101-year-old editor’s daily habits explain her decades of independence

At 101 and a half years old, Eileen Lavine still shows up for work. Every Wednesday, she signs into a virtual editorial meeting for her role as senior editor at Moment, a magazine about Jewish life partly founded by Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, copy editing its content for typos and errors, a job she has held since 2008.

Her working life began decades earlier, at the University of Wisconsin, where Lavine, a native New Yorker, enrolled at just 16. She reported for the Daily Cardinal and became the first woman to serve a full term as its editor, before earning a journalism master’s degree from Columbia University. Her career later spanned newspapers in Massachusetts, The New York Times, public relations, radio scriptwriting, and an editorial role at Better Times.

In 1962, Lavine and seven others pooled $50 each to found Information Services, a company offering writing and editing support to nonprofits that could not afford dedicated staff, including pathology societies, the National Cancer Institute, and the Department of Education. The company eventually closed, but Lavine’s own editorial work has continued uninterrupted since.

Lavine says her longevity has little to do with fitness. She uses a walker, does not swim, and only occasionally walks around the block. ‘I’m not an athlete,’ she told TODAY.com. ‘I’ve got it up here.’ Instead, she credits a strict daily routine: breakfast, followed by The New York Times and The Washington Post, the New Yorker’s crossword, Substack newsletters, and reads from ProPublica, the Columbia Journalism Review and The Hill, sometimes joining a Zoom lecture or streaming her son’s cabaret performances.

Staying connected matters as much as staying informed. Lavine plays bridge with neighbors, a tradition she continued after her husband Richard’s death in 2014, plays poker every Thursday, and ends most nights with the gameshows ’25 Words or Less’ and ‘Jeopardy!’ She keeps in touch with family and friends by email, something her daughter says helps keep her mother ‘really, really sharp.’

Her mother’s advice to ‘look on the best side of things all the time and to really feel that you’re making a contribution’ has guided Lavine throughout her life. She wrote about it in her 2022 memoir, ‘A Medley of Extemporanea,’ composed at age 97, whose epilogue reads: ‘It’s been amazing to look back on it all.’

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