the French ski resort, stomping more extraordinary designs into the snowy landscape. Beck, a self-employed map-maker from the south of England, laboriously paces out his complicated artworks, spending about 10 hours on each. Then he takes a photograph or two…and waits for his masterpiece...
Toward a safer bike
The bicyclist with a jacket tied loosely around her waist, a guy with a strap dangling from whatever is clamped into the mousetrap over his back fender. An errant shoe string or flapping pants leg. Suddenly, the fabric swings that extra inch and gets snagged. It’s pulled into the derailleur or wedged between the chain...
Lonnie Dupre is back on Denali
Lonnie Dupre, the AARP-eligible adventurer who has focused on solo-climbing Denali in January, is currently taking his third run at the mountain.Two years ago, he made it to 17,200 feet–“just hours from the summit”–before bad weather intervened. Last year, even nastier weather pinned him down at a lower altitude. This time, he’s making the ascent...
Fauja Singh: don’t want to look, can’t turn away
When you’re, say, 50, it’s easy to feel like you’re dull. Uninteresting. You can feel invisible. So when you find something that puts you in high relief, that gives you an identity—especially if you excel at it and it demonstrates what a complete badass you are—you’re going to hold on to it. No. More...
Afternoon workouts work best. Maybe.
The popular press has a wealth of information on fitness. But if you are over 50, your reading will often leave you feeling confused or unsure. This is because so many studies focus on younger people and you know better than to generalize. Good health and fitness guidance for a 12-year-old might not true for...
An avalanche of avalanche reportage
The New York Times has weighed in mightily on last February’s fatal Tunnel Creek avalanche, which took three lives near Washington’s Stevens Pass ski resort. Over six months, a handful of writers and graphic designers and web gurus assembled text, videos, maps, slide shows and sound files. The result is a gorgeous package, by turns...
You don’t want anything for Christmas
Young people hate old people for many reasons, most of them justifiable. This time of year they hate us because there is no obvious gift for us. We have most of what we want. What we don’t have we can live without. If we are going to get something more, we very particular about what...
Alan Simpson gets after AARP
As we speed toward the fiscal cliff—with its radical cuts in spending and steep tax hikes and, if you believe the press, the recession that combo will inevitably cause—the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson Plan has been getting a lot of renewed attention. (Including an interesting Atlantic article today, which notes that report of the National Commission...
Is skiing an old person’s sport?
Young snowboarders were once considered the saviors of the ski industry. Without that influx of stoked shredders (the reasoning went), the mountains would have reverted to empty, windswept wastelands. Abandoned chairlifts rusting in the thin mountain air. The Boomers who had built the industry in the 60s and 70s were now too old and feeble....
What does “Age Against the Machine” mean?
CNN is running a collection of articles about Baby Boomers. They are calling it “Boomers: Age Against the Machine.” We assume it’s a play on the name of the rap metal band Rage Against the Machine, a group that formed in the early 1990s, which is long after most Boomers stopped paying attention to new...
Glamping, now with garbage and vermin
Glamping is proving itself to be an exceedingly plastic notion, applicable to pods, safari tents and now—says this person in the N.Y. Times—a blacked-out apartment 10 floors up a dark stairway above a rubbish-clogged, soon-to-be-black-moldy rat-scape. Hats off to New Yorkers, and all you folks in New Jersey and Delaware. Everyone who was clobbered by...
