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JULY 1, 2018 @ 5:30 PM PDT
JOHN LELAND
with host TIM CARPENTER
JOHN LELAND is a Metro reporter for The New York Times. Since joining The Times in 2000, he has covered topics ranging from the poetry of rock lyrics to the housing crisis. He also wrote a yearlong series about his conversations with six New Yorkers, all in their 80s and 90s, all living in different circumstances and in different states of health. That became the basis for Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old, his latest book (Sarah Crichton Books, 2018).
He is also the author of two previously published books: Hip: The History (HarperCollins, 2004), a cultural history of hipness; and Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of ‘On the Road’ (They’re Not What You Think) (Viking, 2007) .
Before joining The Times, Mr. Leland was a senior editor at Newsweek, editor in chief at Details, music critic at Newsday, and an original columnist at SPIN magazine.
In his biography for the New York Times website, Mr. Leland states that he is a graduate of Columbia College and “a dropout from the Monster Factory, a school for aspiring professional wrestlers. He did not last long, but he got a story.”
In 2015, when the award-winning journalist John Leland set out on behalf of The New York Times to meet members of America’s fastest-growing age group, he anticipated learning of challenges, of loneliness, and of the deterioration of body, mind, and quality of life. But the elders he met took him in an entirely different direction. Despite disparate backgrounds and circumstances, they each lived with a surprising lightness and contentment. The reality Leland encountered upended contemporary notions of aging, revealing the late stages of life as unexpectedly rich and the elderly as incomparably wise.
Happiness Is a Choice You Make is an enduring collection of lessons that emphasizes, above all, the extraordinary influence we wield over the quality of our lives. With humility, heart, and wit, Leland has crafted a sophisticated and necessary reflection on how to “live better”—informed by those who have mastered the art.
~ Macmillan Publishers
