‘I’ve got it up here’: the 101-year-old still editing copy every week

Eileen Lavine does not swim, does not exercise, and gets around with a walker. Yet at 101 and a half years old, she still signs into a virtual editorial meeting every Wednesday for her job as senior editor at Moment, a Jewish life magazine partly founded by Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, a role she has held since 2008. ‘I’m not an athlete,’ she told TODAY.com. ‘I’ve got it up here.’

Lavine’s résumé stretches back more than eight decades. A native New Yorker, she left for the University of Wisconsin at 16, reported for the student paper the Daily Cardinal, and became the first woman to serve a full term as its editor. After earning a journalism master’s degree from Columbia University, her career took her through newspapers in Massachusetts, The New York Times, public relations, radio scriptwriting, and an editing post at Better Times.

In 1962, she and seven colleagues pooled $50 each to launch Information Services, a company that supplied writing and editing help to nonprofits, including pathology societies, the National Cancer Institute, and the Department of Education, that could not afford in-house editorial staff. The company has since closed, but Lavine kept working long after it did.

She credits her sharpness to a rigid daily routine rather than physical activity. Each morning, alone in the New York City apartment she has lived in for four years, she eats breakfast, then reads The New York Times and The Washington Post cover to cover. She works through the New Yorker’s crossword, checks her Substack subscriptions, and follows ProPublica, the Columbia Journalism Review and The Hill, occasionally tuning into a Zoom lecture or streaming her son’s cabaret performances.

Community matters just as much to Lavine as reading does. She and her late husband Richard, who died in 2014, used to play bridge with friends; she has kept the tradition alive with neighbors who now visit her apartment for games. She plays poker every Thursday and watches British spy thrillers with her children after her nightly ritual of the gameshows ’25 Words or Less’ and ‘Jeopardy!’ Anyone who cannot visit in person, she keeps up with by email.

Reflecting on her mother’s advice to ‘look on the best side of things all the time,’ Lavine wrote in her 2022 memoir, ‘A Medley of Extemporanea’: ‘I keep reading stories about widows and loneliness. But I guess because I still enjoy a lot, I have enough to keep me busy. I’ve never really felt lonely!’

Image: Wikimedia Commons/by Nenad Stojkovic (representative image)