The year in grandparents
The best stories from my site and beyond in 2019.
An oldster at home is a treasure to your own.
Chinese proverb
The grandmas who snorkel with snakes
Some days, they take care of their grandchildren. Other days, they prowl the bottom of the sea in search of venomous snakes.
The ‘pasta grannies’ still roll it by hand
To document the dying art of making pasta from scratch, British journalist Vicky Bennison has filmed hundreds of Italian grandmas in their kitchens. The result, she says, is a “Noah’s Ark” of knowledge and skills that might otherwise have been lost.
“We stand in solidarity with the youngsters”
Concerned about the impact of climate change on their grandchildren, elders in London have taken to the streets.
6 new novels about kids and their grandparents
In these recent novels for preteens—by some of the best children’s authors of our time—grandparents give kids the inspiration, strength, and love they need to navigate a perilous world.
At this South Korean school, children and their grandmas learn together
Faced with declining enrollment, an elementary school in rural South Korea is welcoming grandmothers, many of whom were not permitted to attend school when they were girls.
Trevor Noah and the grandma who protected him
On a recent visit to South Africa, comedian Trevor Noah interviewed his 91-year-old grandmother, who helped raise him—and hide him—during the last years of apartheid.
Why grandparents outnumber grandchildren
There used to be many more children than elders; now, for the first time in history, the old outnumber the young.
What do Okinawans know that we don’t?
The five places in the world where people live the longest are also places where elders spend a good deal of their time tending vegetable gardens.
The grandma and the pythons
“I don’t think it was anything special, to be honest,” said Faye Morgan, 81, after wresting two pythons from a backyard grill.
The year in grandparents
In 2018, I wrote about a caravan of grandparents who stormed the Texas-Mexico border to protest Trump’s treatment of migrant children, Gabriel García Márquez’s memories of his grandmother, and many other topics.
The Scottish grandmother and the wonky donkey
The world has fallen in love with the way Janice Clark reads to her grandson.
Why does Trump want to keep children and their grandparents apart?
Many immigrant parents seek to bring their own parents here to help with childcare while they toil in grueling jobs, two sociologists recently wrote in The New York Times. President Trump wants to stop them.
The grandfather and the frog
A zoologist who just identified a new species of frog has named it after his three-year-old granddaughter, Sylvia.
When your grandma is Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Clara Spera recently graduated from law school. Her inspiration was her grandmother, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Because of his grandma, Gabriel García Márquez knew magic was real
Until he was eight, Gabriel García Márquez was raised by his maternal grandparents and a bevy of aunts and servants in Aracataca, Colombia, a small town near the Caribbean Sea that he fictionalized in his most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. “I cannot imagine a family environment more favorable to my vocation than that lunatic house,” he later wrote.
Trump thinks this grandma is a threat to our country
Trump’s travel ban has torn apart thousands of families. Here is the story of one of them.
The restaurant where grandmas dish up the world
At Enoteca Maria on Staten Island, the menu changes daily, and so do the chefs: they are grandmothers from all over the world.
“Why I train grandmothers to treat depression”
Depression is common in Zimbabwe. Psychiatrists are not. So grandmothers are being trained to step in.