What “Too Old” Really Means in the COVID Era

Authors

  • Margaret Morganroth Gullette Brandeis University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7146/ageculturehumanities.v8i.144508

Author Biography

Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Brandeis University

Margaret Morganroth Gullette, an internationally renowned age critic, is the author most recently of Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People, winner of the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars and the APA's Award for Contributions to Women and Aging. American Eldercide will be published in October 2024. Aged by Culture, the title of her 2004 book, has become a keyword in age studies, a field she named in 1993. Agewise won an Eric Hoffer Book Award, and Declining to Decline won an award as the “best feminist book on American popular culture.” Gullette is a Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis, and lectures and publishes frequently in mainstream, left, feminist, and cultural media. Her essays are often cited as notable in Best American Essays

References

Begley, Sharon, May 23 2017. “Trump wasn’t always so linguistically challenged. What could explain the change?” Stat News, 23 May, 2017, Trump used to be more articulate. What could explain the change? (statnews.com).

Barry Blitt, “Complaints About 2024 (So Far),” The New Yorker, February 5, 2024, p. 8

—. “The Race for Office,” The New Yorker, October 2, 2023.

CNN, “'You cannot tell me you're so naive': Schiff presses Hur on report's political fallout,” CNN, March 12 2024, https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2024/03/12/adam-schiff-biden-special-counsel-robert-hur-cnc-vpx.cnn.

Coppins, McKay. “Why Attacks on Trump’s Mental Acuity Don’t Land. A decade-old interview shows he has long sounded unhinged,” The Atlantic, February 16, 2024, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/trump-buzzfeed-mar-a-lago-speech-coherence/677480/.

Cutler, Stephen J. “Worries about Getting Alzheimer’s: Who’s Concerned?” American Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias, vol. 30, no. 6, 2015, pp. 591-598, https://doi.org/10.1177/1533317514568889.

Doherty, Erin, and Alex Thompson, "Special counsel report questions Biden's memory," Axios, February 2, 2024, https://www.axios.com/2024/02/08/robert-hur-biden-classified-documents-report.

Gullette, Margaret Morganroth, “Generations on Further Cluelessness in the Media,” Asaging.org, November 1, 2023. https://generations.asaging.org/further-cluelessness-media

Kekatos, Mary. “More than 90% of COVID deaths occurring among elderly adults: CDC,” ABC News, November 30, 2022, https://abcnews.go.com/Health/90-covid-deaths-occurring-elderly-adults-cdc/story?id=94211121.

Milligan, Susan. “Mental Acuity Questions Catch Up With Trump,” US News, January 26, 2024. https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2024-01-26/mental-acuity-questions-catch-up-with-trump.

Moye, David. “Robert Hur Admits Telling Biden He Seemed To Have ‘Photographic Recall’,” Huffington Post, March 12, 2024, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/robert-hur-biden-photographic-recall-eric-swalwell_n_65f0920ae4b01707c6d1f807.

Moyer, Melinda Wenner. “Biden Would End His Second Term at 86. What Could That Mean for His Brain and Body?” New York Times, March 25, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/well/live/biden-president-age-health-2024.html.

Fintan O’Toole. “Laugh Riot,” New York Review of Books, March 21, 2024, pp. 51, 52.

Parker, Ashley, and Dan Diamond. “A ‘whale’ of a tale: Trump continues to distort cognitive test he took,” Washington Post, January 19, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/19/trump-cognitive-test/.

Prokop, Andrew. “Robert Hur’s report exaggerated Biden’s memory issues,” Vox, March 12, 2024, https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/3/12/24098577/robert-hur-testimony-report-biden-memory.

Stockman, Farah, et al. “‘They’re Death Pits’: Virus Claims At Least 7,000 lives in US Nursing Homes,” New York Times, April 17, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/us/coronavirus-nursing-homes.html.

Rajalakshmi, Nirijana. “MEDICAL EXAMINER: “How Long Will Biden Likely Live? We Asked Some Experts,” Slate, November 20, 2022, https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/biden-80-life-expectancy-mortality.html.

Smith-Shoenwalder, Cecelia. “Three Years of Death—and Finger Pointing,” US News, March 10, 2023, https://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2023-03-10/three-years-into-the-pandemic-who-is-dying-from-covid-19-now.

Sparks, Dana. “COVID-19: Who’s at higher risk of serious symptoms?” Mayo Clinic News Network, August 11, 2020, https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/covid-19-whos-at-higher-risk-of-serious-symptoms/.

Sudhakar, Shiv. "Biden and Trump both have shown memory issues: When does memory loss merit dementia screening?" Today, March 4, 2024, https://www.today.com/health/news/biden-trump-memory-issues-rcna141722.

Tejada-Vera, Betzaida, and Ellen A. Kramarow. “COVID-19 Mortality in Adults Aged 65 and Over: United States, 2020, National Center for Health Statistics Data Brief #446, October 2022), p. 2, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db446.pdf.

Downloads

Published

2024-04-19

How to Cite

Morganroth Gullette, M. “What ‘Too Old’ Really Means in the COVID Era”. Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 8, Apr. 2024, doi:10.7146/ageculturehumanities.v8i.144508.